On Saturday, Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday gave rise on Twitter to a show of cinematic enthusiasms, and, when some of my friends offered praise to “Marnie,” from 1964, I chimed in to add that I consider it Hitchcock’s best film, as well as an antidote to Hitchcock-centrism, the snare and delusion that the director bequeathed to other filmmakers and to critics alike. The shorthand for the phenomenon is the ascension, in 2012, of his 1958 film “Vertigo” to the top of Sight & Sound magazine’s Greatest Films of All Time poll. The fuller version entails the assumption that Hitchcock’s conspicuous directorial control and the methods behind them—his meticulous pre-planning, his elaborate storyboarding, his repudiation of improvisation, all in the interest of realizing his thought-out intentions onscreen with a maximum of clarity and precision—constitute the exemplary form of the art of movies.
“Marnie” is the film in which Hitchcock’s method reaches the breaking point—in which Hitchcock, the master of control, loses control. When I first saw the movie, decades ago, I was still unaware of the horrifying backstory to its creation—Hitchcock’s sexual harassment of its star, Tippi Hedren. The drama itself is a story of sexual violence, which is inflicted both physically and mentally by the lead male character, a wealthy businessman named Mark Rutland (played by Sean Connery) on Hedren’s title character. The movie’s story and its backstory converge, rendering the cruelty that went into its production palpable in the viewing.
Hitchcock films the story with a wide-eyed, astonished, fascinated, and disturbed camera stare that seems to shudder and tremble every time Hedren is onscreen. Even the director’s cameo—in which he watches Hedren walking down a hotel corridor and then turns back to look at the camera, shamefacedly caught in his own leer—suggests his self-aware sense of visual carnality. The images offer an extraordinary swing between blasts of heat and an eerie chill, sometimes bringing the two together. Even the film’s exterior locations have a fluorescent buzz that captures an ambient sense of derangement.
The story itself—of Mark’s irrepressible lust for Marnie—is also a story of Marnie’s troubles and Mark’s willingness to turn his life upside down, and put himself at grave legal risk, to help her overcome them. She’s a serial kleptomaniac who insinuates herself into businesses as a bookkeeper, gains access to their safes, and makes off with stacks of cash; Mark, in attempting to shield Marnie from prosecution, risks arrest as an accomplice. But there’s another side to Marnie’s affliction—her extreme aversion to sex, to a man’s touch, and to Mark’s touch in particular—and that’s double trouble, because, in order to help her, Mark has also married her. Or, rather, Mark, holding the threat of legal complications over her head, coerces Marnie into marrying him in haste, and it isn’t until they leave his Philadelphia estate and go on their honeymoon, a cruise to the South Seas, that he discovers her sexual block. He initially puts up with her rejection and suggests that she seek professional help. (Her response: “Oh, men—you say ‘No, thanks’ to one of them and, bingo, you’re a candidate for the funny farm. It would be hilarious if it weren’t pathetic.”)
Mark’s frustration builds and is exacerbated by Marnie’s imperious manner. He bursts into her room when she’s wearing only a nightgown; as he tells her sarcastically that he wants to “go to bed,” she shrieks, “No!” In one sharp gesture, he tears the nightgown off her, as she stands with a lunar, frozen passivity. Seeming to regret his violation, Mark apologizes, covers her with his bathrobe, and takes her into his arms. Marnie is still inert, staring into the void, when, attempting to console her, he embraces her, kisses her, and tilts her backward into bed. Hitchcock matches Marnie’s coldly terrified gaze, straight at the viewer, with Mark’s ardent and aroused gaze, also into the camera, as Mark leans her into bed and, it’s implied, has sex with her—rather, he rapes her. Marnie attempts to commit suicide as a result, and Mark saves her, but the crisis doesn’t destroy the bond between them. Marnie continues to endure the sham of the marriage, and Mark goes on trying to help Marnie, getting her ultimately to acknowledge that she is suffering from mental illness. (The cause—without giving away too much—is a repressed memory of sexual assault and violence from when she was a child.)
“Marnie” isn’t a horror movie, but it’s a movie of horrors, and those horrors are all connected to sex. If there’s one constant in Hitchcock’s career, it’s sex—sexual desire, sexual aversion, sexual fear, sexual repression, sexual gratification—as the engine of human society at both its best (its occasional acts of heroism) and its worst (the crimes that he films with such cunning and such unnerving relish). Hedren’s performance is one of the greatest in the history of cinema, and it’s inseparable from the pathology of Hitchcock’s approach to her, personal and cinematic. Marnie is a woman who is othered to the vanishing point—whose identity is both elusive and absolute, exalted to the height of his passion and thus rendered utterly passive, statue-like, inhuman and inanimate in the presence of desire. It’s exactly what Hedren had and what Hitchcock elicited; she may not have been the most comprehensively trained actress in Hollywood, but she has a singular presence that mixes alertness and abstraction, a presence that’s at the same time an absence, and he pushes it to its extreme.
Marnie is a master of disguises, a shape-shifter opaque to herself and opaque to the world, whose true nature—with her torments and her talents, her intellectual power and emotional fortitude—is revealed only to the man who desires her so passionately that he’s ready to overturn his own settled world in order to possess her, and whose desire to possess her leads him to rape her, and whose rape of her plays the romantic role of the marriage’s consummation and seals their bond. The film is, to put it simply, sick, and it’s so because Hitchcock was sick. He suffered all his life from furious sexual desire, suffered from the lack of its gratification, suffered from the inability to transform fantasy into reality, and then went ahead and did so virtually, by way of his art. That’s why Hitchcock’s methods—Hitchcock’s meticulous and mysterious plots, Hitchcock’s style of image-making, Hitchcock’s process of designing his movies, their images and sounds and performances, with a supremely analytical specificity and intentionality—are relevant to Hitchcock alone. That’s why the veneration of Hitchcock as the reigning model of directorial precision and control is grotesquely counterproductive for filmmakers and critics—and for the history and progress of the art of moviemaking. His films are the beautiful rendering of his own ugly fury.
The greatness of Hitchcock’s artistry, the musical sublimity of his images and the emotional power of his stories, isn’t separable from his carnality—rather, his greatness depends upon the worst and most bestial aspects of his character. Without them, he’d be the artisan of cinematic cuckoo clocks, and what’s all too often celebrated in the name of Hitchcock mania is precisely an abstracted craft that’s isolated from its source of power, from its dynamic principle, from its raison d’être.
The celebration of Hitchcock is a dangerous enterprise, and that’s why Hitchcock participated enthusiastically in its domestication, in the book of interviews that François Truffaut conducted with him in 1962 and 1966, which was published in 1967 as “Hitchcock by François Truffaut,” and which is the subject of Kent Jones’s film “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” currently playing on HBO. (I wrote about it last year, at the time of its theatrical release.) My colleague Nathan Heller, writing about the book, rightly zeroes in on Truffaut’s unique qualification to create it, saying that he “has a director’s experience, a fanboy’s knowledge, and a critic’s offhand bluntness.” Truffaut had one other quality, too—a devotee’s deference. He was an easy mark, and Hitchcock played him like a fiddle. Throughout the course of the interviews, Hitchcock makes clear that his moviemaking was always calibrated to arouse a specific emotion, a specific reaction on the part of viewers, and he approached these interviews no differently. Hitchcock gets the desired responses from Truffaut, and from readers.
Hitchcock is utterly unguarded on the subject of technique and analysis, and utterly guarded on the subject that his movies are about. As Wittgenstein wrote, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Hitchcock passes over the heart of his life, the demonic core of his being, in silence, and that silence—that inability to speak about sex—is why he was a filmmaker, and a great one, rather than, say, a novelist or a memoirist. It’s also why these interviews play like a history of the automobile that makes no mention of the internal-combustion engine, let alone the oil business.
The book is a model for the transformation of Hitchcock’s unspeakably twisted subjectivity into coolly reasoned objective correlates. So, of course, are his films—but Hitchcock’s films, unlike the interviews, have the uniquely inspired madness of his taste, touch, tone, his inimitable visual inflection. This, too, is unspeakable—it’s the irreducibility of the cinematic experience, which is rendered in criticism (if at all) poetically. It’s the part of criticism that doesn’t depend on perspicacity or knowledge; it depends on rapture, submission, and literary invention. It’s exactly the side of criticism that can’t be learned or transmitted, that can’t be built up by countless hours of moviegoing or theoretical study or righteous intentions.
It’s also the side of moviemaking that can’t be acquired through study or training. That’s another reason why, for all its illuminations, Truffaut’s book of interviews with Hitchcock has given rise to a conspiracy of silence—a silence that’s filled with the din of critical discourse and academic study and directorial self-justification and self-explanation, perhaps the loudest and most verbose silence of all time. The cult of Hitchcock, which presses directors’ ideas and critics’ taste toward his hyperrational craft and conceals his tormented frenzy, tends to thrust some filmmakers’ impulses, and the critical response to some of the best modern films, to the sidelines. They borrow the repression without sharing in what’s repressed. “Marnie” remains the Hitchcock film that poses the gravest threat to the cinephile conscience; it’s the ultimate Hitchcock film, the one that threatens to knock Hitchcock out of his own system, and, so, the one that offers filmmakers and critics alike a way out of Hitchcockophilia.
