Angle On: The Limitations of Imitation

Guest Writer Philip Thomas Rudich Searches For the Soul of Gus Van Sant’s "Psycho" (1998)

There are moments throughout Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake that get me thinking: should we be doing this all the time? Should Hollywood abandon legacy sequels and prequels and more interpretive remakes in favor of shot-for-shot recreations? Wouldn’t it be kind of interesting to see new actors and new filmmakers take on the legendary, world-shaking cinema of past generations?

I never feel quite as strongly about that by the end of the movie. There’s just not enough good will left to mourn the ways it might have sparked a strange new wave. I’m not lamenting the loss of Barry Jenkins’ Taxi Driver, or Kelly Reichardt’s Citizen Kane. Van Sant’s movie reveals that the answer to “wouldn’t it be kind of interesting?” is “Yeah—kind of.”

Not much needs to be said about the original Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s angry masterpiece of defied expectations and manipulation. It is a weird film in the most exhilarating, profound way, and had an immediate cultural impact both creatively – the rip-offs started coming within a few years– and practically—theaters didn’t typically start movies at scheduled times before Hitchcock insisted it for Psycho!

Psycho ‘98 is weird, but not profound. Profundity is way on the other side of town. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is dreamy, but it’s not like dreaming. It’s more akin to watching a dream happen, and realizing only at the end: This dream was the famous movie Psycho. It is odd and disconcerting in ways the original is not, and maybe no movie ought to be, which, of course, is part of its very specific curio appeal. It’s one of cinema’s great failures, but also one of its great sneaky little mainstream art films.

A decade into his career, indie darling Gus Van Sant achieved a decent major-studio hit with 1995’s To Die For, then, in 1997, a grand slam with Good Will Hunting. The latter got him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, and won two awards, for Robin Williams’ performance and for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s screenplay. With presumably hundreds of followup options laid at his feet, he accepted the reported $60 million budget – still the biggest of his career – and went to work recreating Psycho. How many other indie artists could say they had the opportunity to use that much money to do something so ridiculous, and took it?

The production used Joseph Stefano’s original screenplay. Danny Elfman and Steve Bartek rerecorded Bernard Herrmann’s score in stereo. The great Christopher Doyle, on his first job with an American director after fifteen years in Hong Kong, was tasked with bringing the original’s stark aesthetic into the ‘90s.

Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn, exciting young actors each on a hot streak, play Marion Crane and Norman Bates. Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, and William H. Macy enter in the movie’s second half as Lila, Sam, and Arbogast the P.I. Nobody came away from it totally unscathed, but Psycho was so critically derided that it effectively killed Vaughn and Heche’s runs. They were the faces of not simply a blockbuster bomb, but a freaky experimental bomb appreciated by approximately no one. Heche’s acting career never recovered.

Understanding Psycho ’98 as an experiment is essential to being able to engage with it, or even care about it, because there is no moment of it that doesn’t feel like an explicit exercise in imitation. It is not meant to be taken at face value. That’s one of its assets, and its major fault.

Van Sant’s picture isn’t an exact copy, is not exactly shot-for-shot scenes. The use of color allows for stark neon-noir moments. There are the occasional new shot compositions, and ‘60s-era problems solved in the ‘90s by smaller cameras and looser morals. There are instances of truly unsettling sound design that create a dull aching aura. The killings are peppered with peculiar and corny imagery implying the powerful storm within Norman. The Bates’ fruit cellar now seems to include a small aviary and some insect habitats, which naturally allows for a scary spider to crawl out of the mouth of the new Rick Baker-designed Mother.

These changes don’t feel thematic or emotionally resonant, though. Copying is a great way to learn for yourself how something works. Copying a painting or a song or a book or a movie may be one step on the path to success. But those copies are for study, practice done with the intent to reinterpret somewhere down the line. The remake of Psycho is absent reinterpretation.

This just raises more questions. Like, what is the value of copying at this scale? How exactly did Van Sant get Universal to give him tens of millions of dollars to make a movie with such limited commercial appeal? Why were these particular actors chosen? Why bother to reveal Norman Bates as Mother? If there was room to shoot the film in color and adjust other details to make it more ‘90s and match upgrades in technology, why not change the plot, just a little?

What is Psycho when divorced from its context as the notorious star-killing shocker that broke open the 1960s, and reduced to its screenplay, its score, and its iconic close-ups and metaphors and scenes? Good, but not great. Even if I could ignore the original entirely, something would still be missing from this. At its core, Psycho is a story about a lonely, perverted, unrelenting world, a woman who can’t escape it, and a man who is both product and representative of it. Why, in 1998, does the Bates Motel now feel an apparition, no longer just isolated and creepy? Somehow still off “the old highway,” it’s also completely outside time and space. At the old Bates place, the new Psycho becomes a specter haunting Hitchcock’s.

Anne Heche meets Janet Leigh’s anxious but confident mischievousness with a nervy and fearful impatience. Vince Vaughn brings exteriority where Anthony Perkins brought interiority. Louder performances for louder times. They resist each other, but don’t completely repel. Instead the audience is rolled around awkwardly through an uncannily familiar experience. We hang on to watch because we can’t look away.

Thankfully Marion’s night at the Bates Motel remains the best sequence of the movie. If they’d botched it, the movie would truly be a disaster, it would have lost its most intense, most surreal, and most heartbreaking scenes. From their dinner, to Marion’s shower, to – the most disturbing part – Norman’s cleanup, all the movie’s tension gathers, explodes, and dissipates. It’s always effective because every time we watch, we’re tricked again into thinking we had to see this.

Hitchcock once called Psycho “rather tongue-in-cheek” and “a big joke,” and said (probably also tongue-in-cheek) he was surprised people took it so seriously. This has sometimes been interpreted to mean that he intended it to be comedic, but clearly he meant he had played a joke on us.

Here in this bizarre place, we’ve been tricked by movie magic into thinking we witnessed a grisly murder, disarming and upsetting and impossible to comprehend. As witnesses, we should be horrified. Then, the tension relieved, we are made to believe the movie is returning to normal as we spend five minutes watching Bates wash away his crime and sink it in the swamp. Hitchcock was teasing his audience. People could leave; he guessed, rightly, that they instead would submit to the banality of Norman’s cleanup.

Psycho ’98 is a more obvious, very postmodern joke: it announces itself as an obsessive recreation of a classic, and it is only what it says it is. I think this is an irritating aspect of the movie. It steps on Hitchcock’s punchline. What once felt transgressive now feels simple and icky. In 1960, audiences were told they could never expect what happens in Psycho. In 1998, they were asked to remember what happened in Psycho.

To be clear, I think it’s cool that Van Sant made this movie. I find the funnier and more intriguing joke to be that he told Roger Ebert he did it “So that nobody else would have to.” But it is a resounding artistic failure. Not because it’s impossible to copy Psycho. They copied it well! There’s an essence to a great work of art, though, that’s harder to replicate. When copied, that quality doesn’t disappear, it broadens and bleeds, becomes less specific, fuzzy at the edges. It’s there, though. Like seeing a tiny image of a Vermeer in a book, or watching Lawrence of Arabia on a fucked up VHS tape.

Psycho’s essence is randomness. The arbitrary way of the universe/god/Hitchcock himself is crucial to a lot of Hitchcock’s films, but it completely powers Psycho. Everything Marion does is haphazard and unorganized and she ultimately loses her life by chance. The great knife twist of the movie—there was no connection between her crime and her murder. The money she stole didn’t matter.

But randomness can’t be copied: something’s only random once! It can’t fly up and surprise us again. It becomes buried beneath the order of everything. So Psycho ’98 subconsciously becomes some kind of logic problem, although not exactly the sort that itches enough to make a (normal) viewer leave the movie wondering.

The suspense and shock and tragedy, all the emotions of Psycho, are drawn from that essence. Gus Van Sant is an auteur with his own vision of the world. For him, unique human connections push and pull us in new directions, for better or worse. Hitchcock’s guiding light seemed to be the often-cruel unpredictability of life, and how it might render human connection life-threatening. They fail to mesh so severely that Psycho ’98 is rendered soulless.

If it’s got no soul, it can’t mean anything. At least not emotionally, not the way most people connect with artwork. Van Sant’s Psycho was a worthwhile artistic experiment, and if something like it happened again, I would watch! Maybe next time around, pick an easier target, one that has a heart to aim for.

The movie is enthralling because it makes me squirm while I wait to see if it’ll work this time. Because after all the Hitchcockian homage scattered throughout decades of cinema, one film finally dared to walk precisely in Psycho’s shadow, and tried to use its complete lack of mystique as an asset. Because there’s never a moment I stop wondering, Are they fucking with me? and I like that feeling. And because I am frustrated by it, am not sure it’s good but don’t think it’s bad, and as a matter of fact I do find it interesting.   

Sadly, being as-a-matter-of-fact Interesting doesn’t have much cultural staying power. The grand reappraisal is probably not around the corner. I hope it doesn’t disappear completely. I would like to save it and make sure every generation the remake of Psycho is rediscovered, and a few people waste a little time trying to determine exactly how important it is. Art like this is worth saving. We need the grand-scale miscalculations. Van Sant was right, somebody did have to do this. Unlike Marion’s murder, it was fated. It didn’t stand a chance of succeeding, but it had to happen.

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Philip Thomas Rudich is a New York City-based writer. He is a 2022 graduate of the City College of New York's MFA in Creative Writing program, where he completed his thesis story collection, 'One Foot Toward The Next World'. In 2021, he was awarded the Dejur Prize in Fiction by the CCNY English Department. His work has appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of Promethean. See more of his writing and thoughts on film at www.philipthomasrudich.com