Motel
Jonathan Romney
There have been a few changes round the homestead. There’s a new neon sign out front, and the poky old fruit cellar has been refurbished as a place where you could get down to some serious taxidermy. They’ve even replaced the shower curtain in Cabin 1. Otherwise, life is much as it always was down at the Bates Motel. In fact, it’s uncanny how similar everything is.
A remake of Psycho sounds like the most futile gesture imaginable – especially coming from Gus van Sant, a once nonconformist director who, with Good Will Hunting, seemed to have capitulated to mainstream values. Two ropey Eighties sequels had already shown that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 original had no need of footnotes. Couldn’t Norman Bates and his dear old mouldering Ma be left in peace?
But Van Sant proposes something stranger than just a remake – this is Psycho constructed shot by shot (bar a few telling lapses) from Joseph Stefano’s original script, even using Bernard Herrmann’s original score. This is Psycho restaged, as a theatre director would restage Hamlet – the difference being that Van Sant duplicates not just the dialogue, but also the original moves.
The whole idea may sound cynical and pointless. But in view of Van Sant’s proven eccentricity, the key word is “gratuitous”, not “pointless” – this Psycho qualifies at the very least as a flamboyantly odd gesture that subverts all Hollywood wisdom about audience expectation.
The key technical innovations are a brilliantly textured, nerve-racking sound design, and the conversion from black-and-white into colour. It’s amazing how much colour alone changes the tenor of the story. The vibrant wardrobes speak volumes. Where Janet Leigh’s bra came in virginal white or femme fatale black, Anne Heche’s is fiery orange. That immediately changes our understanding of Marion, far more sexually confident now than Leigh’s schoolmarm gone bad. This Marion is clearly interested in her beau Sam (Viggo Mortensen’s predatory redneck) for sex and adventure, not marriage and a dry-goods store.
Vince Vaughn’s Norman is less successful. Cast against the Anthony Perkins type as a beefy hick with a camp giggle, he remains blank and mechanical. Where Perkins implied a repressed gayness that was was part of the original film’s great unspoken, this Norman is a good ol’ momma’s boy who thinks he’s straight but is photographed like a gay pin-up.
The really striking changes come when the dialogue is replayed word for word. A reference to Las Vegas – “playground of the world” – has far tackier cultural resonance than it did in 1960. Little supporting parts benefit – James Le Gros makes the car dealer role, once jovially old-world, become seedy and cynical using exactly the same salesman’s patter, tarnished by decades of use. The “dialogue” between Norman and Mrs Bates sounds more than ever like a creaky amateur dramatics script – precisely what it is.
This Psycho is no exercise in genre back-to-basics, but an exploration of repetition and the uncanny, and a demonstration of how our attitudes have changed – to cinema, violence, sexuality, madness and normality. Somehow, Van Sant has managed to spin a big-budget studio project into a piece of conceptual art, a provocative inquiry into the nature of cinematic originality. It’s not the full-on “queer Psycho” that Van Sant fans predicted, but it is an extraordianry drag act.
Psycho opens in South Africa at the end of February