Herrmann’s score reflects the ambiguity of the scene marvelously1.  After Marnie’s disrobing, tender and evocative strings navigate wistfully minor, undulating expanses of their medium register.  The strings might be equally read as representing mournful compassion for Marnie’s state or reverently celebrating the shedding of her shell.  As Mark demonstrates compensatory tenderness towards Marnie, the strings swell and rise, opening into a major statement, which reaches its peak as Mark kisses Marnie.  The rise in the music could, once again, be interpreted either as mirroring Marnie’s rise in anxiety with Mark’s escalating touch, or, perhaps more likely, as serving the same rather stereotypical function as in any sappy romance flick of the age.

The original implied-rape scene in full

Notably, the masculine-coded brass enters the score at the point where Mark’s lips touch Marnie’s.  Herrmann has asserted Mark's presence in the score, and Mark's role will only expand as the passage continues.  The camera cuts to a view over Mark’s shoulder to Marnie’s face, and the brass drop out, giving way to a hesitant, faltering restatement of the Marnie’s Childhood theme – reflecting, either in the rape narrative or the “love conquering fear” narrative, the proximity of the current situation to that of Marnie’s traumatic past.  Marnie descends to the bed in a visual counterpoint to regressing through time, when the sequence cuts to a close up shot of Mark’s eyes2.  Low, pointed two-note brass statements certainly cue male aggression – a strike in the rape theorists’ column.  Yet Marnie’s strings reassert themselves, building in concert with the brass to a climax, and then a sudden restatement of the Sailor’s Motif.  This time, instead of an all-string passage, the Sailor’s Motif takes on sexual overtones: the low, extended pitch with an upstroke at the end belongs to loud brass, while the restatement in the higher register remains in the strings.  The two share the skyward climax of the motif.  Notably, the brass does not overcome the feminine theme – quite the opposite.  On the basis of the interplay between the masculine and feminine parts, taken with their simultaneous climax, Herrmann’s score seems to point to the implied sex act as consensual after all.

 

The rape scene, in a commutation with "Laying Pipe" from Pornosonic's self-titled album.

To amplify the visual sequence's harmony with this notion of consensuality, consider the above commutation. The use of music associated with pornographic films, admittedly, falls far short of Herrmann's intricate dynamic between masculine instrumentation and feminine. Yet the disjunct between music and image is rooted not in the incompatibility with porn-associated music with rape:* quite the opposite. Indeed, the scene proves far too tenderly-acted to fit with even the cheapened consensual sex of the realm of pornography.