Page 36 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

26 Kelly Oliver

women (she plans to invite the little girl Jesse and her mother to live with
her), has such a powerful hold on her daughter that its excess threatens
patriarchal order in which men possess women. Although Mrs. Edgar has
been exploited by men sexually, she was never possessed by them. Marnie
is torn from this world of women—the world of her mother, to which she
regularly returns with her plunder, and the women's world of secretar-
ies—by Mark, who captures and possesses her like a wild animal. But in
spite of his attempts to "train" her to trust him, he cannot train her to love
or desire him. As they leave her mother's apartment, with the girls sing-
ing the jump-rope song in the background, Marnie tells Mark that she
would rather stay with him than go to jail, which is hardly a declaration
of love. As she reminds him (and us) throughout the film, he is as "ill"
as she insofar as he has a "pathological" desire for a man-hating criminal
who cannot stand his touch. Perhaps as Norman Bates tells Marion, we
are all in our own private traps, and we "scratch and claw" at each other
to escape.
In conclusion, Hitchcock's films from the early 1960s associate wo-
men, animals, and animality with an outlaw maternal authority at odds
with paternal law and patriarchal order. Within the logic of his films, this
authority has its source in the generative power of women and Mother
Nature, and its aim is revenge against the animals who have, in Hitch-
cock's words, been persecuted by men for centuries. These films can be
read as a response to the women's movement, particularly the struggle for
greater sexual freedom and sexual agency. Hitchcock's films represent both
the threat and the power of maternal authority, both the threat and the
power of women's sexual agency, both the possibility of confident, strong
women characters and the desire to reinscribe them within patriarchal
order by domesticating them.