trotchky
07-14-2008, 03:37 AM
What do you think of Gus Van Sant's Psycho?
Here's the first half of something I wrote about it. The second half (it'll be about queer theory and post-structuralism!) will be post (by me!) soon!
When Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho was released in 1998, all Hell broke loose; reactions from the critical community tended towards either abject outrage or the sheepish concession that it might be an interesting experiment, albeit a failed one; meanwhile, a genuinely-hoodwinked public rejected the film outright (understandably) after promising opening weekend grosses, much to the chagrin of the presumably equally-hoodwinked Universal Studios, who, hot on the heels of Van Sant’s Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, must have had enough faith in the hottest-name-in-Hollywood director to sink twenty-million bucks into his epically-experimental genrefuck monsterpiece.
Their loss is our gain, however, as Psycho contains as much auteurist marking as any of Van Sant’s later, “death trilogy,” films; that it requires prior knowledge of the Hitchock film and (ideally) that film’s impact on movie-making in order for it to work at all may or may not be a failing on Van Sant’s part, but it almost certainly limits the audience to which the movie will have any appeal at all to mainly critics and film buffs. This might sound like the work of an elitist, academic director pandering to out-of-touch, reductive critics, but the film is nothing if not iconoclastic, and Van Sant means to challenge the critical establishment’s arbitration of quality, and, much more significantly, meaning, by ostensibly queering Psycho.
Utilizing the talents of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Van Sant slathers the decor and clothing of his film with a vibrant Crayola-palette, which emphasizes every artificiality and generally camps-up the whole affair. Beginning with a neon-green-rendition of Psycho’s iconic opening credit sequence, Van Sant’s movie is in-your-face as hell about its transition to color; the effect is that, despite—or maybe because of—its being a shot-for-shot remake of the original, the film blindingly draws attention to its autonomy from Hitchcock’s film in what can only result in an intense case of cognitive dissonance for Psycho fans.
Michael Koresky of Reverse Shot describes it as an act of “self-sabotage”; destroying the shadowy danger and mystery of Hitchcock’s film with a “bright, even sunny” color palette, Van Sant effectively forces a massive dichotomy between the two Psychos.
Van Sant’s cotton-candy-color-scheme isn’t ugly—in fact, it’s gorgeously kitschy and decadent, and audience appreciation of its vibrant sumptuousness is not just separate from, but requires outright rejection, of the original film’s suspense/horror intentions. Its “popsicle slowly melting into a puddle”-color-scheme isn’t Psycho ‘98’s only formal subversion, however; just as he “perfects” every camera movement Hitchcock allegedly wanted but didn’t have the technology to achieve (like the opening helicopter-shot into the hotel room), Van Sant’s minutely-mapped-out, rigid aesthetic stretches and strains for life, which—get this—he provides with various almost-intrusive organic moments. In a film whose very shot-for-shot concept demands careful, academic control, these moments, like the bird flittering outside Marion’s window the second time we see her in her underwear, are jarring next to the calculated artificiality of everything else around them.
These introductions of life (and deviancies from the Hitchcock original) culminate with an extended shot of a static south-western landscape over the end credits; whereas the original Psycho concludes, score-drenched, in the muck with a car, a corpse, and a bundle of money, the remake concludes with the ambiguous image of a natural (and neutral) landscape and ambient noises-only on the soundtrack.
Perhaps the biggest changes Van Sant introduces to Psycho are his reworkings of the two murder scenes. First, in a variation on one of the most fetishized, frothed-over sequences to ever come out of American film, Van Sant offers Norman Bates onanistic relief and ends up blue-balling everybody else. By showing Bates masturbate as he watches Marion undress in the bathroom, Van Sant removes the psychosexual element from the murder, denying the murder as a form of sexual release. Further, Van Sant emphasizes the sterility of the bathroom (with blinding, hyper-saturated white lighting) and of Marion herself; Anne Heche’s already considerably-more-butch-than-Janet-Leigh appearance becomes downright androgynistic in the shower, and her extension of her right arm right before she collapses is cold and robotic, the kind of thing you might expect to see in a ‘90s music video about modern alienation or something, if you didn’t already know what the context of this was supposed to be.
Then there’s the inter-cutting into the stabbing sequence of surreal footage of rumbling clouds; the audacity of Van Sant’s fiddling with one of the most famously edited sequences ever, and the hilarious irony of his doing so in what’s meant to be a shot-for-shot remake, is too pungent to ignore; if the previous tip-offs weren’t enough, critics should sit up and take note here: something is up.
The surreal images added to the second murder scene are by the far the most haunting parts of the movie: a shot of a nude blindfolded woman, and a shot, through the windshield of a slowly-moving car, of a cow in the middle of a foggy road. These images are disturbing mainly because they’re so bizarre; these are the kind of things you might expect to see in Van Sant’s later “death trilogy,” not a campy retelling of Psycho. Their incongruities are what make them successful; having failed at making a Hitchcock film scary the same way Hitchcock did, Van Sant scares us on his terms and the only way he knows how. Against all odds, it’s a blistering mark of originality on a film that, conceptually, at least, is all about imitation.
Van Sant’s final subversion is a good ol’ “fuck you” to heteronormativity and the patriarchy: from Viggo Mortensen (playing Marion Crane’s boyfriend)’s bare ass displayed prominently in front of a window in the introductory hotel scene (Hitchock allegedly wanted to show Janet Leigh’s bare breasts; Van Sant gives us this instead), to Vince Vaughn (as Norman Bates)’s tight-pantsed ass placed lovingly in the center of the frame and wiggling from side to side every time he climbs a staircase; to Anne Heche (whose real-life homosexuality recalls Anthony Perkins’), who is more butch than Janet Leigh ever was; Van Sant queers our expectations of who is eroticized—and for what reason.
As Michael Korseky writes, Van Sant is “disinterested in Norman the weary androgyne[;] Van Sant makes him very distinctly a frustrated man.” Bates is no longer waifish and withdrawn, he’s well-musceled and intimidating, jerking off to a nude Marion and responding to the flirtations of her (lesbian!) sister. That these “subversions” are all more or less minor (ie. on a literal level, the film is still extremely similar to the original) is kind of the point: our realities, identities, standards of normalcy are malleable, and while the big picture might stay the same it’s the details that shade our perceptions.
Here's the first half of something I wrote about it. The second half (it'll be about queer theory and post-structuralism!) will be post (by me!) soon!
When Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho was released in 1998, all Hell broke loose; reactions from the critical community tended towards either abject outrage or the sheepish concession that it might be an interesting experiment, albeit a failed one; meanwhile, a genuinely-hoodwinked public rejected the film outright (understandably) after promising opening weekend grosses, much to the chagrin of the presumably equally-hoodwinked Universal Studios, who, hot on the heels of Van Sant’s Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, must have had enough faith in the hottest-name-in-Hollywood director to sink twenty-million bucks into his epically-experimental genrefuck monsterpiece.
Their loss is our gain, however, as Psycho contains as much auteurist marking as any of Van Sant’s later, “death trilogy,” films; that it requires prior knowledge of the Hitchock film and (ideally) that film’s impact on movie-making in order for it to work at all may or may not be a failing on Van Sant’s part, but it almost certainly limits the audience to which the movie will have any appeal at all to mainly critics and film buffs. This might sound like the work of an elitist, academic director pandering to out-of-touch, reductive critics, but the film is nothing if not iconoclastic, and Van Sant means to challenge the critical establishment’s arbitration of quality, and, much more significantly, meaning, by ostensibly queering Psycho.
Utilizing the talents of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Van Sant slathers the decor and clothing of his film with a vibrant Crayola-palette, which emphasizes every artificiality and generally camps-up the whole affair. Beginning with a neon-green-rendition of Psycho’s iconic opening credit sequence, Van Sant’s movie is in-your-face as hell about its transition to color; the effect is that, despite—or maybe because of—its being a shot-for-shot remake of the original, the film blindingly draws attention to its autonomy from Hitchcock’s film in what can only result in an intense case of cognitive dissonance for Psycho fans.
Michael Koresky of Reverse Shot describes it as an act of “self-sabotage”; destroying the shadowy danger and mystery of Hitchcock’s film with a “bright, even sunny” color palette, Van Sant effectively forces a massive dichotomy between the two Psychos.
Van Sant’s cotton-candy-color-scheme isn’t ugly—in fact, it’s gorgeously kitschy and decadent, and audience appreciation of its vibrant sumptuousness is not just separate from, but requires outright rejection, of the original film’s suspense/horror intentions. Its “popsicle slowly melting into a puddle”-color-scheme isn’t Psycho ‘98’s only formal subversion, however; just as he “perfects” every camera movement Hitchcock allegedly wanted but didn’t have the technology to achieve (like the opening helicopter-shot into the hotel room), Van Sant’s minutely-mapped-out, rigid aesthetic stretches and strains for life, which—get this—he provides with various almost-intrusive organic moments. In a film whose very shot-for-shot concept demands careful, academic control, these moments, like the bird flittering outside Marion’s window the second time we see her in her underwear, are jarring next to the calculated artificiality of everything else around them.
These introductions of life (and deviancies from the Hitchcock original) culminate with an extended shot of a static south-western landscape over the end credits; whereas the original Psycho concludes, score-drenched, in the muck with a car, a corpse, and a bundle of money, the remake concludes with the ambiguous image of a natural (and neutral) landscape and ambient noises-only on the soundtrack.
Perhaps the biggest changes Van Sant introduces to Psycho are his reworkings of the two murder scenes. First, in a variation on one of the most fetishized, frothed-over sequences to ever come out of American film, Van Sant offers Norman Bates onanistic relief and ends up blue-balling everybody else. By showing Bates masturbate as he watches Marion undress in the bathroom, Van Sant removes the psychosexual element from the murder, denying the murder as a form of sexual release. Further, Van Sant emphasizes the sterility of the bathroom (with blinding, hyper-saturated white lighting) and of Marion herself; Anne Heche’s already considerably-more-butch-than-Janet-Leigh appearance becomes downright androgynistic in the shower, and her extension of her right arm right before she collapses is cold and robotic, the kind of thing you might expect to see in a ‘90s music video about modern alienation or something, if you didn’t already know what the context of this was supposed to be.
Then there’s the inter-cutting into the stabbing sequence of surreal footage of rumbling clouds; the audacity of Van Sant’s fiddling with one of the most famously edited sequences ever, and the hilarious irony of his doing so in what’s meant to be a shot-for-shot remake, is too pungent to ignore; if the previous tip-offs weren’t enough, critics should sit up and take note here: something is up.
The surreal images added to the second murder scene are by the far the most haunting parts of the movie: a shot of a nude blindfolded woman, and a shot, through the windshield of a slowly-moving car, of a cow in the middle of a foggy road. These images are disturbing mainly because they’re so bizarre; these are the kind of things you might expect to see in Van Sant’s later “death trilogy,” not a campy retelling of Psycho. Their incongruities are what make them successful; having failed at making a Hitchcock film scary the same way Hitchcock did, Van Sant scares us on his terms and the only way he knows how. Against all odds, it’s a blistering mark of originality on a film that, conceptually, at least, is all about imitation.
Van Sant’s final subversion is a good ol’ “fuck you” to heteronormativity and the patriarchy: from Viggo Mortensen (playing Marion Crane’s boyfriend)’s bare ass displayed prominently in front of a window in the introductory hotel scene (Hitchock allegedly wanted to show Janet Leigh’s bare breasts; Van Sant gives us this instead), to Vince Vaughn (as Norman Bates)’s tight-pantsed ass placed lovingly in the center of the frame and wiggling from side to side every time he climbs a staircase; to Anne Heche (whose real-life homosexuality recalls Anthony Perkins’), who is more butch than Janet Leigh ever was; Van Sant queers our expectations of who is eroticized—and for what reason.
As Michael Korseky writes, Van Sant is “disinterested in Norman the weary androgyne[;] Van Sant makes him very distinctly a frustrated man.” Bates is no longer waifish and withdrawn, he’s well-musceled and intimidating, jerking off to a nude Marion and responding to the flirtations of her (lesbian!) sister. That these “subversions” are all more or less minor (ie. on a literal level, the film is still extremely similar to the original) is kind of the point: our realities, identities, standards of normalcy are malleable, and while the big picture might stay the same it’s the details that shade our perceptions.