The MacGuffin: News and Comment (26/Jul/2000)
(c) Ken Mogg (2000)
July 26
I think that the three most worthwhile essays on Psycho that I've read lately have been (1) Steven Schneider's "Manufacturing Horror in Hitchcock's Psycho" (in 'CineAction' #50, pp. 70-75), (2) Bill Schaffer's "Cutting the Flow: Thinking Psycho" (in the online journal, 'Senses of Cinema', issue 6), and (3) George Toles's "'If Thine Eye Offend Thee ...': '''Psycho''' and the Art of Infection" (in the 'Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Essays' collection, edited by Allen & Ishii-Gonzalès, pp. 159-74). But with the greatest respect, 'worthwhile' is a relative term, and so I hold to what I said in my book on Hitchcock that the best accounts of Psycho remain the early ones by Robin Wood and Raymond Durgnat (plus, surely, Deborah Thomas's "On Being Norman: Performance and Inner Life in Hitchcock's Psycho", in 'CineAction' #44, 1997, pp. 66-72). Of Toles's essay, which attempts to relate imagery from Poe and (French theorist/novelist) Bataille to Hitchcock's film, I'll make no comment, except to say that I found it a routine, relatively infertile academic exercise in cross-reference - though I know that Professor Lesley Brill thinks highly of it. I more enjoyed Australian film lecturer Bill Schaffer's paper, both for its observations on the pervasive invasion-of-privacy motif in Psycho and for what Schaffer says about Hitchcock's camera shunting us back and forth between two worlds - subjective and anti-subjective - while all the while entrapping us in Hitchcock's 'play' (here I was reminded of the possibly no-less self-reflexive title of Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away). And I could relate this idea to Steven Schneider's pivotal point in "Manufacturing Horror" about how, contrary to the implication of some of Hitchcock's own remarks, suspense and surprise are not mutually exclusive ingredients of his films but rather almost necessary complements of each other. (Thus there are suspenseful moments even within the shocking shower scene, not to speak of the considerable tension underlying the supposedly 'relaxed' interlude in Norman's 'parlour' preceding it.) Less convincing was Schneider's attempt to relate the deliberate repetition of elements in the shower scene (multiple shots of Marion showering, multiple shots of the knife slashing, multiple shots of Marion sliding downwards) to Freud's notion of 'the uncanny' (whose take on repetition is surely rather different, evoking more the entrapped, eerie feeling of finding oneself back at the centre of a maze from which one is trying to escape). However, I was grateful for Schneider's invocation of theorist Noël Carroll to explain why the first glimpse of 'Mother' is so terrifying, as opposed to merely shocking: 'Following Carroll, we may say that the figure of Mother here (really Norman in drag) transgresses cultural categories by simultaneously connoting both genders' (p. 72). I'm not sure how apt the particular idea of crossing genders is, but I was forcefully reminded of a terrifying moment when I was in kindergarten and, in front of the class, a man suddenly transformed himself with a wig from his seemingly friendly self (welcomed by the lady schoolteacher, standing nearby) into someone quite different (though not of the opposite sex, as I recall). That altogether disorienting moment has never left me, and is the sort of thing - beyond words and theory (cf. a fear of heights) - into which Hitchcock often tapped. Mother's entry into the shower is just so outrageous, and inexplicable ...
This material is copyright of Ken Mogg and the Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website (home page) and is archived with the permission of the copyright holder. |
