Page 32 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

22 Kelly Oliver

and "domesticated" by the male protagonist. And the mother is a crippled
man-hating former prostitute who removes her daughter from their bed
whenever one of her sailor Johns knocks at the door. The daughter, Mar-
garet Edgar or "Marnie," is traumatized by a repressed childhood memory
of one of her mother's Johns who kissed her and whom she killed. This
episode with the John—"my accident," as Mrs. Edgar calls it—leaves Mrs.
Edgar lame with pain in her leg and leaves Marnie psychologically scarred
in a painful relationship to her mother. Marnie wants her mother's love
but never receives it because, although as we find out in Mrs. Edgar's final
confession, she loved Marnie more than anything and fought to keep her,
apparently the "accident" tainted her love for her daughter; and it left
Marnie unable to tolerate any man's touch, what within the patriarchal
imaginary is considered frigidity. What the film and its male protagonist,
Mark Rutland, identify as sexual aberrations are identified with Mamie's
relationship to her mother.
Mark is the son of a wealthy man and a part-time zoologist who,
as E. Ann Kaplan points out, is attracted to Marnie because "she repre-
sents the wild animal in the jungle that always threatens to overwhelm
society." 26 Several critics have commented on the way that Mark hunts
and traps Marnie like a wild animal, 27 a reading that is made explicit in
the dialogue of the film, particularly in the scene where Mark finds Mar-
nie after she has robbed Rutland's safe and blackmails her into marrying
him. She tells Mark that she is "just some animal" that he has caught;
and he replies that he caught a "wild one" this time. Like Sophie, the wild
Jaguarondi whose picture he keeps in his office, whom he claims to have
"trained to trust" him, Mark proceeds to try to "train" Marnie through-
out the rest of the film. Marnie is filled with allusions to animals, animal
lust, and animal instincts. As Mary Lucretia Knapp points out, from the
beginning of the film Marnie is associated with the girls' jump-rope song
about the lady with the alligator purse. Mamie's yellow purse dominates
the screen in one of the first scenes of the film. After her first robbery she
visits her mother's apartment in Baltimore, where the girls are jumping
rope outside; they are singing the same song at the end of the film when
Mark and Marnie leave her mother's apartment after the revelation that
Marnie killed the sailor. Robin Wood argues that the giant ship looming
on the painted set behind the street on which her mother lives suggests
a trap, the trap of false memory and unreality from which the truth will
set Marnie free. 28