I picked up David Thomson’s The Moment of Psycho this evening. I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to read it because as Richard Crouse notes below, soooooo much has been written about Psycho.* But Thomson is very hard not to read, because his work always manages to feel a little bit like a very smart conversation you have with the author.
One curious effect of the book though is that it has forced me to think about something that I thought might have been an incredible waste of time, Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho, something that I suspected might be a joke on Hollywood; some kind of homework exercise in directing that became commercially viable; or possibly some kind of surreal-occult attempt to communicate with Hitchock through film. But after reading this, I think it was more of a way of writing about the film through making a new film (Oh hell, now that seems incredibly obvious. Goddamn it, I hate having a blog).
But actually, after looking at it on YouTube, I come to the conclusion that I have no idea why this film was made.
In any case: Thomson calls attention to a lot of aspects of the film that I’ve already filed under “Why didn’t anyone tell me that?”, so if you have more than a casual interest in Hitchcock you might want to read it.
*My favorite is the mention in Hitchcock, where Hitchcock advises that Truffaut try making a film like Psycho. Sure!
