Fatal shower scene

As a tribute to Janet Leigh, who died this week, I thought I'd post a little clip of Dora Video's Max/MSP drumkit-controlled version of her famous shower scene in 'Psycho'. This was filmed at my Osaka show on September 21st, where Dora Video (aka Acid Mothers Temple member and Sachiko M collaborator Yoshimitsu Ishiraku) was the support act. (Dora Video also supported me on August 29th in Kokura, Kyushu. At that show he played a different Psycho shower scene, Gus Van Sant's remake, shot by Chris Doyle.)

Dora Video Psycho shower scene (16MB avi video)

The standard obituary adjective for the Psycho shower scene was 'horrific'. Not one journalist that I saw used the word 'erotic'. Yet erotic it is -- you don't have to be a hardline Freudian to see Bates' slashing knife as a penis. Dora Video goes where no newspaper dared go in his acknowledgement of this eroticism, drawing out the fucking/killing symbolism tantalisingly (and ridiculously) until it's plain as day, even 'cute' and 'kitsch'. He also carries us back, using Max as transport, to fetid adolescent days alone with a video recorder and a 'video nasty' slasher movie, shuttling the player heads back and forth in search of sexual thrills we found, at the time, excitingly sick but see, in retrospect, as idiotically innocent.

Janet Leigh was just the first of many actresses to feign her death for the sadistic, voyeuristic pleasure of the audience. It's said that this scene ruined her career -- its memory cast such a psychological shadow across every subsequent role she played that most directors just didn't feel they could cast her in anything. It's almost as if Leigh lay dying on the floor of that shower room, bleeding chocolate sauce, all the way from 1960 to 2004. Hitchcock had Bates kill her, but she took 44 years to die.

I wonder if her career would have been slashed in its prime in quite the same way if we were as in touch with our heads, our bates, our shuttles and our cocks as Dora Video seems to be? In other words, I wonder if the taboo on seeing the sexual side of murder (still evident in Leigh's obituaries) doesn't make us killers of a sort? For although Leigh's death in 'Psycho' was a fake, her career really died. Perhaps an openness to the sexual symbolism of synthetic murder might have allowed us to grant Leigh a new lease of creative life, to keep acting, to go from strength to strength.

'It's just a game, and it's okay to see it as sexual' might have been a more healthy attitude than 'It's truly horrific, like a real murder. She'll never work again'.