Planet Hitchcock: Mannerist Approach and Object of Fascination

After she grabs the gun, Hitchcock's camera again follows Marnie from behind, so that the full extent of her inner conflict is conveyed through the fascinatingly beautiful and 'unperturbed' surface of her golden hair

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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 final day of the film begins with a fox hunt that Marnie is reluctantly forced to attend, in Mark's futile effort to maintain some semblance of normality, as he prepares to make amends to Strutt and the others. The chase sequence kicks off, aided by an uncharacteristically 'excited' Herrmann's with music, almost jovially, only for the perspective to radically change when, in the scene of the dogs that have apparently 'smelled the blood' of the reddish animal that is the object of so much aggression, Marnie herself suddenly, surrounded by people to whom she does not belong, recognizes or identifies as an object in a violent ritual.

In accordance with the triggered associative mechanism, Marnie's gaze falls on the bright red jacket (and white pants) of one of the riders, which gives us the penultimate stage of the scarlet suffusion: placed in the role of a hunted animal, the heroine of Foria must try the only thing that seems logical - to run away.

Marnie is once again bound in her trance, but this time she is on Forio: unlike her previous cases of paralysis, she is now - in keeping with the dynamized, accelerated narrative - in dizzying motion. Does she even control Forius in a wild gallop, or is she completely at the mercy of the horse with whom she has a 'telepathic' connection? Hitchcock exceptionally represents this dramatic action, which undeniably has its own psychological background, an indistinguishable lididal investment: the director, in a masterful interweaving of montages, combines frames which, in terms of their representational and intonation quality, are completely different, which suggests the over-conditioned situation of the heroine in which she found herself.

A superior crane that rises to place the total of the heroine and the horse in the field (with Lil following them) is juxtaposed with scenes of Marnie while the background is overtly artificial giving the impression of a constructed, deliberate unreality, as well as with shots that, in contrast to previous examples, they 'surprisingly' precisely respect spatial integrity, all this in connection with the (quasi) subjective vision of the heroine: at the same time real, but also oneiric, fragmented to the point of dissolution of Marnie's psyche trapped in a traumatic vortex center, but also disturbingly totalized in unified fragments of consciousness that inevitably point to the tragic outcome of this panic acceleration, the whole scene is visually established as a kind of hysterical sublimation, the heroine's radical alienation, the tearing of the remaining connective tissue that kept the heroine somehow in the social fabric.

If for Marnie, no matter how distant, the passage to to jouissance was still guaranteed, as we saw at the beginning of the film, through the obscured, but still functional Name-Father in the form of a substitute Forius, then the ultimate consequence of the scene must be devastating. Marnie's fall from the horse, which will break her legs, completes the trajectory of tearing apart the structure of pleasure that the heroine - through a complex procedure of displacement and re-actualization - somehow managed to build. When she gets up from the ground she hit her head on, Marnie still acts like she's only half-awakened, like she's still out of her oppressive childhood (which is still evident in her voice), but she's still aggressive in her search for some weapon. in order to end the suffering of the injured horse.

After she grabs the gun, Hitchcock's camera, most indicatively, follows her again from behind, so that the full extent of her inner discord is translated or recalibrated through the fascinatingly beautiful and 'unperturbed' surface of her golden hair. And the 'halved' shot of the murder - the glove with the gun in the first, Forio in the second - retains an almost dubious fetishistic subtext. 'There. There now', says Marnie after the fatal shot, consoling Forio, but primarily herself, when there is no adult to soothe the child: an insufficient, pathetic symbolic chorus that actually testifies that the heroine has just left the symbolic domain of recovery and reconstitution.

As Mark and Strutt negotiate to help Marnie, she enters the house with a gun. Although the literal physical position of the camera may not match, this shot seems to be taken from the same point of view - and, indirectly, from the same point of enunciation - as the crane that ended earlier with Strutt in the foreground. But now the frame does not end, but begins with Marnie hearing that Mark and Strutt are talking about her: still in a semi-trance, she climbs the stairs, which Hitchcock uses for a specific gradation as the heroine's figure fills the frame.

Hitchcock's upper angle here serves to first metaphorically place Marnie at the center of her anxiety, since the red carpet acts as a symptomatic background into which the heroine is 'drowning', thus as a 'dislocated' version of past traumatic suffusions, so that - when Marnie succeeds stairs, on which the carpet is no longer reddish, but completely red - the camera could, in the last efforts to re-establish the fetishistic description, focus on the figure from the back and thus observe the heroine's blonde hair, which can still libidiously redirect the basic vision . That the director is extremely concerned that, when the narrative has already taken a different course, on a microsegmental level provides the fetishistic energy that governed his version of the cinematographic apparatus, can be seen in the fact that the two following shots are also spoken from that elevated (rhetorical) position: Marnie she takes the keys to the office and the safe combination, then slowly descends - her hair is the center of attention, of course - just in time to hear Mark's speech (which says: 'all for my benefit') one more time and exits. Even within the framework of the smallest structural unit, Hitchcock is guided by the principles of symmetry, most often around a fetishistic axis: the scene that began with Marnie's troubled face ends with the sight of her hair.

As was the case in Prelude, this additional Hitchcock's stylistic engagement, the surplus value obtained through increased investment in the object of fascination that gives the language the manneristic quality of larpurartistic ecstasy, needs its parallel in the corresponding pleasure of the heroine who, after a new trauma, leaves instead of potential compensation and returned satisfaction. That the whole constellation, and even when viewed through the establishment of the mode of pleasure in the transition from the figure of the author to the figure of the heroine, is clearly sexualized, i.e. that most of the connotative range is contained in this resonance, is clearly reflected in the shape of the gun that, entering from the right frame, phallicly 'penetrates' the framed scene, only for the frame to shift - the transition from male to female 'perspective' - to the 'vaginal' safe.

Hitchcock concretizes this association by giving close up the lock of the safe that matches the logo at the beginning of the film and the ship's window in the rape scene, and perhaps - through a metaphorical link - the purse in the opening shot.

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