Is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie a sex story? A mystery? A detective story? A romance? A story of a thief? A love story? Over 50 years since a theatrical release that saw Hitchcock’s Marnie greeted with middling box office returns and bewilderment from critics, film scholars, and audiences continue to ponder these questions, which are posed in the film’s original trailer (before being followed by the open-ended remark: “yes… and more!”). Nowadays, it has become commonplace to champion Marnie as the director’s most sophisticated and underrated work (what many consider his “late-career masterpiece”) whose artificial “Old Hollywood” style and harrowing lead performance by Tippi Hedren (notably and unjustly snubbed at the 1965 Oscars) have since emerged as misunderstood strengths.
On a visual and technical level, the film is consummately crafted (as are all Alfred Hitchcock films). Hedren’s performance — achieved despite Hitchcock’s abusive treatment of her — remains extraordinary for its nuances and emotional honesty, foregoing histrionics. But in the vitally important age of #MeToo, in which we find ourselves as a society collectively reassessing and deconstructing abusive and sexist power structures in the production of media, it feels archaic and problematic to accept Marnie as Hitchcock likely intended us to: as the story of a woman in need of being “cured”. One way we can allow Marnie to exist today is to understand the film as a misogynistic product of its time and its director’s vision. As a result, one can apply new meaning to the film by reassigning power and solidarity to a female protagonist who is, for the most part, framed as an antagonist.
Marnie on Paper
Alfred Hitchcock’s follow-up to The Birds sees his star discovery of the former in the title role of Margaret “Marnie” Edgar, a habitual thief and con artist who assumes different identities and robs her employers to make a living. Marnie is clearly dealing with trauma, as manifested through her fear of thunderstorms and the color red. Equally alarming is her fraught relationship with her mother Bernice (Louise Latham) whose only purpose in the film seems to be telling Marnie to avoid men. It is a man who ultimately sets Marnie into dramatic motion, however, with the misfortune of Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), Marnie’s latest boss. Romantically and sexually enamored with her from the get-go, he becomes proprietary of her when he blackmails her into marriage after learning of her criminal activity.
Instead of turning her in to the police, Mark becomes intrigued by Marnie’s transgressions and aims to “cure her”, using his power and privilege to learn of her repressed past. Marnie’s repulsion at Mark’s touch, specifically following their wedding night when he rapes her, culminates in the film’s rain-soaked climax in Bernice’s Baltimore apartment. There, Marnie regresses to a childlike state and relives the horror of the past that has caused her such agony.
Spoiler: Bernice was a sex worker. One night she believed one of her clients (played by Bruce Dern in one of his first big screen roles) was trying to molest her young daughter and subsequently attacked him. When he retaliated violently, young Marnie grabbed a fireplace poker and shattered his skull with it, the resulting profusion of blood sparking her fear of the color red, and more significantly of men. This regression into childhood trauma somehow proves cathartic and Marnie decides to resume her relationship with Mark.
Critics on Marnie
The plot of Marnie is somewhat puzzling on paper. As a viewing experience it can be an even greater peculiarity, combining on-the-nose and at times borderline avant-garde choices (e.g. Hitchcock suffuses the screen with a red haze every time Marnie sees something that triggers her fear of the color) with a screenplay that can both intimately involve the viewer and simultaneously keep them at arm’s length. A closer reading of the film can reveal deeper truths that transcend Hitchcock’s vision of his own story.
Many critics praise the contemporary dialogue surrounding the film – which typically heralds it as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s “underrated masterpieces” – and dismiss its original negative critical reception as being shortsighted. For example, the sentiment of Pauline Kael’s contemporaneous negative take is viewed with disdain: “Pauline Kael thought the Master of Suspense was scraping bottom with this tale of a kleptomaniac married to a businessman with psychiatric aspirations,” while the late Robin Wood is widely regarded as an eminent Hitchcock expert, the same Robin Wood who would go as far to say: “disliking [Marnie] boiled down to disliking cinema.” (Fernard F. Croce, Slant Magazine, 17 Feb 2006). Yet, was Kael’s disdain for the film really fueled by the reasons we think? Marnie is important as a work of cinema in a technical and stylistic sense, as are all of Hitchcock’s films. Maybe Kael already understood this. Perhaps she was not suggesting that Hitchcock was “scraping the bottom” in an aesthetic or technical sense with this film, but in a sexual, moral, or ideological sense. (More on this later).
The Auteur Vision
The three points of Marnie‘s dramatic triad denote the alluring but troubled “temptress” (Marnie Edgar), the suave male “savior” (Mark Rutland), and the “shrewish” foil (Marnie’s mother, Bernice). Alfred Hitchcock conveys Mark as an American aristocrat. This archetype comes to embody and enshrine social, economic, and sexual power. He lends these qualities a handsome and approachable facade through the charisma and star power of heartthrob Sean Connery, fresh out of Terence Young’s Dr. No (1962). Subsequently, Hitchcock conveys Bernice as the troubled mother and former sex worker harboring a dark secret and presents a characterization that correlates sex work with bad parenting, childhood trauma, and, ultimately, homicide.
With Marnie, Hitchcock offers us a lead character who is attractive but damaged, even “deviant”, and in need of “saving”. In real life he found in Tippi Hedren an attractive woman “trapped” in the profession of modeling whom he believed he “saved” from obscurity and brought into the limelight — and later sexually harassed — not unlike the character of Marnie who is sexually abused by her husband.
Proof of Alfred Hitchcock’s intent can be found on even the most superficial level: the film’s marketing. One poster shows Marnie and Mark on either side of a split canvas with a quote from Marnie reading: “You don’t love me…I’m just some kind of wild animal you’ve trapped!” and a quote from Mark responding: “That’s right Marnie, I’ve caught you, and by heaven I’m going to keep you!”
Alfred Hitchcock cultivates a pet-and-owner relationship between these characters. An essay about Marnie by Wendy Burton, titled “Yes, Mother, I Am Still A Little Horse: Animal Images in Marnie” and published by Carleton College, notes: “Hitchcock says in the original movie trailer for Marnie that it is the story of ‘two very interesting human specimens’… not the usual way directors speak of their protagonists, certainly; he sounds more like a scientist than a film director. His attitude toward his characters mimics Mark’s toward Marnie: he looks on her as a sort of case study.” Hitchcock reduces Marnie to an “animal” and has presented the dynamic of subordination and abuse that characterizes her relationship with Mark as something palatable, practically romantic. He can do so because of his influence and omniscience as a successful auteur.
After all, the director was at the height of his power in 1964 as arguably Hollywood’s most famous filmmaker and wielded virtually complete creative control over all of his projects. According to the 1997 book Me and Hitch, Marnie’s original screenwriter Evan Hunter (who wrote The Birds for Hitchcock a year earlier) expressed to the director that he was uncomfortable writing a scene where the character of Mark rapes Marnie. Consequently, Hitchcock fired Hunter and replaced him with Jay Presson Allen, who did not protest Hitchcock’s desire to include a rape scene. Yet, it should be noted that Marnie was Allen’s first screenwriting credit and she was one of the few women working as a screenwriter at the time. Defying or being fired by one of Hollywood’s titans would have likely spelled career death for her.
Alfred Hitchcock’s power extended beyond production. His relationship with his audience was significant and generally positive. As noted by Burton, he often appeared in his films’ trailers to dictate to his viewers what his films were about. By the time of Marnie‘s release, he had also fashioned himself an omnipresent pop culture figure via weekly appearances on his anthology suspense TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which capitalized on his dark sense of humor and seemingly harmless facade.
In Marnie, sexual violence is glamorized in a way that takes Alfred Hitchcock’s motivations and normalizes them. Marnie, despite being the protagonist and title character, becomes not the point of identification for the audience but the point of examination, even objectification. And on every poster print, Bernice — perhaps the most pivotal character in the entire film — is nowhere to be found. Her absence symbolizes the suppression of anyone or anything that could potentially undermine Mark’s power over Marnie. She is the antidote to the lead characters’ dysfunctional coupling that Hitchcock would prefer to keep hidden. In the end, Mark’s domination of Marnie — socially, economically, psychologically and sexually — satiates the ultimate patriarchal fantasy. In 1964, most viewers may not have been willing or able to question or counter such a fantasy.
A Feminist Reassessment of Marnie
When revisiting Marnie, my emotions and intellect took me elsewhere. Perhaps the director underestimated his audience, both in 1964 and now, as over the course of its runtime, contemporary viewers may find themselves questioning, even outsmarting, Alfred Hitchcock’s constructs.
Marnie is fascinating in that it was released just as the studio system was dying out and the countercultural ethos of New Hollywood was taking hold. In the United States, the fabric of second-wave feminism was being sewn simultaneously with a director still clinging to the traditional values of his generation and the production system he had worked in for decades. So perhaps the farrago of critical awkwardness and derision surrounding Marnie is a result of an American audience not yet enlightened or emboldened enough to call out Hitchcock’s misogyny, but an American audience nonetheless feeling the times changing. (It is also worth noting that most critics and viewers would have been unaware of the parallels between the abuse Marnie is subjected to in the film and the abuse Tippi Hedren was subjected to by Hitchcock in real life, as Hedren was unable to come forth publicly about her experiences with the director until long after he died).
In Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock proposes a narrative of gendered violence and oppression and it seems many critics and audiences in 1964 neither wholly cosigned this agenda nor criticized it. Instead, many criticized the film’s craftsmanship, particularly its more “old-fashioned” qualities, like Hitchcock’s incessant use of rear-projection and fake sets built on sound stages (which were being phased out by the mid-1960s). As noted in Burton’s essay: “Critics almost universally panned the film; they called it overlong and disparaged its shoddy set design in particular.” Now that the reputation of Hitchcock’s craft in this film has been rehabilitated (many critics today view Hitchcock’s use of rear-projection as “expressionistic” as opposed to archaic — with Burton noting “it has become the fashion to hail Marnie… [as] brilliant in every respect” while also noting, “I just didn’t think the cardboard backdrops were that powerful, even though Robin Wood, Hitchcock critic extraordinaire, insists that’s a deep and meaningful part of the movie”), what remains for viewers to engage with critically? The answer: the constructs and motivations that so define, even more than his command of craft, Hitchcock’s enigmatic (and often problematic) auteurism.
For example, Mark is posited as a debonair savior. But as the narrative unravels, it becomes clear that Mark is actually a pervert who uses his socioeconomic power to dominate Marnie into repression in order to “cure” her in response to her seemingly criminal behaviors. He is the microcosm for the ages-old patriarchal desire to “own” and control women, without realizing that what has driven Marnie to such behaviors were the destructive actions of a man from her past that Mark himself later engages in.
Simultaneously, Bernice is posited as the icy “shrew”, the “fallen woman.” Even with Alfred Hitchcock’s choice to cast Louise Latham, a then-unknown actress with whom the American moviegoing public could locate little sense of familiarity or identification, a sense of alienation is cultivated. This feeling, coupled with her character’s paltry screen-time, seldom allows the viewer to understand Bernice on a deeper level. If one takes a moment to examine Bernice alternately and more sympathetically, one may find in her character a woman who reclaimed her sexuality and power, marginalized by the heteropatriarchal social doctrine, who tried to protect her daughter from sexual abuse and was indicted for it.
Finally, Marnie is posited as an aberrant object of desire in need of saving. But if one can let Marnie exist for a moment outside of the context of the male figure that ultimately, unfortunately, defines her, a far more nuanced image of the title character emerges. One can instead view Marnie as a woman who, in the wake of childhood trauma, engages in criminal behavior as a coping mechanism. Her success at conning men results from her ability to gain their trust and seduce them, despite men’s destructive behavior ultimately defining her. Trapped in a misogynistic power structure, she must try to forge her own resolution, but is forced to do so in the wake of a man’s destructive behavior (when Mark rapes her on their wedding night), even as she tries subverting and escaping the destructive behavior of men from the beginning.
Marnie attempts to derail men by both intriguing them through her kleptomaniac behaviors (Mark certainly finds her robberies sexually appealing) and then infuriating them by exacting those behaviors against them. (The film begins with Marnie having just robbed the safe of tax consultant Sidney Strutt, played by Martin Gabel, who hired her solely because he was seduced by her). Yet, Marnie is not merely stealing their material goods. She is stealing their power. (In a capitalist society, money is power). Perhaps Hitchcock and the character of Mark felt that the only way to reclaim this “stolen” power was through the reassertion of the type of control that Marnie, ultimately, could not steal from these men — their sexual control of her.
Reassigning Power While Viewing Marnie
In many ways, the latter-day awareness of Alfred Hitchcock’s sexual harassment of Hedren — and the recognition of how his gaze, both in general and toward his lead actress, parallels the film’s treatment and ultimate destructiveness of the title character — still somehow hasn’t impacted the latter-day discourse surrounding the film enough.
The aforementioned retrospective read, as recent as 2006, sometimes plays into this unfortunate narrative, noting that “the director contribute[s] to the perception through the gaze of [his] camera, and Hedren, being the unreachable object of Hitchcock’s obsession, brings a particular sense of masochistic revolt to the role” [ibid] while still allowing this recognition of Hitchcock’s toxicity, and the male gaze at large, to underscore why the film should be heralded as an artistic achievement: “Marnie (Hedren) is first seen walking away from us, dressed in dark gray while holding a fragrantly yellow bag in an empty train station, a stunning example of the way Hitchcock’s camera could create visual poetry out of simply following people around.” [ibid] Here, Marnie’s leering opening shot of the protagonist being followed is likened to visual poetry, and Hitchcock is given a pass.
For this reason, pedagogical responsibility is crucial in the study of works like Marnie. Unfortunately, pedagogical abuse can be found more readily than responsibility. The 2017 Netflix docuseries The Keepers, which explores the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, is indicative of this fact. The same priests of Archbishop Keough High School who abused countless girls and remain the prime suspects of the murder of Cesnik (who prior to her death was only moments away from exposing the abuse) felt it necessary to include viewings of Marnie in their curriculum, persuading the girls to “avoid being like Marnie” and “seek therapy” with them in the same way Marnie must unwillingly seek “therapy” with her rapist husband. Life suddenly (and all too frighteningly) espouses and imitates art.
How do we engage with Marnie without cosigning its director’s misogynistic proclivities? Over a half-century since this film (and countless others) saw the light of day, and over 30 years since Alfred Hitchcock’s passing, we are granted control as to how to fathom and put forward the texts — literary, cinematic, or otherwise — that have been fed to us. As an audience, we become the ultimate auteurs, and while the text itself cannot change, our understanding of it and the meaning we apply to it remains pliable. Therefore, we can re-assign our appreciation and understanding in different areas, taking the megaphone away from the monsters (the character of Mark, even Hitchcock himself) and placing it in different hands — specifically those of Marnie, the character. For it is she whom we must ultimately sympathize with and root for, even as she enters Mark’s car during the final frame.
Yet, Marnie is not merely entering a car, she is entering a state of submission, specifically to the male “savior.” Furthermore, Marnie and Bernice might have confronted their personal demons, but because it was the destructive machinations of Connery’s character that forcibly propelled them to that confrontation, they are only more traumatized. Except now, they have no agency left whatsoever — Mark has stripped them even of this — leaving them in a state of subordination and alienation. Marnie is clay to mold in her husband/rapist’s hands as she chooses to continue pursuing her relationship with him, and Bernice is presented as a “cautionary tale” – what Marnie would have become had she not been “saved” by Mark.
It is by no coincidence that the film ends with Bernice alone and mournful in her apartment and with Marnie in the hands of the predator. In Hitchcock’s eyes, this is the ultimate happy ending. Hopefully now we can see that it is the ultimately tragic message about the society we live in — one that objectifies, devalues, and discards women.
Defying the Auteur’s Vision
As Richard Brody of The New Yorker notes in his 2012 analysis of the film, “the greatness of Hitchcock’s artistry, the musical sublimity of his images and the emotional power of his stories, isn’t separable from his carnality—rather, his greatness depends upon the worst and most bestial aspects of his character.” Brody writes that, in understanding how Marnie’s cinematic excellence is precisely reliant on Hitchcock’s own problematic gaze and even more problematic treatment of Hedren, it is a film “that threatens to knock Hitchcock out of his own system, and, so, the one that offers filmmakers and critics alike a way out of Hitchcockophilia.”
There will always be new generations of audiences and cinephiles who will encounter Marnie. The only way to truly “knock Hitchcock out of his own system” then, specifically regarding Marnie, is not to run from the work, abandoning it in the cinematic ether where its patriarchal trappings can prevail unchecked. Instead, we must understand the inner workings of Hitchcock’s gaze and engage with it critically. We must offer the film new meaning and purpose that grapples with the director’s vision and intent — his attempt at convincing us that his narrative of a rapist and his victim (the former framed heroically and the latter framed antagonistically) is some type of acceptable “love story” — and do the one thing Alfred Hitchcock never really wanted us to do: champion Marnie Edgar and the millions of abused and disempowered women she represents.