I feel lucky to have the opportunity to share a post by Alex Jackson. Alex's site "I Viddied it On the Screen" helped motivate me to start my own blog, and his reviews of the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, in particular, are must reads for horror fans (you can check out the Friday the 13th reviews at Film Freak Central). Here, Alex makes a case for Psycho (1998), a movie without many fans; I agree with Alex that it's underestimated and worth revisiting.
I thought about Gus Van Sant’s
infamous shot-by-shot remake of PSYCHO all over again upon seeing the
official music video for Ingrid Michaelson’s “Girls Chase Boys”. Michaelson’s
video is, itself, a seemingly shot-by-shot remake of Robert Palmer’s “Simply
Irresistible” video and does for that piece what Van Sant has done with PSYCHO
albeit much more overtly- through simply gender reversal, it “gays” up an
intrinsically hetero-normative property, forcing our cognizance of not only its
construction as a film but of the underlying cultural assumptions in the work.
Considering
how hated this film is, it’s perhaps no surprise that few seem to have listened
to Van Sant, Anne Heche, and Vince Vaughn’s audio commentary on the DVD
release. Heche points out that Julianne Moore’s performance as Lila Crane
subtly transforms the character into a lesbian (using coded clues that only
other lesbians would be able to pick up) while Vaughn emphasizes how Sam Loomis
(in the hands of Viggo Mortenson) has gone from cowboy to dreamy lover-boy.
(Indeed, an ass-shot early on redirects the male gaze toward a male object).
The remake seems to have reversed the gender construct of virtually all the
major characters, suggesting that the delirious miscasting of Marion Crane and
Norman Bates with Heche and Vaughn was completely by design.
I’m
particularly fascinated by Heche as Marion. In 1998, Heche was America’s most
visible lesbian and there was talk upon the release of the forgettable SIX DAYS
AND SEVEN NIGHTS that America may not be able to accept her as a romantic lead.
The gap between Heche’s on-screen persona and off-screen personal life is
widened here by giving the character a short pixie-like cut that renders her
decidedly androgynous. Plus, with her wide eyes and long nose, she looks like a
bird. Her name is Crane and Norman stuffs birds as a hobby, as constructed
originally PSYCHO intends us to objectify Marion as a “bird”. With the casting
of Heche in the role, this objectification is pushed to its absurdist limit.
So
is PSYCHO ’98 intended as a critique rather than homage to the original? Was
the Hitchcock film sexist or homophobic and is this remake designed to bring
out these attitudes? Well, yes and no. It’s complicated. There were apparently
few if any other films that killed off their lead before the half-way mark
before PSYCHO and after PSYCHO any attempt to repeat the shock seem to strain
with self-consciousness. (Kathyrn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCKER has perhaps come to
the closest to pulling it off). This shock relies on our close identification
with Marion Crane and for this reason; I don’t feel that PSYCHO could
truthfully be called sexist or misogynistic. And yet her murder, nude in the
shower, can’t help but have some erotic component to it particularly as this
sequence is the most famous, most exciting, and most cinematic in the entire film.
Additionally,
once we accept that Marion is dead and gone our tight identification with a
female character goes along with her. Right
after the shower murder, there’s a great shot (duplicated in the
Dilophosaurus/Dennis Nedry scene of JURASSIC PARK (or so I had belatedly
convinced IMDB)) where the camera trucks over to the bag of money- the
“MacGuffin”- as if to say “Now that the bitch is dead, let’s get back to what’s
really important." The shot is unbelievably callous, not the least because the
money barely re-enters the story again. (Similarly, the money surrogate in
JURASSIC PARK—a shaving cream can full of dinosaur embryos-- is entirely
forgotten about for the remainder of the film). If the death of Marion Crane
has any more meaning in PSYCHO beyond salacious sadism, it is as a mere plot
device.
As
for the homophobia, well I’m not really part of the community but I do feel in
my gut that any representation is better than no representation. Not only was
the film somewhat groundbreaking in its use of gore and nudity, this was one of
the first major films to show a toilet and similarly there is a sense that a
lot of the buried aspects of human life are being exposed for the first time. The
debriefing by the psychiatrist at the end of the film, where he explicitly
explains that Norman is not a homosexual or a transvestite, is interesting to
me in that in 1960 it was probably intended to somewhat neutralize the deviancy
of his actions by assuring us that they aren’t (homo)sexual in nature. Today,
it registers as politically correct as though the filmmakers wanted to assure
us that homosexuals and transvestites are not “psycho” like Norman. But
regardless, these defenses are to a very real extent, mere excuses. Nebbish
Norman Bates dresses up as his mother and murders women and this is
intrinsically heteronormative rendering the homosexual (or rather those who do
not fit the Ozzie and Harriet sexual mold) as “other” or deviant.
Interestingly,
Van Sant makes two small but significant deviations that alter our empathic
identification with Marion and Norman. In reaction to Norman’s “a boy’s best
friend is his mother” Marion now rolls
her eyes. Much has been written about how Marion sees herself as similar to
Norman in that they are both caught in “traps”, but she has the capacity to
escape. This eye roll renders the point moot. She doesn’t identify with Norman
because she knows that she is superior to him and his situation has nothing to
do with her own. And then there’s the “peeping Tom” scene where Master Bates,
well, now does his signature move. This doesn’t really confirm his
heterosexuality as much as confirm his overall sexual deviance. I say these deviations alter our
identification with Marion and Norman, but they don’t exactly destroy them. In
hating Marion, we are identifying with Norman and in hating Norman we are identifying
with Marion. That empathy for both characters is still there, but indirectly,
in the form of misanthropy. In the process, Van Sant’s remake emboldens as well
as satirizes the ambivalently sexist and homophobic undertones of the original
film.
I
left the most obvious albeit, perhaps, most significant irony of PSYCHO '98 for
last. The story goes that Hitchcock made the original film so he could
experience the joy of filmmaking again. He wanted to do something really quick,
really simple, and really cheap and dirty. Just to blow the cobwebs away. There
was also the sense that he felt he had to compete with Henri-Georges Clouzot
who may have stolen his title as The Master of Suspense following DIABOLIQUE.
Or that there were a lot of truly terrible exploitation movies coming out and
he wanted to show everyone how to do this thing right. Any one or all three of
these motivations seem perfectly plausible, but they all suggest that PSYCHO by design redeems or trumps its subject
matter with pure style. That it was meant to illustrate Hitchcock’s dictum that
worrying about content would be like a painter worrying about whether or not
the apples he is painting are sour. PSYCHO would be an exercise in pure cinema.
So
then what does it say that a shot-by-shot remake of PSYCHO doesn’t really
resemble the original? You could argue that the slight deviations that Van Sant
made in the transcription created a monstrosity drastically different from the
host. It seems to me though that the existence of PSYCHO 98 strongly challenges
the legitimacy of formalist approaches toward film. Not only do broad highly
political sociocultural influences (such as our understanding and attitude
about gender) greatly influence our understanding of PSYCHO, but so does
something as seemingly trivial as fashion. The original was shot in
black-and-white to make it seem mundane. If it were shot in black-and-white in
1998, it would be affected and arty. PSYCHO was at trash by design and Hitchcock
elevated it to level of art. And now under the hand of Van Sant, who takes it
as seriously as the fucking Dead Sea scrolls, we can no longer comfortably
classify it as either.
No comments:
Post a Comment