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!

Do you believe in Magic?

When Corky first takes the stage for Amateur Night he totally bombs. Once this hits home his habitual timidity suddenly falls away and he berates the audience for failing to appreciate his card tricks. Corky relates this story to his bedridden mentor and revises it as he goes. We see select flashbacks that could verify or contradict his narrative depending how you figure it, and so right from the start Magic (1978) is already playing with misdirection, albeit conservatively so—you get to feeling the movie can’t bear to let Corky be truly humiliated. Next time we see Corky perform he’s got Fats in tow, and all that rage Corky couldn’t keep in check has now been channeled into Fats. This miniature version of Corky redistributes Corky’s repression, cursing and insulting everyone in the room and having them roaring with laughter. With Fats’ help Corky now gets paid for his tantrums. Fats even helps Corky win the affections of that beauty he loved from afar in high school. You might even say Fats can get away with murder. Or try, anyway. Magic is a little like Dead Ringers (88) except instead of two Jeremy Ironses you’ve got Anthony Hopkins and a dummy.

Okay, so Magic isn’t nearly as fascinatingly perverse, chillingly sexy, or generally psychologically juicy as the Cronenberg, but it’s still pretty nifty, if a tad overlong. Adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, directed by Richard Attenborough before Gandhi (82), and starring Hopkins long before Hannibal Lecter, there’s a sense that this modest horror picture with the high-grade talent probably caught most audiences off guard. It left a number of critics sniffy and dismissive, but it’s developed something of a cult following and is available on DVD and now Blu-ray from Dark Sky.

The dummy really is creepy, but this has much to do with Hopkins’ uncanny ability to convey the clot of pettiness nurtured by the damaged child locked inside the beefy adult, something that comes across like lightning every time his face goes from slack to smiling. Hopkins is very good with the ventriloquism—a practice once suspected of being in league with the devil, and one, we should note, usually mastered before puberty—but the movie is almost better when you can see him move his lips. Burgess Meredith has a terrific supporting role as Corky’s manager, bald on top, with glasses and foot-long cigars that make him look like a Vegas Hunter S. Thompson. Eschewing camp, he’s somehow just about Magic’s most sympathetic character, yet his affection for Corky, who he’s convinced with be the next Rich Little, is perhaps best not thought about too carefully. Corky’s clearly got a screw loose long before Fats starts to nag him like Norman Bates’ mother.

Victor Kemper’s cinematography is lovely and effective, evoking the movie’s pervading sadness through diffused light, and often playfully doubling Corky with ostentatious shadows. Breaking away from the epic for a change, Attenborough’s strengths here lie with his attention to actors and their business. Besides creating the right space for Hopkins to give his very polished but nonetheless remarkable performance, Attenborough also gets terrific work out of even the minor players, such as the cab driver who gives Corky a tour of his home town and looks like Keith Ritchie from the A-Team. But I think Magic’s most wonderful surprise is Ann-Margaret—that’s right, Anthony Hopkins gets to make out with Ann-Margaret. She’s great because she seems to understand that the teenage hottie once desired by every boy in town might grow up to be lonely, lost, and a little loopy herself. Her spastic glee upon seeing old Corky do his thing with Fats feels just a little off—most gorgeous women I’ve known don’t usually get so excited about nerds with talking dolls. Of course, we can always fantasize.

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.

Unwanted body hair, unwanted parents, unwanted metal massacre: three from the 1980s

The 1980s were strange years for horror—strange and deliriously productive. The production code was a distant memory, boundaries of taste had already been pushed past their breaking point, the home video market exploded. The inevitable result was the transformation of carnage into camp. Horror always lent itself to humour, its premises so often silly in the cold light of day. Hysterical fear collapses easily into hysterical laughter. The dismal side of this was that audiences were frequently encouraged to take distance from rather than become absorbed by the stories, to stay on the surface. Don’t shudder to consider the terror onscreen when you can smugly look down on the terrorized—the victims are so dumb!—and admire the nifty special effects. But with the remake industry now gobbling up rights to ’80s titles, reconsideration is facilitated through fresh releases of the originals on DVD.

The new comedy-horror equation was apparently still in its infancy when An American Werewolf in London (1981) debuted. Critics felt the film couldn’t make up its mind. This seems more of a slight to writer/director John Landis than a genuine assessment—following Animal House (78) and The Blues Brothers (80) doubts about Landis’ earnestness with regards to the genre may have been in doubt. Yet the film feels lovingly invested in werewolf mythology and the gravity of its protagonist’s dilemma. The humour emerges naturally out of the situation, even if the use of every popular song with “moon” in the title feels awkward and ham-fisted in its irony.


It’s a story about friendship. Two horny, likable, ordinary young guys in puffy coats backpacking through Northern England stray too far from the road and onto the foggy moors. They fall victim to the local lycanthrope. One dies, one lives. The survivor is taken to London, is taken home by a hot nurse, and encounters some unnerving side effects once the full moon rises. The dead friend, lacerated flesh now growing putrid, pays regular visits. He’s stuck wandering the earth until the final trace of his werewolf-killer has been extinguished, so he asks his best pal to suicide, and get it over with. There are captivating dream sequences. Griffin Dunne is terrific as the dead friend with deadpan humour. “Ever talked to a corpse?” he asks. “It’s boring!” And the legendary transformation scene is hideous and completely fixating, you can't take your eyes off of it, a testament to the allure of well-made (by Rick Baker), tactile rubbery effects over blandly smooth CGI.

He always says grace, makes birdhouses in the basement, and gets choked-up while giving a speech at a neighbourhood barbecue. He’s also prepared to butcher his whole family if they can’t realize his demented Republican fantasy of the perfectly wholesome household. But we know that from the beginning, when we see Jerry Blake alter his appearance and close shop at one such failed residence. Inspired by the real case of murderer John List and scripted by crime fiction maestro Donald Westlake—whose own father, like List, once lost his job and didn’t tell his family—The Stepfather (87), directed by Joseph Ruben, is a model of taut low-budget crispness, marred only by the laughably illustrative score from Yes synth-man Patrick Moraz.

There’s no fatuous attempts to explain Blake’s psychosis, while the best subtextual elements—the parallels between Blake and his teenage stepdaughter, the vaguely unseemly romantic vibes emanating from the stepdaughter’s fatherly psychiatrist—remain always just present enough to read without being too winky. There are references, especially to Hitchcock—the newspaper scene, Norman Rockwell setting, and central relationship recall Shadow of a Doubt (42), while the clean-up scene, the shower and the big knife echo Psycho (60)—but these enrich rather than detract from the film’s distinctive mood. The film made a cult star of Terry O’Quinn, whose performance is so committed, so nuanced, so inside the character of Jerry Blake it’s positively chilling.

Trick or Treat (86), by contrast, probably wouldn’t frighten a small child, unless that child is terrified by big hair. But it uses the genre to generate something so sensitive to teenage experience, so merrily immersed in a subculture, it hardly matters. A much-bullied high school head banger who calls himself Ragman—played by Marc Price, aka Skippy from Family Ties, a masterstroke of casting—starts to dabble in the occult after his favoured metal god dies in a house fire. To the first of many pitch-perfect tracks from Fastway, the opening montage is a tour of Ragman’s tormented adolescent mind, the bedroom lined with handcuffs, action figures, studded collars, a Priest calendar, candles, and a poster of his beloved Sammi Curr—who most closely resembles Dead or Alive’s Pete Burns—gazing down at him from high above. “I can’t believe they cancelled your Halloween concert,” Ragman writes in his fan letter to Sammi, choking back tears. “It’s like you say: Rock’s chosen warriors will rule the apocalypse… I’ve got thoughts in my head that only you would understand…” Identification is total.

“Do you even care who’s running for student council?” a big-haired teen inquires, assuring us that the gulf that separates Ragman from his schoolmates is unbreachable. The question is posed just before the menacing Aryan jocks throw Ragman into a public pool, yet another scene of humiliation from which our hero stamps away, his sneakers squishing loudly with water, as he sputters “Bunch of fucking assholes!” in front of the one popular girl who’s on his side. This attention to detail is characteristic of Trick or Treat. Its narrative’s beyond ridiculous, and the last act, devoted mostly to killing the ultra-queer, ballet-trained metal beast unleashed from Pandora’s box—actually a slab of vinyl which offers advice on revenge plots and conjures the dead if played backwards—gets a little tiring, but the writers and director Charles Martin Smith (the guy from Never Cry Wolf) never let a moment go by without some sharp shard of wit intervening, while There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit surveys the suburban scenery in dusky tones.

Unlike the aforementioned films there is no new, or even good DVD of Trick or Treat. I first saw it as a kid on Super Channel. I taped it and watched it until it suffered from video-rot. The crappy pan-and-scan version I bought for ten bucks off the internet sports no special features, and the cover makes it seem like Ozzy Osbourne—who plays a televangelist—and Gene Simmons—who plays Ragman's DJ/father figure, modeled after Simmons' childhood hero Wolfman Jack—are the stars of the movie when the two of them together make up about three—brilliant!—minutes of screen time total. I write this in the hope that this sorry state of affairs will one day change. I'll do the audio commentary track for a case of beer!

Two films from two Michael Powells: A Matter of Life and Death, Age of Consent on DVD

I saw my first two Michael Powell films some years ago at Edmonton's Metro Cinema. A Canterbury Tale (1944), made with Powell’s longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger, concerns strange criminal activities in a fictional Kent village during the Second World War, and it functions as a moving, somewhat mystical appeal to read history in landscape. Peeping Tom (60) is a thriller about a killer who films the death of his female victims. The former is an immensely charming work from the height of Powell and Pressburger’s hugely popular, very British spectacles. The former is an unremittingly grotesque portrait of psychological disease that, far from creating the sensation of the similarly sinister and voyeuristic Psycho (60), released only three months later, it essentially ended Powell’s career in the Britain, driving him to wander the wilderness of international co-production for the last 30 years of his life.

So we have two exemplary Powell films and, as it happens, films that exemplify the two Powells: the celebrated patriot and master craftsman, and the shunned maverick. As retrospectives and home video continue to introduce his legacy to a new generation of filmlovers, it’s interesting that the latest pairing of Powell films to appear on DVD in Sony’s two-disc The Films of Michael Powell also straddle the disparate halves of his career.

A Matter of Life and Death (46), re-titled Stairway to Heaven for its US, opens gazing into the celestial heavens, with a voice-over meditating briefly on stars and gases and the life and death of entire galaxies. It grounds itself in the widest possible context, one of myth, awe and whimsy. It needs to because what follows is so absurdly fantastical. The story shifts between miracle survival and radical brain surgery on earth and a court hearing in heaven overseen by an audience of thousands. The lovers at its centre meet in voice only when British Airman Peter Carter, the last living crewmember aboard a badly damaged bomber en route back to England, makes contact with June, an American radio operator. During what he assumes will be his final moments of life, Peter passionately flirts with June and she’s deeply moved. Peter then leaps from the descending bomber and falls without parachute into the sea—and lives.

Turns out the emissary of death sent to scoop Peter up couldn’t find him in the soupy English fog. Heaven, being an imposingly modern realm run as a well-oiled bureaucracy, sends the emissary back to get Peter. But Peter, having by now awoke on the achingly beautiful shore of Sceptered Isle and met his beloved June, has fallen in love, and demands clemency on grounds of romance and, as it will come to pass, UK-US diplomatic relations. All very silly but also delightful, gorgeous, endlessly imaginative, engrossingly strange and so very unabashedly a movie. And we’re asked to heed the opening voice-over’s implication that this may be best seen as the entirely interior journey of a severely brain-injured man. And it surely spoke to countless soldiers returning from a long war, weary, death-haunted and needing to believe that life really can start all over again.

There’s pleasure to be had in all the dichotomies. Heaven is black and white, while earthly life is conveyed in an astoundingly sumptuous use of Technicolor—like The Red Shoes (48), it was photographed by maestro Jack Cardiff. Peter is played by beloved British star David Niven, a veteran of the war as well as the movies, while June is played by the fresh young American Kim Hunter, basically an unknown, though she’d already played the lead in Val Lewton’s sublimely bleak The Seventh Victim (43). Their ages are visibly much farther apart than the film would have you believe, but what they represent and the strength of their chemistry, like everything else in A Matter of Life and Death, trumps verisimilitude.

From the shores of Sceptered Isle to those of Dunk Isle along the Great Barrier Reef, a Powell hero once again finds renewal begins by the primordial sea. In Age of Consent (69), successful Australian painter Brad Morahan ditches his cosmopolitan existence in New York City to go Gauguin on an Edenic beach back home with a dog named Godfrey, who nearly steals the film. I say nearly because the pooch’s costars are the great James Mason and the 22-year-old Helen Mirren in her first film role. Mirren plays Cora, a deeply uncultured island girl desperate to escape a stifling life shared with her grandma, a screeching old bag that even in a story deliberately forged in archetypes is far too gratingly one-note to suffer gladly.

Cora becomes Brad’s muse, reviving his creative vitality. Their relationship, teetering on woefully antiquated cliché—Powell himself expressed a general distaste for the “Girl Friday” theme—is above all given life by Mirren’s astonishingly immediate performance. Often naked, never able to articulate her sense of confusion, despair or discovery, her Cora is about as pure a presence as can be found in a talkie. Aspects of Age of Consent, like the gags, the music and the occasional excess of enthusiasm with the zoom, can feel corny and dated. Yet the leads, along with Powell’s characteristic sensitivity to nature, light and sound, make very worthwhile what would, sadly, prove to be Powell’s last feature film.

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.