Literature Film Quarterly (2000) - Hitchcock's terrible mothers
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(c) Literature Film Quarterly (2000)
Hitchcock's terrible mothers
In November 1961, George Weltner, then Paramount's president of distribution, was traveling in Italy, where he learned that Alfred Hitchcock was dissatisfied with the way he was being treated by the studio. Hitchcock came to Paramount in 1953; by 1960, he had given the studio six films, the last of which was Psycho (1960). However, until Psycho, Hitchcock felt he was "nothing but a salaried employee [who] never had the opportunity to make the real money his talents deserved," as Weltner wrote to his boss, Barney Balaban, in a letter that ended up at Laramie, Wyoming's American Heritage Center, where Weltner's son deposited his father's fascinating collection in 1987. Fascinating, certainly, but frustrating when it comes to Hitchcock. Only two pieces of correspondence involve Hitchcock, both dealing with money and the director's next two projects. As for money, Hitchcock insisted he never received his share of the gross from Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. Even Welter had no idea what that should have been, except that in the case of Rear Window, the percentage deal only netted Hitchcock $37,798, although the director seems to have done slightly better with To Catch a Thief ($86,240). But, as we know, no one in Hollywood ever took Accounting 101; they took Creative Accounting instead.
The more important letter in the collection is the one of 9 November 1961; the other, dated 16 November, is Weltner's estimate of the profits Hitchcock should have made on the two films. The 9 November letter proves conclusively that Hitchcock knew exactly what his next two films would be: The Birds and Marnie, in that order: "With regard to THE BIRDS and MARNEY (sic) we know we will be presented with a pretty tough deal." The "deal" was an ultimatum: Either Paramount agrees to reissue Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, and offer Hitchcock a better percentage arrangement; or Hitchcock will emulate Coriolanus and say, "There is a world elsewhere." That world, it turned out, was Universal, whose logo was, appropriately enough, a revolving globe. And perhaps it was just as well. Psycho wasn't even filmed at Paramount's Marathon Street lot; Paramount threw up so many obstacles that Hitchcock had no other choice but to shoot Psycho at Universal in the San Fernando Valley, where Hitchcock's television show was filmed. In fact, he used the same crew from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Inevitably, it was at Universal where Hitchcock ended his career.
What is intriguing about the letter is the lineup: The Birds and Marnie were to follow Psycho. A trilogy? Hitchcock probably never thought in such terms any more than did John Ford about his cavalry films-Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), which, to some, constitute a trilogy. More likely, for reasons that will always elude us, Hitchcock wanted to explore the mother-child relationship: mothers and sons, and the women in their sons' lives, in Psycho and The Birds; mother and daughter, and the man in the daughter's life (as well as the men in the mother's life), in Marnie. But we are not in I Remember Mama territory; these mothers represent the dark side of the anima-- "terrible mothers," in the Jungian sense, who generate life and then attempt to draw it back inside themselves" (Newman 149).
Hitchcock had been dealing with mothers, matriarchs, and maternal figures ever since he began directing. The crofter's wife in The 39 Steps (1935) is probably not a mother (there are no children around), but she shows a maternal interest in Hannay (Robert Donat), even helping him escape when she realizes her husband has figured out he's a wanted man. There are also such characters as the secret agent, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) in The Lady Vanishes (1938), who strikes Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) as so motherly that, when she disappears on board a train bound for London, Iris enlists the aid of another passenger (Michael Redgrave) in a rescue operation; and Sylvia Verloc (Sylvia Sidney) in Sabotage (1936), who is more mother than sister to her baby brother, whose death was indirectly caused by her anarchist husband. In Hitchcock's American films, only a few mothers are unthreatening, in the sense of being neither neurotic nor destructive. The maternal paradigm is Mrs. Mason (Dorothy Peterson) in Saboteur (1942), who has no reason to distrust the report that her son's death in an aircraft factory fire was caused by a Nazi saboteur, believed to be his friend, Barry Kane (Robert Cummings). Distraught as she is, Mrs. Mason cannot believe that anyone as ingenuous as Kane (and Cummings's guileless face helped) could possibly be an enemy agent and thus does not turn him over to the police. Emma Newton (Patricia Collinge) in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) may not be the mother from hell, but she has potential. She is so enamored of her brother Charlie (Joseph Cotten), who is really a serial killer, that she names her daughter Charlotte (Teresa Wright) to perpetuate his presence, if only in name. But the name sticks, so much so that Charlotte's nickname, Charlie, replaces her given name, thereby makng her her uncle's double. Anyone wondering what Mrs. Newton would have done if she had a son instead of a daughter only had to wait until Notorious (1946).
In Notorious, Madame Sebastian (Leopoldine Konstantin) has her own way of dealing with her daughter-in-law, Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), when she discovers that Alicia is an American agent whose mission was first to seduce, then marry her son (Claude Rains), who is one of several ex-Nazis living well in Rio de Janeiro and preparing for the Fourth Reich by stocking up on uranium ore. Although the simplest way to dispose of Alicia would be by murdering her and making her death seem accidental, Madame Sebastian prefers another method: gradual poisoning, resulting in fatigue-like symptoms. The manner of death Madame Sebastian has chosen for Alicia indicates that she is more concerned about prolonging the suffering of the woman who stole her son than in getting rid of her as expeditiously as possible.
Mrs. Bates of Psycho, Lydia Brenner of The Birds, and Bernice Edgar of Marnie were models of motherhood compared to Madame Sebastian-or another infernal mother, Mrs. Anthony (Marion Lorne) of Strangers on a Train (1951), whose first name, like that of Norman's mother, we never know. When her son Bruno (Robert Walker) tries to cut a deal with tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger), in which Bruno will kill Guy's wife if Guy will kill Bruno's father, we might wonder why Bruno wants his mother to himself, although the subtext is sufficiently homoerotic to suggest that Bruno would not mind having Guy as well. But Guy would never give Bruno manicures, as Mrs. Anthony does. Although Marion Lorne plays Mrs. Anthony as a dotty dilettante, there is one scene, simultenously horrifying and humorous, in which we see the painting she has done of St. Francis, which reminds Bruno of his father. It resembles Dorian Gray's portrait in its final stages of decay. Mrs. Anthony has created a similarly rotting face out of swirls of paint. Since mother and son are doubles in a film in which doubling is so ubiquitous that Strangers on a Train almost threatens to collapse under a weight twice of what it can bear, the portrait could easily have been painted by Bruno, who would have depicted the man he wants dead in the same grotesque way.
After Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock briefly retired the strangulating mother in favor of the mother as buddy, with a brief detour into wholesomeness in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), with Doris Day as the mother any kidnapped child would kill for. The buddy mothers included Jessie Stevens of To Catch a Thief (1954) and Clara Thornhill of North by Northwest (1959), both played memorably by Jessie Royce Landis. Jessie and Clara function as witty sidekicks-ideal companions for travel and the theatre, and even game for a bit of sleuthing. However, one suspects that, in North by Northwest, Clara would not have minded if her twice married and divorced son Roger (Cary Grant) had remained single indefinitely. Hitchcock, however, does little with what appears to be Roger's aversion to marriage; certainly he does less with it than Frank Capra did in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), in which Grant played a sex-shy drama critic who would rather deal with his flaky aunts than go on his honeymoon. As Roger Thornhill, Grant is more sexually assured; but then, his mother does not go around poisoning elderly men. In a way, Roger and Clara make a charming couple, and Clara's presence is missed when she disappears from the plot, replaced by the Hitchcockian blonde (Eva Marie Saint), who does not mind making love on their honeymoon in the top berth of their train compartment.
After North by Northwest, Hitchcock found two literary properties that allowed him to return to the terrible mother, and one that allowed for her incarnation.
Psycho has become so much a part of our culture that the title has become synonymous with Norman Bates. However, we know so much about Norman Bates that we never think about Mrs. Bates. In fact, we don't even know her first name. She's the lady with the grannie look, who wears Early Depression dresses and has a face that resembles a caved-in pumpkin. Everything we know about her is presented from Norman's point of view; but Norman is an unreliable narrator. When he acts as his mother, he is projecting himself into her, so that we're watching Norman's version of what his mother would have been if she had been he. Mrs. Bates is not a murderer, but Norman/Mother is.
Psycho is based on Robert Bloch's 1959 novel. One of several horrific scenes in the film occurs when the insurance investigator, Arbogast, enters the Bates house and begins climbing the stairs. Suddenly, Norman/Mother bolts from her room with a butcher knife and starts slashing away. Anyone seeing the film for the first time would assume that Mother was a homicidal misfit who looked like a weirder version of Irene Ryan in The Beverly Hillbillies.
In the novel, Norman perceives himself as "Norma" when he becomes Mother. When Arbogast knocks at the door, before admitting him, Norma dons a ruffled dress, rouges her cheeks, powders her face, and glides down the stairs as Scarlett O'Hara might, except that Scarlett would never carry a straight razor. Nor would Mrs. Bates. But Norma Bates would. Mrs. Bates would simply have answered the door. Norma Bates puts on her makeup before slitting Arbogast's throat.
We never think of Mrs. Bates as a woman; she's more like a creature, a grotesque out of William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor. Bloch made it clear that Mrs. Bates had a feminine side; Hitchcock visualized it.
The novel tells us a great deal about Mrs. Bates. Film, however, is show and tell. Hitchcock tells us something about her, but shows us more. In the novel, we're told that Mrs. Bates posed as a widow, although the truth is that her husband left her; but he also left her with some valuable real estate. Then a man by the name of Joe Considine came into her life, and the two of them built a motel on the property. They became lovers, as Norman discovered when he walked into his mother's bedroom and found her with Considine. Norman had witnessed the primal scene-later than usual. But then, Norman never exactly conformed to the stages of oedipal development. Unable to accept the fact that his mother has a sex life, Norman punished her and Considine by putting rat poison in their coffee, which had already been laced with enough brandy to hide the taste. Norman was at the dinner, which was presumably to celebrate their forthcoming marriage, and watched both of them die. Norman faked a suicide note, implying that his mother had poisoned both herself and Considine because, after she became pregnant by him, she learned that Considine was already married. The point is that Norman punishes his mother for having sex; then punishes himself for having punished her. But Norman's self-inflicted punishment is more complex than murder; he becomes the habitation of his mother, not as she was but as she is in the body-and soul-of her matricidal son, who saw in his mother not the woman who gave him life, but a woman who committed an act so unspeakable that she deserved to die. It was not too difficult for Norman to dress up and play Mother. His devotion to her was so strong that, even before Considine came into her life, Norman had been a closet transvestite.
Norman's Mrs. Bates is the exact opposite of a woman so starved for affection that she gave herself to the first man who courted her. Norman's Mother sounds more like Marnie's mother, who assumes that all relationships between men and women are based on lust. . We know more about the real Mrs. Bates from her bedroom. In both the novel and the film, Lila goes up to the Bates house, hoping to learn something about her sister's disappearance. She learns nothing about Marion, but a good deal about Mrs. Bates-and her son-from their respective bedrooms. In the novel, Mrs. Bates's bedroom is described as something "that belonged in a world of Dresden figurines, sachet-scented pincushions, and frescoed vanity tops" (202). The bedspread was hand-embroidered; in the closet were short skirts that harked back to the 1920s, suggesting that Norman's mother may have fancied herself a flapper; there were also fashionable hats and head scarves. Interestingly, there were a couple of shawls-certainly nothing that Joe Considine's lover would ever wear but that the Widow Bates might, if for no other reason than to maintain her image in the community.
A similar scene occurs in the film. We are in the room of a woman with Victorian tastes and a Romantic sensibility. It is a curtained bedroom with a porcelain sink, a fire place, and a vanity table. In the closet are some dresses. We cannot make out what they look like, but they are carefully arranged on hangers. The bed has a sensuous quality to it-smooth and satiny, the perfect setting for illicit sex with style. The bed also has an indentation, suggesting that one of the occupants spent more time recumbent than upright. But then, as we later learn, Norman stole his mother's corpse, treated it chemically, and apparently moved it around during the day and laid it to rest at night.
Lila also visits Norman's room in both versions. In the novel, Norman's room reveals his eclectic taste in books: cosmology, the occult, theosophy, de Sade's Justine, and a whole shelf devoted to pornography. Hitchcock shows us a different room; but then his is a different Norman. Norman of the novel weighs 200 pounds, revels in seeing himself naked, has a fondness for alcohol, and enjoys reading about primitive methods of torture, such as the Incas' habit of skinning their victims and stretching their stomach to form a drum. The film shows us the room of an extremely sensitive young man, who read leather bound books and whose musical taste included Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, a recording of which is still on the phonograph.
We know what Norman is; his room tells us what he was. We also know, or think we know, what Mrs. Bates is. Her room affords another way of seeing her.
If things are not what they seem, to quote one of Hitchcock's favorite maxims, neither are people. In Psycho, we first see Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a white bra and half slip after her lunch hour tryst with Sam Loomis (John Gavin) in a seedy hotel. After Marion steals the $40,000 and is about to hit the road, she's in a black bra and half slip. I've heard explanations of the color switch ranging from, "Well, some people change everything before they go on a trip. What's the big deal? " TO "As a Roman Catholic, with a profound sense of sin, guilt, and retribution, Hitchcock has Marion change from white to black to suggest that she has violated not one but two commandments: "Thou Shall not Commit Adultery" and "Thou Shalt Not Steal." Her double sin led to her murder in a shower, which functions as a cleansing agent, a reverse baptism." In a 1999 documentary, Janet Leigh offered the most plausible explanation for the switch: Hitchcock may have been suggesting that Marion, like everyone, has a dark side and a bright side (Dial "H"). The ancients knew this. In Roman mythology, the moon had two aspects and two goddesses: Diana represented the bright of the moon; and Hecate, the Diana of the underworld, the dark of the moon. We all cast a shadow, some larger, and darker than others.
The shadows grow even more ominous in The Birds. If Hitchcock were to continue exploring the theme of a mother's hold on her unmarried son, he would never have been able to do so if he stayed close to the source, a Daphne du Maurier story that he optioned after it was published in 1952. The story was also called "The Birds," the second of eight short stories in a collection published in America as Kiss Me Again, Stranger. In Britain, however, the title of the collection was less provocative: it was called The Apple Tree, because it explored the question of evil and its origins in "the fruit of that forbidden tree."
Du Maurier's story is set in Cornwall, in the extreme southwest of England, where the author spent most of her life and where so many of her novels are set (e.g., Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel). "The Birds" was inspired by two personal experiences. The first occurred as du Maurier was walking down to the beach. Two seagulls attacked her dog and then flew into her face. Later, she witnessed something equally unnerving, as two gulls attacked a farmer as he was ploughing his field (Shawcross 138).
The story is told from the point of view of Nat Hocken, a farm worker who lives with his wife and two children on what is clearly an island, probably one of the Scilly Islands, an archipelago in the Atlantic, some 30 miles west of Land's End. On December 3 of an unspecified year, a date whose significance becomes more apparent later, Nat notices birds circling restlessly overhead. He assumes that, being unable to migrate, they are frustrated at having to spend the winter in an alien climate. The birds become more daring, swopping down without warning. That night they appear at the bedroom window, pecking at it-and then at Nat when he opens it; one of the birds even goes for his eyes. The birds enter the children's room through an open window, colliding with each other and striking the wall with such force that they fall to the floor, littering it with their dead bodies. Still the man of reason, Nat insists it's the weather.
Because Nat is such an isolato, he does not have much credibility in the community. These are "foreign birds from that Arctic Circle," a neighbor insists (du Maurier 39). When Nat tries to describe what he has seen, the neighbor implies that he may have had too much to drink. Finally, the BBC issues a news alert: a sudden climactic change, due to an Arctic air mass, has resulted in vast numbers of birds descending upon Britain and engaging in unprovoked attacks. The birds are so desperate to escape the cold that they have infiltrated homes by making their way down chimneys.
Only one explanation for the attack seems to carry any weight: "'They're saying in town the Russians have done it. The Russians have poisoned the birds"' (48). Still the rationalist, Nat asks how that can be, but receives no answer. On the third day, December 5, a state of emergency is declared in Britain. The birds attack RAF planes, flying kamakazie-style into the propellers. Nat and his family huddle together in the living room-the phone dead, the radio silent. "`Won't America do something?'" Nat's wife asks. "`They've always been our allies, haven't they? Surely America will do something?"' (65). Apparently, America has become isolationist again, as it had been until December 7, 1941. America might do something if history repeats itself on December 7, but that won't be for two more days-and only if the birds alight on the White House lawn. Meanwhile, all Nat can do is hope; lighting his last cigarette, he wonders "how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains ... giving them the instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines" (66). Du Maurier's birds also seem to have tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; hence, the original title of her collection of stories, The Apple Tree.
"The Birds" was a cold war parable, written at a time when the former Soviet Union had replaced Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan as the greatest threat to world peace. And the fact that there was an undeclared war going on in Asia, which should have been called The Korean War and instead was euphemistically termed a "police action," exacerbated fears that World War III was around the corner. In 1952, when "The Birds" first appeared in print, the Soviet Union and China had nuclear capability, atomic espionage seemed to be rampant, and Joe McCarthy claimed there were Communists in the State Department and the military. If "The Birds" had been filmed in the 1950s as written, it would have been another mutant film. The classic science fiction films of the period attributed the sudden appearance of humanoid plants with chloryphyll instead of blood, giant insects,,and sea monsters to nuclear testing (which was also capable of awakening prehistoric creatures that had previously been dormant). Although the reason for such tests was never mentioned, audiences knew it was to produce bigger and better bombs in case of a confrontation between the United States and what former President Reagan called "the evil empire, " but in the 1950s was known, redundantly, as "godless, atheistic Russia." Even if references to Russia had been omitted from a 1950s movie version of "The Birds," audiences would have inferred that only one nation was perverse enough to turn benign birds into death squads.
Except for films with an eastern European setting that charged the Soviet Union with forcible repatriation (The Red Danube, 1949) or religious persecution (Guilty of Treason, 1950), Hollywood generally avoided references to the Soviet Union, focusing instead on those shadowy figures, the Communists, who brainwashed good Catholics like the title character of My Son John (1952), engaged in germ warfare (The Whip Hand, 1951), or peddled classified information (Pickup on South Street, 1953). Those who used to be members of the mob were now members of the Party. The 1950s science fiction film, on the other hand, relied on subtext-Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in which lockstep conformity became the goal of the new order, implying that ultra right conservatives were as bad as left-wing liberals; or Invasion, U.S.A. (1952), a nightmarish portrayal of life under a dictatorship that did not have to be identified.
When Hitchcock was trying to get a script for The Birds in 1961, he was only interested in two aspects of du Maurier's plot: a coastal setting, suggesting isolation both geographical and social; and, of course, the birds' seemingly unprovoked attacks. Hitchcock found an equivalent for du Maurier's Scilly Islands in northern California's Bodega Bay. Changing the setting was the easy part: it was merely a matter of substituting one insular community for another. Oddly enough, the possibility that the birds may have been infected with rabies, even though birds are not rabid, did exist at one point in Evan Hunter's script (Auiler 217). Hunter was not being paranoid, or rather no less paranoid than the rest of America. If the birds had been made rabid, a 1960s audience would have had no trouble figuring out who was responsible.
By the time The Birds went before the cameras, the Berlin Wall had been erected, the Bay of Pigs invasion had proved a disaster, and another confrontation between the United States and the former Soviet Union was averted when the Cuban missle crisis ended. Hunter, however, had a far more difficult task than moving the film from out of a specific time frame into myth. First, he had to gut the du Maurier story, leaving only a coastal community terrorized by birds; and then, construct a Psycho-like plot with an unmarried son, Mitch (Rod Taylor); his mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy); and a female intruder, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren). It is not coincidental that the women's names, Melanie and Lydia, begin with the same letters, M and L, as those of the sisters in Psycho. Like Marion Crane, who felt that she was in a trap, Melanie Daniels is caged. So much could be made, and has been, of references to caged birds, beginning with Mitch's remark, "Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels," that one could end up compiling lists of bird/cage images, as earlier generations had done with literary texts. But that is part of the film's genius with its interlocking motifs (stuffed birds/real birds), and plot devices that hark back to previous films like Psycho (a car trip that becomes a rendezvous with destiny, a real son-mother relationship as opposed to a spectral one, the female who poses a threat to that relationship). The Birds is a film of such incredibile density that it admits of an indeterminate number of interpretations, all of which can be right, or at least plausible.
If The Birds is taken as an allegory, there is no reason to explain the attacks, except as an external manifestation of something within the characters and the residents of Bodega Bay, who are as insular in their thinking as du Maurier's islanders were in the original. If the main characters in the film had been birds, they would be doing to each other what the birds are doing to them, nor would they spare any bystanders who happened to be in the vicinity. The only exception would have been Cathy; if she had been a bird, she would have been a love bird and equally unthreatening.
We're back to show and tell. Visually, Melanie and Lydia are doubles right down to their hairstyles. One could easily see Melanie as a younger version of Lydia; both are born to be grandes dames. Neither can love. Melanie pursues Mitch Brenner with a pair of lovebirds, offering symbolically what she cannot give naturally, yet at the same time mocking an ancient ritual of courtship. At the beginning of The Birds, Mitch is looking for a pair of lovebirds-understandably so, for he never received love from his mother, who was so determined to keep him with her after her husband's death that she bound him to her by a device only certain types of mothers seem to own: the silver cord. In fact, Lydia was so paranoid about being left alone (perhaps because she sensed her husband would predecease her) that she ignored the basics of family planning, and had Cathy some twenty years after Mitch. In the film, Cathy is 10, about to become eleven; Mitch, at least thirty. Cathy was six when her father died. No wonder she regards her brother as a father surrogate; small wonder, also, that Cathy is attracted to Melanie, who looks more like her mother than Lydia, who could pass for her grandmother. And Melanie is attracted to Cathy, in whom she sees herself as a child.
We're shown-and told-a great deal about both women. Melanie is a child of privilege; just when we are about to relegate her to the category of Stephen Sondheim's "ladies who lunch," she tells Mitch that she is helping to put a Korean boy through school. Does Melanie have a social conscience or is this just one more activity to fill up a void? Melanie is a decent person-spoiled, undoubtedly, manipulative, but playfully so. She has a father, a newspaper publisher, who has given her everything she wanted-except a mother, who walked out on them when Melanie was 11. Melanie doesn't realize that by pursuing Mitch to Bodega Bay, she will inherit a mother.
Had the birds not intervened; Lydia would have done to Melanie what she did to Annie (Suzanne Pleshette): break up her relationship with Mitch and then take on Melanie as a friend, now that she is no longer a threat to the Brenner household. Lydia's household-in fact, the entire community-is really a matriarchy. During the week, Mitch lives in San Francisco; he is also no substitute for Mr. Brenner, as we learn when Mitch fails to live up to his mother's expectations: "If only your father were here!" she cries, when Mitch cannot fend off the birds' attacks, as if anyone could.
Actually, all the women in the film are like two-way mirrors, each reflecting her own image and the others.' They have all lost someone: Annie lost Mitch, Melanie lost her mother, Cathy lost her father, and Lydia lost her husband. One could visualize them all living in the Brenner house. That way, Lydia would have had three pillars of support in her old age.
The perverse ending makes it clear that everyone gets what he or she wants, except for Annie, the only truly tragic character in the film. As Mitch, Cathy, Lydia, and the bandaged and traumatized Melanie prepare to leave for San Francisco, conceding victory to the birds, Lydia holds Melanie against her. For the first time, Lydia looks benign, even maternal-not because she has accepted the idea that her son would marry, but because she knows he is not going to marry Melanie, who is obviously going to need plastic surgery, if not psychotheraphy. From the look on Melanie's face, it's difficult to make a prognosis. However, one is inclined to say-as the specialists in Dark Victory (1939) did after Judith Traheme's (Bette Davis) surgery for what turned out to be a malignant brain tumor: "Prognosis Negative."
Hitchcock must have optioned Winston Graham's novel, Marnie, immediately after it had been published in 1961 or had read it in galleys and decided it would complete the cycle of films about the underside of motherhood. There was another reason for the novel's appeal: its setting was similar to that of "The Birds." With Graham's novel, Hitchcock returned to another theme: isolation that is partly due to choice, partly to geography. Graham's Marnie was born in Plymouth, a port city in Devon on the southwest coast of England; her mother lives in Torquay, a popular resort, some 30 miles away. In the film, Marnie's mother lives in Baltimore, another port city where the past eventually washes up as flotsam in need of decipherment. In both the novel and the film, Marnie learns about her past: in the novel, about her parents' divorce, the brother she thought had died shortly after birth, and the tapping at the window that she first heard when she was five. In the film, she finally understands the connection between her aversion to sex, the color red, the tapping sound, and her mother's born-again puritanism.
The harbor setting also explains her uncommon name. Her real name was Margaret, "Marnie" being the nickname given to her by her father, a sailor who was killed in World War II. "Marnie" evokes the sea and its various associations: ebb and flow, cleansing and renewal, and deities such as Proteus and Poseidon, who, like the tide, could change their appearance.
Marnie was appropriately named: she is a professional thief, who, after each heist, changes her identity, but always sticks to names beginning with "M." She then visits her mother and, when she can, rides her thoroughbred, Forio, on whom she has lavished the affection that is usually bestowed upon humans. Marnie's humanity is dormant; it emerges periodically but has been so buried under the jagged shards of a past that she cannot reassemble that she can only view people as impediments in the obstacle course that she calls life.
Graham's novel is an example of psychological detective fiction, in which a character's neurosis is finally explained by a climactic revelation, much as a murder is solved or a murderer unmasked. In the film, the revelation is more sensational than it is in the novel, even though Marnie remains pretty much the same in both: she is a pathological liar, a thief, and a casebook study in sexual apathy. She finds people, and human relations in general, tiresome: "They [people] spoil your plans-not because you are out in your estimates but because they are" (Graham 8). Her choice of "estimate" rather than "perception" or "impression" reflects her view of human beings: they exist in terms of their worth or function. And if the person is an employer, he or she has a cash value that Marnie has no trouble estimating: she simply takes them for all they're worth, or all they have in the vault. Men who cannot fathom her or interpret her air of mystery as a sexual challenge are spoilers of a plan in which passion has no place. Marnie's plan is to rip off as many companies as she can in order to keep Forio at a nearby stable and provide her mother with the luxuries of which both of them had been deprived.
Unlike the film version, which uses no voiceover narration, the novel is written in the first person, almost exclusively from Marnie's point of view. When we first meet her, she has left the offices of the Birmingham accounting firm of Crombie & Strutt, where she has been working as a clerk under the name of Marion Holland. The police officer who bids her a friendly "good night" would not have done so if he knew what she was carrying in her attache case. Although she will continually fabricate her past, she lies only to the other characters, not to the reader; Graham assumes the reader understands the genre, in which the narrator's reliability is only questionable when she is functioning in her own story and chooses to deceive those eager to penetrate the shieldlike persona she has created.
Next, it's on to Manchester as Mollie Jeffrey and ajob in the box office of a local cinema. After absconding with the ticket money, Marnie heads for London, where she becomes the widow Mary Taylor, a cashier in the printing firm of Ryland & Co., whose co-directors are Mark Ryland and Terry Holbrook, each of whom becomes interested in Marnie/Mary.
To his credit, Graham is objective about his protagonist. Marnie subscribes to a philosophy that allows the underclass certain rights denied to the affluent. Far from being Nietzschean, Marnie simply believes that only those who have known privation can speak for their own kind. When Mark Ryland criticizes the behavior of a group of young men who he assumes are Teddy boys, Marnie quickly distinguishes between the real Teds, who are bullies, and those who only ape their mannerisms and act tough. Marnie accuses Mark of jumping to conclusions: "`You've been brought up in a decent home to know better. You should see some of their homes.'"(Graham 67). Marnie even defends the would-be hoods as restless young men, who will be probably trapped in the same jobs for the rest of their lives; she also reminds Mark that if they had served in the Navy, like himself, they might have had better prospects.
Graham, however, draws the line at making Marnie a left-wing liberal. Marnie may be quite articulate about the gulf between the halves and have-nots, but neither the novel nor the film attempts to justify Marnie's criminal acts in terms of class. Graham does not even use deprivation to explain the fact that Marnie began stealing at the age of 10, more for thrills than necessity. All Marnie cared about was not getting caught; when she is, she receives a beating from her mother, who exclaims: "'A thief for a daughter... Surely God has afflicted me enough without this"' (Graham 33). Exactly what Mrs. Elmer's other afflictions were-apart from an arthritic leg, widowhood, and the loss of a second child suppposedly because of an incompetent doctor-will eventually come to light.
It is important to remember that when Marnie is functioning as narrator, she is telling the truth-or as much of it as she knows. However, when she is functioning as a character, speaking to others, she is weaving strands of truths, half truths, and falsehoods into a tapestry that becomes more intricate as each identity change alters the pattern. A vital piece of information would allow Marnie to pull a thread and begin the unraveling process. However, only three people know which thead to pull: Marnie's mother, her brother Stephen, and her companion Lucy Nye.
When Marnie is asked about her family, she adheres to a basic script that is a combination of truth, fiction, and embellishment. In one version, her parents were a naval officer and his wife who emigrated to Australia, where they died. "Naval officer" is partially accurate, since her father was in the Royal Navy and died in World War II. But Marnie's decision to kill off her mother implies something deeper than fabrication-not wish-fulfillment exactly, but the unconscious desire to be rid of the need to steal in order to ensure her mother's comfort, which has been purchased at the cost of a myth: Marnie as an executive secretary able to afford the best. Mrs. Elmer, in fact, may only be an excuse for Marnie's refusal, or inability, to relinquish the vice she had acquired in childhood-a vice that once was exhilarating but now has become as dangerous as it is lucrative.
The path that Marnie had chosen led to sexual indifference, if not frigidity. The novel implies that Marnie has had to play up to men, perhaps even sleep with them, to achieve her end, to which sex was only a means. In answer to her mother's question about the men who pursued her, Marnie replies: "`They've got nothing for their trouble.'" (110).
In the novel, sex is not exactly a taboo subject to Marnie and her mother; rather, it is one to be discussed in code between two women who have in common a contempt for men. That contempt carries over into the film. In the novel, Marnie answers, however cryptically, her mother's question about the men in her life. Then, angry that such a question was even posed, she reminds her mother that she, too, had married-and thus had experienced sex. The conversation becomes a game of oneupmanship. Both mother and daughter have a hidden agenda. Mrs. Elmer, who still harbors a guilty secret, insists that sex was a burden that women were expexcted to endure: "'I went into it not knowing... It was my duty to submit.'" (Graham 110). To Marnie, sex was more a matter of expediency than duty.
Marnie's suitors, Mark Ryland and Terry Holbook, the co-directors of Rutland & Co., know nothing of her indifference, much less aversion, to sex. Ryland and Holbook are cousins, whose fathers had founded the publishing house. The men are rivals as well as opposites. Mark is the indefatiguable worker; Terry, the perennial playboy. Each pursues Marnie in his own way: Terry, overtly; Mark, subtly, first by inviting her to a flower show, then to the races.
Mark succeeds in marrying Marnie, who, like her mother, submits-but not willingly. She has no other choice when Mark tracks her down after she disappears with the payroll. He is interested not so much in recovering the money, which he can temporarily replace, as he is in her. In both the novel and the film, Mark is a widower; perhaps one reason for his attaction to her is his belief that she is the widow Taylor, whom he would like to make the second Mrs. Mark Rutland.
Although the novel suggests that Mark pursued Marnie for a variety of reasons, ranging from the expedient to the sexual and even the compassionate, the film depicts a Mark who perceives Marnie as a quarry, a prey, and perhaps even as a pet. In the film, Mark is an art collector and a hunter of exotic species; initially, Mark considers Marnie a new acquisition or a rare specimen. He hardly suspects that he has acquired a snow maiden or an ice queen, until their wedding night. Graham implies that accomodating men may have been part of Marnie's embezzlement scenario, in which sex was an unpleasant means to a neccessary end. The film does not even go that far, probably because Hitchcock was less interested in whether or not Marnie was a virgin on her wedding night than he was in the fact that she was a victim of spousal rape on what should have been an occasion of mutual consent.
In both the novel and the film, a marriage that would have ordinarily have been consummated in the traditional way is consummated by rape. Marnie has no other choice but to marry Mark, knowing that he has compiled enough of a dossier to send her to jail. To Marnie, marriage is a temporary inconvenience; to Mark, it is a union of man and woman. In the novel, the honeymoon rape occurs in a hotel suite; in the film, on a luxury liner. One suspects Hitchcock reveled in another opportunity to defy the Production Code, after having already shown a bare-chested man and a woman in a bra and half slip in post-coital conversation four years earlier in Psycho. Although the Code had become moribund and would be replaced with the rating system four years after Marnie's release, Hitchcock was as explicit and yet as circumspect as he could be in 1964. In Frenzy (1972), his penultimate film, he took full advantage of the liberalization of the screen.
Hitchcock and his screenwriter, Jay Presson Allen, took their cue for the honeymoon sequence from the novel, in which Marnie makes it abundantly clear what she thinks of sex: "`To me, it's so degrading.... It's animal.'" (119-20). Mark tries to explain to her in a quaintly masculine way that "`the physical act of love is a normal outcome of the emotional state of being in love"' (119). To Marnie, this is marriage manual nonsense. After a few days of twin beds and listening to Marnie's tirades against sex and intimacy, Mark, perhaps after having had too much to drink, demands his marital rights. For the film, Hitchcock remained relatively faithful to Graham's description: "He grabbed my other arm, and my frock slipped down...I was fairly shivering with rage. One minute I felt I'd let him get on with his love-making and be like a cold statue dead to every feeling except hate" (Graham 127). Perhaps the Hitchcock of Frenzy would have replicated the scene exactly as Graham had written it, with Marnie "stiff with repulsion and horror," responding with "a cry of defeat that was nothing to do with physical pain" (127). In the film, Marnie is not so much stiff as marmoreal; she sinks back on the bed as if she were metamorphosing into an art object, a Galatea to Mark's Pygmalion, who somehow thinks that the "physical act of love" can turn stone into flesh. The rape is followed by one of Hitchcock's visual jokes that almost undermines the gravity of the entire sequence: a pan to the porthole of the cabin, which may explain why he preferred a honeymoon at sea to one in a posh hotel suite.
Strangely enough, Marnie's eventual emergence from the cocoon was the result of sex-- not on her part, but on her mother's. To get Marnie's mother, Edith, whose name is Bernice in the film, to become the embodiment of the mother whose sins are visited upon her child, Jay Presson Allen, obviously following Hitchcock's suggestions, forged a connection between Bernice and Mrs. Bates, both of whom defied conventional morality, took lovers, and paid the price for their indiscretions. In the novel, Edith Elmer had a strict upbringing. When her husband went off to war in 1942, Edith began taking soldiers as lovers, partly out of loneliness, partly out of her need for affection. The soldier would first rap at the window. Before admitting him, Edith's companion and confidante, Lucy Nye, would remove Marnie from the bed she shared with her mother and deposit her in the spare room. Edith's liaisons soon became common knowledge in the neighborhood. Eventually, her husband learned of them and, coming home on leave unexpectedly, confronted his wife with the allegations. Despite Edith's denials, Elmer divorced her. A year later, in 1943, Edith became pregnant; unwilling to face the double stigma of promiscuity and unwed motherhood, Edith strangled the child (the one that Marnie thought had died shortly after birth) and was acquitted on the basis of temporary insanity.
While such a denouement has potential, it exists within a first-person novel in which Marnie learns about the infanticide after her mother dies of a stroke. While rummaging through her mother's handbag, Marnie discovers a newspaper clipping about the trial, the details of which are confirmed by Lucy Nye. Hitchcock relished the climactic revelation about a mother's past, but not the infanticide, which is more repellent than dramatic. Yet he must have appreciated the similarities betwen Edith and Mrs. Bates, whose failure to observe the moral standards with which they had been raised affected their own lives as well as their children's. Another reason for Hitchcock's attraction to the novel was Marnie's resemblance to Marion Crane (Mary Crane, in Bloch's novel), nor was it merely the fact that one of Marnie's many aliases was "Marion" that struck him. Like Marion, Marnie is a thief, who plans her theft to coincide with a weekend. Marion drove off with the bank deposit on a Friday; Marnie chooses a Thursday, since she has prepared the pay envelopes, which had to be ready on Friday. We are also back in liquid consonant land, with L, M, N, and R names. Instead of Marion and Norman and Melanie and Mitch, we have Marnie and Mark. If there seems to be an "l" missing, in the novel her real name is Margaret Elmer (Edgar in the film). And if one is still hunting for an "l" name, in the film Mark has a sister, Lil, who does not appear in the novel.
Hitchcock wanted a much bloodier climax than Graham's, which is narrated rather than dramatized. Suppose Marnie's mother did not just give herself to service men but was actually a prostitute, who worked out of her bedroom and transferred her daughter to a room outside the one where she accommodated her clientele, one of whom was a sailor. The Baltimore harbor setting also explains the presence of a sailor in the room on the night an incident occurred that was more shocking than the strangling of a newborn child.
The film's denouement also involves Marnie, her mother, and a murder; however, it is not a case of a child being killed, but of a child doing the killing. Jay Presson Allen supplied Hitchcock with a shockingly perverse coda-shocking in the sense that the five-year-old Marnie kills one of mother's customers, who happens to be a sailor; perverse, in the sense that his murder is the result of ignorance, which, according to Aristotle's Poetics, is capable of having as much of a tragic impact as an act committed with full knowledge. The inebriated sailor staggers out of bed, perhaps to use the bathroom. He notices Marnie in a corner, frightened of the storm outside. He moves to the cot to comfort her, at which point Bernice awakens. Assuming the sailor is molesting her daughter, Bernice attacks him. The sailor tries to ward off her blows. Marnie, thinking that he means to harm her mother, strikes him repeatedly with a poker, killing him. Realizing she was indirectly responsible for the tragedy, Bernice assumes the blame, is not prosecuted, and does a 180-degree turn, becoming anti-sex and pro-Bible, while Marnie is left with no memory of the incident.
The film's ending is perverse in a third way, too. Always one for a bloody coda that, at the same time, is dramatically justified, Hitchcock subverts the genre of the woman's film, under which Marnie seems to fall, and turns it into a psychological detective story, in which a male (Mark) turns private eye and forces Marnie to relive that traumatic night in the presence of her mother, although in the original it is a woman (Lucy Nye) who reveals the details about Edith Elmer's past, which are then corroborated by Marnie's uncle Stephen.
A novel can rely on considerably more conventions than a film because it does not require the same kind of streamlining. Thus Graham can end his novel with a double cross, which becomes a sort of coda. The climax coincides with the denouement, in which Marnie learns the truth about her baby brother, who she thought was a victim of malpractice. The coda is Terry Holbrook's revenge on Marnie for supporting Mark's decision to sell his shares in Rutland & Co. to a minority stockholder, thereby leaving Terry with virtually nothing. Terry brings Marnie to the home of Strutt, whose accounting firm she ripped off when she was Marion Holland of Birmingham. Graham implies, however, through Marnie's self-assured voice, that the future is not quite so bleak as it seems. She recalls Mark's words: "I want to fight for you. We're in this together" (281), which leads her to conclude that "the way to love is through suffering" (281). Whether or not Mark succeeds in paying back Strutt to keep Marnie out of jail is unknown. But the point is, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, Marnie had the experience but did not miss the meaning.
Hitchcock also adds a coda, which is often ignored because the denoument is so violent that, when it is over, we feel we have been purged along with Marnie, and like her, have to get on with our lives. What Marnie wanted was a declaration of love from Bernice, which she finally receives in the only way a repentant mother, left with feelings rather than emotions, can express it. Bernice wonders why Marnie ever questioned her love, which, she assures her daughter, was always there. That admission, more than the renactment of the sailor's murder, breaks the stranglehold of the past, providing the optimistic ending that mere self-purgation cannot.
Hitchcock's terrible mother is like the wizard of Oz: remove the mask and you have women grappling with their own demons: Mrs. Bates, whose son discovered her double life when he walked into her bedroom; Lydia Brenner, whose husband's death left her petrified of being abandoned; and Bernice Edgar, who paid the price for converting her bedroom into a brothel.
After Marnie, the terrible mother was no longer a character in Hitchcock's films. It was now time for her to return to the world of myth and archetype, awaiting incarnation through another artist.
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