Hitchcock Without Hitchcock

by Thomas Leitch
Literature Film Quarterly. 2003.

My current students' reaction to Gus Van Sant's alleged shot-by-shot remake of Psycho indicates that Van Sant's tour de force has now fallen victim to the ultimate historical irony. Universal's scheme to release the film in 1998 as a loss leader that would rekindle interest in their most prestigious property just in time for the centennial rerelease of Hitchcock's Universal backlist on DVD has now been transformed into just one more old movie, roughly contemporaneous with the Hitchcock original, which my students have heard of but have not seen. Only the Hitchcock establishment continues to keep faith with its original outrage, as the flood of overwhelmingly hostile Internet commentary on the film has sedimented into the quarterlies. I except from this general rule three critics in the 2001-02 Hitchcock Annual: Paula Marantz Cohen, who defends Van Sant's film as "a consummate hybrid of art and criticism" (132); Steven Jay Schneider, who contextualizes the film as "'a Van Sant film'" rather than "a slavish imitation of the original" (142); and Constantine Verevis, who points out that since "each and every film is remade-i.e., dispersed and transformed-in its every new context or configuration," Van Sant's film differs from the long cycle of earlier films extending or quoting from Psycho-Psycho 2, Dressed to Kill, and so on-"not in kind, but only in degree" (157). I would like, in this essay, to extend the implications of Verevis's remark by engaging with several more disapproving commentators on Van Sant's film, but the principal commentator with whom I shall be arguing is myself as I sat watching the remake on its opening night.

As soon as something like Saul Bass's credits, now resplendent in black and green, began to race across the screen, accompanied by Danny Elfman's reorchestration of Bernard Herrmann's classic score, the young man sitting next to me leaned over and murmured to his date, "I'm so scared." The implication of his remark was clear: You call this a scary movie? I'm way beyond this. Of course, the implication I drew myself was rather different: What a jerk. Connoisseurs of film fright may know of instances in which the credits manage, or for that matter intend, to scare the audience, but I doubt that such cases represent the norm. Film fright is earned by the relationship a movie legitimately develops with its audience, not worn on the credits' sleeve.

All the same, the Van Sant Psycho was trading on a relationship that made it different from all other films: its status as a remake of the father (or, more accurately, the mother) of the modern horror film, and a remake of a very particular kind. For better or worse, the detailed knowledge many audiences had already acquired about Van Sant's film before the credits even rolled marked the credits as only the latest step in their relationship to the film. These reflections did not persuade me any more completely that I ought to be frightened by Van Sant's credits, or let down because I was not, but they did make me realize that in silently arguing with the young man next to me, I was really arguing with myself. And long before the film ended, I had lost the argument, because what might have been taken to be his fundamental premise-that the remake was not nearly as good as the original-was one with which I agreed.1 The two commentators I would like to use to return to this argument with myself are James Naremore and William Rothman, whom I choose because they are unusually extended and reflective, and because they are both critics I respect and in great measure agree with, even though I shall be taking issue with them.

Apart from criticizing the specifics of Vince Vaughn's performance or the cut-ins to shots of storms, cows, and near-naked women that interrupt the murders of Marion and Arbogast, the harshest judgment I can make of Van Sant's film is that it put every member of its audience in an impossible position because no matter how they reacted to his movie, they would all be in danger of becoming easy victims to curmudgeons like me. That is, no matter how they treated his remake of Psycho, they were wrong, because the remake itself was neither one thing nor another. It would be the height of naivete, for example, to treat the movie as if it were Hitchcock's film, since, as reviewers across the country delighted in pointing out, it obviously was not. But it would be equally unthinkable to watch it as if it were original, since it had been marketed from the moment its production was first announced on April Fool's Day 1998 as the closest remake in film history, a uniquely austere homage to its master.

Even within the special intertextual context of the remake, then, Van Sant's film was unusual in at least four ways. Instead of adopting the customary strategies designed to improve its original-readapting, updating, or rethinking the original's source material-this film was an homage in the specific sense that it did not seriously contest Hitchcock's superiority.2 Homages, frequent in European remakes, are rare in Hollywood because Hollywood remakes from Gaslight (1944) to Payback (1999) share the goal of superseding their originals rather than paying tribute to them.

Moreover, Van Sant was remaking the film whose shocking story had provided its original audience with one of the biggest surprises in Hollywood history-the death of its heroine little more than halfway through the film-but the remake, no matter how accurate, would necessarily be deprived of that surprise by its original's very success. In fact, the remake seemed to revel in this change, since it was marketed with a soft-focus silhouette of a woman's body seen through a shower curtain-emphasizing precisely the information whose significance Hitchcock's film had been at such pains to conceal.

But these two features were far less widely remarked than a third: the remake's textual closeness to its original. Van Sant and the executives at Universal had gone so far as to proclaim that Van Sant would not only follow Joseph Stefano's dialogue line by line (as the remake generally, though not unexceptionably, does) but John Russell's camerawork shot by shot (as the remake certainly does not), altered only by the addition of color and the necessary recasting of the story's characters. This closeness is not unprecedented. Even Hitchcock's own filmography includes two remakes that follow their originals virtually shot by shot: the synch-sound Blackmail (1929), filmed at the same time as the original silent version but with important variations involving camera and cast as well as sound,3 and Mary, the German-language version of Murder!, shot in tandem with the original, using the same production crew but a different cast. Even so, such textual fidelity as Van Sant aims for is so rare that it poses special problems for theorists. If every remake is a new performance of a pre-existing symphonic score, then the Van Sant Psycho is akin to an original-instrument performance that attempts to recreate as precisely as possible both the textual and performative features of its original. Or if, as Peter Wollen has suggested in conversation, the remake is analogous to a cover of a popular song by a new artist-the Beatles' version of "Till There Was You," or any of a hundred versions of Lennon/McCartney tunes by other singers-then the Van Sant remake is more closely analogous to an Elvis impersonator, or to Beatlemania: an attempt to recreate the effect of its progenitor text rather than using it as the point of departure for a new interpretation.

And this fidelity is compounded by Van Sant's well-publicized determination to restrict himself to the same six-week shooting schedule as Hitchcock and a budget of $20 million-the 1998 equivalent of the original film's shoestring $800,000 budget. In other words, Van Sant's remake aimed from the beginning not only to duplicate Hitchcock's original-changing only the actors and the original film's black-and-white visuals to update it for the '90s-but also to fetishize it by duplicating the sorts of circumstances of its filming that audiences forty years earlier would never notice unless they read the trade papers, and then to publicize these latter duplications so widely through magazine and television features that they would form a well-nigh inescapable condition of the audience's knowledge and experience of the film. Not content to duplicate the 1960 audience's experience for a 1998 audience, Van Sant was determined, it seemed, to duplicate Hitchcock's filmmaking experience himself. All the ingredients of a Hitchcock film would be present except for Hitchcock. But this omission would be the structuring absence of the whole project, the fetish every feature of the new film would systematically evoke or repress by defining itself as the film that uniquely wasn't Hitchcock's Psycho.4

Any such attempt entangles its creator in two yawning fallacies. The first of them involves the artistic status of any literal remake. When students set up shop in an art museum to copy Rembrandt or Van Gogh canvases stroke by stroke, what they are laboring to produce is not a remake but an exercise designed to demonstrate their technical mastery of a style rather than to create a new work of art. The very word create seems antithetical to the exercise, and a teacher reviewing it would be sure to grade it down for any telltale signs of creativity. If a student succeeded in copying the original so closely that experts could not tell the difference, the result would be a forgery or counterfeit rather than a remake. Apart from the fact that he worked in public, the only reason Van Sant was not accused of forging a counterfeit of Psycho is that he insisted at every point that his film, though exactly the same as Hitchcock's, was completely different. After all, it was shot in color, with a completely different cast, and strategic updates to bring it into the '90s.5 In other words, it is exactly Van Sant's changes from the original that give his film whatever status it enjoys as art or entertainment, even though its claim to notoriety is based on denying those changes.

In this regard, Van Sant's film, though it was advertised as unique, simply raises in an unusually straightforward way the paradox peculiar to all remakes: the question of how a film can be identical to its progenitor yet different (and presumably better). And this paradox raises the second fallacy Van Sant stuck himself with: the fact that the harder he tried to be faithful to his model, the more his inevitable myriad changes would stick out. There was no question of casting Anthony Perkins, who was dead, or Janet Leigh or Vera Miles, who had retired from the screen, or John Gavin, who had last been seen as our Ambassador to Mexico. But should the remake, already stuck with Viggo Mortensen and Vince Vaughn, use cars and fashions from the 1990s, which would mark further regrettable changes from the original, or retro models from the 1960s, which would invoke the same nostalgic responses as the mise en scene of Pleasantville, responses quite at odds with both Hitchcock's plan and Van Sant's? Whoever has watched Van Sant's film closely knows that he has wrestled with these problems in inventive and often amusing ways. The license plate on the car Marion trades in, for example, is identical in every respect save color to the license plate on her car in the Hitchcock film; but the license plate on the car she trades for, though it has the same number ("NFB 418") as the 1959 plate, is, like every other license plate in the remake, a 1998 model. In Van Sant's film, Marion is trading in more than a car; she might be said to be trading the world of 1959 for that of 1998.

In order for this claim to be meaningful, Van Sant's film would have to invoke two distinct temporal worlds and sketch a relation between them. And the inevitable changes thrown into relief by the remake's failure to recreate the world of the original film exactly might be argued to create such a systematic disjunction. But Van Sant is not attempting to be true to both the 1950s and the 1990s; he is attempting to be true to both his original (in textual terms) and the 1990s (in cultural terms). The contradictions that arise are therefore not cultural collisions but logistical problems. For example, both Marion and Arbogast, when they arrive at the Bates Motel in both versions of the film, slide over from the driver's seat to the passenger side of the car rather than getting out on the driver's side. This gesture makes more sense for Marion, since she is arriving in the middle of a storm and wants to expose herself to the rain as little as possible; but it makes some sense as well for Arbogast's stealthy return. In faithfully duplicating this repeated gesture, however, Van Sant commits a glaring anachronism, for it is hard to imagine two characters both owning cars that would allow them to slide across the front seat in the age of ubiquitous bucket seats that began not long after the release of Hitchcock's film.

Van Sant's claim in interviews to have made the film Hitchcock wanted to make, from his opening helicopter shot to the hotel window replacing Hitchcock's series of successively closer dissolves to the restoring of risque lines of dialogue (e.g., the oilman Cassidy's description of bed as the "only playground that beats Las Vegas"6) the censors had cut in 1959 to a use of color Hitchcock might well have feared would rouse Hollywood censors to protest, is undermined by his relatively chaste handling of sex and violence. Although Hitchcock claimed to Francois Truffaut that "Janet Leigh should not have been wearing a brassiere.. . . The [opening] scene would have been more interesting if the girl's bare breasts had been rubbing against the man's chest" (Truffaut 204) and allowed audiences an uncomfortable glimpse of Barbara Leigh-Hunt's nipple during her rape and murder in Frenzy twelve years later, Van Sant allows Anne Heche to retain her brassiere in the opening sex scene, and blocks and frames the murder scene with equal solicitude for his heroine's modesty. Greater fidelity here to the original film's textual features results in lesser fidelity to its effects; the remake must come across as prudish for the more experienced and jaded audiences that have grown up in the sexual hothouse that has flourished in America since 1960. The resulting contradictions place Van Sant's film in an historical limbo, a product of both the '60s and the '90s, and therefore, really, of neither.

The biggest difference, though, comes in the shower scene. A friend of mine told me once how, when he first saw Psycho in 1960, he followed the story of Marion's theft avidly until she stopped at the Bates Motel, conversed over supper with Norman Bates, and then decided to take a shower. This is pure pandering, he thought; what is it adding to the story? Imagine his surprise when Marion never got out! I can attest to a very different feeling when Psycho 2 was released in 1983 and I sat through the first half-hour waiting impatiently for Meg Tilly to take a shower, and then being devastated when she finally did, and nothing happened except for somebody spying on her-as if I had accidentally taken a wrong turn and ended up at Porky's. The most obvious reason Van Sant's shower scene is so different from Hitchcock's is not that that the lighting, camera, and makeup are different (though they are), but that the audience knows Van Sant's scene is coming, even if they have never seen Hitchcock's version, because of the remake's ubiquitous publicity line: "Welcome to the Bates Motel. Relax. Take a shower." The most immediately distinctive feature of Hitchcock's film, the shocking unexpectedness of Marion's murder, is exactly what reduces the remake, because it cannot possibly duplicate it, to something like Psycho instead of Psycho itself, or even Psycho updated. It is this decision, more than any other, which indicates the way Van Sant's homage works most effectively. As James Naremore has perceptively remarked, the film "resembles nothing so much as a museum installation. . . . It functions, intentionally or not, as a metafilm" (6).

Naremore aptly notes in elaborating this thesis that "even the small differences [between Van Sant's film and Hitchcock's original] have enormous consequences" (6). Casting Robert Forster as the psychiatrist and making his long climactic explanation of Norman's behavior less pompous "gives the psychiatrist more authority than he deserves" (7); Christopher Doyle's color cinematography "attenuates the force of Hitchcock's brilliant montage sequences" (9); the Bates house now looks "oddly and inexplicably modernized" (10); Van Sant's more elaborate roll on the close-up of Marion's dead eye "spoils the mood of one of the most famous dissolves in movie history" (10); the reorchestrated music "seems less forceful, less fully present, than in Hitchcock" (8); and Van Sant's long crane-out "overly prolongs the scene of the car emerging from the swamp" (9). In short, whenever Van Sant alters Hitchcock's dialogue or camerawork or mise en scene, "he makes bad choices" (10).

I agree with every one of these judgments except for one: Naremore's remark about the Bates house, which seems to me to look even shabbier in color than in black and white. But I wonder if it is not in the nature of Van Sant's project that he was condemned to make only bad choices-that is, that viewers like Naremore and me would necessarily perceive his every departure from Hitchcock, however it functioned, as a bad choice. Naremore rightly points out, for example, that Vince Vaughn "is required to copy Perkins's performance almost gesture for gesture; the result is a stale imitation, with nothing of the boyish humor, pathos, and sinister grace that derived from Perkins himself (8). But this does not mean that Vaughn creates a less interesting or compelling character than Perkins; it means that, like the art student copying Van Gogh, he does not create a character at all, but merely copies someone else's, an endeavor that cannot help but fail as an act of creation.7 Although I heartily agree with Naremore that "Julianne Moore is a far more gifted actress than Vera Miles" (8), I did not find her LiIa nearly as successful because I could not help reading the tougher, savvier character she was creating (a woman who could take a moment while she and Sam were checking into the Bates Motel to wink conspiratorially at Norman) through the intertext of Miles's original character and being disturbed by each departure-particularly by the pivotal moment when she helped Sam disarm Norman in the fruit cellar by delivering a strategic kick instead of cowering like Lila, a '50s icon of passive female fright that would never do for the empowered female audience of the '90s.

Naremore is unhappy with Vince Vaughn's performance because he copies Anthony Perkins's gestures instead of creating his own character. But when it comes to Anne Heche, the only major performer in the film who does succeed in creating her own character, Naremore is equally dismissive: she "conveys almost nothing of Janet Leigh's hard-boiled intelligence and mounting neurosis" (8). This is certainly true. What Heche does create, for better or worse, is a sunnier, flightier Marion who refuses to take her opening argument with Sam very seriously, rolls her eyes in amusement at the lecherous Cassidy's come-on instead of looking daggers behind his back, twirls her pink parasol as she prepares to trade in her car in a fruitless attempt to throw the persistent police officer off her trail, and seems considerably less shaken by her conversation with Norman. Heche's higher, lighter voice makes her a more weightless Marion than Leigh, one who is even less obviously aware of the monstrous forces her theft and flight have released, and whose death is therefore even more ironic than Janet Leigh's. One may prefer the gravity of Leigh's performance (a gravity whose power I appreciated anew after seeing Van Sant's film) and even call Heche's performance a whole series of bad choices without denying that it is, in its own way, a remarkable achievement. Heche is the only performer in the remake who has thought through her character in entirely new terms from beginning to (sadly truncated) end; unlike Vaughn, she does not copy her original's gestures, but comes up with a whole new vocabulary of her own, using virtually the same dialogue to project a completely different character. And she does so laboring under a difficulty that never arose for Leigh: the burden of having to avoid what Leigh was doing. Whether the performers ape their originals or strike out on their own, however, Naremore is equally dissatisfied.

Like Naremore, I prefer a Marion who is not so much a flibbertigibbet as Heche. After all, one might argue, what is the point of creating a lightheartedly oblivious Marion whose murder will be more ironic when the irony has already been pointed out by the fact that everyone in the audience already knows that Marion will die? But to accept the terms of this question would foredoom Heche to failure, because it would acknowledge that she is not allowed, as Leigh was, to create a character free to act; she could only create a character free to die by following precisely in her predecessor's footsteps like an understudy whose every departure from the star's reading would be suspect. When Naremore criticizes Van Sant's substitution of "Venus with a Mirror," with its implications of "female narcissism and rape," for Hitchcock's "more appropriate" choice of a picture showing Susanna and the Elders spying on her (11), he overlooks the possibility that Titian's painting, less appropriate for Hitchcock's film, may be more appropriate for Van Sant's, which features a heroine who is far more narcissistic than Hitchcock's, and which is itself a more narcissistic enterprise in every way, obsessed with its status as mirror image of its great predecessor.

Naremore concludes his attack on Van Sant's film by recounting a parable from Walter Benjamin about a royal cook fated to die for his failure to recreate the exact taste of a mulberry omelet his dying king remembered from his youth because even if he combined the identical ingredients in precisely the same ways, he could never recreate the subjective contexts that made the omelet so distinctive and precious to the young prince. This anecdote provides effective support for Naremore's climactic premise: "Even if Van Sant had been completely faithful to Hitchcock (assuming such a thing was possible), he could never have recreated Psycho" because "Psycho is no longer [the] cutting-edge horror film" Naremore recalls from his own youth (12). But it is much less effective at illustrating the point Naremore brings it up to support: that "Van Sant's film is ultimately an intriguing lesson in what not to do with a remake" (11). Instead it simply indicates the impossible task of all remakes: to recreate the unique contexts of their predecessors. This is the problem of the most devoted original-instrument performances: the audience's inability to hear Haydn except through the intertextual sonorities furnished by the more recent composers and instrumentations, even the more recent nonmusical cacophonies of traffic and industry, they can scarcely forget.

Although Naremore urges that Psycho "can never be remade, and it shouldn't be slavishly imitated" (12), however, he obviously does not feel that all remakes are taboo. He makes particular exceptions, for example, for King Kong and Hitchcock's own The Man Who Knew Too Much. Films like King Kong, he argues, are "especially suited to remaking because they are inherently spectacular and have an elemental, mythopoetic quality" (3). But apart from the tendentious remark that classic films like Citizen Kane "have such artistic prestige and historical significance that remaking them, as opposed to quoting them or borrowing their ideas, seems crass and pointless" (3), he does not explain why The Man Who Knew Too Much could be successfully remade even though Psycho could not.

William Rothman's critique of Van Sant's film is constructed around just such an explanation. What continues to set Hitchcock's films apart from most other films, as Rothman had argued in Hitchcock-The Murderous Gaze, is their "philosophical dimension" ("Some Thoughts" 30). "In Hitchcock's films," Rothman notes in summarizing his earlier argument, "the camera performs gestures that have the force of claims, demonstrations, arguments" (31). Even "the gestures of Hitchcock's camera" that "Van Sant copies [apparently] without alteration" (30), however, undergo subtle but telling changes that drain them of Hitchcock's original meaning and force. Since the climactic dissolve from the dead, grinning face of Mother's skeleton now has long hair rather than the original "tight bun" (32) that links her to Madeleine Elster and Carlotta Valdes in Vertigo, and since the courthouse the shot dissolves to no longer has four pillars that echo the "////" sign Rothman takes as Hitchcock's most pervasive visual indication of the entrapment of both characters and viewers in "the world of the film, a world presided over by the author" (32), Van Sant's dissolve, linking two shots both "stripped of [their] original significance . . . turns Hitchcock's complex and profound gesture not into a gesture of Van Sant's own, however altered or diminished in meaning and expressiveness that gesture may be. Rather, Van Sant's dissolve is not meaningful or expressive. It does not have the force of a gesture at all" (33).

This argument explains why Hitchcock can remake The Man Who Knew Too Much successfully. Unlike Van Sant, he is an author whose films, whether or not they are remakes of his earlier work, are linked by a rigorous visual and thematic consistency that gives each individual shot and transition a unique gravity and power. Hence Hitchcock's 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which draws on and extends the patterns of many earlier Hitchcock films besides its nominal original, is Hitchcock Plus, whereas Van Sant's Psycho, which strips away Hitchcock's original meanings and gestures without replacing them with anything else, is Hitchcock Minus. But Rothman's assertion introduces questions of its own. Why doesn't Van Sant's dissolve have the force of a gesture? Granting that Van Sant's camerawork does not mean the same thing as Hitchcock's, why does it follow that it does not mean anything at all? The obvious answer, which Naremore might have given, is that it is copied too closely, in a context whose network of intertextual markers is too claustrophobic, to generate any possibility of original meaning. Curiously, however, this is not Rothman's answer, as he makes clear in comparing the shot in The 39 Steps framing Richard Hannay, together with the Scottish crofter who has alerted the police to his presence and the crofter's young wife Margaret, who is trying to help Hannay escape, behind the imprisoning spindles of a chair just as the headlights of an approaching police car seem to seal Hannay's fate for good to a formally similar shot in John M. Stahl's Imitation of Life suggesting Louise Beavers's imprisonment in American racial prejudice by framing her through a stair railing overhead. While acknowledging that "any director can incorporate any of Hitchcock's signature motifs and use it for its metaphorical or symbolic meaning," Rothman asserts, "the shot in Imitation of Life does not, cannot, mean all that the Hitchcock shot means. It does not, cannot, signify Hitchcock's authorship. Thus the entire panoply of Hitchcockian signatures marks a private, or personal, dimension to Hitchcock's films, declaring that they are his creations, not anyone else's" (33).

In other words, Stahl's shot, even though it precedes Hitchcock's shot by a year, simply echoes its most obvious meaning without appropriating its status as marker of authorship, its value as gesture, or its philosophical weight. The shot, like the dissolve in Psycho, remains Hitchcock's, no matter who else copies or indeed anticipates it, because Hitchcock, unlike Stahl and Van Sant, is an author whose every cut and camera movement gathers resonance from the context of his entire career. In response to the questions this argument raises-What makes Hitchcock an author when Stahl and Van Sant are not? Could Van Sant ever become an author? How could Rothman tell whether Van Sant was, or had become, such an author?-Rothman is silent. It can be readily inferred that Hitchcock achieves authorship, in Rothman's terms, through his motivic consistency and philosophical seriousness. But it is not clear why Stahl's shot in Imitation of Life, though it obviously cannot have the same meaning as Hitchcock's in The 39 Steps, must simply mean less, or why Van Sant's dissolve at the end of Psycho not only does not have the force of Hitchcock's gesture, but does not have the force of a gesture at all.

Indeed the terms of Rothman's argument, which reads Van Sant's film exclusively through Hitchcock's, makes it as impossible as Naremore's reading of Van Sant's independent choices as invariably bad to consider even the possibility that the remake might be read as a Gus Van Sant film.8 Nor does Rothman make any attempt to connect Hitchcock as the author his analysis constructs or reveals with Hitchcock the artistically unassuming public commentator on his own work. As he notes in his earlier book, "I have no wish to attempt to reconcile the official Hitchcock and the knowing figure who emerges in my book, but to convey how the former may be viewed as the latter's creation, as a perfectly Hitchcockian figure, a projection of Hitchcock's authorship" (37; see Rothman, Murderous Gaze 343). The sole authority for granting authorship to Hitchcock but withholding it from Van Sant is the authority of Rothman's readings of five individual films and the implied authority of his projected conclusions about Hitchcock's career.

Rothman is at pains to defend himself from Timothy Gould's charge that he is distinguishing himself (and by implication the authorial Hitchcock he discovers) from "the ordinary American moviegoer. . . . In Rothman's view, we either give in to the commonplace viewing of a film, or we rise above what is (merely) representative in our viewing and achieve a state in which we are capable of acknowledging Hitchcock's authorship" (40; see Gould 74). But although Rothman stakes an unmistakable claim to the interpretive authority on which Hitchcock's claims to authorship rest, he cannot explain what gives his own writing that authority. "Who . . . has the ability to declare Hitchcock's authorship? . . . I do. . . . [But] what it might be about my 'empirical existence' that provoked and prepared me to find or create my own voice in the writing of Hitchcock-The Murderous Gaze is not my book's concern" (40). Behind the authority of Hitchcock's authorship, which gives his camera movements the power Van Sant's lack as gestures, revelations, and philosophical premises is the authority of Rothman's revelatory commentary, the source of whose power is even more obscure.

Identifying himself as an unrepentant auteurist, Rothman acknowledges that "already when I was writing Hitchcock-The Murderous Gaze . . . it was the dominant view within academic film study . . . that the concept of authorship [had] been discredited on theoretical grounds" (34). He therefore recognizes the unfashionableness of his argument that because his book is not only "an auteurist study" but also "a study of the conditions of authorship in the medium of film," it follows that "it is a study as well of the ontology of film" (35). Most contemporary film scholars would probably dissent from that last statement, preferring to define film authorship not in ontological terms, as arising from specific textual markers, but in historical terms, as arising from a privileged moment in the critical reception of a filmmaker's work (and likely to be eclipsed by later reorientations of the discussion). But Rothman's unreconstructed auteurism is more prevalent than either he or his critics would acknowledge, and it is a signal achievement of Van Sant's remake to have flushed it out.

When the Modern Library published its list of the hundred greatest twentieth-century novels in English shortly after the American Film Institute had published its list of the hundred greatest Hollywood films (a list on which, I'm proud to say, Psycho was ranked eighteenth), Louis Menand observed that critics of the Modern Library list attempted both to "complain about injustices in the rankings (James Dickey's Deliverance is better than anything Joseph Conrad ever wrote?) and then to maintain that the whole idea of ranking books is ridiculous" (4). Just as these two complaints cancel each other out, the critical response to Van Sant's film reveals a fundamental contradiction in contemporary film studies high and low left by the residue of unacknowledged auteurism. For all the differences in their theoretical orientation, Naremore and Rothman both share my outrage that one filmmaker could so blatantly steal the work of another, coupled with my outrage that he got so many of the details wrong. The first of these responses stems from a residual auteurism that establishes a crux between the value of the classic text and the career of its creator, the second from a fetishistic Hitcholatry that arises from an auteurist impulse but ends up turning on it because it prescribes either letterperfect remakes or auteur-sanctioned remakes rather than none at all.

Hitchcock, notoriously the first Hollywood auteur-not the first to make his films, but the first whose career was sanctified by the Cahiers crowd in the '50s-has become the last auteur as well, a figure who continues to hover above auteurism's grave, inspiring reams of commentary from every corner of the critical world. What Van Sant's film most tellingly reveals is the extent to which the Hitchcock who is being honored (in the breach, as in the case with the catcalls that greeted Van Sant's excursion into the sacred edifice) is actually a palimpsest of multiple Hitchcocks who remain, like the Hitchcock who should never be copied and the Hitchcock who should only be copied exactly, not only contradictory but mutually exclusive.

More than any other film, Psycho is a site of these contradictions. Naremore recalls that when he first saw Hitchcock's film in 1960, the audience was "unpleasantly raucous" and the experience "galvanically terrifying": "It was one of the most carnivalesque events I've experienced at the movies" (4). Van Sant's film, by contrast, "strikes me as academic and not at all scary" (5). If my own students' experience is any guide, however, the same could be said of Hitchcock's film whenever it is screened for a contemporary audience. In fact, the label "academic" is more loaded than Naremore realizes, since my students, who encounter Hitchcock' s films almost entirely in college classrooms, regard Hitchcock's Psycho as far more literally academic than Van Sant's. When I taught the film twenty years ago, at least one or two students in each class would hesitantly ask in advance if they could please skip the screening and write a paper on something else instead. (I invariably refused and sat behind those students.) By the time Psycho 2 was released a few years later, however, students had already grown more blase, and now the frequent response I get when I show the film to audiences who have not seen it before is, "Is that all there is?"-which I take to be a slightly more deferential version of "I'm so scared."

Time makes all scary movies less scary, of course, for three reasons: because films like Psycho whose initial effect depends on shock establish new standards for shock that swiftly become reassuring conventions of the horror genre; because an advancing sense of personal time rescues impressionable audiences from the moments of inescapable terror to which the film had originally pinned them; and because the very act of watching the same film repeatedly changes the nature of audiences' relation to it as previous viewings themselves become privileged intertexts.9 So my students' jaded responses to Hitchcock's films are inevitable. But although I would prefer that they share my memories of being frightened by the film, I have never wished that their experience replicated what Naremore seems to be offering as the privileged perspective of an opening-night crowd in 1960, because I could never get them to talk seriously about the film if they did; I certainly could not persuade them that it was a great film (since their point of departure for measuring its worth would be such nongreat scary films as I Know What You Did Last Summer); I couldn't even keep some of them in the classroom. I suspect that Naremore is valorizing his 1960 memories of Psycho in similarly selective terms. He wants to privilege the scary Hitchcock as a yardstick against which to measure Van Sant's paucity of thrills, while holding on, like Rothman, to Hitchcock the auteur as a yardstick against which to measure Van Sant's poverty of meaning. What he fails to realize is that the scary Hitchcock and the auteur are not simply different but incompatible, predicating as they do contradictory responses to his work.

These contradictions are best revealed in Robin Wood's classic essay on Hitchcock's film, which he calls "Hitchcock's ultimate achievement to date in the area of audience participation" (146-47). After tracing the ways in which, throughout the film's first movement, "everything is done to encourage the spectator to identify with Marion" (143), Wood describes the audience's reaction to the violent, horrifying shock of Marion's murder, which

constitutes an alienation effect so shattering that (at a first viewing of the film) we scarcely recover from it. Never-not even in Vertigo-has identification been broken off so brutally. At the same time, so engrossed are we in Marion, so secure in her potential salvation, thai we can scarcely believe it is happening; when it is over, and she is dead, we are left shocked, with nothing to cling to, the apparent center of the film entirely dissolved.

Needing a new center, we attach ourselves to Norman Bates, the only other character (at this point) available. We have been carefully prepared for this shift of sympathies. For one thing, Norman is an intensely sympathetic character, sensitive, vulnerable, trapped by his devotion to his mother-a devotion, a self-sacrifice, which our society tends to regard as highly laudable. That he is very unbalanced merely serves to evoke our protective instincts: he is also so helpless. Beyond this, the whole film hitherto has led us to Norman, by making us identify with a condition in many ways analogous to his: the transition is easy. After the murder, Hitchcock uses all the resources of identification technique to make us "become" Norman. (146)

I can attest to the accuracy of this account as it applies not only to my first viewing of Psycho but to my first viewing years later of Dressed to Kill, in which I was so shocked by Angie Dickinson's murder that I refused to believe she was dead and waited in vain for her to come back to life. But I can attest as well that Wood's "we," inclusive as it is likely to be of any audience that first saw Psycho before 1965, does not include my students, who know long before the credits roll that Marion is doomed and that Norman is her killer, and do their best (with near-complete success in the second case) to avoid identifying with either one of them.

In short, the experience that made their first viewing of Psycho such an unforgettable experience for so many audiences of a certain age is no longer available to most contemporary audiences, who are necessarily watching the film through a host of intertexts Verevis has noted: films as different as Dressed to Kill, Halloween, Psycho 2, Scream 3, and even the Van Sant Psycho. In the same way, the scary Hitchcock who once helped bolster the claims of Hitchcock the auteur is lost (even, I suspect, to Naremore) except as a memory and an historical function. A survey of contemporary film theory might suggest that Hitchcock the auteur is dead as well. Like Mrs. Bates, however, these Hitchcocks, along with many others, survive as haunting memories and historical functions, always available to be put to new uses like discounting a presumptuous homage. To realize that the Hitchcock "we" know and love may be as many Hitchcocks as there are avatars of "we" is to appreciate the fact that Van Sant shared the perspective of Wood and Naremore and Rothman in at least one important regard: he assumed that Hitchcock's film was so universally known that it could serve as an authoritative intertext that could regulate the interpretation of his homage because its classic status and the reactions of its original audience could be universally stipulated. What Van Sant was really doing, pace Naremore, was not creating a simulacrum of Hitchcock, but creating a simulacrum of certain currently fashionable Hitchcocks-the formal architect, the enigmatic cameo (now recreated by Van Sant in heavy makeup), the museum piece, the Master of Suspense-by repressing other less fashionable Hitchcocks-the literal director, the antic inventor, the funhouse entertainer, the prophet of the '60s.

For this reason, it is possible to argue that Van Sant's film out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock-at least, the Hitchcocks it invokes. After all, how many times did the Master of Suspense say that suspense was superior to surprise? And what could be .a more dramatic substitution of suspense for surprise than signaling the audience broadly in advance that you were going to be reshooting the shower sequence forty years later-the same as before, only different? When you think about it, "I'm so scared" was an authentically postmodern response as appropriate to the speaker's generation as my disdain was to mine. The hint of moral disapprobation behind my analogy to the Van Gogh copy is simply a function of my Hitcholatry colliding with the auteurism that gave it birth. A less invidious comparison than a Van Gogh copyist, one that would more judiciously bridge the gap between "I'm so scared" and "What a jerk," might be to Andy Warhol's series of Campbell's soup cans, which redefined the conceptual field of the visual arts by appropriating and framing a mercantile image as if it were art and so forced patrons and museumgoers to ask why they were so sure it was not.

Of course many Hitchcockians think of Hitchcock's Psycho as art rather than merchandise to begin with; and in that thought we express the paradox of our own generational approach to cinema. Whatever we may think of Psycho forty years after the fact, it was certainly marketed as art-free entertainment in 1960-though it may have been, as Robert Kapsis has suggested, the last Hitchcock film to be so marketed. And anyone who argues along with Rothman that what makes Hitchcock's film superior to Van Sant's is thematic penetration and textual originality can do so only by falling back on equally fetishized auteurist notions of art whose widespread resurgence in contemporary film studies would surprise no one more than Rothman. It is less accurate to claim that Hitchcock has been ripped off by Pop Aesthetics than to acknowledge that Psycho itself is a groundbreaking example of Pop Art, with a psychotic killer standing in for a soup can.

Just as Warhol's soup cans are precertified as art by their frames and their display first in galleries and then in museums, Van Sant's Psycho is precertified as a Hitchcock film by both its ludicrously overdetermined textual markers and its publicity, all of which establish Hitchcock as the displaced auteur. In this regard, Van Sant's film is no different from A Perfect Murder, Andrew Davis's remake of Dial M for Murder, and Jeff Bleckner's made-for-TV Rear Window starring Christopher Reeve. The real star of all three remakes is Hitchcock, whose invocation-I had almost said whose participation-warrants the value of remakes which continue to define themselves by their distance from their originals. Such remakes can afford to do a better job of selling Hitchcock than of selling themselves because his potential for appreciation is so much greater than theirs, as Universal acknowledged in releasing Hitchcock's Psycho on DVD on the same day Van Sant's film opened in theaters.

Of course, the Van Sant Psycho is so compulsively bound to its master-text that it is completely risk-free for its audience, whereas the whole point of Hitchcock's Psycho, as Wood argues, is the way it invites an audience to stick their identificatory necks out-or rather, the way it used to invite audiences to stick their necks out, since Hitchcock's accession to classic status has surely robbed his film of the shock that was once its defining feature. In sum, just as watching Van Sant can never give us more than something like the experience of watching Hitchcock, neither can the experience of watching Hitchcock, because every reading and every viewing of Hitchcock's film is not only different from every other but is defined by those differences. Watching Psycho today, I always tell my students apologetically, doesn't give you its full impact, because you've been jaded by all those Kevin Williamson movies. (A generation ago, J would have said, "by all those William Castle movies.") But in assuming that the ideal time to watch Hitchcock's film was on opening night 1960,1 am fetishizing the shocking Hitchcock at the expense, for example, of the ironic Hitchcock, Hitchcock the serious artist, and of course Hitchcock the master who has earned his place in the college curriculum largely on the basis of a Psycho we can never experience again.

Van Sant's Psycho may give us Hitchcock without Hitchcock, but so does Hitchcock's Psycho, which is always forcing us to choose some Hitchcocks over others. For to the extent that Hitchcock's reputation solidifies itself into a genre, it both sanctifies his films as Hitchcock films and marks their distance from the originating power on which that reputation was first based and replaces it with a specifically generic power that is metonymic and ironic. Van Sant's homage to Hitchcock merely crystallizes and accelerates a process that had been going on for years before Van Sant's brainstorm: the historical revision of the films Hitchcock directed first into something called Hitchcock films, then into a career with a coherent curve of development that was its own value, and more recently into a corpus of classic texts to be deconstructed, disavowed, and otherwise fetishized as usual.

Hence Hitchcock continues to survive the demise of auteurism. Like the continuing saga of Mrs. Bates, his posthumous career marks a cheerfully ghoulish return of the repressed redefined and elevated by each unauthorized remake. Hitchcock's Rear Window, reviewers decided, wasn't nearly as corny or star-centered as the state-of-the-art TV remake, and Dial M for Murder, decidedly minor Hitchcock, was revealed as surprisingly tense and plausible compared to the preposterously cluttered, imprudently action-packed A Perfect Murder. Van Sant's Psycho burnishes its original in subtler ways. It heightens first the unrelenting irony of Hitchcock's film, revealed from the opening scene in lines like "Motels of this sort aren't interested in you when you check in" and "I'm tired of sweating for people who aren' t there," all of it unavailable to any audience in 1960 or thereafter who was surprised by the film's plot twists. Its naturalistic, generally laid-back performances emphasize by contrast the stylized performances in Hitchcock's film-especially the uncanny gravity of Janet Leigh, whose "calmness or poise," as Rothman calls it ("Some Thoughts" 29), throughout her half of the film endows her performance with an unnervingly deliberate intimation of ritual. In the process, it becomes an intertext which, by forcing progenitor texts like Robert Bloch's novel to share their privileged status in glossing Hitchcock's film, valorizes the film's textual energy by reminding us that it is always available to be reread.

Rereading, as Verevis points out, is tantamount to remaking, of course, and it should come as no surprise that I conclude by marking the conduct of film studies, from classroom teaching to centennial conferences, as a final locus of Hitchcock without Hitchcock: a master whose career is worthy of celebration by hundreds of participants who no longer subscribe to either the rhetorical view of entertainment that brought him to prominence or the romantic aesthetic of individual creation that insured his academic respectability. As surely as Gus Van Sant's Psycho, the progress of the Hitchcock industry, in and out of the academy, should remind us of the inescapable normality of fetishizing cinema and its masters every time we define a genre, a filmmaker, a masterpiece into the text we overvalue, and the countertext we use to define it by excluding. The very act of defining Hitchcock as Hitchcock simply marks the distance between the Hitchcock we choose to embrace and the Hitchcock we choose to reject, and so condemns us logically to the desire we all share with Gus Van Sant: Hitchcock without Hitchcock.

Notes

1 At least that's what I assumed at the time. It is possible that his remark had a quite different subtext because it was aimed at Hitchcock's film itself (which he may have been "watching," courtesy of Van Sant's mediation, for the first time, and preparing to find overvalued). I did not ask, and on the whole I am glad I did not, because the ambiguity is highly material to the argument this essay unfolds.

2 These distinctions are rehearsed at greater detail in Leitch, "Twice-Told" 45-50 and Cohen 127-30.

3 See Barr 81-97 for an account of the leading differences between the silent and sound versions of Blackmail.

4 The rigor and extent of this fetishism are best illuminated by an anecdote Joseph Stefano told at the Hitchcock Centennial Conference. When he approached Van Sant with the suggestion that the psychiatrist's long explanation be replaced by a scene between the psychiatrist and Norman/Mother, the director declined to make the change, adding sorrowfully, "It was a shame [you] didn't do it that way the first time" (Srebnick 25).

5 My personal favorite: the car Norman sinks in the bog behind the Bates Motel is no longer a Ford, but a Volvo. No wonder Marion now has to have $4000, rather than $700, for her trade-in-and no wonder Norman has trouble sinking this boat.

6 For the removal of this line from Hitchcock's film, see Rebello 45, 77.

7 So Martin has observed that Van Sant's project was doomed from the beginning by the fact that "films are not made shot by shot"; indeed, "only those who do not make films perceive them as existing shot by shot, i.e., in discrete shot units" (136, 135).

8 Within this context, however, Rothman and Naremore diverge, since Naremore briefly considers (6) the possibility that there might be such a thing as a Van Sant film-a possibility Schneider explores in greater depth-whereas for Rothman the prospect of Van Sant as author seems a contradiction in terms.

9 See Leitch, "Theory" 506-07 for a more extended account of this shift in audiences' experiences of Psycho.

Works Cited

Barr, Charles. English Hitchcock. Moffat: Cameron and Hollis, 1999.
Cohen, Paula Marantz. "The Artist Pays Homage." Hitchcock Annual 10 (2001-02): 127-32.
Gould, Timothy. Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.
Leitch, Thomas M. "For (Against) a Theory of Rereading." Modern Fiction Studies 33 (1987): 491-508.
__________. "Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and The Rhetoric of the Remake." Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Roos, ed. Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. Albany: SUNY P 2002.
Martin, Adrian. "Shot-by-Shot Follies." Hitchcock Annual 10 (2001-02): 133-39.
Menand, Louis. "Novels We Love." New Yorker 74 (3 Aug. 1998): 3-4.
Naremore, James. "Remaking Psycho." Hitchcock Annual 8 (1999-2000): 3-12.
Rebello, Stephen. Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.
Rothman, William. Hitchcock-The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
__________. "Some Thoughts on Hitchcock's Authorship." Richard Alien and S. Ishii Gonzales, eds. Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays. London: BFI, 1999.
Schneider, Steven Jay. "Van Sant the Provoca(u)teur." Hitchcock Annual 10 (2001-02): 140-48.
Srebnick, Walter, ed. "Working with Hitch: A Screenwriter's Forum with Evan Hunter, Arthur Laurents, and Joseph Stefano." Hitchcock Annual 10 (2001-02): 1-37.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon, 1967.
Verevis, Constantine. "Psycho (Redux)." Hitchcock Annual 10 (2001-02): 155-58.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films Revisited. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware

"Hitchcock Without Hitchcock". Literature Film Quarterly. 2003.
FindArticles.com. 24 Apr. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200301/ai_n9219387

Copyright Literature/Film Quarterly 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved