The end of a decaying machine. Stills from Psycho

Hitchcock, the split screen and the immanent beyond.

Still from Psycho (1960) featuring Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates.

Lets consider the famous quote from Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in the film Psycho (1960) ‘we’re all in our private traps clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out, we scratch and claw but only at the air, only at each other. And for all of it we can never budge an inch’. What this statement communicates is a feeling of being immobile, passive, suspended, possibly at the mercy of some unknowable higher being. Like insects within a jam jar belonging to a child with a macabre interest in our fate.

Through his disruption of the continuity that regulates narrative cinema, and through his innovations within the techniques of filmmaking; Hitchcock reminds us that he is in control of this world we have entered and that the only rules and laws are his rules and laws, we are reminded that he is the Master, and we the suspended slaves, caught within his intricately crafted bonds, passive to the mercy of his arbitrary desires.

He represents then a force beyond the knowable world. A menace, a disturbance.      

 It is Hitchcock’s intention to unsettle and captivate both his audience and character’s through a suggestion of some disturbance from the beyond, this beyond is realized as the unconscious in the film Psycho, Nature in the film the Birds, and perhaps death in the film Vertigo. Yet it is also Hitchcock himself  who represents this beyond to film goers, since he represents himself as some Macabre Master and creator, pulling the strings behind the scenes.    

The beyond, in Hitchcock’s universe could perhaps be compared to a Platonist view of the beyond, whereby the beyond is something finite, beyond or above our means of perception, yet it is that which governs and locates our means of understanding and perception.

Continuing to loosely follow the narrative of Psycho then lets come to one of the most famous of all scenes in Hitchcock and in Cinema.

The shower scene in Psycho is so well known that it hardly seems worth going into a great discussion of it, to briefly summarize it’s significance as part of my research; I will say that it explores the body, the body as a concept or maybe even a hypothesis, perhaps drawing a parallel between the Filmic construct as a body, a body of segments that are both connected and yet dissected and disjointed by the overall perceptive experience, highlighted in this case through the cut. In the shower scene the body and the machine of cinema become entangled, and become restricted and malfunction as they get caught up in each other.     

Lets consider this shower montage in relation to the preceding montage that we examined earlier ( the driving sequence which brought Marion to the Bates Motel), we can in these terms draw a parallel between these two montages, both representing a drive of sorts if we identify Norman’s or perhaps our own sex drive as fueling the shower scene, Lets then summarize these two montage sequences collectively as being a deregulation or deconstruction of order, just as the driving montage serves to establish a mechanical progression, a vehicle through time/space and the subsequent collapse or malfunction of that vehicle as it is overpowered by the totality of nature, so too does the shower montage establish a body of segments that attempt to resist a unified location, a body of segments that become disrupted, misplaced through the mechanized cutting, a body suspended, dismembered and no where. A body fueled by desire and engaged in a futile struggle against nature, against totality, against suspension and against death.

Just as nature and the weather succeed in deregulating the driving montage and overpowering our assertion over reality by forcing us into an impotent suspended state, it is Marion’s death that interrupts the stabbing montage, and again forces us into an impotent suspended state.  There is one shot which is born from this montage about stabbing, cutting and splicing the body that explicitly illustrates this position.

 

The montage concludes with this final shot of Marion as she is dying of the stab wounds inflicted on her body, I see this shot as an address to the viewer, an effort to challenge the frame, and the restricted, limited, empirical order that is supposed and as I will later explain denied through the process of framing, this reaching into the beyond is then a means of addressing that beyond, beyond the body, beyond the immediate, beyond the frame. Is Marion trying to pull us into the nightmare world that she occupies or is she trying to pull herself out of it? Again I will refer to Norman’s famous quote since it is as if Marion is trying to pull herself out of her own private trap, which after the stabbing montage has been indentified as the frame. Perhaps our position as suspended, disengaged, impotent, witnesses, is our own trap from which Marion is trying to pull us. 

In any case the result is an exposition of a third place that I have already discussed in my study of the driving montage, a third place that exists somewhere between us as viewers and the frame it’s self.

Lets then use a seemingly paradoxical expression to define this third place, that being the immanent beyond, I see it as being a desire to explore this sense of an immanent beyond that motivates many contemporary directors to appropriate a ‘split screen’ device within their films, what emerges when; two screens are situated parallel to each other within a larger screen, is that a void appears in the gap between the two screens, a non-place is created, a place that is real yet is no-where, a place that both belongs to the screen itself and yet is beyond it also.

This split in the screen represents a world of unknowable detail beyond our spectrum of understanding.     

A point I will return to later.

Psycho Driving Montage

This is one of my favourite scenes amoung Hitchcock’s films and a big influence on my own work (see ‘Waterloo Sunset’ project). So have written a short study of the scene. This study might be extended to form part of my essay about Split Screen Cinema and screens within screens, in which case I will start to consider the relationship between the windscreen of Marion’s car and the Cinema screen.

The Scene which leads Marion into the Bates motel, uses montage to represent Marion’s passage through time and space, while as viewers we simultaneously travel through Marion’s metal state.  Point of view shots depicting Marion driving  motorways are intercut with close ups of Marion’s face, while through the sound track we hear an imaginary testimony from several male authority figures, starting with a traffic cop and a used car sales man that Marion has encountered on her travels and finally Marion’s employer and his business associate from which Marion has stolen 40,000 dollars. These voices in Marion’s head expose both Marion’s paranoid mental state and also give us some background information on her position. The sound montage and Marion’s journey concludes with a darker more violent remark from Mr Cassady( the sleazy businessman who’s deposit Marion has stolen) ‘Well I ain’t about to kiss of 40,000 dollars I’ll get it back and if any of it’s missing I’ll replace it with her fine, soft flesh’.

It has turned from day to night, it is pouring with rain and there is little visibility through the windscreen, we just see the lights of oncoming traffic and the poor driving conditions force Marion of the main road, she pulls into the Bates Motel. Thus Marion stops driving and becomes passive and submissive to her environment.

It is important to remember that these voices are presented as Marion’s imagining of the kind of thing these people might be saying about her, rather than as being words actually spoken; the sound montage exists inside Marion’s head, and we as audience are then provided information about a dimension both belonging to and removed and isolated from the overall reality presented by the films narrative.

A kind of alternative reality thus emerges that occupies a privileged space between the occurrences of the film, our engagement with the character of Marion and our unique position as passive spectators. 

This last remark differs from the rest of the voices we have heard which were incidental and matter of fact in their tone, the fierce weather and the aggressive rush of oncoming traffic function as a kind of impressionistic landscape communicating Marion’s psychological disquiet while the functional screen of the Cinema and Marion’s car, begin to lose their illustrative qualities and start to take on a more expressionist charechter.  

What is interesting about the remark from Mr Cassady is that it makes most explicit the connection between Money, Power, Violence, and Sex, and how these are the real factors which constitute the motivational, ‘driving’ complexes of our Character and are simultaneously the themes which keep us engaged as viewers and are thus fueling the journey upon which we are collectively embarked.

Thus during this scene the being of Marion dissolves into the greater cosmos of our viewing experience, as the entity of Marion becomes forced of the road by the weather, she in turn becomes over- powered by her unconscious; both Marion’s journey and our journey through this narrative suddenly become overpowered; overpowered by elements beyond our control, the forces of the world become explicit and Nature, Money, Sex, Gender all emerge from this scene and force us of the road of civilization into a scary, irrational, nightmare, primordial world, The Bates Motel. The montage illustrating a mechanized, passage of time and movement thus malfunctions, we are then suspended, though time has not stopped, it has in fact caught up with us, we are no longer in transit through time, we are firmly attached to it, ruled or governed by it once again, and so as the forces of nature overpower our mechanical, empirical assertion over it we become suspended, impotent and passive.