Planet Hitchcock: The Energy of Rupture and Distortion

One of the many ironies in Psycho is that the film starts with a manufactured couple and then insists on providing an alternative couple.

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Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

After an afternoon of sex with her lover Sam (John gavin), Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) returns to work. In front of her office, it stands Hitchcock who glances at Marion as she passes the director. Is this possessive look directed by Hitchcock already an indicator that this is a heroine who, nevertheless, will not fully fulfill the story that the author intended to tell and which, at least judging by the title, belongs to a male agent anyway, is this kind of director's 'indolent ' position in advance delegates the heroine to a completely non-classical treatment, since her concrete appearance will be eliminated, canceled from the film after fifty minutes?

The director simply lets things pass him by, because the focus will actually be directed towards other figurations of desire. Instead of absorption, we have a fragmentation, a diversion of attention within the narrative development, the first dislocation that hints at a huge shift in the heart of the story that will take place in the most melodramatic, tragic and visually excessive place.

Narrative unity from North by Northwest se u Psycho Moreover, it splits the 'schizophrenic' parter in half: one story abruptly, shockingly ends, in order to continue another, the main protagonist is replaced by a 'modern', split hero, the very form of the film doubles 'abnormally'. Psycho is an internally divided achievement: the two halves (female and male) of the film can no longer be joined, except through the obscene, pathological integration of the son into the mother, due to which the very intonation and formal arrangement become psychotic, a reflection of the dissolution that seems to have passed from the diegetic characters and to the very structure of storytelling.

Perhaps the most famous sequence in all of Hitchcock's cinematography - the murder of Marion under the shower - which should, by its position, be a kind of 'stitch' that will connect and 'heal' the inner narrative imbalance, was precisely conceived as a brilliant staging of tearing (in one frame , the knife seems to break through the fourth wall, to tear the film screen itself, the ultimate border between the picture and the viewer), butchery, literally dismemberment, brutal aggression against the form itself (the desired female body, the desired solid story, the desired classic film) from which, even on the denotative level, remain only fragments or remnants (waste, even) of a whole which, it is now clearer, remains unattainable.

Hitchcock's mise-en-scène is spectacularly effective, it reaches the form of the director's definition of 'pure film' (individual parts that are integrated into a wider design), it elicits a violent reaction from the audience like never before, but it is primarily the effect of disintegration, thanatological pressure on the eros energy of unification: the narrative itself is fatally 'cut', while the phallic signifier is laid bare in its destructive dimension. Lascivious celebration of intercourse from North by Northwest turns - after the classic illusions have been lost - into a staged, but thus even more shocking rape, which is a new content that, in the face of greater liberalization of the depiction of violence and sex on the big screen, will further 'distort' the film form.

So again, Raymond Bellour begs the question whether Psycho - in a different dramaturgy - satisfies, nevertheless, the principle of the end corresponding to the beginning. Yes, but only if the overly complex mechanism of displacement and substitution - in the film too susceptible to the energy of tearing and distortion - is observed in the completely abstract action of the symbol, where the signifiers are still, if only due to inertia, susceptible to the earlier ideological-poetic reading.

Although Psycho Hitchcock's film of discontinuity in relation to North by Northwest where, already on the material level, it is clearly signaled that the transition from one story to another (Technicolor extravaganza versus black and white image, big budget versus malty television production) cannot be painless and without cardinal consequences, first of all for the author himself and his aesthetic choices , he unsettlingly begins precisely with a sequence of almost temporal continuity. While North by Northwest ends at the point of the symbolic predominance of the Signifier (pornography is 'translated' into a sterile abstraction) which summarizes the entire process of forming a narrative couple, Psycho it begins precisely with what comes after the climax, after the ecstasy, that is, with a scene that, in a sudden turn from symbolism to neo-realism, brings a depressed couple deprived not only of the glamorous stylization, but also of the ideological conformity of marriage.

Or, while North by Northwest, although the longest achievement in Hitchcock's oeuvre, constantly rushes to reach the required topos of the union of the two protagonists, until Psycho it begins with an assumed couple, just after (insufficient) consummation, with too specific and, it turns out, too difficult financial problems in legalizing the relationship. Orgasmic pleasure is replaced by post-coital sadness and, more importantly in this case, dissatisfaction: a line propagated by North by Northwest can no longer follow, that is, the effects of a textual mechanism do not produce the same consequences.

But, precisely because this couple is outside the territory of the accepted Law, the transgressive energy of the cinematographic apparatus is obsessively mobilized by the voyeuristic desire precisely to witness - with the camera that approaches the desired object with each subsequent frame - this criminal act: Psycho it begins with a penetrative 'penetration' through the window (the shot as a frame of desire) to reveal, after a brief blackout, a female body on the bed. That body - which has become the target of the camera's movement - the film will not be able to fully contextualize, include in its system of enunciation: it will, before Psycho reaches the middle of its duration, largely disappear from the field of vision, especially the field of vision of the director whose gaze, in any case, he only brushed the figure that all the recognized film postulates up to that point told us would be the absolute center of interest.

The reason for this removal lies in the excessive presence of Norman Bates (Anthony perkins) as the backup hero of the film, and his 'mother' as the phantom heroine of a changed plot: 'harmony' North by Northwest rests on a constellation where the mother, somewhere in the third part of the film, is written out of the narrative in order to fill that topos with an adequate substitute, while the anxious tension in Psycho, somewhere after a third of the film, magnifies because the figure of the mother decisively influences the people and the action.

One of the many ironies in Psycho consists in the fact that the film starts from a manufactured couple, and then - while the external forces of stylization and the internal forces of psychosis deliriously disembowel and redesign the narrative - persistently strives to provide an alternative couple. While the initial couple Marion - Sam is pressed by economic troubles, Psycho 'suggests' that maybe Norman could be the right solution for Marion (their names are almost perfect anagrams), that in the remaining third, Marion's sister, Lila (Vera Miles) grew into a potential partner of Sam. But each of these proposals is actually a dead end, a plot that does not have the strength to lead the narrative to satisfaction as resolution or resolution as satisfaction and gratification.

Only inertia remains in the domain and range of the signifier. The first (written) word in Psycho is Phoenix, the name of a city, but mythologically it is the name of a special bird, and the last (spoken) word in the film is fly (as a noun - fly, as a verb - to fly), two signs that are associated with the heroine, which is already in her last name, Crane (crane), carried the determination as a voyeuristic object of camera surveillance from 'height' (of divine indifference or authorial sadism). Psycho is a (masterpiece) of horrific metamorphosis through physical erasure and symbolic transposition. In order for the female body revealed at the beginning of the film to be re-published (not seen!), it was necessary for Hitchcock to make a triple sublimation, or melting, or displacement, to introduce the three characters into the same visual and symbolic space of suppression and redrawing.

The final shot of the possessed Norman laughing at the camera becomes his imaginary portrait when the symbolic mother's skull is melted (the Other who completely takes over the identity), only after which, through another transition, the real body of Marion (a body that is not con- figuratively), her 'resurrected' corpse that is pulled out - as if from the dark subconscious - from the extreme mud beyond visual signification. Classic narrative model in Psycho becomes known only as a horrific variant of the return of the repressed.

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