Page 31 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Alfred Hitchcock 21

ishment," Hitchcock's films deliver; yet more often they punish woman,
mans victim, for her association with the abject threat of Mother Natures
revenge. His films are littered with female corpses, associated with animal-
ity, food, and death. Just as fqod is served in nearly every film, women are
served up as dishes (in Mamie, Marks sister-in-law, Lil, asks him, "Who's
the dish?" in reference to Marnie): Janet Leigh is covered in chocolate
sauce "blood" for her black-and-white demise in the shower; the sound of
the knife being plunged into her naked body is the sound of a knife being
plunged into a melon; and as Tania Modleski points out, the grotesque as-
sociations between women and food in Frenzy are the basis of the so-called
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black humor of the film. More specifically, in Frenzy women's corpses are
compared to the animal parts that the inspector's wife feeds him: fish heads
and pigs' feet. In these films from the 1960s and early 1970s, through both
visual and narrative conceits, women's bodies, particularly women's dead
bodies, are compared to dead animals or animal parts: Marion Crane and
the stuffed and painted birds from Psycho; Melanie Daniels and the evil
and dead birds from The Birds (not to mention her fur coat that catches
the attention of every man she passes); Marnie as the wild animal hunted,
caught, and domesticated by Mark Rutland; Rusk's victims in Frenzy, one
stuffed into a potato sack, whose bodies are interchangeable with dead
cooked animal parts, suggesting cannibalism humor.
In The Birds it is the mother who had been eating chicken with her
kids in the restaurant who blames Melanie for the bird attacks. After the
birds attack the gas station across the street, the women, huddled in a hall-
way, stare at Melanie, and the mother becomes hysterical, accusing Mela-
nie of being the cause of the attacks and calling her "evil." The mother
screams at Melanie, "Who are you? What are you?" and Melanie slaps her
face. The mother's "What are you?" suggests that Melanie is not human
but some kind of monster or animal that incites the bird attacks. The con-
nection throughout the film between Melanie and the birds, and Mrs.
Bundy's lecture on how it isn't natural for birds to be aggressive, suggests
that Melanies aggressive behavior toward Mitch is not natural. She is not
passive like a good "bird" should be; she has left her gilded cage, flown
to Bodéga Bay, and with the fury of Mother Nature herself, is wreaking
havoc on even innocent children.
Perhaps the most troubling representation of mothers and daughters
in Hitchcock's films, however, comes in Marnie, where the daughter is
constantly compared to a wild animal, studied, hunted, trapped, raped,