Page 34 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

24 Kelly Oliver

not people." When Telepathy wins the race after Marnie tells Mark not to
bet on him because he is "wall-eyed," Mark says that she shouldn't have
"chickened" out because her wall-eyed reject won. Taking Marnie to meet
his father, Mark reassures Marnie (who didn't expect to be making the
visit) that his father "goes by scent—if you smell anything like a horse,
you're in." And when he introduces her to his father—who exclaims, "A
girl!"—Mark says, "Not really a girl, a horse fancier." In the next scene
Marnie is robbing the safe at Rutland's office, after which Mark tracks
her down. And, as I mentioned earlier, the exchange between Mark and
Marnie at this point revolves around the metaphor of Marnie as a trapped
animal. Mark says that he can't just turn her "loose" after she accuses
him of trapping her. And when Mark imagines his father's response to
their sudden marriage, he says, "Dad admires wholesome animal lust."
When Marnie is worried about the name that would appear on the mar-
riage license (she has been using the alias Mary Taylor), Mark says that it
doesn't matter if the license says "Minnie Q. Mouse"; it is still legal. And
he says that he can easily explain why he is calling her Marnie rather than
Mary, by saying that it is a "pet" name. On their honeymoon, when she
screams for Mark to unhand her, she exclaims that she cannot "bear to be
handled" as if she is a horse or an animal. Indeed, she says that marriage is
degrading; "it's animal!" And when Mark suggests that she is sick because
she won't let him touch her, she tells him, "Men, you say no thanks to one
of them and you're a candidate for the funny farm," again an allusion to
the animal.
During a conversation on their honeymoon, Mark is explaining how a
certain coral-colored insect evades detection by birds by taking the shape of
a flower; Marnie is likened to this insect insofar as she is a criminal evading
detection by taking the shape of a beautiful mild-mannered widow. Later
that evening, Mark leaves his book Animals of the Seashore and Marine Life
behind to fulfill his uncontrollable animal lusts by raping Marnie; but
the next morning, he finds her floating face-down in the swimming pool.
When he asks her why she didn't just jump overboard (they are on a ship),
she replies that she wanted to kill herself, "not feed the damned fishes."
When they return home, she clandestinely calls her mother, explaining her
absence by telling her that she had the flu and couldn't visit or call, saying,
"I'm still a little hoarse," a homophone of "I'm still a little horse." Mark
trades in his marine biology books for Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal
Female and begins to interrogate Marnie about her childhood, to the point