All about my dead mother: 24 hour Psycho, Psycho, Psycho II: window, Lightbox, idiot box

24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro

as installed in the Tramway, Glasgow

It yielded a very, very strange and fleeting moment of tranquility when I paused on King Street one night during the Toronto International Film Festival last September to observe a teenage couple holding hands, calmly watching the two projected images nestled against one another, hovering just a few feet inside the window. We were all of us just outside the newly opened TIFF Bell Lightbox, whose gallery housed the piece, and the street was bustling with people and traffic. Line-ups were filing inside and others still forming outside for the evening’s various screenings. The couple watched Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro. I watched them watching 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro. None of us spoke for a long while. I wondered if how intimately they knew Hitchcock’s movie, what this might mean to them if they didn’t know it at all, if it was a sort of American icon you didn’t really need to experience to feel that you were already on familiar terms with, like Warhol’s soup can, the Statue of Liberty, or Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. I felt tremendous satisfaction, seeing how transfixed the couple appeared, because like a million other people I love Psycho. It scares me and moves more now than when I first saw it, back when I was a little younger than the couple on the street. As for 24 Hour Psycho, I first saw that in Mexico City a few years ago at a massive Gordon retrospective, where it inhabited an enormous room, looming over its audience from a great height, and I was drawn into it for I don’t know how long. Time became slippery, both on screen and off. My first experience of it wasn’t too different from the sort of experience described in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, which opens and closes with a man experiencing Gordon’s piece at the Museum of Modern Art. This experience, here in Toronto, was different, being outside, being in the street, not in the air-conditioned comfort of a museum. While the three of us stood there Marion Crane was alive on one screen and dead on the other. It was like the two screens were pages of a book from which many other pages had been ripped out, the pages that detailed Marion’s death. The kids walked away and I stayed on, watching. On one of the screens a pair of eyes were slowly, slowly moving in my direction, and I felt I couldn’t look away.


The story, you’ll recall, concerns a secretary living in Phoenix named Marion, who might be in love with a married man who owns a hardware store in another town—if it isn’t love it’s close enough, given her prospects. She’s entrusted with a not unsubstantial envelope filled with cash. She flees with that cash, almost gets to Fairvale, where the man lives, but she stops at a motel, meets a peculiar, lonely, yet oddly endearing young man. They sit in his parlour for a little while with sandwiches and milk, overseen by stuffed birds, and have what is easily the most intimate moment of human connection in the entire movie—what is one of my favourite scenes in any movie. Their encounter is essentially random, and proves to be devastatingly so. From this point things are turned on their head, a detective story begins, a swamp in consulted, certain scenes become almost funny, a sister arrives and maybe she’ll eventually take Marion’s place in the arms of the man, sort of like in that other story of a missing woman that came out the same year, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura. Seeing Psycho again I recalled a terrific moment in Hal Hartley’s Simple Men. If I remember correctly (it’s been many years), it’s early in the movie, and Martin Donovan, in defense of a woman he loves, barks out “Pushy women are great!” The Crane sisters, Marion and Lila, are pushy and they are great, though it’s the far sexier and cagier one, the one played by the inimitable Janet Leigh, that exits the movie halfway through. The 50th Anniversary Restoration of Psycho opens at Lightbox today. Unlike Gordon’s installation, you can’t see it from the street—you need to buy your ticket and be nestled in the darkness of the theatre. The movie looks gorgeous, the shadows deep and dense and almost eerily immaculate, so that every wrinkle in Marion Crane’s bare feet as she lies collapsed in the bathtub could be traced with a finger. The movie also sounds tremendous, especially every time the silence is cut by Bernard Herrmann’s dynamic, electroshock therapy score, which pivots bracingly from screeching violins to what sound like low fog horns from Hades. Another digression: I recently attended a Lightbox screening of The Godfather. I enjoyed it immensely, but every time the theme music started up I found it difficult to hear it as anything other than corny and over-familiar. Herrmann’s Psycho score by contrast never seems to get old. I get excited to hear it the same way I would to hear a beloved record. If by chance you’ve never seen Psycho—and if you haven’t stop reading this and just go already—I can’t really think of a better introduction. If you know Psycho, know how chilling, psychologically rich, and formally interesting it is, do yourself a favour and see this latest re-release.


Between, I’m going to guess, the ages of about nine and fourteen, I watched Psycho II so many times I lost count. It came out in 1983. I taped it off TV and for some reason just kept returning to it late at night when my parents were in bed and I couldn’t sleep. I just returned to it for the first time in about twenty years and it was the weirdest feeling—though most of it left my conscious memory, watching it again I could anticipate almost every line and gesture, but only about thirty seconds before it happened. I wish I could tell you that my revisiting of Psycho II after all these years was rewarding. Truth is it’s not very good. It actually opens with a bafflingly awful idea, replaying Hitchcock’s shower scene in its entirety as a sort of vestibule, as if to remind you what this sequel will never come close to living up to. Anyway, after 23 years of being locked up Norman Bates is declared “restored to sanity” and allowed to take a job in a diner and reinstate himself at the Bates Motel. It is, of course, utterly fascinating to see Tony Perkins re-inhabit the role of Norman. His speech patterns and body language and odd paucity of affect suddenly resemble those of Andy Warhol. Preposterously, a very young, vulnerable, and holy-cow-beautiful Meg Tilly comes to live with Norman in the house where he had his troubles. Rather quickly the killings begin, but it doesn’t seem like it’s Norman doing them. Could it be Mother? Is this going to be a zombie movie? Answers eventually come, though they don’t make much sense. Director Richard Franklin has studied his Hitch and echoes the master director’s swoops and close-ups, and even painstakingly quotes the shower scene—that very same one we just saw at the top of Psycho II—with nearly as much fidelity as Gus Van Sant. If Franklin and writer Tom Holland really wanted to mimic Psycho however then they would have had to have made Dennis Franz the protagonist for the first half of the movie. Incidentally, Franz turns 66 today—happy birthday, Dennis!

The Radiant Child: Tamra Davis' Basquiat portrait colours within the lines

Among the elements that distinguished the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat was its merging of text and image, or rather its use of text as image, words crossed-out or repeated until meanings shift or dissolve, often hovering between the cryptic and the forthright. Given that the traditional documentary already embraces the incorporation of on-screen text, it wouldn’t seem too great a leap for a film about Basquiat to approach its subject with a like sense of lexicographical adventure. Tamra Davis’ Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child—kind of a condescending title the more you think about it—does in fact use lots of text—it’s a rare documentary that endeavours to give running credits for stills—but does so in a manner that’s neither mimetic nor especially enlightening. The Radiant Child is however a solid introduction to the artist, and for that reason should be widely seen.

The film was prompted by Davis’ re-discovery of video interviews she recorded with Basquiat before grief consigned them to a drawer for 20 years. Davis and Basquiat were friends, and the film was clearly undertaken with tremendous affection, which makes The Radiant Child a very moving experience, yet prompts an approach so cautious as to fall short of offering rigorous insight into Basquiat’s art, celebrity, or private life. Basquiat was prolific, imaginative, wildly ambitious, intelligent, handsome and charismatic, but he died at 27, too young to be expected to comment meaningfully on his own work—not that any artist at any age is required to provide such commentary. So the lost interviews, in which Basquiat seems reticent and a bit self-conscious, are not enough to make The Radiant Child a revelation. An overstocked cast of interview subjects are recruited, but they’re either cut short or generalize. Poet John Giorno rightly attributes Basquiat’s textual innovations to his exposure to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique, yet fails to mention Brion Gysin, who co-founded the technique with Burroughs and was, you know, a painter. Fellow-painter Julian Schnabel, who launched his filmmaking career with a Basquiat bio-pic, seems like he could have contributed much more but has his comments squeezed. No one says much about the implications of Basquiat’s transition from street graffiti to graffiti-infused paintings. Historian Nelson George however does manage to shed some light on the role of racial tensions in Basquiat’s work.

Basquiat by Warhol

I don’t want to get carried away itemizing what The Radiant Child doesn’t do. What it does do is provide a vivid sense of the Lower Manhattan underground art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, probably the last time New York really mattered as a cultural vanguard—not coincidentally this was also the last time any normal person could afford to live there. Davis makes terrific use of archival tapes of Basquiat’s noise band Gray, of his appearances on TV Party, and of the artist at work. Davis also makes a case for the notion that Basquiat and Andy Warhol were, for a time at least, each other’s closest friends. In some only slightly perverse way, Warhol may have been a father figure to Basquiat, whose real father was a middle-class Haitian-American living just across the river in Brooklyn, and with whom Basquiat endured an uneasy relationship. Davis only hints at this unease, perhaps out of respect for Basquiat Sr., perhaps out of an unwillingness to psychoanalyze her dead friend. All of which is perfectly respectable, yet leaves The Radiant Child fraught with half-measures, a quality quite different from its subject who, for better or worse, threw himself headlong and devotedly into a truncated life of high art and dizzying fame.

The long goodbye: pop culture collage + politics + genre deconstruction + divorce = Made in USA

When Paula Nelson wakes in her dormatorial hotel room in some place called Atlantic-Cité she finds at her door a dwarf with high blood pressure who knows her from some shady dealings in their past. Their arrivals here, it would seem, were prompted by the same thing, the suspicious death of one Richard Politzer. But before their relations become unduly friendly Paula beats the dwarf unconscious with a lovely shoe—a blue one, as requested by the dwarf—and the talismanic appearance of his blood becomes Paula’s entrance into an adventure where reality and fiction blur. She soon meets the dwarf’s nephew, a novelist named David Goodis, and his companion, who sings folk songs in the bathroom and whose last name in Mizoguchi. Soon she’ll meet a sinister young man named Donald Siegel and a police inspector named Aldrich. She’ll visit a bar where a very young Marianne Faithful sings ‘As Tears Go By’ a cappella, and a spa where Daisy Kenyon and Ruby Gentry are being paged. As she sinks deeper into mystery she’ll be directed to streets with names like Preminger and Ben Hecht.

If any of this means anything to you, you probably cherish classical Hollywood, the Japanese masters, detective fiction, or the rich cultural palate of the hip 1960s in general. (You’ll also note that the picture is affectionately dedicated to directors Nicolas Ray and Sam Fuller.) The ravenously referential postmodernism of Made in USA (1966) offers a superb example of what once tied Jean-Luc Godard to his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan especially. Though where Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ spun out for nearly 12 minutes on a effervescent wave of irresistible border town melodics and expressive guitar figures, Godard’s long-lost feature is a less inviting, more difficult mélange of imagery, homage and intertext. Made in USA came at the end of a frenetic creative period launched explosively with Breathless (60). Godard had already divorced Anna Karina, and Paula Nelson would be her final role for him. He was becoming increasingly politicized and this would be described as his final attempt at a genre picture. But Made in USA is only a thriller in the most notional sense. So unconcerned with thrills, its shot mainly in front of nondescript walls, and its violence is rendered quite literally as cartoons.

The script was based, though uncredited upon its original release, on Richard Stark’s terse crime novel The Jugger (65). But Godard, never very interested in conventional narrative models at the best of times, giddily changed the gender of its protagonist and took from his source material only the most skeletal framework—though when you think about it Made in USA is only a marginally more liberal adaptation of Stark than the haunted, dreamlike and lyrical Point Blank (67), vaguely based on The Hunter (62). Fact is that the Stark novels featured an antihero from another time, where these films are so very much products of the 1960s. Among the virtues of Godard’s film is its value as an artifact that speaks to the present. The dead Politzer, whose strident political provocations are heard via a cache of tape recordings, was a communist still intensely bitter about recent French colonial misadventures and newly enraged by Vietnam. Godard’s dream of cinema as a progressive art form is conveyed most openly by the unapologetic, sometimes absurd merging of politics and pop culture, revolutionary esprit in creative life being aligned with like struggle in the war of ideas and policy. So in this sense the title of the film is almost a joke, a punk rock robbery where the vestiges of Old Hollywood’s glory days and American iconography are lovingly sewn into a quilt, only to be battered and sullied beyond recognition. It makes for dense viewing at times, but the carefully staged chaos can also be exhilarating.

Watching Made in USA is clearly a different experience when the viewer shares a modicum of Godard’s cultural knowledge base. In Criterion’s terrific new DVD of the film they even provide a video essay that functions as a sort of Coles Notes explaining each of the film’s most important references, as well as another featurette rife with insightful comments and helpful history from Godard biographers Colin McCabe and Richard Brody. Yet, rather surprisingly, the context that McCabe and Brody provide us with deepens our ability to read the film’s emotional undercurrents just as much, if not more, than its intellectual ones. As I watched Made in USA I was struck by how strangely touching certain moments seemed. Strange because so much feels cryptic and cool as can be. Yet Karina’s performance, already very fun and seductive—and so well dressed—is imbued with an elegiac weight, which transmits in one melancholically adoring close-up after another. Politzer, after all, was once Paula’s fiancé, and when she first speaks in the film she’s sleepily recalling the time when she was once “the mirror of his desires,” the virtual embodiment of his dreams. Politzer’s voice, it begs mention, was provided by Godard himself. Paula’s interests in investigating his death are too layered to fully comprehend, but on one very direct level she’s come to say goodbye to him, to meditate on the cause they once shared, and this ostensibly cerebral collage piece leaves us with the impression of having watched something once so ambitious and impassioned slowly fade to black, like the horizon vanishing behind Paula as she’s driven away from that place called Atlantic-Cité.

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

From the beginning he scrupulously surveyed a landscape the rest of us strive to keep at bay. He spent a pivotal portion of his youth in a Japanese internment camp, where violence, death and collapse were regularly on display. He lost the love of his life and mother of his young children while still in his early 30s. Yet despair and hopelessness seemed other to him. In his stories and novels he rendered with great precision and unfettered imagination what other writers merely drape in bathos. In his second novel The Drowned World (1962), he described a London visible only by the tips of its tallest buildings, the remainder completely submerged following a global catastrophe spurred by melting icecaps. “Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids.” Later in the novel we’re given a tour of an underwater planetarium, which is to say we’re given the stars far below the surface of the sea. Such gifts are common in the work of J.G. Ballard.

When characterizing Ballard’s tales, whether fantastically dystopian or chillingly realist, one’s repeatedly tempted by the term “alienating,” yet what makes the work so arresting and provocative is the fact that his protagonists aren’t really alienated at all. They witness horrors that, rather than simply deadening affect, awake a new level of fascination with phenomena far grander in scale than individual lives or even civilizations. Like the experimental plants and animals bred in the laboratory of Ballard’s ‘The Voices of Time’ (60), his characters break away from conventional responses to their environment by utilizing some dormant impulse locked inside all of us, perhaps in our very genes. To read his books is to stimulate, as Martin Amis described it, “a disused part of the reader’s brain.” Transcending genre, form and, most gleefully, taste, Ballard remains singular. He died last Sunday morning in London, following a long struggle with cancer. He was 78.

James Graham Ballard was born to British parents in Shanghai in 1930. They lived luxuriously in an enclave upon whose fringes existed a world both “extravagant and cruel,” boasting a wild assortment of exotic crime. “Anything was possible, and everything could be bought and sold,” Ballard wrote. “In many ways, it seems like a stage set, but at the time it was real, and I think a large part of fiction has been an attempt to evoke it by means other than memory.” In a transformation that would echo again and again in images of abandoned buildings, empty pools and grounded aircraft, their protected world would be left a spectral cavity once the Ballards were placed in internment in 1943. Ballard received lessons in poverty, charity, starvation, solidarity and pettiness. He ate maggots for protein. And he was always curious, amazed and basically cheerful. “Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life.”

In 1946 Ballard returned to England, bombed-out and miserable, a victorious nation that behaved as though defeated, a place where “hope itself was rationed.” Ballard went to medical school, where he became transfixed by the cadavers he was assigned to dissect, seeing in their faces a palimpsest of experience. He then went to Moose Jaw with the RAF, and it was on the Canadian prairie that he discovered science fiction, the genre that would ignite his mind. He married Mary Matthews in 1955 and settled in Shepperton to have three kids and start in earnest his prolific writing career. Mary would die suddenly of pneumonia in 1963, leaving Ballard to do all the domestic and money-earning duties while still engaging in a dynamic social life in swinging London. His memoir Miracles of Life (08) is dedicated to and named after his beloved children, who he remained close to all his life. Yet happy families, or even unhappy families, were never to be a significant subject of his work.

Apocalyptic scenarios fuelled many of the early novels, yet the more Ballard interacted with the familiar contemporary world, the more truly unnerving his fiction became. The Kennedy assassination, his wife’s death, Vietnam, his memories of wartime Shanghai, and his interest in new feats of consumerism, fetish-making and media sensationalism merged to create the image/event/prose graft of The Atrocity Exhibition (66), aligning Ballard far more with Jean-Luc Godard or Andy Warhol at the peak of their powers than with the likes of Isaac Asimov. One of Ballard’s most infamous novels, Crash (73) encompasses the radical approach to speculation Ballard had taken, subverting our response to trauma into an obsession with configurations of modern embodiments of affluence and glamour. His characters survive car crashes only to then crave and even design more of them, erotically, wholly, seeking some psychotic communion. When David Cronenberg adapted the novel into an equally controversial film of the same name (96), it made for one of the most fruitful collaborations between two uncannily like-minded artists of the late 20th century.

Empire of the Sun (84) ushered him into the literary mainstream. A fictionalized retelling of his Shanghai experiences, it melded Ballard’s crisp, coolly poetic language with nostalgia and tenderness. From here, the bulk of remaining body of work would stick largely to the format most clearly outlined in High Rise (75), tales of cloistered, antiseptic colonies—gated communities in Running Wild (88) and Cocaine Nights (96), an elite business park in Super-Cannes (00), a giant exurban shopping mall in Kingdom Come (06)—where the deadening effects of modern life invites transgression, the promise of control invites tacit agreements to lose control, and a state of anarchy is longed for by exactly those who sought to maintain order. I reviewed most of these when they came out, and it never ceased to amaze me how these explicit variations on a theme in each case the same story could yield fresh insights.

I never met J.G. Ballard but I’ll miss him nonetheless. His voice so rarely gave comfort, but there is a sort of vertiginous exhilaration to be found in his probing of our collective psyche and precarious ambitions. His body of work is too alive with possibility to be considered fatalist. His fecund mind sought to unearth the secret contract between surrealism and social commentary. And he did his part in ensuring that the British novel would not succumb to quaintness. Like the protagonist in ‘The Garden of Time’ (61), he has felt the final crystal of life dissolve in his hands, but he’s left us a vast field of jewels to pick through and marvel at in his absence.

There's plenty more on Ballard to be found at The Daily. 

Body trouble: a short piece on the conflicted aesthetic pretentions and elegant alienation of Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway at the very least deserves to be considered a special case. Not only does Greenaway bring the distinct sensibility of the painter to (more or less) mainstream cinema, not only does he subvert the vocabulary of narrative film to make essentially associational structural explorations: Peter Greenaway is a grand cinematic alienator, wildly prolific and without peer. He doesn’t seem to even want you to like his films, which is fortunate.

I started hating Greenaway with 8 1/2 Women (1999), which I saw at Edmonton's Metro Cinema years ago. It’s Metro again who’ve prompted me to revisit Greenaway’s work for the first time since. Making up one half of their weekend Greenaway double bill, Metro’s screening A Zed & Two Noughts (85), perhaps the coldest movie about grief ever made. A clinically elegant approach to design and symmetry permeates the film from the surface down to its core. A car accident outside the Rotterdam Zoo, on a road titled Swan Way, is caused by a swan. Two women perish, each one spouse to one of a pair of Siamese twins. The widowers soon become lovers to the accident’s sole survivor, the driver of the car, who lost one leg in the violence and, urged by the surgeon brother of a famous forger of Vermeer paintings, is considering getting rid of the other. The twins also console themselves with documentaries about the origins of life and by monitoring of decomposition in various organic subjects: an apple, some prawns, a swan. The march of bloat, bubble and rot whizzes by in time-lapse images set to hyper-speed music.

Seen at the close of the opening credits, the image of the dead wives, leaning almost sensuously against one and other as sparks cascade behind them, possesses a certain perverse pageantry that determines the tone of what proceeds. The spectacle owes something to Warhol and JG Ballard in its transfixing power: morbid, telegraphic, flat, yet layered with meaning. It matches the highly theatrical quality of the film’s lighting, composition, production design and even dialogue. In Greenaway’s theatre, civilization is a sort of catastrophe waiting to happen, where genes dictate destiny and personality melts into base needs and the useless accumulation of knowledge. Incidentally, I don’t recall a single close-up in the whole thing: humans are to be observed from a distance sufficient for erasing the possibility of character identification.

Greenaway has stated that cinema doesn’t connect with the body the way painting has. The two mediums behave so differently that I don’t doubt for a moment that he’s right. Yet, while Greenaway has frequently condemned films for clinging to the aesthetics of the novel, I wonder if he’s aware of just how equally limiting his appropriation of the aesthetics of painting is. The body is often most palpably felt in films that fully exploit the medium’s particular sense of movement and urgency -elements Greenaway frequently avoids. In any case,  A Zed & Two Noughts is compelling precisely for its use of static or virtually static imagery. This is something worth praising, even if it’s a far cry from its creator’s ostensible goals.