Hitchcock's the maneuver - the shot of Marnie's frozen face is the shadowy reverse of Marnie's emphatic, glowing face in the bathroom after the blue transformation - represents a kind of critique, if we may say so, of the pure camera, as well as a critique of the power of visual judgment. Although, in one sense, it is at its peak, because with its power it 'forces' the diegetic protagonist to make a physical concession, in a violent act of description and focusing - the diegetic field is also a space of direct intervention in the arrangement of people and objects - the camera at the same time, precisely in at that moment of the greatest sexualized power, of supremacy on both sides of the lens, it also outlines its own internal border, because it dwells precisely on the last element of the Real that cannot be dissipated, cannot be translated into a symbolic-imaginary dominion mise-en-scène. As the camera tilts over Marnie, she experiences - just before the expected but unattainable touch - a constitutional prohibition, a blockade, when the gaze, however controlled and committed to voyeuristic axiology, moves to the side of the object. The camera stares at Marnie, but Marnie too - although she is unconscious, although she is catatonic, although she is rigid - looks back.
What is it that Hitchcock's camera does not capture? Again the same answer: that very central 'nothing', the heroine's connection - and that in a moment of extremely melodramatic male appropriation through the cinematographic apparatus - with the traumatic Real. Because 'nothing' cannot be specularized, cannot be subjected to a reflexive regime: the absent object is outside the mirroring procedure, outside the referential networking. This is Hitchcock's (self) criticism: the camera, pausing at the last step, states that it cannot epistemologically and visually "penetrate" some spaces.
Hitchcock constantly returns himself, as well as the audience, to the strictly formal terrain of filmographic enunciation: the gaze, instead of 'scratching' the surface, in turn simply elegantly glides over it. Because the fascination with the surface - as embodied by Hitchcock in this production of the lost heroine - is primarily fascination with form, shapes, characters, their structural connection, their associative chaining, signifier 'matching', complex strategies of resemblance, association and evocation. 'Nothing' can be represented, but the film script will retain its symbolic character through homologies, invocations, correspondences, textual underlining and reminders. That is why the most notorious scene in Marnie it does not end, for example, with a darkening of that glazed look of the heroine that resists the full commodification of the male voyeuristic gaze, but suddenly happens - a transition, a specific mediation and a culmination. In other words, the camera does not stop at that ambivalent and problematic scene - it starts, rather it turns, it still has something to say or show, just after it has arrived, again on the terrain of gender difference, to a specific standstill. That turn is - metaphorical.
'Nothing' - a hole in the chain of signification - nevertheless turns into a symbol, precisely because the camera moves through a selected, expanded field of vision. But, for this transition, as we pointed out, the mediating function of the veil is necessary, and that is why Hitchcock's camera - in order to reach the desired 'destination', an adequate window (and again, not into the soul of the heroine, but into the 'ontological' character of the depicted world) - must first pass over - the curtain. It is the curtain that is necessary for the revelation of the cardinal symbol: it is, therefore, about an extremely theatrical, artificial procedure that replaces realism (when it can no longer be Real) for a metaphor. Before the "terrible" announcement, before the revelation, it is necessary for the curtain to strategically "fall" before framing the scene, in the form of a specific frame-within-a-frame. The veil again plays a crucial role in mise-en-scène. As he says Lacan, 'a veil or curtain hanging in front of something is something that still best provides an image of this fundamental situation of love. It can even be said that with the presence of the curtain, what lies beyond as a lack tends to actualize itself as an image. Absence is painted on the veil. This is nothing less than a curtain function, per se, whatever that may be. The curtain acquires its value, its being and consistency precisely as that on which absence is projected and imagined'. With the help of the veil, it is possible - with mise-en-abîme orchestration - to outline, to project in the rhetorical register that the film image - even as a vacuum image - can withstand in the classical model.
Thus, the camera from Marnie's face, which signifies 'nothing', through the performative and ceremonial effect of the dark theater curtain, comes - in precise formal and formalistic, not dramatic gradation - to, in close-up, a massive vaginal metaphor - a round ship's window which, as a kind of iris from the period of silent cinema, completely controlling the frame, simultaneously recalling the globe of the Universal logo from the beginning of the film (the metaphor is always universal) and invoking, in its sexual capacity, of course the first frame Marnie, but also Marnie, except that in the opening opening the vulva is given in all its material, almost tangible carnality of the folds of the bag, and here only in an abstract geometric 'essentialization'. The sexual action is, therefore, dislocated by being transposed from the phenomenological (or mimetic) proximity of metonymy into a metaphorical center: this is the essence of classical film presentation, which necessarily carries with it the production of representations, sexual phantoms, erotic fantasies.
In brilliant Hawks's screw ball comedy I Was a War Male Bride (I was a war bride, 1949), the final frame - as a sublimation of all lived gender vicissitudes of the protagonist - brings a completely legal (legalization of the legal status of the married couple in the diegesis, and legalization of the always awkward sexual symbolism in the Hollywood canon) culmination: through the round ship's window you can see The Statue of Liberty, which is - in a kind of anticipation of the end North by Northwest, a film which, after all, mirrors the ultimate suspense ending from another Hawks masterpiece, Bringing Up Baby (Silom dadilja, 1938), of course with Cary Grant in the title role - the final destination (in all senses) of this film, but also of a Hollywood film in its classic phase. Hawks's vaginal metaphor is structurally possible only because it is overcome or directly fetishistically annulled by the (American) phallic metaphor: the institutional guarantor of pleasure. On the other hand, Hitchcock's radical staging, right at the moment of Mark's penetration and consummation, consists precisely in the fact that the signifier of pleasure is suspended by the signifier of castration: no matter how calm the seascape in the background is, it is still a kind of abyss in which the masculine can be lost view. Vaginal picture in the first frame Marnie - and even within its duration itself - was, in Hitchcock's stylization, transformed into the basis, cause, motivation, etiology of rhetorical, signifying expansion. But after this staging, the film itself is lacking Marnie will no longer be able to regain the fetishistic emphasis, due to the internal structural negative determination.
But that's not all in this 'emptiest' Hitchcock shot: there is another nothingness, another absence. As we emphasized earlier, the opening frame of the entire sequence begins with the movement of the camera from the flowers, over the window to the curtain in an apparently quite ordinary description of the space in which the key scene will take place. The final path of the camera - as it continues to slide across the surface - is from the curtain to the window where it stops, i.e. it does not quite return to its original position. In the absolute coincidence of the end corresponding to the beginning - on the microsegmental level - something is missing. The camera can't go all the way back, because it's gone - the flowers, which have just been erased, by the action mise-en-scène, by the actions of the male protagonist. Which means that Hitchcock's most controversial scene is, among other things, a scene de-floration.
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