Book: Understanding contemporary art
Only the first twenty-six minutes: Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960]
Marion Crane and her madness
I came to Psycho very late in the day. It had been around for decades, and all my arty friends had seen it as teenagers. It was one of those you ‘have-to-have-seen’ cultural events that gave me the vague feeling other people knew something I didn’t. And as this was long before the days of video and DVD I really only knew the title, and perhaps that Hitchcock was the director. And as often happened before video, Psycho had all but disappeared from screenings, hardly ever turning up on TV or in arthouses. As far as I know, it never graced the Scala in King’s Cross— the go-to repertory cinema I visited more or less every week — in the 1980s and 1990s. And as I knew nothing of the plot, nor any of the actors — I doubt I’d even heard about the shower scene — I was full of expectation when my time finally came.
A Saturday midnight movie on TV, with Sunday as a cushion. The rest of the house in darkness. Do your worst, I said to myself to Hitchcock, hoping for him to throw me off a narrative cliff.
I well remember snatches of my initial response, and even after repeated later viewings — and a close study of the remastered DVD — I still find myself watching one film…
