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!

Ruptures in time: Point Omega

The new novel begins and ends with brief passages titled ‘Anonymity.’ Set in 2006, their anonymous protagonist keeps returning to the Museum of Modern Art to contemplate 24 Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon’s projection of the well-known Alfred Hitchcock film, slowed down to the point where it takes a full day to reach completion. The protagonist is arguably the artist’s dream audience—certainly the dream reader for author Don DeLillo—alert to nuance, patient, subject to reverie, willing to take on the promise of ambitious, puzzling, or ostensibly difficult work. “To see what’s there, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.” The protagonist knows the work he’s witnessing is incomplete without an engaged audience there to grapple with it, willing to participate in a silent dialogue about the tingle of inevitability, and how our perception of time’s passage defines our place in the world. “…things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him…” I saw 24 Hour Psycho myself some years ago in Mexico City, and found I related utterly, rapturously to DeLillo’s essay-like meditation on Gordon’s unforgettable piece. So, you know, be warned.

The bulk of Point Omega (Scribner, $29.99) however does not involve the protagonist of these bookend passages. That protagonist would appear to be DeLillo himself in fact, his sighting of a peculiar pair of strange men at the Gordon installation, as well as the installation itself, being the apparent prompt for this novel, which is far more concerned with investigating Gordon’s implied questions about time than it is with spinning out a fully realized narrative. (Another warning.) The men are Richard Elster, a 73-year-old scholar—he’s the same age as DeLillo is now—who was summoned by the Pentagon to help plan the Iraq War, and Jim Finley, our narrator, a young filmmaker hoping to convince Elster to the be the sole subject of a sort of minimalist documentary, something akin to The Fog of War or Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, but more formally rigorous, and probably more foolish. Elster invites Finley to his home deep in the desert, never really conceding to do the project but seducing Finley in an odd way with his often cryptic, sometimes funny, sometimes quite profound thoughts on time and the elusiveness of self. “The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware… This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out of the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic.”

Of course these abstractions may simply be Elster’s way of avoiding culpability. “War creates a closed world,” he tells Finley. “We have a living history and I thought I would be in the middle of it. But in those rooms, with those men, it was all priorities, statistics, evaluations, rationalizations.” Maybe he was just flattered by the attention. Maybe that’s also the reason why he allowed Finley to come out to the desert to subvert his solitude. But then a third party joins them, Elster’s daughter, who Finley is clearly attracted to though it takes him a bit to realize it. And then, in the midst of the trio’s odd cohabitation, she’s gone. Out here, in this place of expansive, primordial stillness, where time and space hold the promise of slowing down and evaporating us, in this place where the men come with cell phones and GPS to secure a connection to the outside world which they can utilize at will, the daughter just disappears, and the bond between these men gets denser, and weirder. It could seem like Elster’s musings on the omega point inadvertently delivered his own progeny to that place of non-being or emergence with the infinite. Maybe this is the result of some bafflingly complicated karma. Maybe, like Psycho’s Marion Crane, Elster’s daughter simply never realized she’d exited one private trap only to find herself in another, more dreadful trap in the lonesome desert heat.

Point Omega shouldn’t be read for the purpose of becoming gripped by a rousing mystery tale, or provoked by a work of political interrogation, something DeLillo is surprisingly only half-interested in. Rather, I would suggest reading this as a way of immersing oneself in a state of observation, careful questioning, heightened sensual awareness of the world, and unnerving uncertainty. For this reason, Point Omega is much closer in spirit to DeLillo’s 2001 novel The Body Artist than to his more famous novels, such as White Noise or Underworld. The Body Artist is, like Point Omega, a very slim book. It also deals with a sort of disappearance, also concerns the limits of language, and also functions as a sort of essay on the power of audacious art to capture essences of being. It’s about a woman named Lauren, the body artist of the title, who loses a husband and soon after discovers a strange, mentally handicapped man hiding in her home who seems to be channeling conversations she’d recently had with her husband, almost replaying them like a recording device. Her encounters with this man, as well as with strangers spied on the street, lays the groundwork for a hypnotic new performance piece in which she adopts several personas through a physical discipline so rigorous it threatens to exhaust her beyond repair while helping her discover a way of mourning.

I’d read The Body Artist a few times already, and when I decided to revisit it as a way of thinking about Point Omega, I found myself coming at it from two different angles. I’m in Vancouver just now and, what with the weather being uncharacteristically sunny, I’ve been walking for hours every day through the city, so I decided to have as my aural accompaniment on these walks an audiobook of The Body Artist read by musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson. I read a bit of the book, then listen to a portion of the audiobook. I can’t recommend Anderson’s rendition enough—it helped me to rediscover the compelling strangeness and wit and insight of DeLillo’s highly stylized novel. And Anderson’s so good with vocal modulations that Lauren’s gradual absorption of other voices comes off as eerily plausible. Of course to enjoy this I’ve had to steer clear of Olympic mania, which is about as far from engendering states of contemplation as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.