Hitchcock's Magic

Neil Badmington

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780708323694, 9780708323700
• eBook ISBN: 9781783164516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Why are we drawn to the work of Alfred Hitchcock so long after his final film appeared? What is the source of Hitchcock's magic? This book answers these questions by focussing upon the fabric of the films themselves, upon the way in which they enlist and sustain our desire, holding our attention by constantly withholding something from us.

1

Ps/zycho

LEE: Well, they got people in motels don’t they?

AUSTIN: Strangers.

Sam Shepard, True West1

Psychos

Eee! Eee! Eee! Eee! Eee! Eee! Eee! Eee!

You probably recognize this sound. It is cuttingly familiar, sharply suggestive, perhaps even to those who have never actually witnessed the most notorious moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s most notorious film, for ‘Psycho’s shower-murder scene has passed into the consciousness of the world. An uninitiated viewer – one who does not already know Norman’s story or Marion’s fate – can scarcely be found.’2 Sometimes it takes very little to call up the ghost of the bathroom at the Bates Motel, as I discovered when, while taking a break one afternoon from working on this chapter, I paid a brief visit to my local branch of IKEA. As I pushed my laden trolley into the lift, Hitchcock was far from my mind. Suddenly, an alarm warning that the doors were about to close began to sound in staccato bursts: Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! ‘Oooh, Psychol’, laughed one of the other passengers, making a frenzied stabbing gesture in the air.

It is not only Bernard Herrmann’s wonderful score that enjoys such familiarity of course, for the entire film has, as Stephen Rebello observes in his excellent book on the making of Psycho, ‘slipped beyond mere popularity and into the annals of pop culture’, where it floats as an intertext, a reference point, something to imitate, acknowledge, parody.3 And there have been some truly curious echoes. At the time of writing, for instance, visitors to the bathroom section of Habitat, the British home furnishing chain, will find for sale a transparent shower curtain that is called, quite simply, the ‘Hitchcock’.4 In 1993, meanwhile, Douglas Gordon unveiled an artwork entitled 24 Hour Psycho, in which Hitchcock’s film was projected silently onto a large suspended screen at the rate of just two frames per second, thus stretching the narrative out across an entire day.5 Five years later, Gus Van Sant directed a new version of Psycho for Universal Pictures, promising not only to remake the original, but to remake it shot for shot and with a budget meticulously designed to be the contemporary equivalent of the $806,947.55 spent by Hitchcock.6 The studio’s publicity campaign offered two lucky viewers the chance to dine at the Bates Motel, presumably, in honour of Marion’s last supper, on sandwiches and milk; I have been unable to determine their fate.7 Finally, in the same year that Van Sant’s Psycho was released, O. J. Simpson, who had recently been acquitted of stabbing to death his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her new companion, Ronald Goldman, bizarrely invoked Norman Bates during a fly-on-the-wall documentary shown on BBC television. Peter Conrad takes up the story:

He indignantly insisted that he had not slaughtered his wife and her friend, then addressed a sideways smirk to the camera. Parting from the interviewer, Ruby Wax, he said he had a surprise for her, and promised to deliver it later. When the bell rang, she opened the door of her hotel room. There loomed O.J., his arm raised, emitting a series of staccato shrieks: he was tunelessly singing Bernard Herrmann’s score for the shower scene in Psycho, with its fraught strings, while he lowered his arm to stab her. His weapon? Not Mrs Bates’s knife, but a banana purloined from one of the hotel’s hospitality baskets.8

Psycho, in short, is in the blood. Its secrets are well known; its sights and sounds are common currency. But this was not always the case. In fact, Hitchcock repeatedly appealed to a sense of secrecy when shooting and promoting the film. As Stephen Rebello has pointed out, some of the cast and crew were kept unaware of the ending of the movie during filming, even though a ‘closed set’ policy operated for much of the time.9 Later, in one of the three trailers released to publicize Psycho, Hitchcock made a special plea to his audience – ‘Please don’t tell the ending; it’s the only one we’ve got’ – and subsequently he refused to follow the convention of arranging preview screenings for critics.10 Meanwhile, one of the publicity sheets issued by the studio bore Hitchcock’s image and signature alongside a demand from the director: ‘I insist that you do not tell your friends the amazing secrets of PSYCHO after you see it.’11 And, perhaps most famously of all:

Hitchcock not only advised but also insisted that theater owners follow his decree against admitting patrons once the picture began; finally, he demanded the enforcing of his decree as a contractual prerequisite for any theater exhibitor who booked the film. In a bulletin to exhibitors, Hitchcock wrote, ‘I believe this is a vital step in creating the aura of mysterious importance this unusual motion picture so richly deserves’.12

Even the somewhat solemn Cahiers du cinéma played along happily, when Jean Douchet began his review by stating that ‘[t]his article is forbidden to those who have not yet seen Psycho’.13 Knowing the secret of the film, he continued, ‘will deprive the reader, the future spectator, of a major part of his or her pleasure’.14

What Hitchcock and Douchet failed to anticipate, I think, is the way in which the pleasure of the text has stubbornly survived the revelation of its precious secrets. Psycho, as Robert Kolker puts it, ‘would seem to be the kind of film that people would flee from, and yet we all keep coming back... Even after the thrills, frights, and surprises are revealed, it is a film we want to see yet again.’15 It is precisely this lingering appeal, this perpetual pleasure, that will be the concern of this chapter. Why does Psycho still cast a spell? Why will it, like Mrs Bates herself, not go quietly to the grave? How has it managed to remain so lively, so seductive, even when its mysteries have apparently been dissolved by the remarkably conclusive final few minutes of the film, in which the psychiatrist, Dr Richmond, explains in assured tones how, having killed his mother and her new lover in a jealous rage, Norman stole and preserved the corpse of Mrs Bates. When this failed to erase his feelings of guilt, the psychiatrist continues, Norman began to adopt the personality of his dead mother, often choosing to wear her clothes. In some circumstances, Norman would be both characters at once, carrying on a conversation between himself and his mother; on other occasions, he was ‘all mother’. ‘He was’, though, Dr Richmond gravely adds, ‘never all Norman’. The errant son, moreover, no longer exists at the end of the film, for, faced with the prospect of being blamed for the killings, the ‘dominant personality’ of Mrs Bates has permanently silenced her unruly offspring. The case is closed. There are no more secrets, no more mysteries, no gaps in the picture, no holes in the wall.

But perhaps there are. Perhaps appearances cannot be trusted. Perhaps the case of Norman Bates is not as straightforward as Dr Richmond believes. Perhaps there are riddles that remain.

Ps/zycho

If Norman Bates was ‘never all Norman’, neither was Roland Barthes. Although born in Normandy, Barthes always felt, in the words of one of his biographers, ‘that he was Basque or Gascon, never Parisian, and still less, of course, Norman’.16 With this curious connection to the Bates Motel in mind, I want to bring the work of Barthes to bear upon Hitchcock’s most enduring film in order to address the hold that Psycho still has upon its viewers.

Ten years after Norman Bates terrified cinema audiences for the first time, Barthes – the other Norman – published S/Z, a strange, stirring book that appeared to devote over two hundred pages to nothing but a microscopic, meandering reading of ‘Sarrasine’, a short story by Honoré de Balzac.17 That reading, moreover, was derived, according to a note at the beginning of S/Z, from a seminar in which the author had devoted two years of teaching to Balzac’s thirty-page narrative.18 Although S/Z contains no extended discussion of cinema, and although there is, to the best of my knowledge, just one reference to Hitchcock in Barthes’s entire oeuvre, I want to propose that his book on ‘Sarrasine’ offers a theory of reading, rereading, textuality and the tenacity of the text which helps to account for the undying quality of Psycho.19

At the very beginning of S/Z, a distinction is made between the ‘readable’ (lisible) text and the ‘writable’ (scriptible) text.20 Readable texts, Barthes suggests, ‘are products (and not productions), they make up the enormous mass of our literature’.21 They are ‘classic’ cases; they ‘can be read but not written’,22 and they are ‘committed to the closure system of the west, produced according to the goals of this system, devoted to the law of the Signified’.23 In the realm of the readable, ‘everything holds together’ and eventually comes together in a neat conclusion: if there is an enigma at the beginning of the tale, it will be resolved by the closing words.24 The reader will ultimately be led from mystery to knowledge, to satisfaction, to ‘symbolic plenitude’.25 Although its route may be marked by various ‘snares’ – ‘deliberate evasion[s] of the truth’26 that prolong the life of the narrative – the readable text travels in revelation from expectation to truth.27

As a classic, readable text, Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ moves to tie up all of its loose ends – to disclose the truth that will dissolve enigma – by its final page. Accordingly, the identity of the curious little old man, the history of La Zambinella and the source of the Lanty family’s wealth are all revealed by the end of the tale, which began by shrouding all of these issues in mystery. All the enigmas are now unveiled, the vast hermeneutic sentence is closed [close]’, writes Barthes towards the end of S/Z.28 What was once unknown is now known; the reader – held in a state of ignorance at the beginning of Balzac’s tale – apparently gains access to knowledge, to truth, to a position of mastery.

S/Z has no difficulty in finding a readable text for analysis. Writable texts, meanw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Hitchcock's Magic; or, How I Starred in Saboteur
• 1: Ps/zycho
• 2: Frame Tale: Rear Window and the Promise of Vision
• 3: SpectRebecca
• 4: Stories of 'O': North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much
• 5: The Animals Who Knew Too Much: The Zoopoetics of The Birds
• Postscript: Into the Mystery
• Appendix: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
• Notes
• Bibliography