05.01.2015Besides 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 “co。

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