Marion / Marion

I’ll blame Twin Peaks for this. I’ve had doubles on my brain for months now, but at least I’ve managed to make something of it.

Also, I have a bold declaration: I actually like the 1998 remake of Psycho. I don’t think it was necessary, exactly, because the original was no less great in 1998 than it was in 1960, but the Gus Van Sant version makes sense, thematically speaking.

Twin Peaks may rack up more lookalikes and opposites just by virtue of having a greater overall runtime, but Psycho packs more of them in, scene for scene. It’s there even in the Saul Bass opening credits: the screen gets slashed by horizontal lines and then by vertical ones. And that horizontal-vertical contrast continues throughout the movie, from the opening scene, with Marion (Janet Leigh) in bed and Sam (John Gavin) standing next to her, to the layout of the Bates property—a multistory house that towers over a lateral sprawl of a hotel. You could say it’s there in Marion’s murder itself. Stabbing a person is, in a sense, a very violent intersection of perpendicular elements.

This mix of opposites extends to the movie’s core four characters, I’ve always thought. After Marion dies midway through the film, she gets replaced by her sister, Lila (Vera Miles), who looks like Marion but seems more sensible. We get the sense that Marion is impulsive and flighty, and that the theft of the money that propels the plot is maybe just a spur-of-the-moment decision she made. Lila, by contrast, seems conservative — more mother than child, though I realize that’s a weird way to describe it in this context. Sam and Norman look alike too, but whereas Sam is smooth, Norman is twitchy. Both characters are driven to action by a sexual attraction to Marion; Sam follows her from Phoenix to the dusty backroads of California, and Norman murders her. Killing Marion off is the big surprise, but it’s also surprising that the characters we learn most about first, Marion and Norman, turn out to be the “wrong” versions of the “straighter” Lila and Sam.

In a similar way, I’ve always thought of the Gus Van Sant version as a weird twin to the Alfred Hitchcock version. The variations are subtle. If Janet Leigh’s Marion was flighty, she was also oddly grave in the way she seemed to process her crime. The Anne Heche Marion seems even further out, and watching her movie, I get a sense that she may get a thrill out of the whole thing that I don’t get when I watch the original. Viggo Mortensen’s Sam seems seedier, though that could just be his clothes. But when he interacts with the Julianne Moore Lila later in the film, I feel like he has designs for her even before they know Marion is dead. (I know, I know—neither Lila made the cut for this, which is too bad, because I love the character. And then in Psycho 2, poor Vera Miles gets all dressed up to play Lila again and ends up getting stabbed in the mouth. For what it’s worth, she did end up marrying Sam.) Finally, whereas a first-time viewer of the original might not immediately peg Anthony Perkins’ Norman as the person named in the title, Vince Vaughn plays the character as creepier from the get-go. (He masturbates while watching Marion in the shower; Norman does not.) And that difference in characterization makes sense; anyone who watched the remake already knew who Norman Bates was, but also it’s Vince Vaughn.

I don’t remember exactly when I got the idea to make this video, but at some point I just became charmed with the idea of thinking about the remake as an alternate version of the events, where things play out slightly differently, but the variation just isn’t enough for the characters to break out of the roles they’re assigned. And yeah, the movies do play differently. The 1998 Psycho may have been billed as a shot-for-shot remake, but Van Sant doesn’t adhere to that too strictly, even beyond allowances for the change in time period. Scenes are shot differently. Some run longer. And many times I had to crop a shot or change the tempo to make the two versions look like they were mirroring each other more than they actually were.

In the end, however, all that is not enough to save poor Marion (either version) from getting into that motel shower at the end. And no, I didn’t bother to show that in this video. Everyone has seen that a million times. I was more interested in looking at Marion while she’s still alive.

This is my third video project. “Rewind” was long and full of VHS static. “All the Colors of the Night” was shorter, more focused and less with all the distortion. This one is only seven minutes long and has no VHS distortion. I didn’t even mess with the color on this one.

I have big, weird plans for what I want to do next.

The Standout Passage from Robert Bloch’s Psycho II

One summer, I took a class in horror movies. I realize now that this decision resulted from a desire to live out the sitcomish notion of a throwaway college elective such as Intermediate Thumb Wrestling or Robert Loggia Appreciation. Of course, it backfired, and the class turned out to be terrible. All I could take away from the experience was the professor’s analysis of the scene in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare were Heather Langenkamp’s husband gets stabbed by Freddy Krueger’s claw: “metaphoric castration by the disembodied hand of infantile masturbation,” and yes, that’s an exact quote (I wrote it down) and no, I am not making that up. Well, I took away that and Psycho II.

Not that we watched Psycho II or even the orginal Psycho, I don’t think, but the class reader — which was thick, rest assured — included a chapter from the book Psycho II, the sequel that the original book’s author, Robert Bloch, published shortly before the release of the cinematic Psycho II. The two sequels, however, aren’t related: Bloch published his sequel after Universal rejected his story as a basis for the movie. In retrospect, Universal made the right call. Whereas the movie Psycho II focuses on Norman Bates returning to his hometown upon his release from the loony bin, the book Psycho II ditches Norman almost entirely. The story opens rather spectacularly, with him murdering two nuns and then escaping from a mental institution, but he then lurks in the shadows for most of the book, with the action focusing instead on his doctor and the cast and crew of a Hollywood film based on the murder of Mary Crane. (Yeah, it’s Mary, not Marion, as the character was named when Janet Leigh played her in the movie. Maybe they thought naming the victim “Mary” was too obvious a hint about Norman’s mommy issues?)

Once the story arrives in Los Angeles, however, it just meanders about, like a tourist trying to find where all the rich, famous people hang out on Hollywood Boulevard. The only commonality it has with the movie Psycho II, now that I think about it, is its treatment of Marion’s sister, the far more sensible Lila. In the book, Lila marries Marion’s boyfriend, Sam Loomis, and the two get stabbed to death in the hardware store they own. In the movie, Lila still married Sam, even though he doesn’t appear, and she dies from getting stabbed in the mouth in such a horrendous fashion that you actually feel bad for Vera Miles, who got her hair done and who put on her best dress suit to make this silly sequel and now look how they treat me.

But Vera Miles’s Lila is important, because she exemplifies a pronounced, recurrent theme though all the Psycho manifestations: twins, doubles, and good/bad twists on the same character. (By the way, is there a term that means “double but with a significant difference that makes the double an opposite as well”? Because there should be.) I mentioned before, Lila works as a more composed, rational version of Marion, and that’s why Lila is the Crane sister who survives the first Psycho, whereas Marion is the flighty twit whose impulse decisions take her to the Bates motel. If you look at Norman and Marion as the central characters of the first half of Psycho, Sam and Lila could be viewed as the flipside pair. In the film, they even look like Norman and Marion, respectively.

These sets abound in the later Psycho movies — and hell, even the movie itself got a “bad twin” in the form of the Gus Van Sant remake — and in the book Psycho II. However, the strangest instance of them happens in the very passage that was included in my horror movies class reader. It’s brief, but memorable, mostly because it’s the gayest thing ever, and it hits out of nowhere, and trying to imagine how it fit into the overall novel’s plot actually prompted me to buy a copy of the book and see for myself. The passage focuses on Paul Morgan, the actor playing Norman Bates in the movie-within-the-book. (I should point out that the movie being made is titled Crazy Lady, which… is a choice that Robert Bloch made for some reason.) A minor character, Paul struggles with the role because he’s convinced he needs to play Norman as gay even though that’s not really Norman’s deal.

The following passage appears near the end of the book, in a series of check-ins with characters connected to the movie and contemplating their existence in Hollywood:

“This really is a picnic,” Paul Morgan said. He gestured toward the nude males crowding behind him at the dressing table’s three-paneled mirror. “I mean, look at all those buns and weenies!”

Robert Redford giggled. “Speak for yourself, dearie. Whenever I see naked bodies, it just reminds me that God didn’t know very much about anatomy.”

“Let’s not be blasphemous.” John Travolta peered at his image intently, teasing his eyelashes. “Why are you always putting down religion?”

“Because my grandmother was raped by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t your grandfather?”

Everybody let out a shriek except Clint Eastwood. He glanced up from the chair in the corner, where he sat waxing his legs. “You’re a fine one to talk — you and your group-gropes.

Sylvester Stallone elbowed his way to the mirror, pursing his mouth as he applied lipstick. “Personally, I detest the action at orgies. It’s like opening a dozen beautifully wrapped Christmas packages and finding them all empty.”

“But isn’t that what we’re doing here?” Robert Redford asked. “We’re peddling illusions not just the bare necessities.”

Clint Eastwood rose. “It’s getting late. You’d better stuff your bare necessities into your jeans and get downstairs before Queenie throws a snit fit.”

Burt Reynolds tossed his powder puff into a tray on the dressing-room table. “Oh my God, I forgot! That party of Iranians is coming in again tonight.”

“Not again!” John Travolta made a face. “Iranians suck.”

“Doesn’t everybody?” asked Paul Morgan.

There was a hoot, and Clint Eastwood moved beside him, nodding appreciatively. “That’s telling them, hon. Don’t pay attention to what they say. I know it’s your first time here, but there’s nothing to get uptight about. Just remember, Queenie’s here to protect you.”

Paul nodded, reaching for his Jordaches and peek-a-boo blouse.

Yes, it’s a group of bad twins — celeb lookalikes working as prostitutes. You find out in the next paragraph that it truly is Paul Morgan posing as a Paul Morgan-looking rent boy, and he’s ended up in a gay brothel because he’s a method actor to the point that he’s willing to let a party of randy Iranians enter him. In no other section of the book does Bloch exude such a campy sensibility, and even more strangely, the scene concludes with Paul heading down to meet the clientele, at which point he’s never mentioned again.

So how does it fit into the plot of Psycho II, after all these years? It doesn’t, it turns out, even if it works thematically with the overall series. It’s just the section in Psycho II that makes you say, “Well, that was certainly something.” And you wonder if you’ll ever be able to work the phrase “his Jordaches and peek-a-boo blouse” into your own fiction.

In case you’ve made it this far, you can read a defense of the Psycho remake that I wrote back in 2003, when I was not even twenty-one. I don’t completely get where I was coming from back then, but I will maintain that there’s more going on in that movie, and people might see it if they could overlook the sacrilegious nature of its existence.