11. A Doubly Possessed Psycho
Nov 7, 2023
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TV Shows
In 1998, Gus Van Sant did a shot-by-shot a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960). In a podcast interview with Marc Maron on July 16, 2018 (WTF Episode 933), and in response to the latter's, "Obviously, I can't go through every movie that I want to, but I need to ask this pressing question, to remake 'Psycho' frame-by-frame: That's an obsessive undertaking?" "Yeah. There's a whole reason behind it.... During the 90s, the joke about the executives was that they would rather make a sequel than they would an original piece, because there was less risk.... When I did 'Drugstore Cowboy', I was all of a sudden meeting with the heads of studios because they knew that actors would work with me.... During one of the meetings, Casey Silver at Universal brought in all of his vice presidents, and one guy was head of the library, and he said, 'In the library, we have old films that you could remake, we have scripts that haven't been made yet that you could make,' and it just reminded me of that thing that they wanted to do, which is remake something. And I said, 'What you guys haven't done is try to take a hit and remake it exactly. Rather than remake it and put a new spin on it, just remake it for real,' because I'd never seen that done yet, as an experiment. The whole thing seemed experimental to me anyway, so I thought why not, and they laughed-they thought it was silly, ridiculous, absurd-and they left. They said, 'We won't be doing that.' Every time I would meet with Casey I would bring it up, and I locked in on 'Psycho'; I'm not sure why 'Psycho', but it just seemed like the movie that would work the best. I would bring it up again and they would laugh again. And then later when we did 'Good Will Hunting' and it did really well at the box office-it also got nominated for nine Oscars or something ... my agent was saying, 'Universal really wants to do deal with you, have you got anything for them?' And I was like, 'Universal, Universal ... oh yeah, tell them "Psycho", frame-by-frame, new cast, in color, and that's the idea,' and then my agent calls back and says, 'They think that's fantastic.' So, all of a sudden, they were in.... The idea was whether or not you could actually remake something and it would repeat the box office.... It obviously didn't work." I didn't expect that he would indicate that one of the reasons to do the remake was that "the whole thing seemed experimental to me anyway, so I thought why not," the worst justification for making something (Deleuze: "Philosophy ... consists in creating or inventing concepts.... Of course, you don't just say one day, 'Hey, I am going to invent this concept,' no more than a painter says, 'Hey, I'm going to make a painting like this.' There has to be a necessity, in philosophy and elsewhere, just as a filmmaker doesn't just say, 'Hey, I'm going to make this film!' There has to be a necessity, otherwise there is nothing at all. [A creator is not a preacher working for the fun of it. A creator only does what he or she absolutely needs to do]"); I would have expected that he would rather answer: "I did the film for the sake of introducing two images that appear to flash through Arbogast's mind as he falls down the stairs after being stabbed by Norman while the latter is possessed by his dead mother: a half-naked woman with shades over her eyes in some featureless misty environment and a calf seen from the windshield of a car heading in its direction in another rainy, foggy landscape." I myself remade Gus Van Sant's remake of Hitchcock's film to make use of an exquisite opportunity that was missed by Gus Van Sant's remake. In my remake, "A Doubly Possessed Psycho", which is not experimental but conceptual, the dead mother's voice of Hitchcock's "Psycho" does not simply haunt her son, Norman, indeed possess him; it also haunts Gus Van Sant's remake of Hitchcock' "Psycho", replacing the voice of the mother in that remake, claiming the body of Norman across films, presenting another power of the acousmatic voice, one that Michel Chion did not address not only in the initial, French edition of his book "La voix au cinema", 1982, but even in the preface to the English translation of his book, "The Voice in Cinema", published in 1999. The voice of Norman's dead mother will possess her son Norman wherever he goes, even across films, into another film. Instead of a double bill, it would be most fitting to curate a screening of the three feature films.
