On Sun, 6 Apr 2008 22:18:31 -0500, bill harris <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>My words of content are as follows
[...]
>(6) In Psycho, The Hitch was putting us on with that psychobabble ending.
Just on that, Bill, and on your earlier assertion that Norman Bates is an
exemplary Nietzschean ...
I have responded on my website (the "Editor's Week" column or blog) about
the latter matter. I can't accept your assertion, and have given my reason/s.
Nor do I see the psychiatrist's scene as a put-on, exactly.
For one thing, and I don't wish to be pedantic, the scene is two scenes
removed from the film's end. (Still to come are the superb scene of Norman
in his cell and then the end-credits, behind which we see Marion's car being
pulled from the swamp.)
More to the point, Hitchcock himself, though he surely knew full well that
the psychiatrist's scene leaves unexplained, or inexplicable, the deeper
mysteries of the human psyche, or of the Schopenhauerian Will, felt that the
scene was necessary (though it risked being 'a hat-grabber', as the trade
term has it). He wasn't 'putting us on' so much as giving audiences a
moment or two to regain their composure - and while tying up some loose
threads that the 'ice-box brigade' would raise when analysing the film
afterwards (however superficially).
The psychiatrist (played by Simon Oakland, whom Hitchcock thanked for
'saving my picture') is clearly characterised as somewhere between smug/
smarmy and a regular guy, a professional for all seasons, very 'American'
(figuratively implying territories not covered).
For what it's worth, on the matter of the inexplicable, I have been
corresponding with an Australian academic who has published an article on
Sidney Lumet's THE OFFENCE (1973), about a policeman and a paedophile. It's
a powerful film but never gets close to 'explaining' the psychic wilderness
opened up, a wilderness shared by BOTH protagonists.
Or take Scottie's line in Hitchcock's VERTIGO, 'Why me?' It's finally
unanswerable, the equivalent of 'Why am I [or why are we, collectively] here
at all?' Hitchcock's films regularly deal with matters that are absolutely
basic, exposing our ignorance.
- Ken M
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/news-home_c.html
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