29. Marion Crane in 52 short takes, Part 1

I never came up with an explanation or a theory. Over the years, though, I began to notice other things in the movie that seemed to rhyme with that shot.

I got an email from The London Review of Books announcing that in honor of the centenary of his death, the LRB Diary for next year is going to be called “52 Ways of Looking at Kafka” and will feature views of him by various writers as well as excerpts from Kafka’s diaries in a new translation.

I don’t know whether the title is a nod to Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or that profile of the artist David Salle by Janet Malcolm entitled “Forty-One False Starts.” But it has bolstered me in my impulse to play around with an essay called “Marion Crane in 52 Short Takes” which would float my revisionist interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

It's an idea that came together for me near the beginning of the Me Too movement after years of pondering the significance of a particular shot in the movie. And the essay wouldn’t really consist of 52 aperçus about the character played by Janet Leigh—or 52 anything. I just took that number from the fact that Hitchcock claimed that the shower scene that destroys Marion in Psycho was created out of 52 pieces of film. That’s the number of shots it took to slash her to pieces. I wanted to try to put her back together.

There’s an interesting documentary from 2017—78/52, by the Swiss filmmaker Alexandre O. Phillippe—about the making and meaning of the shower scene in Psycho. It’s full of interesting people being erudite and insightful about American cultural history, and it’s worth seeing even if you don’t think you’re interested in the movie.

My own fascination with Psycho, I happen to know, began the year that Veronica Geng got sick—or, rather, the year of her first brain surgery. Not that there was any connection between the two things. I just remember a conversation I had with her friend James during the period when he and I had started hanging out together a bit because we alone of Veronica’s friends were in a position to look after her.

Of the handful of people who had shown up at the hospital after she collapsed in the kitchen of her tiny apartment in the East 60s, Barbara Epstein, who had telephoned me to tell me what had happened, was one of the New York Review of Books’ two editors-in-chief and didn’t have a lot of time on her hands. And the sportswriter and humorist Roy Blount, Jr. was frantically trying to get his latest book to press. Philip Roth didn’t live in the City most of the time, though he did remain peripherally involved. (Philip would lend Veronica his Upper West Side pied-à-terre when she got out of the hospital so she wouldn’t have to deal with the stairs in her walk-up, and I have an idea that he also tried to make sure she had editing work.)

It seemed that James and I were the only people in Veronica’s life with anything like leisure time. He was a freelance photographer. As for me, having spent a year or so working at a failing magazine and another at a failing theater company, I was between jobs.

James was an autodidact and old-movie buff—even more of an old-movie buff than I was. He didn’t just know old movies, he owned hundreds of them: the walls of his studio apartment were lined with shelves and shelves full of VHS tapes.

There was a game we used to find ourselves playing driving around in James’s Jeep doing errands for Veronica or hospital-ward visiting. It wasn’t really a game so much as a shared habit of quoting obscure lines of movie dialogue that seemed apt.

“‘You’d think the rain would have cooled things off,’” James might remark on a hot day after a thunder shower. “‘But it only made the heat wet.’”

Then I would say, “Thelma Ritter in Rear Window.”

If I felt it was time to get cracking on something we’d been talking about doing, I might say, “Let’s take these cattle to Missouri!”

And James would say, “John Wayne in Red River,” even though that isn’t really the exact line.

One time James came up with a line so apt and so wonderful that I jumped into bed with him that night. It was a day or so after Veronica’s surgery, and she was crazy focused on trying to sneak out of her hospital room so she could go outside for a cigarette. (She was a committed smoker.) Veronica kept asking if one of us would take her downstairs “for a stroll.” We kept explaining why we couldn’t do that—she wasn’t supposed to get out of bed, she was hooked up to an IV, and so forth.

Finally she said that she was going to go downstairs on her own. And James said: “‘You’ll never even make the elevator,’” which is what Edward G. Robinson says at the end of Double Indemnity when the gut-shot Fred MacMurray talks of trying to head for the Canadian border.

It may have been the line from Rear Window that led to a mini-lecture from James about how Hitchcock always storyboarded everything in his head and how nothing in any of his pictures is ever an afterthought or the result of happenstance.

Mansplaining makes me misbehave, so I said, What about that moment in the breakfast scene in Rebecca when a bit of toast falls into Laurence Olivier’s lap? Did James think that had been part of Hitchcock’s mental storyboard?

James said without a doubt.

Then I got serious and brought up this shot in Psycho that I’d noticed a few nights back when I’d been balancing my checkbook and looking for something to watch that was scarier than my bank balance.

Some channel had been showing Psycho and I’d tuned in on the scene where Janet Leigh is dressing and packing to leave—right at the point where the camera dwells on the envelope full of money lying on the bed. It had struck me that the envelope was very meticulously staged.

“It’s all crumpled and has that rubber band around it,” I told James, “and there’s a tear in the flap so it looks like there’s too much money in there and the envelope can’t really close properly. You see a corner of the pile of cash peeking out.”

James said he knew the shot.

 “So what’s that about?” I asked. “It’s as though the envelope can barely contain the money.”

James said he didn’t know but it was unquestionably intentional.

That was the first time I ever put my fascination with that shot into words.

I never came up with an explanation or even a theory. Over the years, though, I began to notice other things in the movie that seemed to rhyme with that shot.

Sometimes it was how something else seemed to barely contain whatever it was encasing—like those brassieres we keep seeing Janet Leigh wandering around in, that fit her perfectly but are still nervous-making because they have hardly any back. Or the way one corner of the the envelope full of money always seems to be peeping up out of the bag Marion carries it around in, as though it doesn’t quite fit in there.

One time, watching Psycho, I noticed how confining Marion’s clothing is. We keep seeing her belting and buttoning herself into those cinch-waist outfits. And those half-slips (she’s wearing one in the packing scene)—unlike the full slips that most women wore most of the time—could be very constraining because of the way they hugged your body from the waist down.

Another time, recording the movie, I found myself backing up and watching the opening sequence over and over, a series of shots that lure the eye deeper and deeper into a cityscape until we’re zeroing in on a particular window leading to a particular room within a particular building within a particular district of the city whose skyline we started out with.

“He stuffs things,” Bill said of Norman the other night when Psycho was showing on TCM and I’d asked him to sit through it with me so I could try to figure out what to put in and what to leave out of this essay about things containing other things and confinement motifs.

They all culminate in the fate of that pile of cash. At one point, Marion takes it out of the envelope and places it on a spread-out newspaper. Then she folds the paper a couple of times lengthwise and a couple more times crosswise, so that the money now lies within layers and layers of newsprint.

The money becomes a vehicle for transferring our sympathies to Norman after Marion’s murder, when he comes to clean up after “mother.” He mops, he wipes, he sluices. He wraps Marion’s body in the shower curtain and throws her in the trunk of her car. He collects and packs up all of Marion’s things with a view to eliminating all trace of her. He’s about to turn off the light and close the door on a job well done, but we know that he’s left the newspaper full of money behind on the bedside table. We wince and worry that he’ll leave without noticing it, and we breathe a sigh of relief when he catches sight of the folded newspaper and goes back and takes it away. Boom! Norman is suddenly the protagonist.

Something similar happens when Norman sends the car, whose trunk now contains Marion’s body with the suitcase and the newspaper full of money, into the nearby swamp. The car gets stuck and for a couple of seconds it looks like it might not sink completely. Again: suspense! (Whose side are we supposed to be on, anyway?)

So the money winds up swaddled and stowed and submerged—within the swamp, within the car, within the layers of newspaper.

Clearly, it represents something—but what?

That was as far as I’d gotten in my thinking about the envelope shot in Psycho when the Weinstein scandal broke.