Department: Communication and Culture
Introduction to Media Theory and Aesthetics
Take-Home Exam #3

“You Freud, Me Jane?”
-Concepts of Spectatorship in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie-

eingereicht von:
Simone J. Donecker

2005

 

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.¹ In the history of cinema Hitchcock appears as one who no longer conceives of the constitution of a film as a function of two terms – the director and the film to be made - but as a function of three: the director, the film and the public which must come into the film, or whose reactions must form an integrating part of the film.²

The interest of visual narrative in Alfred Hitchcock’s movies is well-documented and widely-known. His films provide a context for the analyses of spectatorship which examine the theories, structures, and functions of the gaze. Furthermore, by letting the spectator negotiating and producing the film’s meaning, Hitchcock’s works acknowledge the presence of the audience. His film’s calculated narrative style, the self-consciousness within his works, and the address of the spectator make his movies a prolific source for the examination of different approaches to the media viewer.

In film theory, Hitchcock’s concentration on the male character and the male gaze represents a specific and often problematic debate. In my paper I will examine some of the theories that shaped the discourse of identifying and positioning the spectator within the narrative of film by focusing on Alfred Hitchcock’s film Marnie (1964), since this movie is probably Hitchcock′s most significant work to visualize the subjective psychological states of his problematic central character through the use of cinematic technique.

First, I want to focus on a psychoanalytical interpretation by explaining the dynamics that Laura Mulvey describes in her analysis of conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition that not only typically focus on a male protagonistin the narrative, but that also assume a male spectator. Theories that work within this tradition have cited Hitchcock as a director exemplary of the Freudian or Lacanian exegesis. By the 1980s Mulvey’s theory generated considerable controversy amongst film theorists and was criticized to present an oversimplification of Hitchcock’s agenda. Since then scholars shifted their interest to a strong empiric or historic focus on the spectator.

The collapse of the psychoanalytic interpretation was replaced by heavily contextualized analyses that questioned universalizing categories. In this context I want to discuss Janet Staiger’s approach which examines the relations between spectators and their interaction with the film which activates meaning. Thus, Staiger works against Laura Mulvey’s idea that the spectator plays a passive role in the process of interpreting. Furthermore, I want to examine the limitations of Mulvey’s approach by comparing it to the concepts central to a realization of reception studies as conceived by Staiger. In a final step I will provide a research model on how Hitchcock’s Marnie can be seen through the lens of the concepts central to reception studies.

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1 John Berger, Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972

2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p.11