The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #4

to convince the invisible observer

that father is potent,

to cover up father's impotence.

So the second way to read the scene

would have been as a spectacle,

a ridiculously violent spectacle,

set up by the father

to convince the son of his power,

of his over-potency.

The third way would have been

to focus on Dorothy herself.

Many feminists, of course, emphasise

the brutality against women in this scene,

the abuse, how the Dorothy character is abused.

There is obviously this dimension in it.

But I think one should risk a more shocking

and obverse interpretation.

What if the central, as it were, problem,

of this entire scene is Dorothy's passivity?

Don't you f***ing look at me!

So what if what Frank is doing

is a kind of a desperate, ridiculous,

but nonetheless effective attempt

of trying to help Dorothy,

to awaken her out of her lethargy,

to bring her into life?

So if Frank is anybody's fantasy,

maybe he is Dorothy's fantasy.

There is kind of a strange,

mutual interlocking of fantasies.

You stay alive, baby.

It's not only ambiguity,

but oscillation between three focal points.

This, I think, is what accounts

for the strange reverberations of this scene.

This brings us to our third

and maybe crucial example,

what is for me the most beautiful

shot in the entire Vertigo.

The shot in which we see Scottie

in a position of a peeping Tom,

observing through a crack.

It is as if Madeleine is really there

in common reality,

while Scottie is peeping at her

from some mysterious inter-space,

from some obscure netherworld.

This is the location of the imagined,

fantasised gaze.

Gaze is that obscure point, the blind spot,

from which the object looked upon

returns the gaze.

After suspecting that a murder

is taking place in the nearby hotel room,

Gene Hackman, playing the private detective,

enters this room and inspects the toilet.

The moment he approaches

the toilet in the bathroom,

it is clear that we are in Hitchcock territory.

It is clear that some kind of intense,

implicit dialogue with Psycho is going on.

In a very violent gesture,

as if adopting the role of Norman Bates's

mother, the murderer in Psycho,

he opens up the curtain, inspects it in detail,

looking for traces of blood there,

even inspecting the gap, the hole,

at the bottom of the sink.

Which is precisely another of these focal objects,

because in Psycho, the hole, through fade-out,

the hole is morphed into the eye,

returning the gaze.

We say the eye is the window of the soul.

But what if there is no soul behind the eye?

What if the eye is a crack

through which we can perceive

just the abyss of a netherworld?

When we look through these cracks,

we see the dark, other side,

where hidden forces run the show.

It is as if Gene Hackman establishes,

"No, we are nonetheless not in Psycho.

"Let's return to my first object

of fascination, the toilet bowl."

He flushes it,

and then the terrible thing happens.

In our most elementary experience,

when we flush the toilet,

excrements simply disappear

out of our reality into another space,

which we phenomenologically perceive

as a kind of a netherworld,

another reality, a chaotic, primordial reality.

And the ultimate horror, of course,

is if the flushing doesn't work,

if objects return,

if remainders, excremental remainders,

return from that dimension.

The bathroom.

Hitchcock is all the time playing

with this threshold.

Well, they've cleaned all this up now.

Big difference.

You should've seen the blood.

The whole place was...

Well, it's too horrible to describe. Dreadful!

The most effective for me

and even the most touching scene

of the entire Psycho,

is after the shower murder,

when Norman Bates tries to clean the bathroom.

I remember clearly when in my adolescence

I first saw the film,

how deeply I was impressed

not only by the length of the scene,

it goes on almost for 10 minutes,

details of cleansing and so on and so on,

but also by the care, meticulousness,

how it is done,

and also by our spectator's identification with it.

I think that this tells us a lot

about the satisfaction of work,

of a job well done.

Which is not so much

to construct something new,

but maybe human work at its most elementary,

work, as it were, at the zero level,

is the work of cleaning the traces of a stain.

The work of erasing the stains,

keeping at bay this chaotic netherworld,

which threatens to explode at any time

and engulf us.

I think this is the fine sentiment

that Hitchcock's films evoke.

It's not simply that something

horrible happens in reality.

Something worse can happen

which undermines the very fabric

of what we experience as reality.

I think it's very important how the

first attack of the birds occurs in the film.

When a fantasy object, something imagined,

an object from inner space,

enters our ordinary realty,

the texture of reality is twisted, distorted.

This is how desire inscribes itself into reality,

by distorting it.

Desire is a wound of reality.

The art of cinema consists in arousing desire,

to play with desire.

But, at the same time,

keeping it at a safe distance,

domesticating it, rendering it palpable.

When we spectators are sitting

in a movie theatre,

looking at the screen...

You remember, at the very beginning,

before the picture is on, it's a black, dark screen,

and then light thrown on.

Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl

and waiting for things

to reappear out of the toilet?

And is the entire magic of a spectacle

shown on the screen

not a kind of a deceptive lure,

trying to conceal the fact

that we are basically watching sh*t, as it were?

There was a young lady of Ongar

Who had an affair with a conger

They said, "How does it feel

To sleep with an eel?"

"Well," she said, "just like a man, only longer"

Usually, people read the lesson

of Freudian psychoanalysis

as if the secret meaning of everything

is sexuality.

But this is not what Freud wants to say.

I think Freud wants to say the exact opposite.

It's not that everything

is a metaphor for sexuality,

that whatever we are doing,

we are always thinking about that.

The Freudian question is, but what are

we thinking when we are doing that?

In sexuality, it's never only me and my partner,

or more partners, whatever you are doing.

It's always... There has to be

always some phantasmatic element.

There has to be some third

imagined element

which makes me... makes it possible for me,

which enables me to engage in sexuality.

If I may be a little bit impertinent

and relate to an unfortunate experience,

probably known to most of us,

how it happens that while one is engaged

in sexual activity,

all of a sudden one feels stupid.

One loses contact with it.

As if, "My God, what am I doing here,

doing these stupid repetitive movements?"

And so on and so on.

Nothing changes in reality,

in these strange moments

where I, as it were, disconnect.

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