How to Watch a Movie (9 page)

In
Rebel
, Plato panics. He rushes outside, gun in hand, and is shot down by the police. There is then the agonized image of Jim shouting out, “I've got the bullets.” It's a tragedy once you see the whole film (and maybe it is Jim's tragedy as much as Plato's), but I never lost the feeling that Jim had arranged it so. That was my mistake, I'm sure, or not what the director Nicholas Ray intended. But a depth of movie expression has little to do with being right or wrong. There are layers of information or feeling that are not in the script and which may never have been spelled out. In other words, Ray believed in elements—of life, light, passing time, place, chance, gesture, whatever—that were not always under his control.

Control and its opposite—that tension goes all through the history of movies. The control covers the technology (more or less incomprehensible to most viewers) and the fixed frame. But the opposite can be improvisation, the infinity of
performance, or simply the untrammeled beauty of movement within the frame (think of the implied lewdness in the way Groucho walks—I'm not complaining). It can be the unmediated passage of time and distance. Of course, nearly always it is a fusion of the two where we are almost obliged to assess the balance if we are watching closely. There are directors who seem to have a famously open liberated style, waiting on the vagaries of behavior, light, and time—Rossellini, Altman, Renoir, Antonioni, and many documentarians. And there are disciplinarian directors who want to control or direct our experience as much as possible: Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick. Up to a point, this is a useful distinction, but only if you're ready to recognize the contradiction it contains.

Hitchcock seems like the epitome of control: he liked to envisage every shot of his films in advance; he wanted to have his storyboards turned into film; he was persistently nagging us on how to look; it may have been his teasing superiority, but he sometimes declared that he found the actual shooting of a film rather boring; he preferred to cast known quantities who hardly required direction. As much as any director, he seems to have supervised everything; even so, an element of suggestion cannot help but creep in. It is so strong that one has to believe he at least stayed awake during the shooting. He loved to look. And I suspect nothing frightened him as much as loss of control.

Consider the first thirty minutes or so of
Psycho
.

Marion Crane is a secretary in a realtor's office in Phoenix, Arizona. Let us say she is thirty-two, the age Janet Leigh was when she made the picture. She has a man friend, Sam Loomis, who lives in another town far to the north, Fairvale, California, where he works in the hardware business struggling to
pay alimony to an ex-wife. Sam and Marion lack the money to be together, but they have managed a lunchtime assignation in a shabby hotel room in a sunless Phoenix (something you have to wait for—Hitch seldom gives nature a break).

Marion is in control of herself, but troubled. When she returns to the office, on the Friday afternoon, her boss has just settled a large deal and he asks Marion to deposit the cash in the bank quickly. She goes back to her apartment; she changes clothes; and then she drives out of town with the money. She is active, but control has gone. She is headed for Fairvale, and she sleeps by the roadside. When a cop wakes her she becomes increasingly nervous about what she has done. It was an irrational action, though she seems to be a sensible person. She trades her car in an abrupt, foolish way. As the hysteria of her action mounts, she is losing more control. She begins to imagine the voices of her boss and others working out what happened. It starts to rain on the highway, adding to her stress and fatigue. And then she sees a neon sign in the dark, a motel sign saying “Vacancy.” She stops to stay the night. She is “home”; she is lost.

More or less, that's what police evidence might be at the inquest: the cut-and dried facts of the case, the information. It's not that it's incorrect. But it's less than the movie. Let's list some of the other “movie” elements that inform us on how to think and feel.

1. The film is in black-and-white, and by 1960 that was a decision that went against normal practice. Further, the black-and-white is more harsh than rich. It's a little abrasive on the eye, not comforting or beguiling. This would be a different film in color: Marion would have real skin; colors in her clothing—would you want her in white, black, red, or yellow?
Arizona and California would have to acquire the hues of desert, forest, mountains, and sunlight. Nature would creep into the film and life would be a little gentler.

2. It's Janet Leigh. What does that mean? Well, Leigh was beloved in 1960. She was attractive, amiable, Californian, with a sense of humor, and a very good body. That information is touched by opinion, of course, but I think you would agree with my account of the actress if I ask, What would
Psycho
have been like with … Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, or Anne Bancroft, all of whom might have been in contention for the part? Novak—intriguing, more helpless than Leigh, seemingly not as smart; more sexual; maybe a little more vulnerable. Kelly: too smart, too witty, hardly fit for Phoenix or a secretary's job, hardly prepared to settle for the occasional lunchtime sex session, or for John Gavin, who plays Sam Loomis. Hepburn: maybe, interesting, a victim to be sure, but she's not quite sexual or common enough, and is she impulsive enough to steal the money; above everything, could anyone bear to see Audrey hacked to pieces in the shower?
Psycho
deals in cruelty, but there are limits. Bancroft: very interesting, because she's odder, brunette, not really starry, and she could bring out the irrational neurotic qualities in Marion. We might have no doubt about Bancroft: Marion Crane would be the psycho.

3. Or Anne Heche? She played Marion in the 1998 remake, directed by Gus Van Sant. That
Psycho
is a travesty, but Heche is a good actress (arguably subtler than Janet Leigh, if colder). So Marion becomes a very different figure in a film that never performs. To see the remake is to understand more fully what Leigh's genial star persona contributed—not least in the abruptness of her removal. In the original film, an
appealing woman is murdered. The remake merely disposes of Anne Heche, who is a blonde in a color film and more believable as a half-desperate secretary.

4. So it's Leigh, who brings her own qualities: she is blonde, and being blonde in black-and-white has its own force. What is that quality exactly? It's hard to say, but impossible to miss. She has experience, much more than innocence. By 1960, Leigh had two children. She was married to Tony Curtis, and they had been a favorite item in the media in pictured embraces where it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Janet and Tony were having fun. Moreover, Tony was her third husband. Leigh's first marriage had occurred, in Reno, Nevada, when she was fifteen, and it had been annulled a few months later. Leigh was experienced: when the client in the office propositions Marion, Leigh's eyes know exactly what he intends. This is delicate territory, even if Janet Leigh has been dead for a while. I met her a few times and I'd say she was appealing, insecure, and anxious to be liked. IMDb says she had “a voluptuous figure.” That's how it struck me and that is certainly how she had been photographed over the years.

5. It's how she is regarded in
Psycho
. The police evidence omitted a few things—like the way she is first seen in the film, stretched out on a bed (with the camera at bed level) in a white slip and a white bra (and a bare midriff). Now this was 1960, when that coded information was easy to read: sex had been had, and enjoyed (which does put it at the level of a meal or a sauna—movies are not often much good on the inwardness of sexual satisfaction). Also, this was what the film showed us after a very striking opening in which the camera had closed in on the drab building in Phoenix and slithered in through six inches of open window to discover Marion on her back on the
bed with Sam above her naked to the waist. And because it was 1960, we did not see their sexual activity—which made it that much more repressed and desirable.

She could be shown in other ways: she might be dressing or doing her hair—the purposeful secretary on her way back to work; she could be splayed out, from a high-angle view, meat on a morgue slab or a body for hire; she could be face down (that might permit no bra) as if exhausted or depressed; she could be asleep; she could be gazing out of the window at the wretched city of Phoenix. But no, she is on her back, composed, still, sexual but not flustered or disheveled. There's something insolent, not in her, but in Hitchcock whispering to us, Well, you know what's happened, but you're not allowed to see it. You'll have to imagine it. Put like that, you can feel how the film offers her as a prize we will never attain.

6. As the film advances, it becomes apparent that the framing of the photography is intense and claustrophobic. Those may be imprecise terms, but if you go through
Psycho
shot by shot you can point to the exact remorselessness with which Hitchcock visualizes the action and oppresses Marion. He treats her as a kind of target, or a victim in the making. A reinforcement of this are those scenes where she is driving, compelled to look straight into the camera, while being grilled by voices on the sound track. The headlights of other cars serve as a version of the third degree. This only schools us for talk in the motel meeting with Norman Bates about people living in their traps.

7. Note, too, that the several other characters we meet (all small parts) make a gallery of rather unpleasant people: the coworker in the real estate office (played by Hitchcock's daughter, Patricia) is crass, vain, and intrusive; the boss is anxious and chilly; the client in the office is a drunken lecher who wants to
get Marion in bed; the policeman on the road is a peaked cap and dark glasses looking straight into the camera; the used car salesman is brisk, clichéd, suspicious, and opportunistic. Five cameos and a world of abrasiveness, so that Marion has been abraded throughout, which only makes it clear how Norman Bates—the motel man—is kind, thoughtful, sensitive; he's Anthony Perkins.

8. In the most incriminating moment so far, when Marion decides to take the money, and when the envelope holding it is resting on top of her bed, she is undressing again. She abandons her office outfit for traveling clothes that include a black slip and a matching bra. The body is there again. That's twice, and missing from the police evidence. Well, so what, you say, she's got to wear something—except that you are wearing something now and we haven't mentioned it, let alone seen you in it (because you're not in a movie). Also, there will be a third disrobing for Marion, the most complete, as she takes off all her clothes before entering that merciful shower at the end of her long day on the road (after she slept in her car the night before).

Now, these numbered levels add plenty to the basic information offered by the police. Not that I have mentioned every level: for instance, the music, by Bernard Herrmann, has not been featured yet. We'll come to music, which may be the hardest thing to write about. And we'll come to cutting, which clearly is relevant to a film devoted to sharp blades.

It's temping to say that a camera is always a source of detachment and objectivity: when the camera moves in on that building in Phoenix with date and time, there is a hint of surveillance footage, and you can imagine the dry voice of a cop (Joe Friday: “Just the facts”) delivering the information. But as that camera sneaks in through the open window, the film picks
up a feeling for the furtive and for voyeurism. In other words, the detachment—the film, if you like—is saying, Come and see what I can show you. Be enlisted, and that old feeling of privilege is touched on again—should we be looking? Well, don't you want to see?

Especially in 1960,
Psycho
built up an erotic urgency that had to do with Janet Leigh, those bras and her breasts. You can call this pressure old-fashioned and sexist. Isn't it asking why a thirty-two-year-old who looks like Janet can't get laid as often as she likes? Isn't it also hinting that maybe we could do that laying?

Now, Marion is our central character. She is embodied by an actress we like. We sympathize with her tough day and her less than ideal life. We can understand why she thought of absconding with the money, and we feel (even if we do not note it) that the irrational impulse is linked to her sexual frustration. She is not a bad girl, just stressed. We follow her through the lengthy, touching, and beautifully handled conversation with Norman and we feel her regaining calm and balance. We like her all the more for deciding to go back to Phoenix the next day and return the money. We wonder how that will work out. We may even have a suspicion that she and Norman could become a couple. I know, Norman is odd, and he seems a victim of loneliness and that domineering mother we have heard in the distance up in the house that looms over the motel. It's not that Norman is Mr. Right, but he's righter than the other people in the movie and he's more tender to Marion's inwardness than Sam Loomis is. Who knows which way it will go? But in 1960, Janet Leigh was the star of the film, so presumably it would go with her.

Let's not be coy. You know what happens. Control has gone; a shy control freak has moved in. We are then asked to
witness what is still one of the most shocking disruptions in an American film. I should add that
Psycho
is now fifty-five years old. That's a long time in movie history and there's no shame in something dating badly. It was made in 1960, the same year as
Inherit the Wind, Spartacus, The Alamo, Can-Can
, and
Sons and Lovers
. You can watch those films again, but it has to be on sufferance. So many conventions that worked then have been wiped away. Those films are no longer as suspenseful, as frightening, as exciting, as funny, or as inspiring in the moments when they were meant to be. But the shock of the shower scene has not abated.