With the visual and rhetorical hysterization of the text, the status of the testimony as such is also problematized: 'He hit my mom', shouts Marnie, while the shot before and after the heroine's report from the 'face of the accident' shows exactly the opposite, that Bernice attacks the sailor with her hands he tries to reason with her. Then she grabs a poker and hits the sailor's head and back several times. Who with bloody heads falls at her feet: the shot of their two intertwined bodies, in another directorial interpolation that 'mixes' the infantile with the symbolic, stages a resonant image of intercourse, as a child imagines, in an initiating sexual fantasy, a primal scene in which the father violently injures the mother during close physical contact.
From that convulsive position of 'intercourse', Bernice calls on Marnie to help her: the girl (re)takes the poker and finishes her mother's work. 'I hit him with a stick,' says Marnie in another falsifying flashback, where the lethal poker is - through indicative deployment - transformed into the stick Bernice wields.
"Freed" from the burden of the past through dramatic staging, but also reinterpretation, Marnie can now offer words of comfort, primarily to herself, but perhaps also to Bernice and Marko, as an assurance that the nightmare is over: "There. There now'.
But this soothing effect must be read through the director's ironic optics: as well as when shooting Forio who figured as a symbolic father, Marnie uses the same phrase after another committed murder, this time of a sailor who acted as a kind of imaginary usurping father mother's bed. As in the case Spellbound, Hitchcock u Marnie underlines - pointing to the fickleness of the psychoanalytic procedure itself - how locating and publishing the cause of trauma can be, in fact, even more traumatic than the 'original' trauma itself that is being attempted to be reconstructed: Ballantyne (Gregory Peck) thus learns that he deliberately killed his younger brother, and that Marnie is directly responsible for the death of an innocent sailor.
In order to achieve the 'therapeutic' intention - the task of the narrative is to provide a period of convalescence for the main character - and Spellbound i Marnie, hence, they have to cancel additional knowledge, trauma added to trauma, a potential source of even more excessive anxiety, in order to 'rehabilitate' the loving couple itself. But unlike Spellbound which simply, without explanation, skips over the information that would actually have to determine Ballantyne's future, u Marnie Hitchcock, on the other hand, in mise-en-scène registers and represents an iconographic 'residue' - brought to another, realistic color suffusion - which confirms that in the letter itself there remain crucial, 'residual' signifier traces: what both the girl Marnie and the grown-up Marnie see is the movement of the camera into a huge red, bloody stain which - revealing how, in fact, the heroine's associative mechanism worked - fills all the narrative space, turning the frame into a saturated, 'uniform' modernist image that is 'reduced' to a non-representational sign.
The casting on Marnie for the last time in the film sets up the famous color trope of the manifestation of trauma, as well as 'clarifies' the very etiology of Hitchcock's graying: in order to develop this deformation in the visual field, therefore, a white background (the sailor's shirt) is necessary so that the scarlet tide ( just like her in The Shining) flooded both the text and the margins of the letter: red color in Marnie it does not represent, in this sense, the heroine's menstrual or defloration blood, but the crimson stain of 'undiluted' guilt in the act of metaphorical patricide.
Given that, in the violent mode, Marnie 'removed' both the symbolic and the imaginary, where is the real father, that absent center of the heroine's oedipal narrative, the original plot that was covered by other traumatic layers? After Marnie's memory performance, Mark says, 'It's over now. You're fine', but the story is not over, nor is its main protagonist okay. Hitchcock places Marnie and Bernice so that they sit opposite each other, at the same time in a relationship of confrontation, but also a mirror match.
Mirroring also means that now Bernice needs to take over the shared (i)story, that is, it is her turn to tell the real primal scene, the real point of origin. Bernice settles into the armchair to begin her (is)story and puts down the cane, that imaginary deadly weapon from Marnie's false memory. When Bernice says that she took the blame for the sailor's murder, Marnie can finally find the ultimate proof of motherly love: 'You must have loved me, Mummy'. Bernice uses a strange wording to confirm her daughter's 'epiphany', 'You are the only one thing (underlined by AB) in this world that I loved', and then - following his train of thought - the matter turns to a problem that has never been mentioned in the film until now, but which nevertheless had a strong influence, from the background, on all the heroine's relationships - the question of the real father: 'Do you know how I am? received (underlined by AB), Marnie?'
The topos of origin is the starting point of the story, nevertheless establishing at least the minimal presence of the father, through the rhetorically recognizable convention of the oldest forms of storytelling: 'There was that boy, Billy'. But this is not a love story, but a story about buying and selling, a twisted version of the 'boy meets girl' narrative. Since she already had 'nothing of her own', Bernice wanted - an ordinary thing, Billy's sweater. The primal scene is thus transformed into a scene of economic transaction as a sexual act, an exchange of objects and goods: Bernice will get her object of desire if she 'lets Billy', who will run away when she becomes pregnant. But anyway, a sense of satisfaction, even a touch of fetishistic pleasure, suddenly appears on Bernice's face when she says, 'I've still got that sweater': that feeling will be softened somewhat when she adds, 'And I've got you, Marnie'.
Marnie is visibly shaken, but even in this state, she realizes that Bernice's reaction is still flawed, that at the crucial moment there is still something that prevents their full communication, even after the cathartic realization. Moreover, Bernice's performance itself contains a certain, unpleasant irony, an unconscious humiliation of her daughter, which Marnie recognizes, and reciprocates with the same irony her mother's 'lifetime' goal to make her 'decent': 'Of course, I'm a cheat, and a liar and a thief, but I'm decent'.
After another, somewhat trivial "therapeutic" intervention by Mark about how a child takes love as it comes and "that it is not difficult to understand", which only transfers the irony to him, because such a statement is, in fact, completely out of place, more naturally learned, completely foreign in this Hitchcock film, in every Hitchcock film, Marnie rests her head on her mother's lap: if the trauma has been dramatically reenacted, if the 'truth' has been known, does this mean that the repetition compulsion can be broken?
Bonus video:
