05.01.2015
Besides the famous shower scene in Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock has led us into many other bathrooms which often divide onscreen spaces and thus create suspense and anxiety by restricting audience/characters’ vision. Bathrooms, as they repulsed film censors of the Hays Code, repulse any form of surveillance while sometimes allowing a moment of self-investigation. In Spellbounnd, John Ballantyne leaves the bedroom that he shares with Dr. Peterson to shave in the bathroom, and finds the unpleasant memories resurfacing at the sight of the white shaving cream. In North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill hides in Eve Kendall’s bathroom to avoid the porter or to avoid Eve Kendall herself. And though Hitchcock’s bathrooms are for outlaws, his male protagonists are often falsely accused and would be incorporated back into the mainstream society; while the women, Judy Barton, Marion Crane and Marnie Edgar as well as the “mother” in Norman Bates’ body, are authentic criminals and dysfunctional social beings. Bathrooms thus become a gendered space that belong to those expelled (some only temporarily) from the social institution regulated by paternal symbolic laws.
As the film that culminates the “trilogy of modern despair”[1], Marnie, revolving around a female thief, depicts a cold world where the bathroom, once a compartment of the abject, is invaded and torn down, and thus releasing what repels the symbolic order. The film features several bathroom scenes: Marnie washing away the hair dye in a hotel room and the red ink in Rutland’s ladies’ room, waiting in a toilet partition for the best time to steal the Rutland’s money, and coming out of the bath after Mark’s request on the boat. Forced out of the “place of the abject”[2] not as a re-defined person who conforms to social rules, Marnie still struggles with herself, a social other, and with her problematic childhood, a mental abject. Gradually invading Marnie life, Mark Rutland coaxes her out of her “bathroom” with her spoiled identities and repressed memories that should have been flushed away and that consequently nearly corrupt his business. In other words, in order to achieve the “purification of the abject through a ‘descent into the foundation of the symbolic construct,’”[3] Marnie’s body and psyche are turned into a “defilement rite”[4]. However, whether the boundary between the Symbolic and the abject is redrawn is unknown since the film does not reveal if Marnie has become a law-abiding citizen and dutiful wife. Marnie thus leaves us wondering in an unending horror about a possibly failed re-definition and a destabilized symbolic order.
It is worth noticing that after Mark painstakingly tries to cure Marnie, they leave Bernice’s apartment with children still chanting “mother, mother, I am ill” behind. Though it seems that the boundary between the world of the maternal and the paternal is redrawn after Marnie throws out the traumatic experience that haunts her, the ending does not promise a full “recovery” from asexuality and kleptomania. Throughout the film, Mark suffers the threats of castration because Marnie cannot stand being “touched by men,” her maternal bowels occupied by the abject, the repressed memory of the murder. He is curious and anxious, but for a while he can only wait by the door—since on the other side, it is the world of the mother in which shame, crimes, lies and bodily fluids that are regarded as the abject by the “order of the phallus”s a climax. The artificiality associated with “Marion Holland” is flushed away and she returns to a natural state, blonde, bare-shouldered and fresh-faced (pic1), a sharp contrast with the image of a controlled and shrewd criminal a few moments before. Her body no longer contained and surrounded by the straight and rigid lines of the train station, she becomes a sensual, glamorous and lively figure. The bathroom, for now, ensures a temporal containment of and a safe haven for an outlawed and undefined body.
The division of space by bathrooms prevents the authority from probing and also lends the outcasts a sense of agency or even a safe haven unlikely to be regulated by laws. As a result, the walls should be broken down to “bring about a confrontation with the abject”[7] in order to “eject all that threatens the symbolic order.”[8] When Marnie rushes to the ladies’ room in Rutland’s to clean the red ink off her blouse, Mark stands right at the bathroom door and demands Susan Clabon, a long-time and trusted high-level employee to check on Marnie. Immediately switching to an overhead shot, the camera follows Susan entering the room and captures Marnie in her undergarment. The omniscient and scrutinizing gaze transferred from Mark who waits right outside penetrates the walls and demands an answer. Such an invasive gaze also defines the space: a clean, cold and empty room of blue and grey, unlike the warm-colored and vaguely drawn-out hotel bathroom. Marnie’s cleansing process (both physically and mentally) is disrupted and her reply “what a lot of excitement over nothing” seems to be directed at herself rather than at Susan or Mark. It harks back to the confrontation between Marnie and her mother who claims “nothing is wrong with you, Marnie” while in fact sees on her daughter every detail of the “bad accident.” The “nothing” is a euphemism for the unspeakably horrifying abject that cannot be discharged in front of someone else. Consequently, in the bathroom, the expelled “I”[9] that bears the memory of a murder, instead of being flushed down in the sink, is suspended in the air due to Susan’s/Mark’s intrusion. Equally unsettled are Mark and his intermediary Susan, yet both urge to look and to find out—they do not know how ugly it is yet, but their efforts promise a more thorough investigation that shall not be blocked by the bathroom walls. Therefore, a once formless private quarter is punctured and crumbling under “a dominating overseeing gaze” that “exists to serve a rigorous, meticulous power”.[10]
Psychologically speaking Marnie is a subject who regurgitates her childhood trauma, while socially she is an alienated object excluded from the community. Michele Piso’s interpretation the film from the aspect of “class antagonism” between Mark and Marnie’s classes[11] that evokes “communal alienation”[12] suggests a possibility of social abjection induced by the otherness of the minority or the less powerful. Growing up as one of the “grindingly poor,” Marnie alienates oneself from the environment consisting of moderately well-off white-collars, walking towards the ladies’ room in a shot with a shallow depth of field and waiting in a partition for the gossiping crowd to clear. Before the theft sequence, Marnie is staring into the camera with a clearly unpleasant look after being kissed by Mark, who, oblivious, still tries to invite her over. “Bring your tea bag,” he teases, the nonchalant tone reminding her of her difference deeply rooted in her lower class upbringing. Editing together these two sequences (pic 2 and 3) indicates Marnie’s re-emerged self-awareness of her “other” status, and thus she refuses to be assimilated into Mark’s class to avoid being “hurt,” namely being abjected someday, and attempts to run away as soon as possible. The urgency speaks to her desire to steal the money. In the ladies’ room, Mark’s ghost lingers in Marnie’s female colleagues’ chitchat about men “This is the best one you’ve had,” seeming to laugh at her and remark on an unequal relationship. Bathroom is no longer a safe haven. Apparently surprised at the sight of the cleaning lady, Marnie very likely has never worked overtime during weekdays to familiarize with the cleaning schedules: she is underprepared, maybe because she is cornered by Mark. And this time we see her coming out of the bathroom from the shadowy partition to the well-lit office, a “compulsive thief” who constantly needs to get rid of her impoverished past. Such needs shared with her mother are projected onto the canvas of social classes, and hastily take the shape of corporate money of which meaning so well comprehended and controlled by Mark. Thus, as a psychological subject, Marnie’s kleptomania, instead of being abjected, clings to her when she exits the bathroom chased by the shadow of Mark and will be used against her to keep her away from the bathroom.
For other outlaws in Hitchcock films, they either shake off the undesirable “I” in the bathroom (e.g. Mrs. Bates the murderer in the bathroom and Norman the dutiful son outside), or perish with the abject (Marion Crane is killed in the bathroom). However, when at last Marnie is caught by Mark, he does not let her go back to the bathroom to deal with the “I”:
Marnie: Mark, I’d like to go freshen up.
Mark: Uh-uh. You’re fresh enough. Come on.
Like Marnie says, she cannot run away from the evidence Mark now holds against her, but he refuses to let her “out of his sight,” or for her return to a shady space to fabricate lies and masks to “draw attention to the fragility of law”[13], a law which he speaks and obeys and in which he resides. As a result, he chooses to keep her illegality and mental illness with him, and at the same time attempting to create a meaning of his action—love and marriage—to enclose her. As they drive on a road in a forest, he admits:
It seems to be my misfortune to have fallen in love with a thief and a liar…
We'll just have to deal with whatever it is that you are. Whatever you are, I love you. It's horrible, I know. But I do love you.
With nature as the background, Mark’s big romantic gesture only conveys a sense of perverse pleasure in the light of Barbara Creed’s understanding of the popularity of horror films: “a pleasure in breaking the taboo” accompanied by disgust in the confrontation with the abject.[14] And by facing the “horrible,” Mark embarks on imposing a symbolic meaning on the abject incarnate Marnie via legal procedures, to homogenize and own her—“to make you mine.”
To say that Marnie is the most “unusually severe and bleak”[15] is to point out not only the impersonal coldness of Mark Rutland and the society that he represents that exploits an emotionally repressed Marnie, but also the implied message that it proposes an infinite war with the maternal authority in the world of paternal laws, Marnie’s psyche and body its battleground. The second half of the film contains some of the most disturbing scenes: the rape and the memory recovery. The honeymoon rape begins with the discovery of Marnie’s asexuality after her bath. The camera first inspects the bedroom and then turns to the closed bathroom door as Mark makes a comment about the “battleground of marriage”:
Contrary to the movies and the Ladies Home Journal, the battleground of marriage is not, I repeat, not, the... bedroom. The real field of battle is the bath. It is in the bath and for the bath, that the lines are drawn and no quarter given. It seems to me, we are getting off to a dangerously poor start, darling. You’ve been in the bathroom exactly 47 minutes.
Some might say that one secret of marital bliss is to keep one’s personal hygiene issues in the bathroom and from one’s spouse, while it is nearly impossible to not invade and see some unsightly things at some point. Marnie’s “personal hygiene issues,” namely her history of stealing and lying, is partially exposed to Mark, yet from his comment, he seems to want to advance deeper into the “bath” and to win the battle. Deeming himself above the popular culture which probably romanticizes marriage, Mark the zoologist understands the more primitive drives spoken by the maternal authority that affect marital harmony. Thus, to win the battle as an always triumphant businessman, not only does Mark need to possess the bath, he also needs to be in the bath that originally only harbors Marnie. However, to enter the bathroom, he can anticipate seeing a naked body with possibly disgusting bodily fluids. A few moments later when Marnie comes out in a light blue nightgown[16] (pic4) of which intentions were explained by the designer Edith Head: “Marnie’s nightgowns are almost decidedly airtight. There’s nothing seductive about them. They are constructed to keep people out.”[17] Mark, nevertheless, seems genuinely aroused by a meticulously dressed and frigid Marnie and wants to kiss her. Even when he is about to rape her, he seems to be unable to bear the sight of her nakedness and wraps her with his own nightgown. “Off with her shirt, off with her shame,”[18] wrote Herodotus centuries ago, but in the “world of the father (a universe of shame),”[19] it is still highlighted by Mark that direct contact with a nude female body violates the paternal laws; and clothes, especially the nightgown with the similar yellow hue (pic 5), is a construct of such laws to protect a man from a body of shame. Therefore, since physically possessing and occupying the bathroom is dangerous to the system that Mark represents, he can exploit Marnie’s body and psyche outside the space of taboo to continue the “purification of the abject”[20], and to win the war. The “bath,” in the end, is a metonymy for Marnie.
The rape is a turning point with its ritualistic overtone to defile (archaic)[21] Marnie, evoking a series of self-annihilating behaviors[22] beckoned by the abject. Before the rape, Mark stares from behind the Animals of the Seashore with brooding eyes at Marnie’s shadow coming out from the bathroom; the morning after the rape, he pushes the bathroom door open and discovers that Marnie is not inside. Rather, she is in the pool, trying to drown herself. The aftershock of the rape, which probably recalls the repressed memory of the bad accident, almost swallows Marnie’s “self.” And her bathroom, once a place for her to recover from the neurosis, is metaphorically torn down while her body and psyche becomes a site of horror. Floating in the pool, Marnie already appears like a corpse, expelling the “I”[23] from the body defiled and abjected by Mark. At Bernice Edgar’s apartment, Marnie is forced by Mark to remember the details of the murder. As her mind travels back to that fatal night, Marnie’s voice borders on that of a child and her adult self risks being usurped by abjection. Such cases, though without blood and gore, are a way to “renew the initial contact with the abject element and then exclude that element.”[24] Free from the prevention of Marnie’s bathroom, Mark exercises the “ritual” to normalize her in order to assimilate her back into the symbolic order and make her his. Sean Connery’s performance emphasizes more on the calculating and determined psychiatrist than a caring husband, which highlights the “ritual” aspect with all the procedures Mark imposes on Marnie.
It is worth noticing that after Mark painstakingly tries to cure Marnie, they leave Bernice’s apartment with children still chanting “mother, mother, I am ill” behind. Though it seems that the boundary between the world of the maternal and the paternal is redrawn after Marnie throws out the traumatic experience that haunts her, the ending does not promise a full “recovery” from asexuality and kleptomania. Throughout the film, Mark suffers the threats of castration because Marnie cannot stand being “touched by men,” her maternal bowels occupied by the abject, the repressed memory of the murder. He is curious and anxious, but for a while he can only wait by the door—since on the other side, it is the world of the mother in which shame, crimes, lies and bodily fluids that are regarded as the abject by the “order of the phallus”[25] are kept at bay. The fact that Marnie’s abjection feeds on his corporate capital gives itself a form and Mark a breakthrough, and thus the “purification of the abject”[26] commences, away from the “other” side of the border and right on Marnie’s body. Unlike other Hitchcock characters who walk out the bathroom, either clean of charges (Roger Thornhill and John Ballantyne), or with a new identity after destroying the other (Norman Bates and Judy Barton[27]), Marnie becomes the site of a “defilement rite;”[28] and we might see more defiling: she is still “ill,” and instead of being imprisoned, she goes with “the doctor over the hill.”
[1] Michele Piso, “Mark’s Marnie,” in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 283.
[2] Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 9.
[3] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 17, quoted in Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 14.
[4] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 72.
[5] Ibid., 102.
[6] We later learn that Edgar is her mother’s last name.
[7] Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 14.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3-4.
[10] Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/ Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 152.
[11] Michele Piso, “Mark’s Marnie,” in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 281.
[12] Ibid., 283.
[13] Barbara Creed, a, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.
[14] Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 13-14.
[15] Michele Piso, “Mark’s Marnie,” in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 284.
[16] The color of her gown is similar to Mark’s shirt when they both sit in the shadow.
[17] Jay Jorgensen, Edith Head the Fifty-year Career of Hollywood's Greatest Costume Designer. (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2010), 314.
[18] Herodotus. "Candaules, His Wife and Gyges." In The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt. Accessed May 1, 2015. http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodotus/hist14.html.
[19] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 74.
[20] Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 14.
[21] Defined by Oxford Dictionaries: (archaic) Violate the chastity of (a woman). http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/defile
[22] Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 10.
[23] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3-4.
[24] Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 8.
[25] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 74.
[26] Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 14.
[27] Judy comes out the bath as Madeleine in the grey suits.
[28] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 72.
Works cited:
Creed, Barbara. The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London; New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Foucault, Michel. “The Eye of Power.” In Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Herodotus. "Candaules, His Wife and Gyges." In The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt.
Accessed May 1, 2015. http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodotus/hist14.html.
Hitchcock, Alfred. Marnie. 1964.
Jorgensen, Jay. Edith Head the Fifty-year Career of Hollywood's Greatest Costume Designer.
Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2010.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York :
Columbia University Press, 1982.
Piso, Michele. “Mark’s Marnie.” In A Hitchcock Reade, edited by Marshall Deutelbaum and
Leland Poague, 280-294. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Works consulted:
Allen, Richard. "Color Design." In Hitchcock's Romantic Irony. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007.
Utton, Dominic. "His 'n' Hers Bathrooms: The Key to a Happy Marriage." The Telegraph.
September 8, 2014. Accessed May 1, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/11081251/His-n-hers-bathrooms-the-key-to-a-happy-marriage.html.
美艳女贼讲述童年阴影
