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Write a four page single spaced creative fiction work that incorporates ideas and elements from our course. You have a lot of freedom with this assignment and there is not incorrect way to approach it. (You must still proof read, etc.) You may use any literary approach and you may format it as prose, poetry, or a script. (The submission for this assignment cannot be an excerpt from a larger work.) Do not write a personal essay. The course is called American Horror where we talk about different aspects of horror movies and other content. Below are some articles you can bounce ideas off of.
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C HAPTER 6
Self-Deliverance
Children Unmaking the Family in
Psycho (1960 and 1998) and
The Parent Trap (1961 and 1998)
The myth of Oedipus haunts parents, as the most upsetting underlying
trauma to those who have children is the fate of their offspring and its reflection
on them. This leads to two primary cinematic archetypes — the parent who fails
to mourn, as Klein explores in “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive
States” (1940), and the ones who engage in manic reparations as Klein starts to
examine in “Love, Guilt and Reparation” (1957). Most often the films of the
sound era tend to represent the parent who fails to mourn as the father — for
instance the bad Lieutenant, Rufus in One More Tomorrow, or Dad in A Clockwork Orange— and, unrelatedly but concurrently, also represent the parent who
indulges in manic reparations as either the father or mother — usually the
mother, as with Isabel Amberson or B. Pullman/Delilah.
The cultural haunting of Oedipus in post–World War II America leads to
widespread manic reparations on behalf of the parents to overcompensate for
what can be considered their “original sin”— that which is culturally inherited,
illustrated and predetermined by consumer society. As Klein observes, “This
connection may also throw some light on the obsessional element which so
often enters into the tendency for reparation. For it is not only an object about
whom guilt is experienced but also parts of the self which the subject is driven
to repair or restore.”1 Parents try to live through their children in a type of
schizoid narcissism, which in turn allows them to refocus the good and bad
within themselves.
Having reached a state of modernity where production — and crime, (and
television shows) was syndicated, and knowledge of self-destruction a neurosis
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6. Self-Deliverance
137
of daily life, post–World War II American culture remade itself with each decade
successive to the 1960s, through appropriation and nostalgia, with the end result
of recreating the nuclear family unit. This refocused emphasis first from the
extended family, to the “modern” concept of the nuclear family, and finally to
a hyper-capitalized version of the nuclear family, where progeny-not-parents
direct the family unit.
After the Second World War, cultural anxieties born out of the nuclear
family dominate American culture, and the myth of Oedipus — of the separated
family — is remade in sound cinema, removing divine providence and placing
the onus not on Jocasta and Laius but their progeny. A world of children in
bumper cars already, there are no minors or parents in Crash; however other
movies from the 1990s featuring children and teenagers — for example Home
Alone (1990), Kids (1995) and Disturbing Behavior (1998)— represent national
upbringing as being in turmoil. What’s more, 1990s-period youth movies like
Dogfight (1991), The Ice Storm (1997), and Whatever (1998)— wherein the 1990s
actually remake preceding decades — present tumultuous youth as a fact and
perhaps a natural element of the world. Psycho and The Parent Trap bridge Peeping Tom and Crash, as Strange Illusion bridges The Black Cat and Peeping Tom.
Themselves, both Psycho and The Parent Trap are key case studies of the remaking
of family by cinema’s myths.
The first movie of Psycho was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released
during the summer of 1960. The Parent Trap, first written and directed for the
screen by David Swift, followed the release of Psycho less than a year later during
the summer of 1961. These movies’ remakes, both released in 1998, follow a
similar but inverted trajectory —The Parent Trap, directed by Nancy Meyers,
opened during the summer, and Psycho, directed by Gus Van Sant, closed the
year in December. As noted in the introduction, Psycho 1998 is a landmark of
the end of the sound era of cinema.
In The Human Stain, Philip Roth’s narrator remembers 1998 as “a summer
of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle
between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown,
and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when
terrorism — which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the
country’s security — was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying
on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America’s
oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony.”2 Matters of sanctimony aside, Clinton
is a defanged Kennedy, and semen — the wet spectacle of the body itself— is
removed from the personal by media and technology. In the 1960s, American
spectacle was politicized violence. In the 1970s, that energy found its expression
in new horror classics like Last House on the Left (1972), The Crazies (1973) and
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Halloween (1978). However, by the 1980s, violence was dangerously and irresponsibly subverted into works like Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Blue Velvet (1986)
and The Stepfather (1987). The alignment of Psycho and The Parent Trap and
their remakes is essential for understanding how, from each decade after the
1960s, the United States remade the 1960s. Each time a previous decade is
remade it is significantly declawed with the abstraction and commodification
of the decade before. Raider of the Lost Ark (1981) was novel, Indiana Jones and
the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) is not. Indicative of this cultural abstraction and commodification, nostalgia booms as an industry, and individuals
come to expect certain gestures which are needed to reinforce their largely illusory status. Debord writes that “in societies dominated by modern conditions
of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”3 Psycho and The
Parent Trap represent, as Gene Youngblood essays in Expanded Cinema (1970),
how, “by perpetuating a destructive habit of unthinking response to formulas,
by forcing us to rely ever more frequently on memory, the commercial entertainer
encourages an unthinking response to daily life, inhibiting self-awareness.”4 In
the 1998 editions of both Psycho and The Parent Trap audiences meet characters
less self-aware than in their 1960s counterparts.
Psycho and The Parent Trap are dually family comedies and horror films.
As comedies, they toy with viewer’s emotions with regard to their ignorance.
As horror films, they exploit the perversion of children’s domination of family
structure, which became epidemic in the second half of the twentieth century.
These anxieties harken back to Klein writing in Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict that “the early feeling of not knowing has manifold connections. It unites
with the feeling of being incapable, impotent, which soon results from the
Oedipus situation. The child also feels this frustration the more acutely because
he knows nothing definite about sexual processes. In both sexes the castration
complex is accentuated by this feeling of ignorance.”5 Children need a certain
type of symbolic castration complex — that is, they must be under the stewardship of an adult, under an ultimate authority. But in the late twentieth century
this element of discipline is confused with punishment and therefore eschewed
by parents, as parents — adolescent themselves because of an ever more stifling
cultural landscape in America post–World War II — increasingly desire to be
“liked” by their kids and perceived as “cool,” etc, while children’s levels of selfentitlement and self-actualization through consumerism results in these trends
which are so popular because they tap into Klein’s connections regarding the
“early feeling of not knowing.” To buy, or to buy for one’s child to relieve the
presupposed castration complex, manic reparations are indulged. The children
of Psycho and The Parent Trap— Norman Bates, Sharon McKendrick/Susan
Evers (as The Parent Trap twins are named in 1961) and Hallie Parker/Annie
James (as the twins are named in 1998)— are largely sexually ignorant. As Klein
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139
writes in “Inhibitions and Difficulties at Puberty” (1922), “missed opportunities
for enlightening children at an early age may never present themselves again; but
if openings can be made, many difficulties can be alleviated or even removed.”6
Ignorance here at least partially motivates moral transgressions, like Norman’s
murder of Marion and the others, and the twins’ deception and manipulation
of the adults who should be responsible for them. The other side of this motivation is the stronger impression that the children’s transgressions are represented
in the movies as the result of parents who should have alleviated their children’s
symbolic castration further, perhaps “better”— for Norman, his mother should
have realized that a “son is a poor substitute for a lover,” and for the twins, they
should have never been split up and kept in ignorance of each other’s existence.
The line between comedy and horror is thin. Søren Kierkegaard neatly
surmises, “The comical is present in every stage of life (only that the relative
positions are different), for wherever there is life, there is contradiction, and
wherever there is contradiction, the comical is present. The tragic and the comic
are the same, insofar as both are based on contradiction; but the tragic is the
suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless contradiction.”7 Cinema is usually
painless, and so it desensitized viewers to the truly tragic. In Psycho, audience
members react to Marion being slashed but not necessarily the situation that
forced her to steal money from her boss. In The Parent Trap, the secret of the
other sister is absolved in the twins’ remaking of the family’s primal scene —
that is the romance of the parents. The duality of joy and sorrow, exhalation
and death, is not new (and better charted by Georges Bataille), but what Psycho
and The Parent Trap show as cinematic learning plays is how the pursuit of this
jouissance is something the individual strives for at an increasing earlier age. It
is the illustration of the acceleration of cultural cycles by media and the resulting
family unit breakdown.
Before the end of the sound era and the events of September 11, 2001,
definitively sent the nation and its culture off in a new, previously unexplored
direction, the 1990s remade the 1960s, and doing so illustrated how the balance
of power both culturally and familiarly had shifted from the adult to the reign
of the minor.
Psycho (1960)
Hitchcock’s Psycho remakes the influence and mastery of Universal horror
pictures for the second half of the twentieth century. The first Universal horror
cycle charted the First and Second World Wars’ contribution to the cinematographic medium, whereas the second wave — that of the influence of Psycho—
envisioned technology’s attack on the body, not as it was dispersed in a series
of monster rallies, or noir descendants, but across the genre in remaking and
by imitation of Hitchcock’s film. In Peeping Tom, the camera adds a surrogacy;
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in Psycho the camera causes the need for surrogacy, as it is that which castrates
the viewer, denying the forbidden truth or reality — that is, excrement, (genital)
penetration and snuff. Peeping Tom is about the reaction shot, whereas Psycho
is about penetration. When coupled to machine and flesh, Psycho’s gruesome
spectacles of murder-as-acts belie a culture-wide displacement of self. This is
illustrated by what Deleuze cites in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) as
Rohmer and Chabrol’s thesis of Hitchcock’s schema: “The criminal has always
done his crime for another, the true criminal has done his crime for the innocent
man who, whether we like it or not, is innocent no longer.”8 Apart from the
astute Hitchcock ramifications, it is also Deleuze noting how movies instruct
viewers culturally how to displace character. It is behavior often disadvantageous
to the individual but desirable for those institutions that prey upon individuals
like the forces of capital and media.
Psycho 1960 opens with a frenzy of gray, split lines of credits dancing to
spunky, yet tense music care of Bernard Herrmann. The composer of The Magnificent Ambersons among many others, Herrmann’s contributions to the success
of the films he wrote music for cannot be over-valued, as feeling is evoked and
elicited by the soundtrack, and the most totally successful movies surrogate
what is absent from the pictures with sound. It is important to note how this
allows a “lowbrow” genre like horror to visually take on a Warhol (and Bressonian) exploration of absence from the frame. In the media era, montage for
the first time since the silent era takes precedence over sound, and in doing so
remakes image as having to be actual. Ever influential, Warhol and Bresson are
remade and expressed conceptually in early twenty-first-century phenomena
like YouTube — which fuses Warhol’s underground do-it-your-self technique
and Bresson’s use of “models” or nonactors and essentialization of tape recorder
and camera. While as radically experimental a stylist as Warhol or Bresson,
Hitchcock is easy to imitate but very difficult to actually authenticate and thusly
has never visually entered English-language cinema culture deeper than multiple,
some admittedly impressive, set-piece pastiches of what Deleuze terms his
“weaving.” Deleuze separates Hitchcock’s images and his content, and this separation holds true for Van Sant, who remakes Psycho. “The essential point, in
any event, is that action, and also perception and affection, are framed in a
fabric of relations. It is this chain of relations which constitutes the mental
image, in opposition to the thread of actions, perceptions and affections.”9
Hitchcock’s (and Van Sant’s) contribution to the cinema is the power of “chains
of relations,” which supersede the images, becoming images a la Duhamel’s
complaint to Benjamin.
Deleuze illustrates Hitchcock’s influence via his theatrical concepts of story,
which further point out the relative unimportance of Hitchcock’s images in
relation to the greater importance of weaving viewer and character relations.
“What matters is not who did the action — what Hitchcock calls with contempt
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the whodunit— but neither is it the action itself: it is the set of relations in which
the action and the one who did it are caught. This is the source of the very
special sense of the frame. The sketches for framing, the strict delimitation of
the frame, the apparent elimination of the out-of-frame, are explained by Hitchcock’s constant reference, not to painting or the theater, but to tapestry-making,
that is, to weaving.”10
On the other hand, unlike Hitchcock, Herrmann is a truly influential
figure like Warhol and Bresson, as Herrmann is very easy to imitate with some
success. This is the result of Herrmann’s purity of style, scoring being rooted
closer to orchestration than composition, and because Herrmann, while
immensely gifted, lay as much in Wagner’s footprint as that other almost great
composer, Richard Strauss. However, it cannot be denied that much Englishlanguage cinema music stems from Herrmann’s work, whereas Strauss’ contribution to twentieth-century opera is important but limited and easily superseded
by Weill, Berg and Stockhausen.
From the music and opening credits, Psycho could be North by Northwest’s
black-and-white twin. Saul Bass’ skyscrapers and urban playtime have been
assumed by symbolic gray — not white, it should be noted — lines representing
both the skyscraper and the ledger. That it is the Jet Age, wherein global war
has better informed culture and everything is a pulsing combine of assemblages,
is the immediate evocation of both Hitchcock works. North by Northwest really
is that film, whereas Psycho is not, but both represent, in different ways, the
point of classical twentieth-century modernity — also on display in 1960’s other
big (but not quite as droll) summer comedy hit, The Apartment— about to be
ruptured by the events of November 22, 1963. English-language cinema is led
close to the totally pornographic by Psycho and The Apartment, however, it is
the reality of The Zapruder Film that sets the new benchmark for spectacle and
for technology interfacing with the flesh.
Like the leaves of grass on the grassy knoll, Psycho’s credits dissolve into a
pan of Phoenix, Arizona. The rhythm of the gaze is so familiar, the viewer can
almost hear the voice of the portly English director directly asking, “Who are
all these dots below?” Seeking prurience on the viewer’s behalf, the camera
sneaks into a cheap hotel room. The cuts in Hitchcock’s kino movements suggest
stolen glances — a looking away, or a chance to look — as the camera moves
closer and deeper into the rented bedroom space. In 1998, Van Sant’s fluid CGI
has none of the texture, or hesitation, in the peeping that the audience engages
in with Hitchcock’s 1960 movie. Hitchcock, like Ulmer in Strange Illusion,
offers the audience a psychoanalytic dream transference with his mise-en-scéne
in the opening scene. Marion ( Janet Leigh) is either the woman viewers could
be, or the woman viewers would like to instinctually be with. The slight discrepancy of matching shots in Hitchcock — while not as distractingly marvelous
as the studio/location work of Vertigo— makes all of Psycho an uncanny, dreamy
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experience. Much of the 1960 movie’s effects — apart from Herrmann’s aforementioned contribution — is courtesy cinematographer John Russell. His blackand-white images remake newsreel yet also possess an artificial quality of gloss
that denotes construction and fantasy.
With the first scene in the hotel room, Hitchcock ironically suggests that
there is no great difference between stealing lunch hours and stealing money.
Marion Crane’s guilt is the same in either case, as no matter what, she persecutes
herself for it as much as the coitus she evidently just enjoyed. As she says to her
lover, Sam Loomis, “You make respectable sound disrespectful.” The worse
transgression than sex here might be taking off from her work routine, as Marion
consciously recognizes that it is her numbing repetition of days that expedite
her participation in culture, which results in “respectable” identity. At Marion’s
office, her fellow administrative assistant, Caroline (Pat Hitchcock), is zonked
and pushes tranquilizers on her as a cure-all. As mentioned in Chapter 2, this
prefigures the relationship to drugs in Point Blank and in the gangster film from
that point on. Psycho is as much a crime movie as The Public Enemy or Bad
Lieutenant, Strange Illusion or A Clockwork Orange. In all, crime is socially motivated from within the family unit, or from the outside the social structures they
create and endorse. In the twentieth century, the pharmaceutical industry are
like their nineteenth-century counterparts who sold their workers chocolate
and sugar directly outside the factory, thus immediately taking back some of
their workers’ earnings, reducing the mode of production to slavery.
Marion’s work is the only thing she can feel good about, as her life is so
different from what she expected. Debord speaks for her when he writes, “The
fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by ‘intangible as well
as tangible things’— attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the
real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet
which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome
of reality.”11 Caught up in late 1950s American culture, Marion is getting old;
currently unmarried, she desires sex yet fears being promiscuous — things contradictory and unreconcilable. As a result, she is desperate for a happy end.
“Respectable” is good capitalism where shared debt will underwrite the bond
of marriage. Marion is a masochist in that her desperation is unleashed on herself. She tells Sam, “I’ll lick the stamps,” with regard to his ex-wife’s alimony
payments and is willing to assume crime — as Deleuze explores via Hitchcock’s
schema with Chabrol and Rohmer’s guidance. Sam himself is trying to get out
of the system and — like a Philip Barry hero — understands that the rejection
of the fetishism of the commodity erupts out of sexual pleasure. Regarding their
possible marriage, Sam pleads with Marion, “If I can see you and touch you as
simply as this, I won’t mind”— what amounts to one-room poverty, as that is
space enough for a love nest but not capital’s cinematic illusions, appearances
and “stuff.”
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Sam seeks the simplicity and purity of the real, not reel, and Hitchcock’s
cruel joke, best remade since in Café Flesh (1982), is that the viewers in the theater are denied the real, for cinemagoing is by nature irreal, an individual’s
filling an absence with illusion. Hitchcock understands this frustration cinema
offers, and it is why the sexual sadism in his work is so resonant. Hitchcock’s
toying of erotic fascination and inaccessibility are the two tenets of prostitution,
which is the business model for cinema. On screen, crime, these acts of commerce, are inherently alluring as they suggest and connote illicit behavior.
Hitchcock’s English socialism runs amok at Universal and results in Psycho
being marketed as “the picture you must see from beginning to end,” so viewers
understand that economics drive the plot of Psycho 1960 and that the spectacle
of wet death is an illustration of capital’s effect, shaped by its morality. At the
conclusion of the motion picture, Norman Bates is almost absolved by Psycho’s
screenplay when the Psychiatrist says that his were “crimes of passion, not
profit.” True to this hypothesis, the villain of Psycho, the manifestation of “Mrs.
Bates,” decries “cheap erotic minds,” belittling the very eros that might truly
liberate Norman. Free love is so powerful that it must always be devalued by
capital.
Many of Marion’s maladies are the result of the way women are treated
poorly by men in the world of Psycho. In this regard, Psycho 1960 is one of the
first movies to remake the myths of the 1950s, even taking one of its boy
ingénues, Anthony Perkins, and presenting him as pervert Norman Bates. It is
the type of negative depiction of the decade that starts from within in the Universal movies of Douglas Sirk and continues in the twenty-first century with
TV shows like Mad Men. For instance, Marion has to endure that her male boss
George Lowery’s (Vaughn Taylor) office is air-conditioned, whereas the secretary
pool is not. Marion is solicited by Lowery’s associate Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson), who believes in “buying off unhappiness” but only sees her worth as a
commodity of amusement value. The morning after the theft, the Car Dealer
is contemptuous to Marion, and this further results in Marion convicting herself,
as when she imagines Lowery finding out about the theft on the soundtrack.
Marion is so “psycho” as to actually hear voices, including Cassidy’s speaking
of the money and threatening, “If any of it’s missing, I’ll replace it with her
fine soft flesh.” Because Marion is always operating under the supposition of
her guilt, her actions are guilty. By the time she is falling asleep at the wheel
while driving to Sam in the rain on Friday night, she is at the breaking point
psychologically — her theft a (final) cry for help.
Though blinded by the rain and oncoming traffic, no one ever seems to
be driving in front of Marion, suggesting not only, as she herself says, that, “I
knew I must have gotten off the main road,” but illustrating the total isolation
of self that pushes her to break. From this point on Hitchcock’s Psycho can be
understood as Marion’s masochistic dream that she has while she is asleep by
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the roadside, or that she experiences, a la Paul Cartwright or maybe Walker, at
the moment of her death, having fallen asleep at the wheel while driving. The
interpretation depends on how the fadeout at the end of the night-drive
sequence — mid-drive, mid–falling-asleep — is read. In her break — death or
slumber — Marion’s psychic reality jumps from being voices in her head to a
fantasy of annihilation and then absolution by a murder more socially unacceptable than she feels herself to be.
What is apparent is that if Marion is not alive, then the remainder of Psycho
is her nightmare of female castration where her penetration, first by her boyfriend (actual, emotional and physical), and second by Mother/Norman
(metaphoric, represented by “mother’s picture on the wall” and in the shower
with the knife), renders her unfit or ineligible for marriage, while tauntingly,
her younger sister Lila usurps her, achieving these social goals. Marion sees
Norman in herself— she is the worst fugitive ever, and he too nearly gives himself
away at every chance. For Marion, the car swap achieves nothing but the further
loss of money, and when the Highway Patrolman (Mort Mills) suggests the
motel to her, it is as if she is doomed to that brothel as he confirms her as the
girl who will never marry and never get the house. Like the knife or camera,
the house is another phallic substitute, but Marion Crane feels herself unfit to
possess it because of her relationship with guilt, apparently fostered with her
(dead) mother. Both Marion and Norman are trapped by dead mothers. Marion’s mother is represented by a picture on the wall that Sam wants to turn over
when they make love. Norman has dug up his mother’s body, preserved it, and
has it in his/her house.
The irrefutable evidence is that Marion is a “fast girl”— Friday afternoon
during their almost-spat, Marion toys with the idea of leaving Sam if he does
not make an honest woman out of her, and by Saturday night she is already
out on an intimate dinner date with Norman Bates. From the minute he invites
her with, “You’re not really going to go out and drive up to the diner, are you?
… Well then, would you do me a favor and have dinner with me?” it is apparent
that Norman is the only man Marion has met so far that she is able to dominate.
As she can sexually entice anyone she wants, Norman is something of a pity/
mercy fuck for Marion. In a world of dominant men, Marion’s subconscious
dream has created an individual to whom she clearly has the upper hand. Marion
dreams Norman because he is, within Psycho’s universe, the only figure imaginable more uptight than she — after all, Marion can say “bathroom,” whereas
Norman cannot, and Marion gets to fuck, whereas in Robert Bloch’s source
novel, as well as suggested by Hitchcock’s movie, Norman is impotent.
In a relationship echoed in the dream reading of Psycho, Norman is Marion’s
psychological whipping boy, as Marion’s conception of Norman’s relationship
with his mother (when and if she was alive) is only a slight grotesque of her
own maternal relation. Klein underlines Marion’s projection and representation
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in Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. “Another typical feature of schizoid
object relations is their narcissistic nature which derives from the infantile introjective and projective processes…. When the ego ideal is projected into another
person, this person becomes predominantly loved and admired because he contains the good parts of the self. Similarly, the relation to another person on the
basis of projecting bad parts of the self into him is of a narcissistic nature,
because in this case as well the object strongly represents one part of the self.”12
Marion, the masochist-narcissist, sees Sam as the good ideal and creates Norman
to project all the bad parts of herself onto.
When she is murdered by Norman, Marion removes herself from her own
dream because of her anxiety at nonconformity. Seeking the stolen money, the
private investigator Abogast (Martin Balsam) is searching for Marion. Tellingly,
the montage of hotel and motel keepers he speaks to are all female, denoting
the oddness of Norman’s situation and how in Psycho mothers are iluminated
like a “No Vacancy” sign. If Marion had been awake or alive and had gone to
a real hotel or motel — one not of her imagination — Hitchcock reminds viewers
that there would have been a female innkeeper. This is complemented in how
Norman cannot let his mother die, because he’d have no oppressor, and in how
Marion cannot absolve herself because of preexisting material guilt. Obviously
perfect for each other in terms of romantic comedy, Hitchcock eschews a Marion-Norman love match, and makes Marion’s murder one of many, as at the
end of Psycho viewers are led to believe that there are at least two other missing
girls at the bottom of the swamp who met their deaths at the hands of Norman
Bates.
As early as in her afternoon tryst in the hotel room with Sam, Marion is
aware of a manifesting psychological illness within her mind — as perhaps something overcoming herself. With her erratic action — that is, the theft — the voices
in her mind increase to a nearly schizophrenic level. Perhaps she, not Norman,
is the titular character, or more possibly, they are the same character with the
same mother, split like the twins in The Parent Trap or brother and sister Michael
Meyers and Laurie Strode in some of the Halloween sequels, and the remakes
and their sequels. The fear of madness in Marion is symbolized by how Norman
can’t say “bathroom,” yet calls foul when Marion utters the euphemism “someplace” (i.e., “put her someplace”) for an institution for his problematic mother.
Marion’s fear of her anxieties getting the best of her — which would ostensibly
make her Norman — or of having to suppress anxieties like Caroline in the office
with the use of drugs, informs her nightmare with its suicidal, self-annihilative
bent, as anything is better than that terrible “someplace.”
Already noted, the influence of Psycho was a pebble thrown into the horror
genre’s melting pot — one that rippled outward in influence, finally ending what
could be looked upon as the classical era of so-called slasher films with the
release of Scream (1996) and The Blair Witch Project (1999). Those movies again
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chart cinema’s remaking as media: in the first one, the characters act like they
are in a horror movie — they have become Marion and Norman — or in the latter, the viewer’s surrogate seeks to create the motion picture that will further
remove the individual from him- or herself. As discussed in Chapter 5, and earlier in this chapter with regard to Deleuze, Warhol’s contribution to the cinema
was the removal of vitality from the frame. The Blair Witch Project is the perfect
example of underground having become indie, as it is the commodification of
the progressive evolution of cinema wherein the audience is left literally in the
dark for minutes on end and the soundtrack (the voice of the mOther) rules. A
reading of Psycho as Marion’s dream leads to a reading of The Blair Witch Project
as its protagonist’s, Heather’s, dream — a dream which expounds on Psycho’s
dichotomy of gender and cinema. In “Spelling It Out,” published in the Village
Voice in August 1999, Amy Taubin perceptively does just that:
The Blair Witch Project blends the timeless terror about the evil that lurks in the
woods at night with current fantasies about instant indie success and current confusions about cinematic fact and fiction…. Blair Witch is a cautionary tale about
Heather Donahue as “Heather Donahue” in The Blair Witch Project (Daniel
Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999). The movie is the perfect example of the underground having become “indie” as it is the commodification of the progressive
evolution of cinema wherein the audience is left literally in the dark for minutes
on end and the soundtrack (the voice of the mOther) rules. (Courtesy Andrew’s
Video Vault at the Rotunda.)
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what happens when a woman directs a movie. That the film is set in rugged terrain
and involves much fiddling with compasses and maps suggests a parallel between
moviemaking and war and calls up the commonplace analogy between directors
and generals. Heather, the director of the aborted “Blair Witch project,” fails in
her primary responsibility — to bring her boys home safely. An overreacher who
gets her comeuppance, Heather spends the last third of the film crying and apologizing for having fucked up. To add insult to injury, it is not Heather’s film that
is currently breaking box office records at the Angelika. The fame and glory belong
to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, the filmmakers who packaged her raw
footage into a commerc
