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!

By the time I get to Phoenix: Psycho, in all its trauma and fascination, returns on DVD

It is for me one of those genuinely inexhaustible movies, and, though its violence pierces me only more deeply as time goes by, I find myself returning to it more than any other. Psycho, newly released on a special edition two-disc set from Universal, with a beautiful new transfer and unusually good supplements, has that crystalline character of something that yields new or richer readings or sensations with every handling. It forbids and seduces at once. As the brutal set pieces in the shower or on the staircase or in the basement grow more familiar, the relatively mundane moments—Marion’s hurried negotiations with the used car dealer; Sam and Lila’s negotiations in the nocturnal gloom of his hardware store, brimming with sharp objects—grow in fascination. It’s one of the few Alfred Hitchcock films not about glamorous people, yet its morbid allure is colossal.

The story? Two no longer young lovers meet for another tawdry rendezvous and feel a decisive moment looming over their stalled relationship. He’s been married, is struggling financially, and proud, painting for her a sad picture of the two of them living meagerly as monthly alimony payments are sent off in the mail. She’s a secretary, is starting to feel life close in, is ready to dive into domestic hardship with him, and offers to lick the stamps. Back at work a client of her boss leaves a huge amount of cash which she’s meant to deposit but instead pockets. She packs a suitcase and makes a break for the nearby town where her boyfriend lives, that always hesitating hunk unaware he’s in love with a felon. She drives through a rainy night, tires out just as a motel with vacancies shows up on the side of a lonely road. She checks in, meets the lonely, sensitive, clearly unworldly and maybe unstable but still innocent-seeming proprietor. He’s the wispy, soft-spoken twin of her boyfriend, and serves her sandwiches and a huge jug of milk while his batty old mother mutters curses in the house overlooking the motel. She starts to wonder if she hasn’t gone a little crazy. Everyone goes a little crazy sometimes... Given its stature, I’m going to keeping writing here on as though you’ve seen Psycho. If you haven’t, well, my friend, you’re in for something special.

The horizontal lines that push steadily across the screen during Saul Bass’ famed opening credit sequence, accompanied by our first taste of Bernard Herrmann’s masterfully portentous, nerve-fraying score, strike me now as a graphic preview to Norman Bates’ hand slapped over his mouth after “discovering” the bloodbath. Better yet, these lines resemble the viewer’s hand closed over eyes that can’t help but continue to watch. Psycho is nothing if not an ocular web. The peephole Norman watches his naked prey through; the montage that sinks us into that bloody drain hole and then circles out from Marion’s dead eye in the film’s chilling mid-point; the gaping hollow pits that stare back at Lila from the shriveled head of Mother: the mere act of looking never feels so passive after Psycho but rather something all too easily corruptible.

It was Lila’s third-act sequence of looking at things that caught my attention most intensely during my most recent viewing. She enters Mother’s room, sees the antiquated mirrors and dresses, the strange decorative objects and, most bizarrely, the deep impression of Mother’s presumably rarely moved body on the bed. She enters Norman’s room, sees the dolls and examines that untitled book we’re never allowed to glimpse. And Hitchcock keeps cutting between these objects and Lila’s pointed gaze—not unlike his cutting between Marion’s eye contact with her rather confusedly troubled looking (tipsy?) boss as he crosses the street in front of her car—reminding us over and over how very purposeful and consequential this activity of looking is. Reminding us, too, of the unnerving, seeming randomness of things, the constant details, like Marion’s uneaten lunch or the exacting date and time given at the top of that first scene of Marion’s hotel room tryst with Sam. If an individual’s death has seldom been so horrifyingly palpable as that of Marion’s in Psycho, surely this is partly due to the randomness Hitchcock so lovingly emphasizes in every conceivable way, right down to the casting of a star in what in other hands would seem the disposable role.

And what a strange and utterly perfect star performance it is. Janet Leigh is so damn good in Psycho because she’s as supple and cagey as her final adversary. Whether looking luscious in her bra with her boyfriend or in the office where she works, Marion is never quite penetrable. Indeed, it’s her eyes that remain remote. Other than hints of panic—with the car dealer or the cop—her eyes don’t betray her. Until she meets Norman, and only then do they begin to truly soften. Norman, his insecurities so eloquently, so tenderly embodied by Anthony Perkins, talks to Marion about “private traps” and here we have, in all its bravura irony, the most poignant moment of connection between two people in the whole movie. Marion is still guarded, yet she’s engaged to the point where this strange young man will actually cause her to turn around and go back to Phoenix, to return the money and accept punishment. But just as her private trap becomes illuminated for her, she has of course walked right into a different sort of trap beyond her ability to avoid, and moves straight into one of the most enduring evocations of sheer trauma in cinema history.