BOOK OF THE DAY: RUTH BARTONreviews The Moment of PsychoBy David Thomson Basic Books, 183pp, £13.99
THE ADVENT of the DVD extra has produced a new generation of movie know-it-alls. How delightful to be able to listen to the director’s commentary on track two, the cinematographer on track three and then to click on “Even More Extra Features” to access an erudite essay by a leading member of the film studies community. How does the book publisher compete?
David Thomson, the author of The Moment of Psycho, is best known for his definitive Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975 and updated and reissued in 2004. The joy of that book is its author's distinctive, sometimes cantankerous, always opinionated voice, as he dissects the careers of Hollywood's more or less illustrious members. He has contributed a column of the same title and in the same vein to the Guardian, while he is also a biographer and novelist.
Now, Thomson has written a DVD extra. The Moment of Psychois a slight book; it opens as Hitchcock turns 60 and American society enters the 1960s. Thomson's ostensible project is to link the two moments, arguing that in PsychoHitchcock pre-empted a generation's dismissal of the mores of their parents. He interweaves a brief account of Hollywood's decline in the late 1950s with a discussion of Hitchcock's own search for a property to follow his successful 1958 release, North By Northwest. Soon, however, he abandons social commentary for an exploration of what really draws him back to the Bates Motel. Here, as Norman (Anthony Perkins) peers through the peephole at the showering Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), Hitchcock (and Thomson) invite us into the mind of a chronic voyeur – a man who, let's face it, is the consummate film viewer.
Writing a few pages earlier of Leigh’s opening sequence, where as poor, rather dim Marion, she commits adultery in a cramped room in Phoenix, Arizona, Thomson has speculated about the occasion. We ask ourselves, he muses, “what Marion might look like without these comprehensive bras she’s wearing (I’d guess a good 36 D-cup). But guessing is a fool’s romance.”
Taking on Perkins’s perspective gives Thomson more opportunities for guesswork: “I think there is an underlying psychological urge in us, the audience, to see her stripped and ravished, to see her rebuked.”
More sedately, he discusses how revolutionary it was for a film director to kill off his leading lady half way into the film. Hitchcock, he so rightly says, was playing games with his audience, as he loved to do.
The shower sequence is the climax of Hitchcock's film and Thomson's book. The second part of Psycho, he argues, where the corpse of Mrs Bates reveals to the audience just why mother wasn't feeling herself today, is simply not worthy of the first half. Nor is the second part of The Moment of Psychoworthy of Thomson's talent. He has already expended more time than was necessary on a retelling of the plot. Then he lists and briefly analyses all the films he can think of that were influenced by Psycho. He follows this with an account of the critical response to Hitchcock's film and its place in American culture of the 1960s. Finally, he winds up with a digression on the experience of driving on American highways.
The Moment of Psychois a haphazard, occasionally brilliant book. When the e-book evolves to allow us to download accompanying film clips, it will probably find its moment. Until then, it loses out to the collector's edition DVD.
Ruth Barton is a lecturer in film studies at Trinity College Dublin