ira friedberg*
Gaslight Cinema: Ambiguity in Suspicion and Last Year in Marienbad
A critique strives for the rational. This may be at odds with the art form it hopes to describe and analyse, which trades in obscurity, obfuscation and coercion. Such manipulation of character and viewer can be readily found in the plot and form of the film genre variously described as ‘gaslight melodrama’ (Barefoot), ‘gothic romance’ (Waldman), ‘Modern Gothic’ (Russ), the ‘paranoid woman’s film’ (Doane), and ‘domestic noir’ (Philips), but the manipulative performance is inherent to the conventional model of genre filmmaking. It is a model which has prevailed, and remains in most minds as the pre-eminent vision of what the filmmaker does; they guide our emotions, they make us laugh, cry, and get angry. They bend us to their cinematic will.
The work of surrealist and narratively unorthodox filmmakers suggests an alternate approach and vision for the medium. In such films, the medium invites participation, rather than sowing submission. The ‘gaslight genre’ (Modleski) is a useful case study to question the very foundations and ethics of conventional filmmaking, and its capacity as a tool of patriarchal control, regardless of whether the content of a film itself alludes to or imitates a resistance to power.
To illustrate my thesis, I take Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) as proof of the long-standing patriarchal approach to filmmaking, and pair it with Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad / L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961), the latter marking a shift in form that validates rather than appropriates concerns over patriarchal and authoritarian influence.
Guy Barefoot sees the gaslight melodrama as Victorian in origin and concern, with its ‘period furnishings,’ its ‘expressionist’ light, and a ‘melodramatic narrative,’ (2) one ‘of domestic tyranny and a woman's perception denied’ (9). The term’s etymological source is the play-turned-film Gaslight (1944), directed by George Cukor, but this was a late entry into the developing genre. The genre’s roots are of Gothic origin, and its popularity held from the pre-war to the post-war period, despite being written much less about than the more male-centric and ‘hard-boiled’ film noir (Barefoot 10-11). Film noir brings the ‘paranoid fears’ of men to the surface, while its female-centric counterpart reflects women’s unease in domestic isolation and the fear that their husbands had returned from the second world war as strangers (Modleski 21). In this vein, Philips conceives of the genre as ‘domestic noir,’ identifiable by the ‘the suspiciously charming man, the claustrophobic domestic setting and the terrorized woman' (141).
Each conception of the genre takes as its subject the act of gaslighting: the ‘deliberate, multifaceted deception that is created in order to give a false picture of reality’ (Poore 71). The term “gaslight genre” is a fitting umbrella term, to encompass competing notions. It seems arbitrary and counterproductive to differentiate the subgenre into further subgenres, depriving us of the ability to build a strong and sustained generic theory that speaks to a real and concerning phenomenon.
With film noir and its male protagonists’ assumed prominence (Modleski 12), the narrow understanding of the gaslight genre is almost entirely an ‘academic formulation’ as opposed to a ‘popular’ one (Berry-Flint 26-27)—there is little mainstream conception or conscious understanding of the genre. And yet, a shared framework for a wider audience must be established, particularly so as to identify the change from the early entries in the genre which dangled the hopes of female validation—only to deny them with greater intensity—to more subversive iterations which authentically challenge the patriarchal order.
I differ from Barefoot and others in their concern with the Victorian setting; it may be ‘fundamental to many gaslight melodramas’ (8), but as Barefoot concedes, it holds ‘a vital relevance beyond the Victorian … a relevance across time that has appealed to different ethnic groups, nationalities, and eras’ (9). Barefoot’s study is located in pre- and post-war Hollywood cinema with period settings (16); most work on the genre has been confined to this period and approach, but I wish to extend beyond the Victorian setting, beyond borders, and into the second half of the twentieth century. Barefoot writes of the ‘significance of Paris in the generic world of this cycle of films’ (14), and as Resnais’ films reveal, the French context is ripe for gaslight melodrama, particularly the subversion of it.
Of this essay’s pair of films, Hitchcock’s American model challenges the patriarchal order, only to later dismiss suspicions and compound the denial of the the female perspective. Meanwhile, the French film posits male manipulation as engendered by cultural repetition; specifically, by film’s inculcation of an inability to discern the truth, by smothering the viewer in cinematic illusion.
Hitchcock is the quintessential auteur in this respect; he introduces complex ideas into a popularly readable generic text (Braudy 448 in Berry-Flint 31) while also exercising a control of the genre’s conventions that flouts audience expectation and knowledge and establishes his authority and responsibility (Faubert 45). This desire for authorship, however, blinds the filmmaker to the wider ideological implications of their work, in uneasy parallel with the singular male domination of narrative found in the text.
Since Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light: A Victorian Thriller (1938), the melodramatic villainous male with his ‘combination of urbane good looks, seedy charm and an air of a mysterious past’ (Philips 140), has been oft represented but remained undefined and thus powerful. Instead, male directors have co-opted the female gaze, while academics have positioned the films ‘as part of a female Gothic tradition’ (Barefoot 11). Hanson writes that: 'The Hollywood woman’s film, and the female gothic cycle … is not under a patriarchal stranglehold, but foregrounds the problems of the patriarchal system from the heroine’s point of view’ (130-131). I disagree—in most cases, this is an illusion generated by filmic techniques. Even when a film accedes to a woman’s suspicions, as in the 1944 film version of Gaslight, it nevertheless promotes the ideology of the ‘wrong man,’ deferring blame to the protagonist’s choosing of a manipulative suitor over a safer alternative, found in the heroic detective (Shoos 56), in a case of victim blaming (57).
The wartime entries into the gaslight genre might lean towards social consciousness in their deference to female experience (55), but uncritical praise of these mildly progressive films leaves the patriarchal order mostly untouched. I concur with Doane that the films are rather appropriative of the female gaze (141). In this view, the gaslight genre is no better than the ‘male text’ in which women end up ‘domesticated’ if not ‘dead’ (Modleski 2).
What Resnais accomplishes as a male auteur is the dismantling of the order he might represent. Resnais’ film works as a response to Hitchcock’s in its repositioning of the male as protagonist, not ‘to elevate what men do simply because men do it’ (Modleski 2), but to engage in an act of self-critique rather than co-option. By placing Last Year at Marienbad in the gaslight genre, the construction of the male gaze in ritualistic filmmaking is laid bare. If male filmmakers can countenance honest self-critique of their behaviour, revealing the mechanics of patriarchal manipulation, then women will gain the freedom to express their experience without appropriation. Resnais’ film can thus be understood as a ‘subversive’ entry into the gaslight genre, challenging its predecessors for the formal and ‘ideological values implied by their narrative’ (Berry-Flint 37).
If genre reflects ‘changes in social consciousness’ (Berry-Flint 29), then genre must adapt to the growing demand for the dismantling of patriarchal rules; Resnais’ film is open to many interpretations, but this is a particularly valuable one. The apparatus of genre is vital—in isolation, Resnais’ film is a formally daring but socially empty film. Placed in the social and narrative genre of gaslighting, it proves revolutionary to deconstructing the fallacious gender hierarchy. Making such manipulation apparent through self-reflexive formal practices can redefine film as a medium that entrusts the audience with the responsibility of perception, rather than making them victims of illusion. As Donald Skoller has observed:
‘Whatever benefits seemed to have been derived from illusionism have apparently entered a phase of critically diminishing returns … not only in the history of art but in the history of culture … Focus has shifted to the act of perception itself, as if the good servant were suddenly exposed as the villain’ (Skoller 41).
Through ‘anti-illusionist’ practices (41), the film auteur might avoid perpetuating the idea that domestic and emotional violence is ‘the unfortunate fate of a small and suspect group rather than the widespread consequence of hegemonic masculinity’ (Shoos 58). The gaslight genre is more problematic than its most optimistic critics would have us believe, but its social potential is not a lost cause. In the exposition that follows, I argue that works like Last Year in Marienbad can counteract the manipulative tendencies of works like Suspicion, to positive social and aesthetic effect.
Engineered Ambiguity
A crucial divergence between the films of Hitchcock and Resnais is in their ability to sit with ambiguity. Notwithstanding his authorial creativity, Hitchcock represents the approach to filmmaking whereby film technique is employed to manipulate the audience, guiding collective emotion to reach preconceived points of fear, joy, and catharsis. While a contemporary review of Suspicion called Hitchcock, in congratulatory terms, the ‘most artful sophist working in films’ (23 qtd. in Faubert 49), I do not construe this depiction of Hitchcock’s art as praise, but condemnation of the pursuit of aesthetic mastery against any social imperative.
This essay does not dispute Hitchcock’s visual genius and mastery of the form, but one could objectively admire the Machiavellian cleverness of the gaslighter without wishing him success. As Skoller writes, Hitchcock’s merit as an artist and entertainer is not up for debate, but we must accept that his mastery also embraces ‘the manipulation and … continual conditioning of consciousness that the entertainment public is subjected to through exposure to the popular arts’ (48). To be uncritical of an intent to hold an audience in thrall to the manipulations of a singular authority figure is to reduce the art form to the level of advertising, propaganda, and misrepresentation, in the same vein as societal gaslighting.
McCarron argues that the emergence of a suspicious mode in the face of ambiguity ‘can be conceptualized as an interpretive framework whose principal function is to bring order to circumstances that otherwise would remain confounded by uncertainty’ (193); at first, Hitchcock’s Suspicion foments the eponymous mental state. As we follow the timid Lina into her marriage to the charming and conniving Johnnie Aysgarth, we are localised in her affection for, and then suspicion of Johnnie; later with the eventual realisation that he might be planning her murder.
Rather than seeding a form of ambiguity which satisfyingly provokes further thought, Suspicion introduces an uncertainty that dissatisfies like a puzzle with a missing piece. Hitchcock’s interest in ambiguity serves only to reinforce his reliance on narrative, tellingly, in Suspicion’s most ambiguous moment, when the butler brings Lina a glass of possibly poisoned milk. But the scene breaks from Lina’s focalisation—despite the sideways glance from her bedside that precedes the sweeping shot of the butler, his long shadow, and the glowing glass, it cannot be her point of view, for she is in her room, the door closed. The scene can then only be read as a direct act of communication between the director and the audience. Nothing comes of the scene; it remains unclear whether the drink was poisoned. But the effect exposes Hitchcock’s hidden perspective; unable to contain his glee at his own authorship, the filmmaker breaks the false perspective he has effortfully developed up until that point. The scene reveals how Hitchcock attempts to mimic Lina’s perspective, while confusing it with his own.
The real switch in perspective, however, comes at the film’s end, when Johnnie’s malevolent character is thoroughly whitewashed. Realising she has been mistaken in her grave assessment of Johnnie, Lina reprocesses each of Johnnie’s suspicious actions in a different deductive light to see him as a self-destructive but loyal husband, not a murderous and conniving one. As McCarron puts it, as an audience 'we come away, in other words, somewhat suspicious of the reliability of what we are shown’ (195); the trust instilled in the female perspective is shattered, and the veracity of the male confirmed without doubt. The once-measured Lina writhes and wails, embodying a melodramatic trope of the hysterical woman. Johnnie is firm and in control, arresting the fleeing Lina and the camera with her, his hands tightly clenching her elbows—the same grip which ostensibly “saved” Lina from falling off the cliffside—while her hands are curled in grotesque submission. As Johnnie reproaches Lina, his voice must be understood as ‘appropriately gendered,’ the commandeering, masculine tone reinforcing the primacy of patriarchy (Hanson 106). Hitchcock holds on Lina’s reaction; we remain fixed in her perspective until the end, but only so we might follow her emotional arc to her abandonment of trust in herself. Before Johnnie drives them away from the cliffside, the shot holds on his reaction as Lina begs for his forgiveness. In this final, crucial point, the future is placed in Johnnie’s “responsible” patriarchal hands.
Richard Allen detects an ironic tone in Hitchcock, attributing ‘metaskepticism’ as crucial to his practice, in which ‘duplicitous masculinity’ is ‘at once threatening and alluring’ (71). Allen sees Hitchcock’s ambiguity as a means to probe romantic love’s status as a ‘self-annihilating desire’ (75), satisfied with the wisp of ambiguity at the film’s end, that Johnnie’s embrace could be either ‘a romantic embrace or the serpentine coil of death’ (76).
It is difficult to accept that Hitchcock resists what he represents; if he does, his own style works against him. The heightened music, rapid editing, and repeated shots of Lina’s alarm on the high-octane car ride to the cliff’s edge are quintessential acts of filmic persuasion, meant to convince us of Johnnie’s murderous intent. To the contrary revelation, the viewer can react in one of two ways: reject Hitchcock’s tendency to manipulate or reject the reliability of Lina’s narration. Given the jarring twist just minutes from the end, an audience accustomed to narrative closure and reliance on the director will seek the latter, easier judgement. As Lina is swept up by Johnnie’s manipulation and her own perceptions questioned, the audience falls for Hitchcock’s familiar strategy. Rather than relying on their own interpretative nous, the viewer is rendered infantile, crying out for the director to rectify the confusion.
McCarron argues that at the end, Lina is ‘substituting faith for suspicion’ and by doing so, empowers herself (207). While I agree that Lina’s decision to place her faith in Johnnie despite his suspicious behaviour is a salve for her ‘all-consuming torment of suspicion’ (205), treatment for the symptom does not cure the disease, and Lina’s ability to abandon her disquiet over Johnnie’s strange behaviour is hardly empowering in the context of his campaign of manipulation and obfuscation.
To claim that Lina has the autonomy to choose between suspicion and trust, as McCarron has done (208), is to wilfully ignore the precarious mental state she inhabits at the time of the decision, when her faculties of judgement worn down by Johnnie’s careful erasing. Lina’s admirable perspicacity at the film’s start is swapped for blind faith at its end; able to swallow the bitter pill of Johnnie’s sudden declaration of innocence for the easy comfort it provides, she can at last put her suspicion to bed and be a willing servant to Johnnie’s narrative. But her character is forever altered: where once, her casually spelling out “murder” in a game of Scrabble served as a powerfully metaphoric—if not preternatural—insight into her dangerous husband; on a second viewing it appears as the hysterical delusion of a madwoman.
Similarly, the audience’s ability to suspend their own scepticism of Johnnie will be determined by the sway of Hitchcock’s film techniques. To the contemporary viewer more versed in film grammar, Hitchcock’s manipulative art has lost some of its potency. For the viewer of the day, the ending was satisfying (McCarron 201); filmgoers were sufficiently wooed by Hitchcock’s filmic spell to find purchase with the denouement he himself was unhappy with. Like Lina, so worn down by Hitchcock’s manipulation, audiences found comfort in acceding to the manipulator’s unreality rather than confronting the discomfiture of having been beguiled. Critics, meanwhile, took Hitchcock’s side in criticising the ending (McCarron 201); but weren’t they, too, in the same hypnotised state, achieved through different means? The critics, far more conversant with filmic techniques, may have been unconvinced by the film’s charms, yet revering the power of the auteur, would readily accept Hitchcock’s paratextual opposition to the ending.
A loose sketch of the narrative of Suspicion is, in Last Year at Marienbad, told from the male perspective and with significantly less transparency. Within the walls and symmetrical grounds of a maze-like hotel, a man tries to convince a woman of their meeting the previous year, and her promise of a relationship. In Alain Robbe-Grillet’s fusion of screenplay and novel which underlays the film, the man is designated X and the woman A, identifiers even more indeterminate than the passage of the film. Morari reads Last Year at Marienbad as having only two narrative options within its web of ambiguity: A ‘does not remember, or pretends not to remember’ (94). But this occludes a vital, third possibility which, when one assigns the film to the gaslight genre, becomes urgently apparent: the meeting never took place⸺X, with a fictitious account of their love affair, is attempting to undermine her sanity, and eventually does so.
Mere reference to the interpretations of the film’s screenwriter and director serves this reading: ‘the only interpretive element that they share in analyzing the film they made is that it is about a “persuasion”’ (Skoller 43). That word does not conjure notions of a memory retrieved, but one contrived for that effect. And yet, while the pseudo-narrative concern is this act of convincing, the filmmakers are not themselves concerned with persuading the audience. In a scene at the hotel bar, stripped of music and sound effects, X’s whispered monologue tells the opposite of the present scene: ‘we met at every turn, behind every shrub … We talked about anything’ (37:20). The chronological schism between voice and image is further confounded by shots of a room draped in white, with A inside, appearing in repeated, rapid flashes. The scene at the bar continues, as X holds up his hand—strong and steady like Johnnie Aysgarth’s, but with a hypnotic intensity, as this fragment of memory or imagination struggles to penetrate.
In the white room, A plays with one of several pairs of heeled shoes, a diminutive representation of her femininity. Her laugh is then intercut with another woman’s laugh at the bar, and in a repetitive, throbbing set of cuts, X and this woman collide; a glass shatters at the bar, and X menacingly approaches A in the white room. The editing is so unnatural as to draw attention to itself; the filmmaker’s process is revealed as violent, a forced intermingling of different worlds. At the same time, it is a potent visualisation of a memory being implanted; X’s final appearance in A’s white room signifies the completion of the process.
This interpretation of the sequence is made possible by Resnais’ protection of the film’s ambiguity. ‘The film is open to all phantasies’ (Valentine 1046) without any ‘preferred reading’ (1055). In this manner, a tension between A’s persuasion by X is contrasted with the ambivalence of the form.
We can witness this stark contrast with Suspicion. The opening credit’s of Hitchcock’s film present as a pleasant overture; a lithographic print of the British countryside with delicately serifed letters accompanied by a score that trembles with both delicate and uproarious emotion. Marienbad begins in an unforgiving and solid grey, like concrete. No glimpse at the “story” to come is offered, and the music, initially mimicking the bombastic quality of Hitchcock’s credit sequence soon dwindles to the air of an eerie organ and the whispered tones of the narrator, ‘its atonality, its harshness, its discordance, its lack of harmony … seemingly having no beginning and no end’ (Valentine 1047). A voice-over describes the hotel in its infinite complexity, generating an image in the viewer’s mind before they can make their own observation. The first images pan across the hotel’s ceilings: intricate, baroque, cupolas of rich artifice. As an ironic visual metaphor, the use of ceilings as establishing shots does the opposite of “grounding” the viewer. Shots dwell on embossed cherubic dioramas; the first instance of mise en abyme, ‘an image within an image’ (Webb 23), reminds us of the film’s artistic construction.
In Hitchcock’s first scene a train whistle sounds over black; within the first shot, his two main characters are introduced, and the narrative’s concern is immediately apparent. The train emerges from a tunnel, the ‘emergence from darkness into light … a potent stylistic motif for the theme of suspicion, for Lina will shortly find herself plunged into alternating moments of doubt (darkness) and clarity (light) in the course of the film' (McCarron 197). At the same time, a dramatic shift to brightness mimics the firing up of the film projector, separating the world of reality from the world of the film. Similarly, the carriage window reveals a picturesque moving landscape—also ‘an image within an image’—but instead of drawing attention to the film as a projection on a screen, it uses movement to mesmerise, recollecting the first attempts of cinema to evoke movement in an otherwise static scene. The image of the window is swiftly replaced by the shot-reverse-shot sequence of the first instance of Johnnie’s taking advantage of Lina; thus, from the outset, Hitchcock draws us into a cinematic world while establishing the thematic and narrative stakes. Resnais, meanwhile, postpones indicators of plot and theme; instead of enveloping the viewer in a world that reflects reality and replaces the viewer’s own, Marienbad draws attention to the medium and the act of watching.
In another instance of mise en abyme, the film represents a play being watched within the hotel, making us immediately ‘aware of the artificiality, or, rather, theatricality, of filmmaking and story-telling’ (Webb 22). The viewer’s narrative concern becomes the story of the play rather than the film itself, and any attention left over for the film manifests as an interest in its trickery imaged in the labyrinthine hotel, its literal halls of mirrors, and the many maps of the hotel grounds whose cartographic accuracy clashes with the [PR1] geographic origami of the shots. In parsing the ambiguous spatial exploration of the hotel and the narrative of the play, the experience of viewing is preeminent: ‘teleologically looping back to ourselves as spectators’ (Valentine 1050). The play references Ibsen’s play Rosmerholm, which dramatises the conflict between ‘a man representing orthodoxy’ and ‘a woman representing liberation’ (1055), a pertinent clue for our reading of the film as a critical entry in a continuum of films which prop up the patriarchal structure.
Marienbad, even when it leaves the play behind, never places its narrative at the centre. Its focus is always on non-chronological shots with the potency of the ever-present moment, in which each synchronic node appears as an exercise in the wearing down of A’s belief in her own memory, in an extreme parody of the medium’s ability to shape our interpretation. As Skoller writes of Marienbad, contra Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958):
‘there is a deliberate and rigorously executed usurpation of story dynamics to which the audience has been accustomed by long exposure and habituation to the conventional plot's cause-and-effect relational patterns. Hitchcock is making his film for an audience he knows very well, and he does everything he can to give that audience what it needs and expects’ (Skoller 44)
The discordance between these films is that within filmmaking itself; whether it is the filmmaker’s role to reclaim narrative comprehensibility from a rising tide of worldly ambiguity, or to expose the ambiguity of the world, and denounce the megalomaniacal attempts to exploit it. Marienbad does manipulate, but its mechanics of manipulation and forced observation are not directed towards any obvious ideological or narrative effect; the experience is so overwhelming and maximalist that one cannot help but begin to view the entire activity of filmmaking as farce.
Genre: appropriation, disruption, interpretation
Both Suspicion and Marienbad are engaged in intentional acts of subversion and reconstruction. As Resnais’ film can be read as a reconstructed Hitchcock film, Hitchcock reconstructs a novel; equally, both subvert the tropes of film noir and the many shades of the gaslight genre. Skoller sees Marienbad as ‘an exercise in the cubistic transformation’ of Vertigo (42), which I extend to Hitchcock’s work more broadly, including Suspicion. In a comparison of Marienbad and another Hitchcock film, North by Northwest (1959) Morari invokes and argues that the pictorial easter egg of ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s silhouette next to the elevator … acknowledges its source of inspiration’ (95). But as I proceed to argue, while these readings of Marienbad position the film in Hitchcock’s genre and style, Hitchcock’s films are constrained by their generic prescriptions whereasMarienbad allows for genre as a tool of analysis.
Both films borrow tropes of the sentimental women’s film and melodrama, to variously parody, appropriate, appreciate, and transcend the form. In Suspicion, the film reaches a melodramatic fever pitch when Lina avoids capitulating to Johnnie’s advances, only to overhear her parents discussing her marital isolation. A close-up and a swell of music—her rush of thoughts made sonically manifest—is followed by Johnnie’s appearance beside her. In her emotionally charged state, she kisses him before running inside. As her father says, ‘Lina has intellect and a fine, solid character’ (10:10) and such a melodramatic performance does not necessarily become her, but Hitchcock applies the logic of the generic style to her, to Johnnie’s advantage.
Hanson describes melodrama ‘as an expressive code … a particular form of dramatic mise-en-scène, characterised by a dynamic use of spatial and musical categories, as opposed to intellectual or literary ones’ (98). Hitchcock uses music to disarm Lina’s intelligence with the logic of melodrama—Johnnie’s sudden reappearance is accompanied by a sting of horror, only counteracted by Lina’s impulsive kiss, softening it into a sultry tune. In this moment, Hitchcock teaches Lina and the audience a visual and sonic lesson: in a world that demands Lina play the patriarchal game, she must act irrationally, betraying her own sensibility for a dangerous romance. The paternal figure of Lina’s father hangs over the film in the form of his portrait, suggesting a clash between rivalrous male forces; Lina must decide between the two, with no reasonable option for autonomy. This is how the melodramatic form is used to appropriate and distort the woman’s voice.
Last Year at Marienbad behaves like a melodrama in its most heightened form. In the absence of a conventional, linear plot, pure emotion takes precedence. Without clear exposition, the viewer is forced to experience the performances and their exaggerated emotions without a trace of its origin or meaning. Morari writes that ‘the characters are devoid of psychology, memory and feelings: automata trapped in a labyrinth, in a musical box’ (93), but the absence of these features does not imply lack of emotion. Without the interior detail a viewer is accustomed to exploit for investment in a character, they are compelled to identify with emotion in its purest sense, which narrative so often obscures by rationalisations. The viewer must then witness emotion for what it is, rather than as a node in a causal chain. In one scene, X and A sit on a balustrade, gazing at something unseen, just beyond the camera. As they talk, their performances appear directed at this object, occasionally looking towards it with concern, fear, or anger. Eyes widen in exaggerated response, without clear relation to their dialogue.
Initially, this might discomfort and alienate the viewer, who is unable to identify with the struggles of the characters, given that viewers were, and remain, inculcated in the patriarchal, “rational” mode of viewing, whereby causality informs emotional response and understanding. A typical genre film, even a melodrama, exists as a layered iteration within a series; a viewer comes to a new genre feature familiar with the archetypes and myths they will encounter; they will invest these with pre-established motives and desires, and allow the originality of the narrative to fill the gaps of motive and make the emotions on screen plausible and in some sense “logical”—notwithstanding that logic is emotion’s antithesis. But Marienbadis also critical of how these emotions can be engineered and manipulated. In one scene, X recalls and describes A’s physical emotion from the last year: ‘Your eyes open even wider. Your lips parted, as though to speak, or groan, or cry out. You are afraid. You open your mouth a little more…’ (54:09); as he goes on, the camera pans to A and twists around her, as her own body curls into an uncomfortable shape, her expression visibly altered by X’s description.
Here, in a visceral manner, the film represents the capacity to shape the emotion of a romantic partner, or a viewer, through persuasive language. As the persuasion reaches a point of overwhelm, A is compelled to run outside, as keys on an organ are pressed in discordant unison and the scene is so over-exposed as to paint her body as white as the wall, her hand resting on her forehead in exasperation. The scene expresses both A’s fragile emotional state together with the hollow culmination of a campaign of embedded emotion, the technical imperfections of the over-exposed and sped up shot implying that the apparatus responsible for producing emotion can no longer function from its overuse.
Marienbad achieves a replication of the “automata” of genre, in which the filmmaker fills prefabricated character moulds with new content; in this case, however, that content is obscured or non-existent. The viewer is then permitted a number of viewing experiences: they can view Marienbad’s emotional performances in an objective light, noticing its movement and shape as pure form rather than vessel; they can apply their own ‘emotional state on the object of perception’ as a form of ‘empathy’ (Morari 102); they can view the emotions as superficially implanted by a malevolent force; or they can apply a particular generic code to theorise an origin of the emotion.
The film is readable in any number of contextual categories such as a romance, or ‘a perfect detective film’ (Morari 95), or a gaslight melodrama. Skoller observes a similar phenomenon, in the film’s invocation of ‘a generic déjà vu,’ in which elements are familiar but undefined (49). The film operates with a sense of ‘absence’ in which the viewer must ‘tolerate not knowing’ (1055); the viewer will never know the story of Marienbad, but they can use its absence to understand other genres and sets of stories more deeply. The difficulty in accepting this might be due to the ‘bias toward conceptual thought … so ingrained into Western consciousness that it has become difficult to develop the emotional faculty of visual activity’ (Morari 102). Marienbad embodies a form of narrative that grants precedence to emotion while reminding the viewer that the emotion is an artifice manufactured by a creator.
The film pre-dates the likes of Carole Maso, who called for women to write in a new way, as opposed to the way men have always written (1996). It rejects the patriarchal mode of cinema that Hitchcock represents, in which both emotional truth and genre definition are imposed by the film’s creator instead of allowing the audience to interpret. In Maso’s call for women’s writing, she parodies the male critic: ‘You ask where is one sympathetic, believable character? You ask where is the plot? You wonder where on earth is the conflict? The resolution?’ (1), precisely what a critic of Marienbad might say. In the same essay, Maso quotes Jean-Luc Godard, one of Resnais’ French New Wave contemporaries: ‘There is only one solution, and that is to turn one's back on American cinema. . . . [ellipsis in original] Up until now we have lived in a closed world. Cinema fed on cinema, imitating itself … We must turn to life again. We must move into modern life with a virgin eye’ (qtd. in 10). The inclusion of this quote points to Maso’s admiration of what the French New Wave directors were attempting to accomplish, in line with her vision of anti-patriarchal narrative. I concur with Morari that Resnais’ film ‘expresses the aesthetic credo of the Nouveau Romanand of the emerging Nouvelle Vague, that is, the decomposition of traditional narration’ (95).
Resnais’ film encourages us to, if not depart from the fetters of genre, then become more conscious of its framework as applied to a text rather than inherent to a text, as a means to draw new supplies of meaning instead of constraining thematic possibility. Hitchcock is, however, more concerned with subverting the expectations of genre than with ‘subverting the sensibilities of the audience' (Skoller 48), or with delivering a coherent and meaningful social statement. His work is entirely inward-looking, and superficially subverts the form while reinforcing the archetypes of his genres as well as the social status quo. As Carmen Maria Machado writes of melodrama in her account of domestic abuse In the Dream House (2015), the word ‘comes from melos, which means “music,” “honey”; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen—but they are still hot to the touch’ (166). The etymology speaks to an enduring debate over the value of melodrama, the perceived pleasures and dangers of women’s emotions in patriarchal society. Machado continues, ‘how [do] people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator?’ (166); this question is at the centre of the two approaches discussed in this essay. Hitchcock foists unreliability on his melodramatic protagonists while hiding his own unreliability; while Resnais effaces any front of reliability and grants the audience the power of perception.
Hitchcock’s work reflects a problem with auteurism, the preference for the director’s manipulation of genre which rejects the potential for audiences and critics to use genre as a means of interpretation. Suspicionis an adaptation of the novel Before the Fact by Anthony Berkeley Cox (under the pseudonym Francis Iles), which itself was a generic reinvention of the crime genre in its revelation of Johnnie Aysgarth as the killer at the novel’s outset (Faubert 42). Hitchcock was compelled to subvert that subversion and conclude the film with Johnnie’s innocence rather than guilt (46). But unlike Iles, who sought subversion to inspire criticism and deeper consideration of the genre he favoured, Hitchcock’s subversion of the original, as Faubert argues, merely ‘usurped Iles’s authorship just as he had done with numerous authors previously’ (42). For Hitchcock, the act of subversion is a means to promote his authorship, to exercise a greater mastery over ‘generic conventions’ than is possessed by his audience (45). This all amounts, in Susan Smith’s estimation, to an act of ‘sabotage’ (in Faubert 46). Hitchcock’s predilection for flaunting his authorship thus casts him in a similar role to Johnnie Aysgarth. They grant the audience and Lina an illusion of autonomy, smothers them with kindnesses (gifts and affection for Lina, the pleasures of narrative convention and coherence for the audience), while carefully and subtly deceiving them throughout the duration of the film. It is a conception of authorship based on control, domination, and superiority, rather than emotional connection.
Resnais’ film offers insight not only into the workings and possibilities of the gaslight genre, but also into the auteur. Like Morari, Skoller invokes the ‘life-size cardboard cut-out of Uncle Alfred suspended feet off the ground against an elevator shaft’ (42); beyond this spark, I forward that this is not a reverent act towards the master of suspense, but a jab at his style. The hovering in an elevator shaft implies an impending fall or crushing, and its silhouette form alludes to a singular shadow worth stepping outside of. Marienbad abounds with visual critiques of Hitchcock’s style; in one scene, A strolls down a hallway thinking herself alone, only to meet the cunning gaze of X. A’s full figure is framed within a baroque mirror, while X’s face takes up the foreground. A single shot of A follows but is now informed by the male framing. In visual conversation with Hitchcock[PR2] , the scene reveals how the female perspective can be appropriated through cinema’s hall of mirrors. The female viewer of an early gaslight melodrama might have found identification, butMarienbad reminds us that a male author was always controlling the gaze.
Resnais eschews not only Hitchcock’s brand of targeted manipulation, but also his claim to singular authorship. Whereas Hitchcock intentionally distanced himself from his source material, changing the title as well as the trajectory of Iles’ novel, Resnais highlights his connection to the famous director, while also making no secret of his ‘extraordinary’ collaboration with Alain Robbe-Grillet (Skoller 43); the film is accompanied by Robbe-Grillet’s “ciné-novel” adapted by Resnais. Unlike his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, who exemplified the writer-director model of authorship—Varda, Godard, Rohmer—Resnais produced Marienbad in a creative partnership. Such a collaboration extends to the audience, with the filmmakers encouraging interpretation. In an interview, Resnais stated, ‘It’s not my role to give explanations … each spectator can find his own solution’ (qtd. in Webb 21). Additionally, the mise an abyme, the stilted yet expressive performances, the disruptions to chronology, all contribute to Webb’s idea that ‘we are watching a film about the construction of cinematic stories’ (22), and through witnessing an allegory of the filmmaking process, the viewer is given agency to approach films with a more discerning eye, to interpret rather than be told.
Hitchcock’s approach to authorship helped carve out the autonomy and creative freedom of the director as distinct from the producer and the financial arms of the studio, but to accomplish this, he raised himself above the level of the audience and other collaborators. The conceit is also clearly illogical; despite Hitchcock’s artistic footprint, the collaborative nature of film rejects an authoritarian vision. Without a mention for the wider crew, for Suspicion, Hitchcock ‘was aided by his longtime assistant, Joan Harrison … and by his constant collaborator, his wife, Alma Reville,’ by screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, and by earlier screenplays by other writers (Faubert 52). Nonetheless, Hitchcock’s manipulation of generic conventions positions himself as the authority, while the viewer is made subservient to that authority. One could argue that the Hitchcock film is the more enjoyable picture, but only because we are so in thrall to the manipulative style. Hollywood cinema has sedated us, we have been led down a narrative path by a stranger, one who we cannot help but love despite their continual betrayals of our trust. Marienbad provokes discomfort and tension in a viewer unaccustomed to its approach. Robbe-Grillet, in his introduction to the ciné-novel, admits that a viewer might approach the film one of two ways:
‘this spectator will certainly find the film difficult, if not incomprehensible … or else … The story told will seem the most realistic, the truest, the one that best corresponds to his daily life, as soon as he agrees to abandon ready-made ideas, psychological analysis, more or less clumsy systems of interpretation which machine-made fiction or films grind out for him ad nauseam, and which are the worst kind of abstractions.’ (Robbe-Grillet 13)
If film has the capacity to manipulate and subdue, then certainly it has the capacity to make free. A filmmaker might attempt to depict the experience of women in coercive and violent relationships, but the employment of techniques designed to manipulate can only encourage the kind of manipulation being admonished in the diegesis. In The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), itself a deconstruction of true crime, courtroom drama, and memoir, Maggie Nelson recalls seeing Vertigo in a college class and feeling that Hitchcock’s women ‘were somehow always already dead, or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist’ (112). This is Hitchcock’s manipulation manifest; his texts are structured with one ending and single interpretation in mind; in his ideological bent traces of the inevitable fate of his women bleed earlier into the film.
This essay has not argued against the gaslight genre nor genre films broadly; in the hands of a generous filmmaker, genre presents itself as a tool for understanding, rather than constraining interpretation. If the male filmmaker is serious about confronting patriarchal manipulation, they will carry a similar commitment to avoiding manipulation of the viewer by cheap imitation and subversion of generic practices. Women will then be granted the space to make films showing real rather than appropriated experience. Similarly, this essay does not argue for a cinematic landscape filled with the surreal. Cinema has a ‘sense-making power’ (McCarron 203), especially in the form of conventional narrative, which can illuminate a path forward. Indeed, ‘the term “gaslighting” obscures but also illuminates’ (Poore 84), and there is the potential for persuasive methods to be used productively, to explain rather than convince. Thus, a balance ought to be struck between “suspicion” and “faith,” between art that makes us question and art that makes us believe.
Works Cited
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