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.

An attempt to summarise the Surrealist perspective

The Lovers by Rene Magrette

The need for sincerity in literary expression, felt strongly in France during the first twenty years of the century, is really the belief that the conscious states of mans being are not sufficient to explain him to himself and to others. His subconscious contains a larger and especially a more authentic or accurate part of his being. It was found that our conscious speech and our daily actions are usually in contradiction with our true selves and our deeper desires. The neat patterns of Human behavior, set forth by the realists, and which our lives seem to follow, were found to be patterns formed by social forces rather than by our desires or temperaments or inner psychological selves. This discovery or conviction that we are more sincerely revealed in our dreams and in our purely instinctive actions than in our daily exterior habits of behavior (tea drinking or cocktailing etc) is of course basic to surrealism. It is admirably summarized in a sentence of Andre Gide’s autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, when he speaks of the difficulty of our knowing the real motivation of any of our actions. ‘le motif secret de nos actes nous echappe’ pg 15 Age of Surrealism Wallace Fowle, Bloomington a London, Indiana University Press, fourth printing 1966

Martin Arnold

Martin Arnold uses repetition as a device to convey multiple ideas and meanings across his work.Some of his pieces are driven by a desire to interrogate the construct and to challenge the grammar and mechanics of Hollywood film making. Others (such as the example here) seem to function as a means of bringing the subtext and the unconscious driving forces behind the situations and narratives in to the foreground. Generally however both of these interests are present and interrelated in the work of Martin Arnold.

His work is fundamentally a commentary on the mechanisation of urban living, and also an exploration of domestic space and the political/sexual tensions that charge and shape the material environment and of interpersonal relations within the ‘family unit’.

His work is of relevance to my present studies because of my interest in ‘cut and paste’ and ‘feedback’ .

‘Consider Pièce Touchée: a fifteen-minute recollection
of eighteen seconds; a man who appears as a father
(a kind of symbolic patriarch), struggles to pass
through a door, enter a living room, and kiss the assumed
mother. It is a child’s view, a primal movie scene
and an umbilicus to the imaginary. The insignificance
of the view is undermined by its fixation. The seemingly
innocent act that forms the nucleus of the scene-a
kiss-is reworked in the spectator’s imaginary into a
series of violent gestures and assaults.
Regarding the displacement of the scene from its
larger context or flow, Arnold confesses his indulgence
in the sampled fragment or excerpt. Passing the original
material of The Human Jungle through a computerdriven
analytic projector that could both decrease and
accelerate the time of projection, Arnold became fixed
on individual moments within the film. “At a projection
speed of four frames per second the event was
thrilling; every minimal movement was transformed into
a small concussion.”26 Those concussions, or traumas,
are a feature of Arnold’s own memories of a childhood
immersed in Hollywood: “In my childhood,” he writes,
“Hollywood’s love and crime stories instilled in me
great expectations of adulthood. I absolutely wanted to
be a part of that exciting world. When I grew up, I was tremendously disappointed.”.’

Akira M. Lippit
Martin Arnold«s Memory Machine. In: Afterimage.
The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. Vol 24 No.6, Rochester, NY 1997, S. 8 – 10

This exert refers to the significance of memory within the work Pièce Touchée (embedded within this post)

Why I think this work has been compared to a memory process is because of the way that time and space are transfigured by memory, in perhaps a similar to way to how the preexisting footage is re-worked by Arnolds’ process’s which re-member the footage.

The result is a kind of implosion, the impressions embed themselves in the present and refuse to filter through into memory, and a kind of feedback ensues whereby the past and the present become entangled and the machine that regulates experience gets jammed. I find it quite useful to think of this work as a kind cinematic feedback, based on the principle of sonic feedback, whereby a loop is created between input and output. In the films of Martin Arnold a similar kind of loop is created between sensation and memory.

It is easy to contextualize this kind of repatitious implosive style of work as being charechterisitc of an advanced capitalist, postmodern culture, in a situation whereby the media mirrors life and life mirrors the media and a situation similar to sonic feedback has accured. However this work also has in it’s essence a methodology that is shared with much medidative and trancendental rituals and practices that follow a similar mechanism based on repatition and attempt to blur the boundries between experience and perception. Chanting is an example where the name and often the supposed charechteristics or vitues of a particular god, saint or deity are repeated again and again untill the workd lose meaning, take new meaning, re-invent themselves and re-afferm themselves, while the experince moves between discomfort and illease with the body and the immediate to a sense of dislocation from these notions.

Magic is Technology’s unconscious

The powerful aura that today’s advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying complexity; it also derives from their literal realisation of the virtual projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology’s unconscious, its’ own arational spell. Our modern technological world is not nature, but augmented nature, super nature, and the more intently we probe it’s mutant edge of mind and matter, the more our disenchanted productions will find themselves wrestling with the rhetoric of the supernatural. Pg 48 TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information Erik Davis Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)