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Libreration and Death - A Marienbad Theory

posted 13 years ago by Artimidor
5 replies | jump to latest

Ok, I've watched it a second time and this time around various things become clearer to me. Maybe a very similar theory was posted already, but here's what I have:

First what I consider as "facts" in chronological order
(even though it's difficult to be entirely sure)

- X falls in love with A, when is unclear
- M is either her husband or her fiancee
- X tries to convince A that he has met her before (probably simply a romantic technique)
- A rejects X
- X wants to liberate A from the world she's living in where she - like the others standing around in these corridors - turns completely into lifeless stone with their meaningless existence they portray
- X's advances become stronger
- A realizes that she's trapped in this world and shows signs of affection
- This eventually leads X to enter her bedroom and forced sex takes place
- X is convinced that this is what A wanted, A is in denial
- Eventually she however leans more and more towards X
- She promises that she will leave with him - next year
- X falls from the balcony when he's trying to hide from M and dies
- Next year A returns with M to Marienbad
- While she's there X is still around in her mind, and everything that happened is still present. To her life is what X represented to her, which she now fully realizes after his death. Organ music is playing throughout the film to signify the presence of her dead lover that haunts her and at the same time still tries to liberate her (more on all that in the "form" section).
- M realizes eventually in the final scenes that he has lost her and that he needs to let her go
- Eventually A leaves, liberated, "alive" as X wanted her to be
- (Maybe tearing up that letter means that she destroyed her suicide note?)

Now to the form how things are shown:

- Events that really took place in the past are shown in the movie
- Many parts of the movie show the presence of the dead X talking to A. It's nothing supernatural that's going on here, but a mind thing. A is still working it all out and in doing that her memories, fear, hope and denial, past and present, overlap. The dominating thing is X - he represents her path towards liberation.
- Sometimes also fantasies are thrown into the mix. One crucial scene fro example is when you see A lying down in her bed multiple times - once you see her from the right side, then from the left (both shots twice). Then you also see her being shot by M (woman in bird costume dead, stone-dead maybe) and then taken by X where it looks like she's ecstatic and actually flying away with her bird dress. These are two things played against each other.
- The two statues: The statues represent A and X, and it is pretty much explained in the movie. X wants to protect her from M and all that means, A sees the wide open sea etc. The meaning is all there. M explains to them who these two actually are, tries to bring it down to reality, but X doesn't accept that. They stand for much more. It is a similar story to the one of Orpheus in Greek mythology, where the hero attempts to rescue his love from the underworld but must convince her to leave of her own free will.
- The liberation motive is always present throughout the film (the gardens vs. the confines of the building; the gesture of the her hand trying to protect something; X's "I need you alive!" instead of the human "statues" inside; the reminder "you were sincere" after the supposed rape). The acting of A of course is intentional, she is on the brink of becoming one of these lifeless automatons herself - there's e.g. a brilliant shot when the camera circles around her and she doesn't move at all, like hewn out of stone.
- So in short: X still needs to fulfill his mission to liberate A (at least in A's mind), even in death. In this he finally succeeds, A accepts this.
- The game X played with M (over A actually) is rigged if you so want, because there's a particular way to play Nim without ever losing it - this is the method M uses. X liberates A in a different way. I assume A is out there now, alive and well, away from the endless monotonous corridors M has trapped her in.

Well, at least that's my take on it :) Comments welcome!

Artimidor's Top 100 Movies: http://www.imdb.com/list/e-VkvtHDDNQ/ - recommendations welcome!

[–] el-9984 13 years ago

One of the truly amazing, and maddening, things about Marienbad is its remarkable ablitly to draw adequate interpretation from a hugely wide array of divergent, competing, and sometimes downright contradictory theories. Your theory of the film is definitely a viable one. The ideas of liberation, death, and memory played important roles in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" as well as some of Resnais' earlier documentaries, so it's not surprising to find him giving these themes expression in Marienbad too.

A true plunge into the whirlpool of Marienbad interpretation requires more than two viewings of the film. I'd seen it about five times before I became comfortably familiar with the film's structure, rhythms, repetitions and turns…and it was several more viewings after that before I fully awoke to some revealing aspects of the film's dialogue and character gestures and their interpretive implications.

Ultimately some Marienbad theories are lot stronger and robust than others. About the only class of interpretations I have rejected completely are those that involve time travel, parallel universes or robots.

[–] spurc 13 years ago

The story is being told - and endlessly retooled - by a ghost or sorts. A literal lost soul who forever haunts the hotel where he and his adulterous married lover - if they were ever even really lovers - were murdered by her husband.

Our ghostly narrator is essentially doomed to haunt these grounds, unable to move on. You might say he's trapped in a Limbo of sorts. And here he roams the vast and labyrinthine hotel hallways and retells himself various self-deluding variations of his own life story, over and over, until he arrives at a version he prefers or the one he can bear.

The real story, however, is essentially that he once met the married woman at Marienband, where she and her husband were vacationing. Hard to say if they actually transgressed at this point, but it does appear that a connection of some sort was made, even if only in the narrator's mind.

They met again at Marienband a year later, and attempted to resume their affair and run off together.

The husband, always one step ahead of our doomed "hero", shot his wife before she could run off. And because the narrator is also dead, we can presume he was also shot by the jealous husband.

The card game was symbolic of how the husband will always stymie our ghostly narrator, no matter what version of the stroy he tells himself. And this is of course because the narrator is dead and cannot ultimately deny this one terrible fact. So he takes refuge in telling himself various versions of the story, but is always forced to return to the bitter truth of his own demise at the husband's hand.

And it's game over.

"FUNNY HOW SECRETS TRAVEL..." and "Facts are STUBBORN things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] rickertlaw-1 13 years ago

That's a pretty good possible analysis. It explains the continued references to guns and the shooting range, which stymied me. I don't necessarily think X has to be dead, the film could be a representation of his tortured mental state as he tries to make sense of whatever tragedy obviously happened at Marienbad (whether it was a murder, a rape or merely an adulterous encounter). Ultimately, I don't think there is a single "correct" analysis and that is why this film and the screenplay are pure genius.

[–] spurc 13 years ago

That's a pretty good possible analysis.

Good or bad, it's a very definite analysis.

It explains the continued references to guns and the shooting range, which stymied me.

Understanding the role the gun plays in this film - and how it is directly linked the theme of the card game through the husband whose wife the narrator is pursuing - is certainly one of the keys to understanding the film.

Remember, the story the narrator is perpetually circumnavigating - the true story of what actually happened, that is - must be one that is rather undesireable from his perspective. Why else would he feel the need to keep modifying and retooling the story if this were not the case?

I don't necessarily think X has to be dead...

Well, the narrator is introduced to us a disembodied voice drifting through the halls and rooms of a vast empty place. Also, the conclusion (conclusions?) of the story suggests the husband murders both the wife and the narrator. I mean, it seems highly unlikely he would gun down his unfaithful wife, and then proceed to let her scheming lover just walk away free as a bird.

But I'm definitely interested in hearing alternate theories which explains away these points in a clear and believable fashion, with a unified theory bolstered with evidence culled directly from the film itself.

In other words, it's hard for me at this point to imagine why the story is told in this particular way unless the narrator is a wandering spirit/lost soul of some sort, doomed to dwell in this palatial purgatory of his own regrets.

Next time I see the film I plan to pay special attention to the outfits the characters are wearing, the woman in particular.

"FUNNY HOW SECRETS TRAVEL..." and "Facts are STUBBORN things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] Jes' Sayin' (5953) 4 years ago

Plausible. I like it. Should watch again with this in mind.