What is MARNIE about?


Marnie has become a thief, stemming from a traumatic experience from her childhood. Viewers are not told the trauma until the very end of the film which is…SEE THE FILM!

I’m just joking…

Marnie, the main character of Hitchcock’s film, is plagued with nightmares stemming from a source unknown to us at the beginning of the film. As viewers, all we know is that whenever Marnie sees the color red, she is pushed into a stressful remembering of a traumatic event only subconsciously known to her.

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In her childhood, Marnie killed a sailor that was hurting her mother. We find out that Marnie’s mother took the blame for it as self defense with Marnie ending up blocking the whole event out of her mind. Through the whole film, Marnie is plagued with nightmares that affect her waking life. She meets a man, Mark, who tries to play Freud by psychoanalyzing her into remembering and dealing with the childhood trauma with free association drills.

At the end of the film, Marnie regresses back into her childhood trauma and begins to remember it which ultimately cures her condition.

FILM TECHNIQUE 1: Now, Hitchcock, uses one major film technique – color – which shows Marnie’s state of mind. Whenever Marnie sees the color red in waking life, he chooses to halt external time, have a close-up on Marnie, and envelop the screen with the color red to remind us that Marnie is flashing back in her own way trying to overcome the painful situation which is burdening her. It triggers an emotional type of breakdown until she is pushed right back into reality.

With Hitchcock’s constant use of the color red, we are prompted to enter into Marnie’s shift in consciousness and back towards the reliving of her traumatic event as a child – something Freud would call regression.



Read more:

  • An Introduction to Dreams on Film
  • Who are HITCH and BERG?
  • What is MARNIE about?
  • What is WILD STRAWBERRIES about?
  • So who is influencing HITCHBERG?
  • RED RED RED!
  • Is that you...Borg?
  • Think Psychoanalysis, Think Freud
  • Dream-work and Wild Strawberries
  • Concluding Thoughts, Works Cited, Suggested Reading, Image Credits, and About Me