It was not just Marion Crane who disappeared in 1960. When Janet Leigh’s character was stabbed to death at the Bates Motel, some 40 minutes into “Psycho,’’ we lost not only our protagonist, but any semblance of the sense of safety that had once been our guarantee at the movies. “Psycho’’ marked a watershed in film history, removing the barrier protecting us from chaos. Full of sex and violence and without the redemption of a happy ending, Hitchcock pulled the rug out from under us.
Thomson, author of “Biographical Dictionary of Film’’ and an eminence grise of American film critics, takes the occasion of “Psycho’s’’ upcoming 50th anniversary to celebrate Hitchcock’s gonzo classic, and also to gently bemoan the film’s effect on American culture. Thomson’s short book, part close analysis, part speculative cultural history, is itself of two minds about the film, which it admires without fully respecting. “Psycho,’’ in Thomson’s estimation, is Hollywood’s brilliantly creative primal sin, opening the floodgates to five decades of unabashed reveling in murder, mayhem, and disorder. Sam Peckinpah’s “balletic’’ violence, the FX-heavy storytelling of “Jaws’’ and “Star Wars,’’ and even the Zapruder film, in his telling, are all children of “Psycho.’’
“Psycho’’ is a rift in American culture represented by a rift in the film itself, sacrificing its heroine one-third of the way in and stumbling with deliberate uncertainty for its remainder. Into the yawning gap opened by Norman Bates’s slashing knife, decades of carefully wrought filmmaking technique, and an American film industry that assiduously kept the wraps on horror, tumbled in. What happens when a familiar world begins to crumble?
