Diane Baker's World of Entries and Exits

     When in 1980 Voyager 1 photographed Saturn's moon Mimas, the small world showed a giant crater, the place resembling the Death Star in Star Wars.  In 2015, New Horizons passed Pluto, photographing a large Valentine heart-shaped plain.  Florida looks like a long, limp penis.  Israel looks like a knife, Wyoming and Colorado like bricks.  The universe, filled with natural formations resembling objects or symbols speaking to the human imagination, seemingly creates an endless succession of forms, making it more than likely that extensive exploration of outer space will continue to unveil new structures sparking comments from humans, the species that calls, for instance, an enormous weather system on Jupiter, "the Great Red Spot."
     A spot.  The gas giant's famous many centuries-old storm is larger than our own planet.  A swirling, spectacular vortex that could be used as a hypnosis tool, the Great Red Spot was first seen in 1665 by Giovanni Cassini.  It preexisted Cassini's first observation, making it a storm lasting, to date, at least 352 years.  Picture a storm on Earth lasting five human lifetimes, a storm smothering the entire planet.  Let's call it Spot.
     Another understatement describing a natural phenomenon must be the most inadequate name for an event ever coined: The Big Bang.  The universe's creation is the biggest thing that's ever happened, a mega-event we all owe our existences to.  I'm reminded of Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in a Seinfeld episode, explaining to an obtuse waitress an item that's not on the menu:
     "A big salad.  You know, it's a salad.  It's big, and it's got a lot of stuff in it?"
     The creation of the universe was a bang, it was big, and a lot of stuff came from it.
     We humans lack the words, at times, to describe things properly.  Sometimes emotions act better as indicators of what's going on with someone.  This is why an image in a film can, without words, convey something deep and heartfelt, like the silence accompanying Monica Vitti's and Alain Delon's last goodbye in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, their passion visible on their faces, even while they don't acknowledge with words the ending of their relationship.  I had a similar experience quite a few years ago.  The last time I saw the woman in question (after dating her for three months), we were still, on the surface, visibly, to others who knew us, together; apart from two phone calls in successive weeks, we had no further contact, didn't even officially break up.  Technically, we're still together.
     When I started writing this essay, I thought, for an unknown reason, about the actress Diane Baker, who played Joan Crawford's daughter in the great homicidal maniac film, Strait-Jacket; also in the epic, The 300 Spartans, as well as Hitchcock's masterpiece, Marnie.  In that film, she plays the sister of Sean Connery's late wife.  She's jealous of the new woman in his life, Marnie (Tippi Hedren), a secretary who makes a habit of stealing sizable sums of money from her employers.  Connery's character discovers her criminality and uses this over her to make her into his wife, while Lil (Diane Baker) looks on, acting sneaky, spying on conversations, trying to find out the real story behind Marnie, this interloper in her life and disruptor of her plans with Connery's character.
     I've seen this film several times.  It's always disturbed me.  I think it's one of the finest Hitchcock films.  It acts on the senses on a painterly level, the images alive and deep with light.  The bizarre premise (a compulsive thief who fears the color red) and the psychological underpinnings of the plot, make this, for me, Hitchcock's most hidden movie, in the sense that I don't readily understand it, like I do, for instance, the more straightforward North By Northwest.
     Diane Baker's presence in the film--subdued, furtive, mousey, fly on the wall--is that of the observer in a household dominated by dark male--and at times hostile--energy (Connery's character). The film's quiet spaces through which the characters move, acting inside beautiful cinematography and rural northeast America location imagery, make the experience of watching this one of emotional involvement, wherein rational reasons don't readily come to mind to explain what we're feeling.  In spite of the psychological explanations (a quest to understand Marnie embarked upon, painfully for her, by her husband) I'm still left feeling lost in terms of understanding the movie in rational terms.  I can't say, "It's the Big Red Spot."
     Diane Baker's mostly unvoiced concerns about Marnie (but she's consumed with wanting to find out the truth) reflect something like pure intuition, a feeling inside, like a shift in the organs.  The first time I saw the film, around 1989, I finished watching it, then had to go to a college class.  I sat in the classroom, unable to follow the lecture.  I felt sick, displaced.  I told a friend from the class about having seen Marnie.  She understood my discomfort, having also seen it.
     Diane Baker, in that huge country house, watching Marnie and her brother-in-law, suspicious, not quite knowing what to make of her.  She can't put her finger on it, because it's not obvious, like a landscape on another world shaped like a heart.
   
                                                                               Vic Neptune