An appreciation of Psycho (1998)
In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, Borges details the attempt by an eccentric French writer to ‘recreate’ Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Menard sets out not merely to translate the original work into French, nor to simply copy the text. Instead he seeks a wholesale recreation, line by line, word by word, in the original 17th century Spanish.
To achieve this, he seeks to live the life that Cervantes would have lived in the 17th century. This requires him to “Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918 - be Miguel de Cervantes.”
The narrator of the tale tells us that Menard partially achieves his goal. Recreating fragments of the original work. Of course, Borges also plays an unreliable narrator that casts much of the tale of Menard in a light that makes the reader question whether we should put any faith in Menard’s reports of achieving his aim (albeit partially). The short story takes the form of a review that dissects the text produced by Menard and that of the original work (they are the same thing).
The short story is a delight and one of those masterful pieces that Borges seemed to effortlessly crank out. It is also one of the formative texts in de-centering the role of the author in the meaning and interpretation of a text.
It is of course fiction as to attempt such a quest would be an absurd impossibility.
Enter Gus Van Sant.
Fresh from the unexpected (and quite sizeable) success of Good Will Hunting, Van Sant approached Universal with the pitch of remaking Psycho (1960). Not just a remake mind you, a shot for shot remake. Perplexed by the pitch, they still agreed to option it (which is hardly surprising, Good Will Hunting had made $225m on a budget of $10m - most studios don’t try to get in the way when a filmmaker has demonstrated that sort of return).
While it is relatively simple to make a straight copy of a novel (the lazy can simply crtl-c, ctrl-v and be done, those that want a workout can type as they read the original text), the same is decidedly not true of filmmaking.
Most remakes use the original as a source. It is, to an extent, simply another form of adaptation, albeit to the same medium. Sometimes that works (Ocean’s 11), sometimes it does not (The Departed). Regardless of the outcome, few seek to remake something shot for shot.
Yet, here was Van Sant, an Oscar nominated filmmaker proposing to do just that.
As a side note, there is something humorous that Van Sant had an easier time having his Psycho greenlit than Hitchcock did.
Hitchcock met staunch resistance from the studio when he approached them to make his Psycho. It was only through offering to self finance the film, using a significantly reduced budget, that he was able to secure agreement from Paramount to distribute the film (for the sharp eyed, Universal now owns the rights after Paramount sold them).
"There were a couple of scenes we just couldn't get it right. We just couldn't see how Hitchcock did the blocking, where people were supposed to be standing in relation to the camera. So all we could do was loosely base them on the original"
- Gus Vant Sant
It is of course nearly impossible to recreate a film shot for shot. As per Van Sant’s quote above, it is not enough to understand a shot that the original director setup. One would need to have been on set to see how it was blocked, how it was lit, and what discussions were being had that lead to the shot being realised.
Years ago I came across a quote that people were forever unable to photographs taken by Ansell Adams. They could place their camera in the same place at the same time of day at the same time of year and the resulting photograph would differ, even if slightly.
There are simply too many variables at play, particularly when it comes to making a film.
Not the least of which are the actors. There may come a time when the majority of actors are virtual constructs which can be manipulated in such a way as to achieve fidelity in a situation like this. We do not live such a time yet, however.
Even if Vince Vaughan and Anne Heche studied the performances of Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in exhaustive detail they would still end up delivering a different performance. And even if every single shot was the identical between the Psychos, this would remain true - resulting in different films.
Perhaps most difficult to recreate would be the famous shower scene. While most would be able to give you a rundown of the scene, not many could actually tell you the actual number of shots. Including, none other than Hitchcock, who at various points said that the sequence contains 70 or 78 shots. Critical analysis of the scene suggests that it is closer to 60 and even then their is divergence on the precise number.
How then to recreate a scene that, despite its fame, appears to stretch and contract depending on the viewer.
The film was met with widespread rejection. Roger Ebert noted that the film was “pointless”, a sentiment echoed by most critics. Audiences similarly were dismissive.
I have little love from Van Sant’s Psycho. There is a lack of restraint that was commonplace in the late 90s cinema (and that Hitchcock would never have been allowed if he wished the film to see release) that I find exhausting. 25 years later, cinema is in a different place and I suspect that a shot for shot remake (not that it would happen) would show a restraint similar to that of the original.
The performances are interesting but undertaken by a cast that generally (Julianne Moore and William H Macy, aside) are pushing at the limits of their craft and not always succeeding.
The moments where the film diverges from, and is additive to, the original, I find uninteresting. The more successful sequences are where the film most closely recreates the original.
However, I don’t believe that makes the film pointless or without merit, for numerous reasons.
First, I long for a day when Hollywood would take a risk like this. 25 years after the release of Psycho (1998), we are awash in franchise pictures that have little to say beyond whispers that “the next movie will explain everything.” Or, legacyquels that bank on us being nostalgic for a franchise that ended only a decade or so ago.
Second, I have to applaud the shear audacity of the experiment. I suspect that Soderbergh would have loved to convince a studio to pony up for an experiment like this. To actually take the step to ape Menard and attempt a recreation of the source material rather than just remixing an existing property for its parts. I am stilled stunned that Van Sant was given the go ahead to do something like this.
“Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote” suggests that it is the reader that brings meaning to a work. The context of the author will impact the work, as a necessity, but is the interpretation of the reader that infuses the work with meaning (see the delightful sequence where Borges puts side by side a passage from the original and the same passage from Menard’s text, and then ruminates on how Menard’s is the superior of the two and discusses the meaning that is captured within).
In that light, the reaction to Psycho (1998) is fascinating. Perhaps it was obvious. And perhaps the fact that presented with 2 Psychos, one is clearly superior. Given that critics are immersed in film in a way that audiences generally aren’t, Ebert’s comments (and the chorus of agreement) were no surprise - and as it was in a time where critics were gatekeepers for cultural items (rather than today where the audience will decry any critic that disagrees with them), the audience following the path of the critics is similarly unsurprising.
There is an element of shock at play here. “Why?” was a constant refrain upon its arrival. “Why is this something that was done or that we wanted?”
I myself had a similar response at the time (though that is part of a larger stance that I have when it comes to remakes regardless of how slavish they are to the original work).
As time has passed though, there is a chance to reassess the film as an object in its own right. That has not lead to the quality of the film increasing (those performances, while interesting, are not as strong as they need to be, and I don’t need to see Anne Heche’s bum as part of the shower scene).
Instead it allows for a decoupling from the initial reaction to give space to examine the film on its own merits. In doing so, we can see the film as a part of Van Sant’s filmography. It is often seen as the outlier in his work, however that’s not really true. While the film may not be a masterpiece, it is definitely an arthouse film in its experimental nature. Good Will Hunting probably the outlier across his career and his next step wasn’t to try and piss on Hitchcock’s grave but instead to move back to the arthouse track he has spent most of his career on.
I’m not going to tell you that you need to rush out and watch Psycho (1998). I’m not going to tell you that it’s a misremembered classic. But I will tell you that it is a film that can be engaged as a singular piece of filmmaking. That we should be lucky if we get something like it again.
That, maybe, just possibly, that if we react in shock to the initial thought of the existence of the film that we are proving the point of Menard and his narrator.