imomus | Fatal shower scene

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'.

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janet leigh said herself that she never took showers again because she felt too "vulnerable" after filming.

i hope this link works (http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?display=day&todayDate=10/04/2004).

'You'll never work -- or shower -- in this town again, bitch!'

Actually I may be wrong to call Leigh 'the first actress to feign her death for voyeuristic pleasure'. Louise Brooks is slashed at the end of 'Lulu'. But I can't remember if that's done in a sexy way. I rather doubt it. I think Hitchcock was the first to make a murder so overtly sexual.

Peeping Tom deals with the idea of murder as a sexual or erotic act and was released a few months before Psycho though I'm not sure which of the two films was actually made first, nor what was floating around in the air in 1959/60 that made Powell and Hitchcock so hot for knives.

Of course, how could I forget Powell! Isn't it a spiked camera tripod in 'Peeping Tom', though, rather than a knife? And isn't the answer to your question 'Freud was floating around in 1959'? But it's more complex than that. Both directors were very interested in the idea of the camera as violating phallus. Hitchcock had a penis in his name, Powell drew attention to cinema's penetrating nature by having his photographer killer dispatch his victims with the 'pole' a camera sits on: the tripod.

Isn't Freud floating around in your post too though Momus? The idea that if we talk about things we make them right and neutralise their power. What makes the eroticism of murder so powerfully disturbing is that we don't try to normalise it, surely. I'm reminded of when Foucault was asked by a Californian student about gay life in the 50s, before the advent of "gay liberation". It was so much better then, Foucault said, because all the secrecy and tabooness of it made the sex and the getting of it so much more intense!

H.

Foucault's point is close to a comment I made yesterday about 'Queen Victoria refusing to believe that lesbianism existed in 19th century Britain, and therefore refusing to sack some palace governesses someone was telling her were lesbians.'

While I can appreciate that taboos do sometimes provide limited freedoms and excitements, I think that it's all too easy to build a reactionary argument in favour of repression and suppression on points like this. (I'm assuming Foucault was just being perverse when he made the remark to the student. I don't think he argued that in his books.) In today's entry I'm saying that the taboo on the idea Jenny Holzer expressed in one of her truisms (http://mfx.dasburo.com/art/truisms.html) as 'Murder has its sexual side' can actually be repressive and even, in some sense, murderous. It certainly seems to have stiffed Leigh's career.

"I'm assuming Foucault was just being perverse when he made the remark to the student. I don't think he argued that in his books"

I'm not so sure. The anecdote kind of fits with the Foucault of the History of Sexuality. He characterized the Western, Christian attitude towards sexuality as "confessional", where sexuality is constructed around the urge to talk about or "confess" our sexuality. He counterpointed that with attitudes in Japan, China and the world of Antiquity where sex is a form of art, but not one that should be revealed or talked about, because its secrecy is part of its pleasure. I'm simplifying horribly of course.

(Janet Leigh's career may have been dealt a fatal blow by unfortunate typecasting, but she was also at an age (mid 30s) when women in Hollywood find leading roles increasingly hard to come by and either quit the business or become character actors.)

H.

I have to agree with anonymous. I don't think Foucault was being simply perverse in the anecdote above.

Foucault's argument in The History of Sexuality is that our notion of repression ('natural' sexuality is kept in check from above by forces directly or indirectly external to us) ignores the proliferation of sexual discourse, identities, etc. The eros of the confessional is one example.

When understood within a traditional conception of power, this proliferation would not necessarily contradict this "repressive hypothesis"--it would be easy to argue that the stifling force of repression would, like a pressure cooker, express our sexual truth like so much steam. For Foucault, however, power operates productively: our sexual 'truths' (and all truths for that matter) are the effects of power relations, not timeless essences contained/marginalized by a monolithic, top-down Power. A 'healthy' sexuality, in touch with its True Desire, is no less a product of power than an unhealthy, repressed one.

From our contemporary queer eyes, one could say that not only is "sex" less exciting than it used to be, but it's gotten quite boring.

Thanks for that explication. I've read some Foucault, but not the 'History of Sexuality'.

I think we can agree that power is productive without going so far as to say that it's definitive. In other words, I do think there is a 'timeless essence' to sex in the form of our biology as mammals, but I'm quite happy to accept that there's a continuous dialectic between this and the social meaning of sexuality, which is subject to, and channelled by, fashion, power, repressions and exploitations of all sorts.

Foucault drew much inspiration in his conception of power from Nietzsche, who had a proto-quantum-mechanical view of existence as an endless interplay of forces and chance. The relative stability of what appear to us as necessary natural (e.g. our sex drive) and less necessary cultural phenomena (e.g. expression thereof) can be apprehended in this way, in opposition to the machinations of a dialectic that must always place one term in the center and one on the periphery.

Nothing is definitive: some things are just more stable or timeless than others. It's my hope that that particular distinction will eventually lose its contemporary currency, or at least become...a bore.

"Lulu courts Jack in the stairwell, tells him to come in anyway even though he has no money. He looks into her eyes and clutches a knife behind his back, struggling with the decision. He drops the knife and they go upstairs...

Lulu sits on Jack's lap. He puts mistletoe over his head and tells her she must kiss him. They embrace, but before they kiss, Jack sees the knife blade behind her, shining a bright reflection into his eyes. He wrestles with the murderous impulse, grabs the knife, kisses her and then stabs her. Her hand falls."

i'm waiting on the edge of my seat for a loving tribute for the also recently-departed, rodney dangerfield. you know you want to.

I'm hoping you know this...

I can't remember the name of the buildings in East Berlin built as idealised communist apartments that have become really very chic for wealthy young urbanites to live in. I'm hoping to work in a comparison of them to American urban loft spaces and the lost potential of low income housing projects like Pruitt Igoe.

Well, you could mean one of several things:

Plattenbauten are the 70s blocks built under communism. New Brutalist concrete towers, basically. A Stalinbau in Zuckerbacker style is a building like the one I live in on the Karl-Marx-Allee, formerly the Stalinallee. These are basically mid-century Soviet style blocks erected in 1952, and yes, they were indeed erected as a showcase for the high living standards possible under communism. Today I was walking along this street thinking that this is the only place I've lived which can compete for sheer grandeur with the Georgian terraces of Edinburgh where I was brought up. It's solid, sombre, serious. My one was unfortunately renovated in 1996, so it's lost a bit of its original character. I wouldn't say there's much of a parallel with American lofts or post-industrial spaces, though you could perhaps contrast them.

Too much reality, not enough irony in ill conceived American housing projects.

thank you.

i love christopher doyle's DP work on wong kar-wai's films and didn't realize that he shot the psycho remake. you inspired me to look him up on imdb, something i've put off for too long.

now i have something to do with my life.

One of those projects that was probably attractive or somehow challenging if one were to work on it but from a viewing stndpoint an excercise that leaves one searching for a purpose to watch.

I'm not quite sure if you're talking about the Van Sant remake of Psycho or the Dora Video manipulation of it. On the Van Sant, I agree. If you meant Dora Video, I don't -- visually and viscerally it's very compelling viewing. It's formally interesting and gets you thinking about cinema and music in a different way. It didn't cost a fortune to make and doesn't outstay its welcome.

Sex and violence is your main theme, isn't it?

I count two themes there.

Sorry, my English is shit...

Sorry, I was talking about the Van Sant excercise of self gratification. I have't seen the Dora Video work.

As for Leigh's further career or lack of it I tend to somewhat though not completely temper that conclusion, as someone else said she was already in her 30s and I guess she did do the very respectable "Manchurian Candidate" afterwards, though I guess Angela Lansbury had the more memorable female role in that one. A fine role in Welles and a classic Hitchcock part is much more than many good actors get.

Hitchcock himself had one more worthy experiment in him ("Birds") , but his subsequent career was pretty spotty, making "Psycho" effectively prevented him from suceeding at the kind of stylish films he made before "Psycho", namely "Marnie", I wouldn't call his back to British basics "Frenzy" a failure but some of those other post "Psycho" ones like the forgettable "Topaz" and repeatedly compromised "Torn Curtain" have little to offer.

nicholas d. kent

Check out french director, Bruno Dumont's "29 Palms". A riff on the good old Hitchcock version.

or the jenny holzer wooden card that states:
"murder has a sexual side"

Doravideo at Alternativa festival in Prague, Czech Republic ( http://www.alternativa-festival.cz/2006/index.php?l=en )
1 December – 9 December 2006

Despite of this story's long timem it's pity that such persons die quite early.

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Fatal shower scene

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Momus, here is a description of Lulu's murder that I did for a film paper last year:

no respect.

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29 Palms

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