Looking at The birds and Marnie through the Rear window.

Wood, Robert Paul

It was my intention not to contribute to this issue. While my admiration for Hitchcock's work has deepened over the years, I felt I had nothing more to say. Which is not, of course, to suggest that I have said everything there is to be said: Hitchcock's films exist as fixed physical entities on celluloid (give and take a bit of wear and tear), but the perception of them will vary from viewer to viewer and from age to age: in that sense there will always be more to say (or sometimes to retract or reject). I have also come somewhat to feel that I have been type cast. It is thirty-four years since the publication of the original Hitchcock's Films (a work with which I am now dissatisfied, though it had, I think, a certain historical importance in gaining Hitchcock serious critical recognition). Many seem still to prefer it (to me incomprehensibly) to the far more aware and sophisticated chapters I added to it for Hitchcock's Films Revisited. But other members of the collective seemed to feel that a contribution was expected of me, that I have a certain duty, and I have let myself be persuaded.

There was, however, another immediate stimulus, and it has given me a fresh enthusiasm for what I initially saw as just a `job'. I was invited to participate in the documentaries that are to accompany the forthcoming DVDs of Rear Window, The Birds and Marnie. The invitation came as something of a shock: I had never before been asked to work within such a commercial framework, aside from a number of aborted TV offers of interviews along the lines of `Hitchcock is always called the Master of Suspense. Would you talk about this?' (No); `Psycho is the movie that led to all this emphasis on violence in the cinema. Would you talk about this?' (No.). I was wary at first, but then I realized that the interviewer was someone who both loved Hitchcock and respected my work, and that I would be allowed to say what I wanted to say. I felt surprised, honoured and challenged: I didn't want simply to repeat myself, and I also sensed an opportunity to address a wider audience than my books are likely to have reached. I had the great pleasure--the great joy--of reseeing the three films in question, and they sprang to life all over again: it wasn't exactly that I felt I was seeing them for the first time, the feeling was more that I was now really seeing them. This article has grown out of the experience. I can't promise that I am saying anything I haven't already said in some form, but I hope I may be saying it in a somewhat new way.

If the films remain the same, as images impressed on celluloid, `Hitchcock', the meaning of the films, changes as the culture changes. We may see less, or more, but we see it differently, through the prism of a modified consciousness. I take my own work as a convenient example. My early book interpreted `Hitchcock' primarily in terms of `the human condition': the films presented a world of superficial and precarious order constantly threatened, often undermined, by some metaphysical `chaos' that may erupt at any moment from beneath. This still seems to me a tenable way of looking at the films: I don't find it `wrong' exactly, and it continues to be my starting-point in discussing The Birds. But I also don't find it very helpful, unmodified, in my attempts to confront contemporary reality and find ways of dealing with it and, hopefully, move toward change. I prefer today to view the films as a particularly incisive and radical critique of a particular (but very lengthy, with a history going back virtually to our beginnings) phase in our cultural evolution, with an emphasis on male/female relations. This need not necessarily mean that I don't believe there is such a thing as `the human condition'. But I don't see how we can know this either way until we have fully investigated the workings of social construction and determined just how much of what we used so confidently and casually to call `human nature' is subject to change and is therefore changeable. Such a position has the advantage (within a peculiarly depressing and debilitating period in which the metaphorical birds seem to hover over us like the Attack of the Fifty-Foot Vultures) of making things not necessarily beyond hope and irredeemable. Looking around me. at our current phase of (alleged) civilization--in which scientists confidently predict the end of life on the planet within a hundred years if nothing is done, and nobody does anything--I cannot go further than that in optimism, but I suppose it is better than nothing. And I don't think one can deduce anything much more positive from Hitchcock's films.

The extended sequence of Lisa's first visit to Jefferies' apartment establishes and develops this very thoroughly (though we should also bear in mind that his initial response to the `film' he is supposed to be so obsessively watching--i.e. his immediate environment--is that it amounts to `a swamp of boredom'--more J. Lee Thompson than Hitchcock, perhaps). Lisa arrives with her whole armoury of cunning seductions (`dinner at 21', a fabulous dress, her beauty, wit and poise, the charm she knows exactly how to use--or thinks she does), with the clear intention of luring him into the net of matrimony. She is in fact trying to buy him, which is precisely what he can't tolerate. She joins him in viewing the opposite apartments, and we are introduced, via their gaze, to the pathetic `Miss Lonelyhearts', who is engaged in preparing her own seductions. The song `To see you is to love you, and I see you everywhere' begins simultaneously on the soundtrack (coming, we assume, from one of the other apartments). But Miss Lonelyhearts' eagerly anticipated suitor is a figment of her desperate imagination. As she goes through the actions of welcoming him, seating him, pouring drinks, Jefferies raises his glass in an ironic toast, and we see her toasting her non-existent guest. The implicit comparisons are at once close and distant: Lisa's youthful beauty/Miss L's fading charms, Lisa's vintage champagne/Miss L's humbler wine bottle, `dinner at 21'/a home-cooked meal, the elegant candles Lisa has supplied/the simpler ones of Miss L. The song ends, and its final words destroy the fantasy: the beloved is seen only `in the same old dreams tonight'. Miss Lonelyhearts collapses at her table in sobs.

Jefferies immediately draws a parallel/contrast, at Lisa's expense and in his own self-defence: `That's one thing you'll never have to worry about'. Which she promptly challenges (`You can see my apartment from here?')--asserting her own sense of singleness and desire. Jefferies transfers his attention to the apartment of `Miss Torso', who is entertaining several eligible young men simultaneously, and tells Lisa that her situation must be more like that--to which Lisa responds that Miss T is doing `the woman's hardest job: juggling wolves'. Each character is using a partial identification (thinking him/herself into another's position) in order to draw comparisons, but the comparisons drawn, the interpretations they make, are invariably supportive of--and determined by--their own immediate needs. We may extend the principle to film criticism: even the most rigorously `scientific' semioticians have shown themselves quite unable to exclude personal bias from their interpretations (though they may try to conceal it).

Which is no doubt what I am doing when I offer my own reading of the purpose of these comparisons: there is one thing that all three of these male/female relationship situations have in common: the seemingly hopeless incompatibility of male and female viewpoints within our socially constructed arrangements of gender and sexuality. This--and the attempts to move beyond it--seems to me the core of Hitchcock's work, and of his importance to us today.

Consider how the sequence progresses, drawing another, and crucial, couple (and another, very different, dinner) into its frame of reference. Jefferies shifts his attention to the Thorwalds (with whom we have already seen him beginning to be preoccupied): Thorwald serves his apparently invalid wife dinner in bed, on a tray; she expresses her contempt for his services; he leaves the bedroom, closing the door; she promptly gets up and eavesdrops on his phone-call, which we may already guess is to another woman, a guess subsequently confirmed. We cannot of course hear her words, but her gestures eloquently express her scorn and venom. Here male/female incompatibility crystallizes into overt rage and mutual hatred. Without comment, Jefferies passes to the songwriter, struggling to compose at the piano (with clock-repairer Hitch's little cameo, alerting us to the importance of time throughout the film). To Lisa the romantic song sounds `as if it were being written especially for us', which prompts the instant rejoinder `No wonder he's having so much trouble with it'. Their lengthy (and potentially final, though perfunctorily patched up) confrontation develops directly out of all that has preceded it--and is followed, immediately after Lisa leaves, by the scream and smashing of glass which we later understand signify the murder. It would be going too far to say that Jefferies would like to murder Lisa, but it is clear that, on a certain level, he would like to be rid of her, despite her obvious fascinations, not because he feels nothing for her but because he fully grasps the impossibility of a relationship based on directly opposed desires.

The ending of Rear Window has often been seen as cynical (which merely shows what diehard romantics we are at heart, and how diehard romanticism always favours the male position). It seems to me as positive as it could reasonably and realistically be, given the film's basic premise. It's not only that Jefferies has discovered a whole new side of Lisa, and one that he can unreservedly admire: she has discovered it too. From the point where Lisa not only becomes an action heroine but actively enjoys the role, the relationship becomes at least possible. The traditional `romantic' happy ending would have shown Lisa ready to submit completely to Jefferies' way of life. Hitchcock is far shrewder, fairer, more honest--and, as so often, implicitly anticipates a major premise of the feminist movement which the film precedes by a decade: Lisa is now ready to share in Jefferies' interests and values, not in any spirit of self-sacrifice, but because she wants to--but not at the expense of her own. The ominous implication is that there is--and, within the film's terms, can't be--any corresponding compromise on the male side. Lisa may be ready to fly off on dangerous missions around the world, but one can't quite envisage Jefferies attending her fashion shows.

As for all the other happy endings, we are invited to take them with more than a few grains of salt. The woman whose little dog Thorwald poisoned has a replacement--which in no way affects the validity and force of the central diatribe in which she denounces all the neighbours for not `reaching out' (has she? Has Jefferies?). Miss Torso's reunion with her little tubby G.I. encapsulates a relationship based upon a common love of food and nothing more: after their ecstatic hug he makes straight for the fridge. As for poor Miss Lonelyhearts, she is with the composer whose song (and certainly not, as I culpably suggested in the original Hitchcock's Films, Jefferies, who is far too preoccupied elsewhere) saved her life. But just what hopes may we have for this decidedly unglamorous middle-class woman with a New York songwriter given to late-night cocktail parties with all his friends in evening dress? Lisa, perhaps, has `reached out' to Jefferies, but the gesture has not been reciprocated. But it is precisely the possibility of `reaching out' that is the concern of The Birds.par

Everyone asks what the birds `mean', and many answers have been attempted. It still seems to me that Hitchcock goes out of his way to ensure that the birds can't be explained, or at least not entirely (the `male gaze' theory is tempting but inadequate). Hitchcock said the film was `about complacency'; the complacency of all the central characters is revealed by the birds as a very fragile affair indeed. Each clings to a facade that proves a totally inadequate protection against the terrors of existence--its unpredictability, the potential eruption of chaos, all those things we still don't know and therefore can't control or accept and live with, about `life' but above all about ourselves, our own desires and impulses and motivations. Melanie has her pathetic veneer of brittle sophistication and self-assurance, Mitch his faith in the Law (which he practises not only in court but with everyone he encounters), Lydia her faith in the protective security of her husband, Annie her obsessive clinging to a romantic passion she knows to be hopeless (and about which the LP cover of Tristan and Isolde is eloquent). Lydia's, of course, has crumbled before the film begins, which is why she is the most vulnerable to the bird attacks, the first to collapse into defeat and apathy; Mitch is finally confronted with his own helplessness, in a situation on which the Law has nothing to say. Annie, the only one to meet a violent death, is (in a sense) redeemed by her commitment to children, for whom she gives her life. That this (of course only partial) reading of the film corresponds to Hitchcock's conscious intentions seems confirmed in his next film, Marnie: Mark Rutland's little speech (during the shipboard honeymoon, desperate to find something that might at least get Marnie talking) about the tropical bugs that disguise themselves in the pattern of a flower to avoid the attacks of birds has clear enough direct reference to Marnie but even clearer reference retrospectively.

But above all, what is being tested is the characters' ability to form successful and meaningful relationships, and here the birds actually take on certain positive connotations: the smashing of false facades becomes the prelude to an extremely tentative formation of new trust, honesty and mutual acceptance. There is of course no promise of a `happy ending': indeed, there is no ending at all, the two magic words that traditionally signify the resolution of all problems never appearing.

Much has been written about the way in which the film frequently connects the bird attacks to `the look': the initial attack seems provoked by Mitch's accusing council-for-the-prosecution stare at Melanie. No one will, I think, argue with this, but it requires modification: we may equally feel that Melanie herself provokes the attack, by her affectation of an uncaring and clearly false superiority. It is the attack that makes possible the continuance of the relationship: without it they would never have developed beyond mutual hostility and provocation. In this way, the attacks are linked throughout the early stages to tensions between or among the characters: see, for example, the first mass attack, during Cathy's birthday party, where Melanie and Mitch, now moving tentatively toward an understanding and acceptance, are watched by (a) a jealous would-be lover and (b) a possessive mother, their looks at the couple triggering the birds' fury. The subsequent attacks are less obviously connected to `the look': once unleashed, the birds' destructiveness spreads uncontainably, provoked less by individuals as by the tensions initially dramatized in them but endemic to the entire cultural organization. (The most convincing, sophisticated and complex extension of this kind of reading is that offered by Susan Smith in her forthcoming book, because she takes the argument well beyond `the look' to link the attacks to the manifold tensions, both expressed and suppressed, among and within the characters. My own far less comprehensive account is indebted to her).

The film's central (and most explicit, most thesis-like) scene in the Tides restaurant, leading to the mass attack on the town, extends Hitchcock's theme from the particular to the general. The point of the debate is, precisely, the inadequacy of explanations: it exposes the failures of the major protective coverings which humanity has elaborated in its attempts to explain or justify the still inexplicable: notably scientific rationalism (the ornithologist who dismisses the attacks as `impossible') and religion (the bible-spouting drunk who complacently announces `the end of the world'). It all crystallizes, when the attack subsides, in the ultimate and desperate irrationality of the hysterical mother's accusation that Melanie `brought' the birds because it all started when she arrived--the final helpless attempt at an explanation, its grotesque absurdity emphasized by the huge close-up.

Hitchcock is never simplistically optimistic about human relationships within our cultural arrangements; his apparent `happy endings' are patently concessions and always heavily qualified. Yet his work does not lack strong positives: centrally, here, the implicit suggestion that if all the illusions and self-protective deceptions we erect around ourselves were stripped away, successful human relationships might (and no more than that) become possible. The Birds and its non-ending beautifully expresses the tentative nature of this possibility. In my original book on Hitchcock I likened Lydia's experiences in The Birds (plausibly, I still believe) to Mrs. Moore's in the caves of A Passage to India. I would add to this now, as qualification, another familiar moment of E.M.Forster's--the epigraph `Only connect'. The Birds is about the seemingly insuperable difficulties that stand in the way of connecting, within our culture's gender expectations.

To fully grasp the greatness of Marnie one must understand the precise nature of Hitchcock's concept of `pure cinema': putting pieces of film together in order to create effects. The formula (an instance of Hitch's characteristic modesty, his refusal to make any claims for himself beyond the technical/aesthetic) is far too simple to describe what is actually achieved--he makes it sound like an elementary exercise in editing more suitable for a film school student than a major artist. Much more than editing is involved, and what finally matters is the kind of effects produced--their nature, their quality, their value, their complexity, their force. Marnie can stand as the supreme manifestation of this particular concept of `pure cinema': from shot to shot, gesture to gesture, line to line, frame to frame, composition to composition, the film exemplifies the perfection of Hitchcock's method, the summation of his virtuosity: total control over effect, every concept thought cinematically. Any of the great set-pieces would demonstrate this: the opening ten minutes, the first robbery at Rutland's, the hunt and shooting of Forio, the climactic reclaimed memory. But the same goes for even the apparently static and lengthy, largely actionless, central Mark/Marnie duologue (car/Howard Johnson's/car). Yes, it's just two people talking, but every exchange is perfectly judged, in emphasis and tempo, and the build-up of tension is as much a matter of editing as acting. This kind of perfection can only come from an artist working at the highest pitch of imaginative-emotional involvement, and Marnie is clearly one of Hitchcock's most intensely personal films.

It must be recognized that this form of `pure cinema' obviously represents a totally artificial concept of film: in lesser hands, without the artist's full engagement, it could easily degenerate into an intellectual exercise, into mere `cleverness'. To talk of artificiality is not to denigrate the actors: everyone in the film is flawless, from Hedren and Connery right down to the gauche young office assistant who tries to interest Marnie in a Danish, or the Howard Johnson's waitress who, totally unaware of the undercurrents of suppressed rage, tells the warring couple who have dropped in from the freeway to `be sure to come back now'. Yet ultimately everything depends on the assemblage of usually brief shots: we are very far removed from the actor-centred cinema of Renoir or McCarey, from all that we call `Realist' cinema (with a capital R). The artifice is so transparent, in fact, that what is most remarkable is that, even while we are aware of it, awed by the sheer virtuosity, we never lose our emotional involvement: the creative intensity is never a matter of skill alone. It is this concept of cinema--its effects achieved, not by representing `reality' (whatever that is) but by assembling little scraps of film--that easily allows for the most obvious artifice: the backdrops, the travelling-matte, the rear-projection, the notorious red suffusions, the expressionistic thunderstorms at emotional high points. Once one accepts the aesthetic principle, nothing is barred.

Perhaps, though, today, for many people the problem--the challenge--of Marnie, the cause of a certain uneasiness, is not the obvious artifice but Mark Rutland. Hitchcock himself expressed uneasiness about Mark in his characteristically joky trailer (he is tender and caring but also dark and menacing), and the attitude deducible from the evidence of the film is markedly ambivalent. The problem is that Mark offends many of our most preciously guarded beliefs in political correctness, yet he appears to emerge as the film's hero. Hence the tendency I have noticed in recent years to demonize him, treating him as a monster of male chauvinism (and even to see Marnie herself as a lesbian, for which I can find no plausible justification, although, interested, I have searched). We may find this tempting, but it does great violence to the film, and especially to its final sequences: it demands that we see the ending as worse than ambiguous or hesitant, that we read Marnie as simply choosing one prison over another, and perhaps even making the wrong choice. I want to set the record straight, and to ground this (partial) defence of Mark (despite my distrust of the species Great White Heterosexual Male) so securely in the film's detail that it will prove incontrovertible. Those who can't accept Mark on any terms whatever will, I'm afraid, have to abandon the film on grounds of its sexual politics.

Is the relationship between Mark and Marnie that of analyst and patient or of hunter and prey? Both readings are offered quite explicitly in the film, and both must be accepted. That Mark is attracted to Marnie because he sees her (initially) as a wild animal he can trap, dominate, tame and ultimately possess is beyond question; he is also instrumental in her cure. His attempts at amateur psychoanalysis (after reading a few books) are clearly not meant to be taken seriously in themselves: Marnie herself understands this perfectly, and the spectator surely identifies as much with her ridicule as with Mark's misguided efforts. The bedside analysis, however, which she deliberately provokes, precipitates her breakdown and marks an important step in the development of both characters: she has admitted the fragility of her mental state and her consequent need for help, for the first time in the film (it is obvious to the audience in her attempted suicide, of course, but there she immediately withdraws into her habitual protective `bird' cover of irony); and Mark's attitude shifts from there on, becoming less that of hunter and tamer, more that of genuine concern.

Yet Mark alone does not cure Marnie, nor could he. Her progress toward cure (obviously still far from complete at the film's end, as suggested by the repetition of the `Mother, Mother, I am ill' rhyme) is also dependent on other factors: the appearance of Strutt at the party (as if in answer to her cry for help, invited not by Mark but by Lil, and forcing Marnie to confront the reality of her peril); the foxhunt and its brutal, crucial aftermath, the shooting of Forio, later revealed as a reenactment (`There. There now') of the original trauma, bringing Marnie to the verge of what we now call recovered memory (after it, she can no longer steal the money). To answer what I understand Victor Perkins once set as a quite splendid examination question in a British university film studies course: No, Mark does not cure Marnie; but there would have been no cure without him.

For those who find Mark unmitigatedly loathsome the crucial scene is the honeymoon rape. I shall probably get into trouble for this, but to me the term `rape' here, though not entirely inaccurate, still seems a little too clear cut. Yes, Marnie has said `No!', and said it very forcefully; her terror is obvious, and Mark's tearing off of her nightdress is certainly an act of violation. The ensuing act of intercourse, however, is much more qualified. Marnie acquiesces. Why, exactly? Because she knows he will do it anyway? But this isn't clear to the audience, rather the contrary: Mark is looking thoroughly ashamed of himself (as he should be), and seems to have sobered up abruptly, shocked by her helplessness and by his own actions. She neither pleads nor struggles. It is not impossible to read her behaviour as suggesting that at some level she wants intercourse (though not, obviously, if it is accompanied by violence, which now it isn't). I had better say that I am quite aware that I am putting forward what is today a very dangerous and highly unpopular argument. But I stop short of condoning Mark's actions, and I think the film does too. We reach a paradox here: the action is wrong, but it is also a step toward cure. In this it is consistent with every such step throughout the film: every one is presented as at least an unpleasant, at worst a terrifying, experience for Marnie. That the suicide attempt is also ambiguous is spelled out by Mark's suggestion that she could have thrown herself overboard, not into the ship's swimming pool. This enables us to read it, if we wish to, as a preliminary (and desperate, and very dangerous) cry for help.

It now becomes possible to chart Marnie's (and by necessary extension Mark's) progress through the film in four crucial, harrowing sequences, each taking her a step nearer cure: the honeymoon, the bedside psychoanalysis, the hunt, the recovered memory. It is not by any means impossible to read them also as bringing Mark towards the `cure' he never quite realizes that he needs. Hitchcock is not so naive as to suggest that either reaches it. Mark (in direct parallel to Jefferies at the end of Rear Window) remains the further from it, precisely because he knows that, as a male in a male-dominated culture, he can function without it, as Marnie cannot. But at least he is shaken: the Great White Heterosexual Male has been made to face a great many ego-threatening facts: that he didn't understand the completeness of Marnie's withdrawal (her terror of being touched by men, as he takes for granted that he can touch her and embrace her, in his office, in his father's stables) in the first place, that he has never grasped the intensity of her anguish (the psychoanalysis scene), and that he finally doesn't know (as he thinks he does) `what really happened', which has finally to be given him, not by the mother, but by Marnie herself. I conclude, then, with a detailed look at the climactic sequence and the ending.

We should perhaps also look more carefully at some of the things Hitchcock said about his own films: there are moments when the jocular facade slips. One such moment was his sudden, typically casual and offhand remark in an interview, that Forio represents `the father'. I admit it puzzled me at first, the connection not being exactly obvious: Marnie's father neither appears in the film, nor is mentioned until the closing moments (`There was this boy, Billy...', a brief segment cut from the British release version, which is how I first got to know Marnie--was there a fear that audiences might laugh?). But Forio is directly linked to the sailor (`There. There now'), who, as the man about to engage in sexual activity with her mother, becomes the stand-in for the father of the `primal scene'. Hitchcock's casual remark in fact gives us the crucial chain of connections: father-Forio-sailor-Mark. The causal chain, the progress to Marnie's at least potential cure, is given us clearly in the imagery and action of the climactic sequence, which, in the interests of clarity, I shall break down into its most significant `moments'.

1. Mark's car drives up to the mother's house, in long-shot and high angle; the ship (backdrop) we saw earlier looms ominously at the end of the street, seeming to block any exit. We may already have guessed that the male figures who haunt Marnie's nightmares (`Them in the white suits') are sailors.

2. When Bernice (Marnie's mother) attacks Mark and he is fully occupied in struggling with her, Marnie's memory begins, quite independently of him. In her child voice she identifies him with the sailor (father, Forio) as the man who hurt her mother. Although it is Bernice who is violent, her hysteria displaces the guilt on to the man.

3. Knowing that this is the sign Marnie needs, Mark taps three times on the wall--the taps that instigate the memory: `What do the taps mean, Marnie?'/`They want in'--a phrase with obvious sexual connotations.

4. `He came out. He came out to me': the appallingly terrifying, horrible, disgusting thing that men do to her mother is going to be done to Marnie the child.

5. But what the sailor (very early Bruce Dern, already distinguishing himself in a minuscule but crucial role) does to Marnie is stroke her hair, kiss her in a clearly non-sexual way, and try to comfort her: precisely what the adult Marnie was still wanting her mother to do near the beginning of the film. The sailor, previously impatient for sexual satisfaction, is tender and gentle with the child, clearly concerned for her.

6. Bernice pummels him as (in present time) she pummelled Mark, telling him to keep his hands off the child. He protests, quite rightly, that `There's nothing the matter with my hands.' Marnie has stressed throughout the film that she hates to be `touched'.

7. `He hit my mama'--the height of Marnie's intensity. But he didn't! Bernice hit him, he was very careful not to hit her, only trying to hold her off. (But he does say `Now don't go hitting me, you're gonna get hit yourself').

8. Bernice strikes him repeatedly with the fireiron, and he falls on her leg so that the legs interlock: the child's embedded image for the `horror' of sexual intercourse. Bernice calls for Marnie to help her; the child grabs the poker and strikes. In present time Marnie is saying `I hit him. I hit him with a stick". Bernice now walks with a stick; there is no stick in the flashback.

9. `There. There now.' Emerging from the memory/trauma, exhausted but suddenly calm, Marnie identifies the sailor with Forio, her adored horse whom she had to shoot. Her compassion for Forio is transferred, through time, to the innocent sailor she killed, at her mother's instigation. So much seems to be compressed into those simple words: that the sailor was not doing anything very terrible; that the terribleness was in her mother's imagination; that her mother was directly responsible for her own terror of the sexual act. It is the film's key moment, and any reading of Marnie has to account for it. It makes possible the tentative `happy ending'. On its first release this film was ridiculed for its simplistic psychology; I don't think a comment on such a judgement is now necessary. Perhaps the film's finest psychoanalytic perception is the sense it conveys that ultimately Marnie is responsible for her own cure--that she is herself consistently struggling (on some subconscious level) toward the retrieval of the memory that so terrifies her. Certainly, in the bedside analysis scene, she uses Mark to that end, pushing him on until she breaks down; she insists upon destroying Forio herself, when Lil is on hand ready and willing to officiate, reliving the lost memory in a symbolic form that enables her to forgive and accept the sailor/father; and there would be no actual restored (and restorative) memory if she herself didn't lead into it (Mark doesn't know, and her mother is still insistently blocking it off). One might say that Marnie cures herself, using Mark as her instrument. [Note to Victor Perkins: Did I pass? B plus perhaps?].

After the memory Marnie makes one final attempt to obtain from her mother the affection she has always craved and which Bernice (Marnie being the constant reminder of her past) has always felt forced to deny her: she kneels (as she did earlier) at her mother's chair and lays her head on Bernice's lap, to have her hair stroked, as the sailor stroked it in the flashback. Bernice's hand reaches out, but she still can't bring herself to touch the living reminder of her deals with `filthy men'; her hand withdraws, with her usual withdrawal into the myth of her `accident' (`Get up, Marnie, you're achin' my leg'). Mark raises Marnie to her feet and strokes her hair, and Marnie accepts this. I submit that if you don't find this one of the most moving moments in cinema, you don't understand, or can't accept, the film.

The final Marnie/Mark exchange may remind us of the end of Rear Window, with its half-promising, half-sinister compromise: Marnie's `Oh, Mark, I don't want to go to jail. I'd rather stay with you' exactly expresses its tentative nature, which Mark accepts with his `Had you, love?', which equally exactly shows that he understands that this is a less than ideal response. But there is a crucial difference: at the end of Rear Window Jefferies has progressed very little, the compromise is all Lisa's; here, Mark has learned a lot--about Marnie, about himself. In this film (with The Birds intervening) Hitchcock comes as close to admitting that there might conceivably be a future for male/female relationships as he ever could.