Page 27 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Alfred Hitchcock 17

victims. In this regard it is important to note that for Kristeva the abject
is not only horrifying but also fascinating; we are drawn to it even while
it repulses us. This is why Kristevas theory of abjection has been popular
among feminist film critics who discuss the horror genre, which both fas-
cinates and terrifies viewers who are drawn to horror. 15
Kristevas theory also links the threat of the maternal and the femi-
nine with the threat of the animal and animality:

[T]he abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man
strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have
marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening
world of animals and animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and
murder. The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our per-
sonal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity. 16

Within this analysis the animal and the maternal are the original threats to
our identities as human and as individuals; and the animal and maternal
are linked in their relation to the threat of the natural world, the threat of
sex, birth, and death that makes them abject. But what makes the mother's
body abject is also what gives her authority, an authority that comes from
her connection with the natural world, particularly her power to give birth
and the infant's dependence on her body for its life. The women in Hitch-
cock's films, particularly the films from the early 1960s, are mothers and
daughters who represent the power and threat of maternal authority and the
power and threat of feminine sexuality unchecked by that authority. These
women are presented as abject in the double sense of horrifying and yet fas-
cinating, especially in their association with the animal and animality. And
the struggle between these two aspects of the maternal / feminine—horri-
fying and fascinating—is represented in the tension between mothers and
daughters in these films.
It is noteworthy that the "daughters" in these films are associated
with the mother at the same time that they are punished by her. Their
names all begin with M, as if for "mother": Marion, Melanie, Marnie.
And all of Mamie's names are versions of Mary, as in the Virgin Mary:
7
Margaret, Mary, Marion (an echo of Psycho)} If we trace the trajectory
of mother-daughter relations from Psycho to Marnie, we see first Marion
Crane, who mentions her mother in the opening scene with her lover
in the hotel room in Phoenix when she tells him that she would like to
meet him "respectably," with her "mother's picture on the mantel." Soon