What is it about the iconography of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) that continues to inspire theorists, critics, film-makers and artists to revisit its set-pieces and dissect them from every available angle? To recall when and where they first saw the film - and how it affected them; and to slow down, speed up and project distorted images of its shower scene onto art gallery walls in Warholian exercises of unapologetic post-modernism?
The fact is that Psycho is so much more than its shower scene, although the visual, metaphorical, psychological and historical importance of those seventy-odd shots should not be underestimated. What Psycho is is a classic example of image versus text - audaciously adapted from a dime store potboiler, the film is analysed ad infinitum where the source novel is disregarded as pulp fiction; and few films have underlined so graphically the difference between the impactive sensationalism of pure cinema and the absorbing intellectualism of 'great literature.' No other Hollywood film had at that point harnessed the burgeoning popular interest in sexual psychology so audaciously and sledge-hammered it into a Gothic American horror text with such academic abandon. And no other mainstream thriller had killed off its sympathetic leading lady - and so brutally, with such indignity - a third of the way into the action. Most incredibly, Psycho was at least seven or eight years ahead of its time in blowing open the doors on safe, conservative, God-fearing fifties America and pre-empting the pornographic anarchy of seventies excess.
But it is worth remembering that Psycho was a film for the public - Hitchcock made it cheaply, functionally, with his own money, and marketed it brashly as a horror thriller with a twist. There was something akin to horror impresario William Castle in the way he announced that patrons should not be allowed into the cinema once the screening had already started. This was an era of getting TV viewers off their fat asses and back into the picture house. Whatever neo-Freudian 'post-humanist' stance the film's sub-text was taking, Hitchcock had the usual thing on his mind when he was making it: the manipulation of the audience's emotions. So when the film is hi-jacked by academics and eggheads and deconstructed with the anthropological aridity of a lecture on ancient civilisations, all its lyrical style and libidinous sensationalism is somehow diluted in a syllable-heavy mist of interpretation and intention.
With this in mind, it was with some trepidation that I, a committed admirer of the mood and the emotion and the visceral impact of the film, embarked on the arduous task of reading Raymond Durgnat's - who died soon after writing this book - A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho'.
Durgnat's approach to almost every shot in the film is meticulous, informed and heavy, but it is at least tempered with the humanity of someone who knows that film studies does not always have to be steeped in a humourless quagmire of multi-syllabic navel-gazing and pedantic reference-spotting. Durgnat was someone with enough respect and experience as a writer to know that throwaway remarks can have a place in the tempo of a scholarly sentence. There are some interesting and enlightening observations here, along with the bullshit. Durgnat's command of film history, his highbrow multi-disciplinary knowledge and his undoubted skills as a writer cannot fail, on at least a few occasions, to illuminate the dynamics of a particular scene with a striking lucidity - whether the scene's 'message' was intended or not.
To justify its title, and, no doubt, Durgnat's own insatiable appetite for deconstructing the film, A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' dutifully, occasionally playfully, and often annoyingly, gives space to every conceivable analytical reading of the movie: Freudian, Freudo-Marxist, neo-Freudo-Marxist, Behaviourist, existentialist, feminist, socio-political, auterist, collaborationist, and, not least, pedantic (indeed, one section is subtitled 'For Pedants Only').
Ultimately, A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' is something of a highbrow, academic indulgence. There are satisfying moments, mostly those that explore the Western psycho-social climate of the late fifties, but when they are over you are still niggled by a feeling that you should have being doing something more constructive. Still, Durgnat probably deserved to indulge himself at that point in his career, more so than anyone else who writes these sorts of books. Consequently, it probably stands as a decent enough epitaph to one of film theory's movers and shakers.
Reviewed by Julian Upton
