Page 35 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Alfred Hitchcock 25

that Marnie says, "You Freud, me Jane," again pointing up Mark's (and the
film's) linking of Marnie and the primitive.
Like so many detectives in Hitchcock's earlier films, Mark searches
29
for clues to the mystery of Mamie's sexuality. As he discovers, the key
to the mystery of her sexual "aberration" lies with her mother. Raymond
Bellour suggests that Mamie's horse, Forio, is one key to her sexuality
insofar as the horse represents Mamie's desire for the phallus. 30 And
Knapp argues that the horse is a lesbian fetish onto which the desire
between Lil and Marnie is displaced. 31 But the film suggests a link be-
tween the horse and Mamie's mother. Mamie's love for her horse and,
more significant, her love for her mother compete with Mark and seem
to foreclose the possibility of her love for him. It is her mother who made
her "decent" and taught her to hate men. But her mother's link to Mar-
nie's beloved horse, Forio, goes beyond Mamie's love. It is also evidenced
in the words that Marnie says to comfort the horse after she shoots him,
suggesting that the horse's broken leg represents her mother's broken leg
(suffered in her accident, when the sailor falls on top of her), the horse's
pain becomes her mother's pain, and his screams are like her screams for
help. After she shoots the horse, Marnie says, "There, there now," as if
to comfort him. She hysterically insists on getting a gun to shoot him
because he is "screaming" in pain, and she desperately wants to stop
both his screaming and his pain. As we discover at the end of the film in
flashback, when she was a small girl, her mother defended her against a
drunken sailor who began to beat Mrs. Edgar. Marnie wanted the sailor
to stop and when the sailor fell on her mother and her mother screamed
for Marnie to help her, Marnie grabbed the fire-poker and hit the sailor
on the head. After we see the sailor fall dead (in her flashback), Marnie
says, "There, there now," as if comforting her mother. Finally, Mamie's
mother is indirectly compared to the horse when Lil quips to Mark in
reference to Marnie that she thought that "a girl's best friend is her
mother." The adage is, of course, that man's best friend is his dog; and in
Mamie's case her best friend is her horse.
In the end both Mark and the film hold Mrs. Edgar responsible for
Mamie's criminal and sexual perversions, which is why Mark can reas-
sure Marnie that after he tells the authorities what he has to tell, she won't
go to jail. Mrs. Edgar, a loose woman herself, has ensured that her daugh-
ter will be "decent" to the point of hating men and "preying" on them for
their money. Here, the mother, herself an outlaw who lives in a world of