Bond_on_Blonde_(Psychological_Study_of_Hitchcock's_Marnie)

Bond On Blonde Tippi Hedren stars as Marnie Edgar, a compulsive thief who has taken clerical jobs from Baltimore to Buffalo, only to bide her time for a few weeks and then loot the safe. But when she turns up in Philadelphia at Rutland Insurance, company man Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) discovers her pattern of theft and then threatens to expose her unless she marries him. Far from a marriage of convenience, playboy Mark, who loves a challenge, sees Marnie as a sort of wild animal that he has trapped and intends to tame, while his new bride struggles with various deep-seated psychological problems — including a fear of thunderstorms and sexual frigidity — that indicate a traumatic event in her past. Before long, Mark becomes fascinated with Marnie's emotional dilemmas, which he intends to pinpoint and perhaps cure. Marnie is not a "whodunit" but a "why-is-she-doing-it" type of film by Alfred Hitchcock. Mark Rutledge admonishes the audience that we are "not supposed to get it," when he defends his attraction to a thief and a liar. Marnie, hired under a fictitious name as a secretary for four months in the New York accounting office of Mr. Strutt, robs her boss of a considerable sum of money. Marnie changes her hairdo and identity every time she robs a place. She then returns to her mother in Baltimore with presents. Her relationship with mom is fought with abnormal psychological overtones. The mother is in a state of denial about how she feels about her daughter; while the daughter exhibits strange behavior such as, freaking out at seeing red gladiolus in her mother's vase. She is trying to gain her mother's love by materially providing for her while also desperately trying to please by being a respectable woman. The highlight of her home visit comes when her mother exclaims: "decent women don't have a need for a man;" and, Marnie accepts this as gospel. It seems that the mother didn't mention anything about stealing, as part of a person being decent. Like the latter film, the blonde heroine becomes an obsession for one of her male victims - Mark Rutland - whose behavior is as peculiar as her own. Instead of turning her over to the police once he apprehends her, Mark forces her to marry him, partly in an effort to understand her compulsive need to steal and partly because he's sexually aroused by this beautiful but frigid kleptomaniac. Marnie is a thief. She steals compulsively. The money is used partly to set up her mother comfortably and partly because it is a compulsive act, an act intending to fulfill the unmet needs of the human being, to whom normal relationships and love are denied, sex. If there is any question of this, the proof will come at the end of the movie, when Marnie has to put down her horse, which was injured...and in a daze, goes to the vault to steal money. As the relationship between Mark and Marnie progresses from jailer/prisoner to something deeper and more complex, Hitchcock's film refuses to conform to genre expectations. Is Marnie a perverse love story, a psychological thriller or a clinical case study' The answer: her identity isall of these things. The internal construction of Marnie as heroine is complex, for narratively she functions both as subject (the protagonist) and as object (the legendary cool blonde). Furthermore, in either capacity she also alternates between femme fatale and particularly vulnerable ingénue. As the former, Marnie has conflicts with being a cunning thief, unencumbered by emotional involvements; as the latter, she is the inexplicably troubled young woman who cannot understand her own compulsions, nor trace her own past. Both types of gender type roles coexist in the female lead of Marnie, and yet, overall each mode is given differentiated treatment as contrasting conflicts, such that Marnie as a character is at times formally coded as dangerous and mysterious in her attractiveness and at others as sympathetic and softly appealing. Certainly Hitchcock, insistent on the nature of film as a visual medium, occupied himself with the craft of developing such elements through showing rather than telling. All of this is to establish my interest in the film’s treatment of Marnie’s unconscious and the amount of showing that goes on around the development of her character and its function as intriguing object. The telling has a part to play in this; the detail in the opening sequences of Marnie, in which discussions around this mysterious female figure are key to her introduction—but Hitchcock would seem to be less invested in the affect produced by this aspect of the story. Thus, the repressed trauma Marnie had suffered as a child may not seem commensurate with her symptoms, or, to take it further, the entire psychoanalytical framework attached to Marnie’s character, as some have scoffed, may seem just plain silly—and yet, the film’s focus on showing us a stylized approximation of trauma and the return of the repressed would seem to be the affective core of the piece, with the details of Marnie’s past and psychic journey just a way of getting us there for the show, as it were. Interestingly enough, the prime cause of Marnie’s condition, is considered to be a murder. But Hitch shows, almost graphically, that the real cause is child molestation. And it was evident, implied, before the murder. But the traumatic event that triggered this psychosis was repressed, although it was more than molestation, a nearly symbolic event ending the childhood of Marnie, by the death of her innocence. Defenders and detractors of the film have both applied themselves to explaining the meaning of Marnie’s episodes—either to justify or complain about devices such as the red tint flashes or the patently artificial backdrops and rear projection. While the interpretation of these devices (as expressionist, as an artful deployment of artifice, as encouraging subjective identification, or what have you) often blooms into the kind of purple over-reading that Hitchcock’s apparent fascination with unattainable women receives, this tendency does point up the manner in which interpretation is inextricable from discussions of style. Like all of Hitchcock's work, it stands as a work marked primarily by its differences from anything else being filmed at the time. It goes a step farther in dealing with themes that are both timeless and chilling to the bone but were not in fashion during modern psychologyof the time.