Fatal shower scene

[imomus]

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'.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

"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.

[fibdemetics.livejournal.com]

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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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.

[fibdemetics.livejournal.com]

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.