That double invocation of the mother - that repetition in the way of addressing - with which, in fact, it begins Marnie or starts over Marnie - because the space of pleasure that is strongly marked in the Prolegomena is abandoned - as if noting in advance the 'double' semantic weight of a character, a figure, a trope: a real, concrete, biological mother and a maternal figure, an imaginary mother who, also leaves the deepest consequences in the narrative. Until Marnie, the mother as a direct diegetic participant or symbolic phenomenon had a strong function in Hitchcock's opus, especially after his move to America, when the trajectory of both male and female protagonists took on a clearer Oedipal orientation.
Due to the nature of Hitchcock's melodramatic constitution - which stands out even more impressively in the thriller setting - the mother, in the narrative space marked by the forces of tension and anxiety that decisively influence the formation of a loving couple, took on negative characteristics, often as the main blocking principle in solving the romantic enigma. And in that regard, Marnie is the peak of Hitchcock's oeuvre, since the figure of the mother received its most complex elaboration: with Psycho where, of course, the inverted gender constellation is considered, it is a film in which the heroine's fate is determined most complexly, but also most directly, in relation to the trauma that negatively determined the mother-daughter relationship. This necessarily entails a retrospective look back: the invocation of the mother in Marnie, at the same time implies that in the analysis, even in the briefest terms, the figure that possessed Hitchcock's visual domain and the classic structure of the plot is invoked.
In the director's English period, where generally family 'values' were under less social and sexual pressure, we nevertheless find the beginning of a 'negative' series in the form of Mrs. Whittaker (Violet Farebrother) or Easy Virtue and Mrs. Hillcrist (Helen haye) from The Skin Game which 'blend' into the principle design of the films to provide a relevant, convincing couple as the most important goal of the melodramatic narrative. The first due to the open antipathy towards the dubious heroine, Larita (Isabel jeans), and others for class-financial reasons, make it impossible to reach the desired happy ending. Going to Hollywood, where the obligations to outline the Oedipal trajectory more clearly were much greater and sharper, Hitchcock needed a little more time and narrative variety to gradually profile mother characters like Emma (Patricia collinge) or Shadow of a Doubt or Mrs. Antony (Marion Lorne) or Strangers on a Train which are extremely well-intentioned, but unable to see the wider implications, which gives them an indirect negative characterization.
Of course, the mother figure takes on its most perverse incarnation when she refuses to sever the incestuous connection with her son, for which Notorious provides the most impressive example. Hitchcock's portrayal of Mrs. Sebastian (Leopoldine Konstantin) brings a certain dimension of monstrosity to the character: she will not only regain control of her son Alex (Claude rains) - after he, ignoring her 'inherences', decided to marry Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) - but will plan the most effective way to eliminate the heroine, both as an American spy and as an intruder in her house.
The moment when this cardinal regression takes place, Hitchcock portrays as economically as possible and, of course, as perversely as possible: Alex leaves the marital room where Alicia is lying and goes, repentant, to her mother's room for confession, instructions and consolation. But this kind of explicitness is possible because it is Notorious not only extreme, but also a lone case that allowed a heightened, more 'one-way' rhetorical denunciation in the description of the open villain: Mrs. Sebastian is a Nazi, but much more important for Hitchcock's further hermeneutics and heruistics is the fact that she is not the parent of any of the protagonists of the authentic diegetic couple , consisting of Alicia and Devlin (Cary Grant), because Alex is only a secondary, third member, doomed to be, in the end, literally erased from the romantic plot.
Since the mid-XNUMXs, the issue of the influence of the mother figure on the narrative flow of films has become thematically consistent, growing into an exceptional polyvalent study of the action of a figure that in Hollywood cinema - to the extent that it necessarily contained predominant elements of the patriarchal worldview - had to be 'spared' from ambivalent tones. as, for example, code John Ford. If a series of films from the mid-XNUMXs to the mid-XNUMXs - in which mothers play prominent roles, and even where they literally do not appear - is taken as such a study, then it is not unexpected that, despite the entrenched prejudice of Hitchcock's alleged excessive misogyny, that the first three films in that series, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry i The Man Who Knew Too Much, present a partially or completely positive portrayal of mother figures.
U To Catch a Thief, Mrs. Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis) not only does not sabotage, but actively helps her daughter Frances (Grace Kelly) becomes involved with Robbie (Cary Grant), despite his notorious reputation and the danger of her being stolen. U The Trouble with Harry i The Man Who Knew Too Much the potentially disruptive nature of the mothers' presence in the Hitchcockian narrative is almost entirely nullified by the simple fact that Jennifer (Shirley McLaine) and Jo (Doris Day) have a small child. Considering the comic tone and generally ironic treatment of death - through emphasizing the irrelevance of the corpse whose 'owner' is highlighted in the title - in The Trouble with Harry, Jennifer's family situation does not present too many problems in starting a relationship with Sam (John forsythe). Things are, of course, much more serious in The Man Who Knew Too Much where the kidnapping of little Hank (Christopher Olsen) brings to the surface the hitherto obscured tensions in the marriage between Jo and Ben (James Stewart), but the effective recovery will occur primarily because of the unbreakable connection between mother and son, which Hitchcock poignantly stages at the end of the film when Doris Day performs 'Que sera, sera', and her voice travels - through the 'empty' space that is filled with the mother's melody - to a child who responds to a familiar song.
As will quickly become visible, the negative and even destructive character of the mother figure takes place when she wants to forcefully enter or remain in the prescribed Oedipal scenario that Hitchcock's films, both as melodramas and as thrillers, try to embody classically. Position The Wrong Man as a kind of mediator film in the indicated Hitchcock's development sequence, it should mark a change when the character of the mother, who in the previous three cases, kept a positive profile, moves to the opposite side of pathology, jealousy, destruction, and even madness.
What is in The Man Who Knew Too Much was only an implicit possibility under the tension that comes from outside, through a Hitchcockian fateful 'set of circumstances' which is both a mere coincidence, but also a brutal intervention of a cruel God or dark gods, in The Wrong Man it becomes concrete - almost in the neorealist register - a representation of the disintegration of marriage, the dissolution that threatens to completely separate the couple. In order to reach a new point, which culminates in one of the most famous shots in the director's entire oeuvre, Hitchcock will have to - in a film that he himself claims in the prologue-cameo to be a 'true story, down to the last word' - to perform a large symbolic deployment. The 'difference' that the director immediately promised is ultimately not about the film's mimetic verisimilitude, including filming on real locations (rather than in a studio, which was standard Hitchcock method), but about a different formulation of the beloved auteurske theme - the transfer of guilt, which will be addressed with the help of an unexpected mother figure.
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