Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists
MARNIE US 64
significantly, in the world of science.
Despite this intriguing glimpse of the possibilities of an
interrogation of male sexuality and desire, however, the film
shies away, substituting for this interrogation the simple and
familiar opposition between the old and the new. Such
recognitions as Mark is capable of making, then, of the
inequities in gender politics can be ascribed to the
discredited 'old* personified by Strutt and his ilk.
Sooner or later you'd have gone to jail, or been cornered
in an office by some angry old bull of a businessman who
was out to take what he figured was coming to him. You'd
probably have got him and jail.
Yet it is also true that Mark himself won't take no for an
answer, as his relentless pursuit of Marnie shows. The
audience, as we have seen, is skillfully positioned in such a
way that, within the terms of the diegesis at least, we must
agree with Mark that Marnie is sick and therefore doesn't
'know her own mind'.
Marnie: Oh listen to me Mark. I'm not like other
people. I know what I am.
Mark: I doubt that you do, Marnie.
Marnie: But I don't need your help.
Mark: I don't think you're capable of judging what
you need, or from whom you need it.
For the female reader of the film this positioning is fraught
with contradictions. By the final scene the patriarchal moral
codes are unquestionably dominant as Mark censures Bernice for
her life of prostitution and 'rescues' Marnie from the
clutches of her mother. As Marnie kneels by her mother's
chair, head on her mother's lap, a close up shot shows us
Bernice's hand hovering over Marnie's hair, unable to touch
it. It is Mark, gently lifting Marnie up and stroking her
ha∕ir, who is able to offer Marnie the comforting she needs.
It is Bernice's antipathy to men, we must conclude, that is
responsible for Marnie's unacceptable rejection of them, a
rejection made doubly inappropriate by the fact that she is
desirable to men.
Aside from the classic patriarchal blaming of the mother
implicit here, there is also evidence of another key concern
of the film and that is the relation between knowledge and
power. It is Bernice's wilfulX withholding of knowledge that
has maimed Marnie; and it is Mark's insistence on uncovering
the 'truth' which finally provokes Marnie's acceptance of the
proposition that she is 'ill'. This entails not only
acceptance of Mark as companion and protector but also an
acceptance of the legal codes - she wants it 'all cleared up'
by which we must understand that she will both confess her
crimes and submit to psychiatric treatment. She will, in
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