The Girl

The Girl – Made for HBO, The Girl is the story of Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with Tippi Hedren, an amour fou that the director enacted in the making of two films, The Birds and Marnie. The film’s thesis is simple enough to be characterized as simple-minded: Hitchcock fell in love with his actress and, when his advances were rebuffed, he tortured her on the set, notably in the filming of two infamous scenes: the spousal rape in Marnie and the bird-attack in the attic in The Birds. The film is interesting but superficial and has really no place to go because of a certain confusion afflicting the production. A great artist transmutes the raw material of his life, sublimating events that are crude, raw, and vulgar into something that is beautiful and profoundly meaningful. If The Birds and Marnie are masterpieces, then, why should we care that a minor actress from Minnesota suffered in the making of these films. Tippi Hedren’s misery is incidental to Hitchcock’s creation and, perhaps, we should be grateful that the director was able to use his sadistic impulses to create a thing of beauty from what was ugly in his relationship with the actress. The film is politically correct, however, in focusing upon Hedren’s undoubtedly exasperating ordeal and the movie is unsure whether it wishes to celebrate her pluck, denounce Hitchcock’s commission of what would now be regarded as severe (and legally actionable) sexual harassment, or commiserate with the great director’s despair at being an ugly duckling in a profession that celebrates physical beauty. The interplay of these subjects would make an interesting film if the issues were dramatized or debated, as it were, in the mise en scene, but this doesn’t occur. H.L. Mencken once made the remark that he would sacrifice whole villages full of virgins and youths in New Jersey for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and The Girl suggest similar notions – if Tippi Hedren’s suffering was instrumental to the creation of The Birds and Marnie, then, wasn’t the price paid for these films a reasonable one. The problem with the film is that Tippi Hedren’s character doesn’t seem conscious of these issues and doesn’t have any agency to make a choice. Hitchcock’s claims that his relationship to her is that of Pygmalion to his creation – but we really don’t see much of Hitchcock’s charm or aspects of his influence over the actress that might be benign or, even, benevolent. Rather, Hitchcock is portrayed as a repulsive old man who humiliates a beautiful young woman by reciting filthy limericks to her and who sits by inscrutably while she is martyred by having birds thrown at her for five days or subjected to staged rape. Some critics have felt the film defamatory to Hitchcock, an attack on a great director who, of course, can’t defend himself – and these criticisms may be marginally valid. The movie is handsome and contains many shots that are hommages to famous images in Hitchcock films. But the picture is a footnote. It can’t compete with the delirious, obsessional images by which Hitchcock staged his own fantasies and, therefore, is superfluous.