Psycho
With Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, Robert Forster, Philip Baker Hall, Ann Haney, and Chad Everett.
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But let me be just. The first 53 minutes of Psycho–very nearly the first half, everything from when we enter a seedy Phoenix hotel room to when we see the sinking of a car in a marsh, capped by Norman Bates’s triumphant grin–constitute one of the supreme achievements of Hitchcock’s career. What makes it so remarkable is not simply the hysteria provoked by the repressed sexuality but the no less troubled feelings it arouses about money–too little money, too much money, money as a signifier of despair and twisted human impulses. Indeed, it’s the interplay between sex and money (as ferocious here as it is in Charlie Chaplin’s equally misogynistic and misanthropic Monsieur Verdoux) that accounts for the extraordinary sense of dread that infuses these 53 minutes–an interplay of perpetual displacement and substitution that culminates in the simultaneous descent into slime of both the sex object and the $40,000 she stole. The crime of murder both effaces and permanently conceals the crime of theft around the same time that our moral position shifts from being complicit in an act of spontaneous theft to being complicit in an act of spontaneous murder.
But the implication of Alspector’s remark is that if Hitchcock–or Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Jackson Pollock, Henry Moore, or Frank Lloyd Wright–were freer from established conventions, he might have created his works in hopes that they’d be redone by other people. Maybe I’m misconstruing the leap she makes from the vantage point of creators (“plays are created”) to the vantage point of consumers (“us”) by assuming that she believes these vantage points are or should be identical. But where money is concerned, our society made that leap a long time ago; the final words of the closing credits of “Gus Van Sant’s” Psycho inform us that Universal Pictures–not Alfred Hitchcock or Gus Van Sant, novelist Robert Bloch or screenwriter Joseph Stefano–is the legal author of the film we’ve just been watching. That statement couldn’t appear on any film in France, where the authorship of the director is established by French law. I could argue further that it’s “only convention” that has persuaded us–Alspector included–that this Psycho somehow “belongs” to Gus Van Sant and not to Universal Pictures.
For all his ambivalence about Psycho, Farber was particularly impressed by the drab desperation realistically described by the scenes with Leigh in Phoenix. This depressive realism has usually been labeled a complete departure for Hitchcock, but it has one revealing precedent–the most underrated American Hitchcock film, made only three years earlier and also in black-and-white (and with Vera Miles), The Wrong Man. Critic James Naremore recently told me he thought this was the most depressing commercial film in American cinema, and surely there’s no other work of Hitchcock’s that more vividly details the state of being economically downtrodden and hopelessly ensnared in an uncaring system. Psycho begins in more or less the same state of everyday depression and banality before getting lost in gothic potboiler details; Marion Crane’s hallucinatory cross-country flight by car punctuated by imagined conversations is every bit as harrowing as Henry Fonda’s entrapment in a cell, and the real estate office she’s in flight from is every bit as uncomfortable as the public spaces in the earlier film.
A few added lines of dialogue, surrealist montage inserts in the two murder scenes, a substitution of a country-and-western tune for the Eroica Symphony on Bates’s record player, and other pointless replacements or supplements reveal not so much a desire to interpret or reinvent the film as an idle flight from boredom or bemusement–the logical outcome of Van Sant’s doomed and misguided experiment. That doesn’t mean that flacks like my colleagues and I won’t be toting up all the meaningless variations for weeks to come. After all, part of our job is to supply meaning and significance where there is none.
