Planet Hitchcock: Touch and Cold

What is an advantage for Jessie, becomes a fatal flaw for Marnie in the eyes of a mother who cannot forgive her daughter for any involvement in the sexual field.

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Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

The obvious jealousy that Marnie feels towards Jessie, her little doppelgänger who was 'adopted' by Bernice, is emphasized in two ways. When Marnie tells her mother that she doesn't need to be a babysitter because of the money, Bernice replies that she doesn't have to, it's her 'pleasure': a mother figure, who positions herself towards her daughter as someone who, above all else, is , an agent of restriction, deprivation, 'puritanical' intolerance towards any excess, is nevertheless capable of pleasure, just not in relation to her own child. The real umbilical cord is severed, but the alternative one also works well, providing for Bernice exactly what she expressly denies to others. This contestation turns her daughter into an abject 'original', who is kept at a distance while the 'copy' gets all the attention.

On another level, another symptom of the problem is reflected in Bernice's remark that Marnie has 'lightened' her hair: 'too-blonde hair' - that perhaps the most recognizable sign of Hitchcockian aesthetic ideology, an irresistible motivator mise-en-scène stylization - it serves to attract men, like some top jewel in the crown of female attractiveness and beauty. And again, Bernice can't stand the excess that Marnie, that is, the movie Marnie products. Within the diegesis, it is an excess of elusiveness, de-limitation and 'resourcefulness' (as Mark also noted), and on the semantic level it is a fetishistic excess, a textual excess, a signifier's excess.

Marnie tries to divert Bernice's attention with an expensive gift, a weasel scarf - as in the wider connotative layer of the film, money tries to appear as a more 'relevant' topic than fetishes - with which, in a clear sequence of moves, she 'buys' her mother's love. It is particularly indicative that within this conversation between mother and daughter about the fictional Mr. Pemberton who constantly gives raises to his secretary and is generous to her as if to his own daughter, which Marnie can then 'redirect' to her mother, is the only frame of the heroine who, for a moment, she enjoys it: with her gaze wandering away - much like Mark did in the scene just after he said: 'Resourceful' - Marnie enjoys her own fiction, which is designed to fill the 'gap' in reality.

But the 'distraction' - a kind of respite in the traumatic chain - does not last, or cannot last excessively 'too long': Jessie immediately returns things to their place, to the fundamental subject of the conversation, but also to the authentic focus of the director's attention, that is, his insight (which he cannot quite cross with the heroine's). Namely, Jessie asks Bernice to brush her hair, before her real mother comes home, which reminds her of the kind of hair Marnie had as a child, especially its color.

When the girl reaches for the brush, Marnie lowers herself onto Bernice's injured leg in a desperate effort to physically occupy the space that now 'legitimately' belongs to Jessie, with a position that once again 'gifts' special attention to her hair. Which leads to an extremely pregnant configuration which Hitchcock spatially establishes in this strange triangle: after Jessie sits on Bernice's leg to brush her hair, Marnie is put 'aside', 'thrown out' of the scene of intimate touch, thus becoming structurally, for the first time in this intensely voyeuristic letter, congruent in ' plane' of view with the director, since both - one diegetic, the other non-diegetic factor - suddenly share a focus which, however, considering the enunciative disproportion that must appear even within the same scene, simultaneously registers the traumatic and fetishistic side of the cinematographic apparatus.

While Bernice is talking about her 'bad accident' and non-existent father - thus, about the root of the heroine's anxiety - the staging follows Marnie's gaze, which is also Hitchcock's gaze: Jessie in profile turns so that the camera can, in a suspenseful and sensual, gentle approaching, he completely devotes himself to what the film itself, in constant repetition in the first fifteen minutes, has already crucially marked - blonde hair, from the back, which fills, or enchants, or colorfully shapes the frame. But while for Hitchcock it is a frame that constantly re-actualizes consistent fetishistic concentration, regardless of the adequacy of the object itself, for the heroine it is a scene of lack, loss, an 'inner' quality that is not recognized and therefore rejected.

And again, what is an advantage for Jessie, for Marnie becomes a fatal flaw in the eyes of the mother who cannot forgive her daughter any involvement in the sexual field, which brings a new ironic accent, since the heroine - as will be revealed very soon - is, in contact with men, frigid. Although her aggressive maternal law (which is, in fact, a kind of inverted, but thus even more effectively prohibitive law of the Father) is essentially internalized in her daughter, Bernice persistently refuses to acknowledge the result of her own influence.

After both agree that 'we don't need men', Bernice nevertheless continues to deny - all with a violent crescendo - the fundamental other, physical access to her daughter. In a symbolically charged shot, one of those brilliant Hitchcock productions that resonate multiple times, Marnie wants to touch her mother, after asking her why she doesn't love her: the (un)wanted contact of two female hands with red painted nails - and again, tactile as sensual and suspenseful - in an act that is both cathartic and obscene, tender and unacceptable, it is additionally specified by a pervasive association, because two milk bottles bring, equally suggestive and absurd, an image of two protruding nipples on the chest. The mother as a semiotic abundance, as a nurturing refuge, as a utopian safety zone for the (especially female) child: that insight, that myth, that reality, are simultaneously evoked (even with a grotesque note) and resolutely denied, because Bernice - disgusted, humiliated , alarmed by this familiar gesture - abruptly withdraw her left hand. Only then - when Marnie connects her 'abject' status, her sexual 'corruption', her 'indecent' position with alleged relationships with men that make her 'unfit' for a mother's touch - she would slap her own daughter with the right hand.

In a tense, causal continuity - through the careful symbolization of the hands (which are primarily used for touching) - the mother's slap causes Marnie to spill the bowl of nuts (intended for Jessie): scattered red dots, scattered red spots and yes, in more in one quick condensation, the presentation of Marnie's trauma, a schematic indication of the problem that, in the texture, in the very surface of the film, will occasionally manifest itself, synaestically re-actualize and deploy. What is unspeakable, what cannot be fully extracted from the pre-linguistic Real, nevertheless tends to take shape abstractly, almost like a geometrical problem that is fascinatingly indicative, but certainly unsolvable.

The next short scene masterfully retains the aforementioned causal mechanism, only that the same constellation is transferred from the realm of reality to the somnambulistic region, the oneiric landscape: the 'seam' that connects two disparate, yet coincident levels is effectively 'tangible'. An unsuccessful attempt at a real touch between mother and daughter 'echoes', is answered in a symbolic touch, a triple knock on the window that initiates Marnie's 'old dream', that is, the original nightmare with a short red saturation of the frame. Coldness can also be defined as a lack of touch, and Marnie, having just woken up, tells Bernice, who came to wake her up, that the coldness started 'when you come to the door'. The daughter, in bed, still under the influence of the dream that haunts her, can only see her mother as a shadow in the door frame, a dark figure that looms over her in such a way that it blocks her view, her vision of how to continue.

It is the moment of re-crystallization of Hitchcock's specific conception of the negative mother: once again she is invoked as an icy silhouette, a shadowy figure, faceless, motionless in her imperative existence, 'reduced' to a commanding (ob)figure, to a spectral intrusion. It was as if Miss Edgar had instantly transformed into Mrs. Bates. When Bernice turns and slowly begins to walk down the stairs, Hitchcock holds the camera on her until she almost vanishes from the frame. We look - perhaps together with Marnie - at the door frame, the very formal precondition of coldness: what remains, in that stylistic 'void', is itself mise-en-scène, the frame itself, the frame itself, itself One device.

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