The Moment of Psycho

I just finished reading David Thomson's The Moment of Psycho How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder. Not only great insight in to Hitchcock as a director, businessman and human being, but also America as a society on the verge of recognizing something it was but would not want to admit.

The Hollywood of 1960 still had some of trappings of the Golden Age, but also had a censorship office that was nothing as to what it had been in 1930s and 1940s, was losing viewership to television, and the lions of the earlier age were going toothless, if not dying on the plain.

America was on the edge of a decade that would see unrest through the assisnation of a president, the expansion of and reaction to civil rights and the smouldering then burning war in Vietnam.

And to begin that decade in American film, we had an Englishman telling us the story of an American Beauty trapped in despair, with her one apparent attempt at salvation ending in a shower and not in the arms of her "lover." It is also the story of a man trapped in the horrors of his own mind, with props that brought those horrors to "reality." And when the two meet, well, you know the rest of the story.

Psycho, Vertigo, and the Birds would influence later works by later directors, including Roman Polanski, Francois Truffaut and Brian DePalma. And yet, Psycho and the Birds met with sharp critical disdain in the hands of American Film critics at the time of their release. In filming the shower scene, Hitchcock padded the film footage to willingly make sacrifices for the production code office, who would object to a toliet even merely show on screen, let alone flushed. And violence, outside of war movies, was just as dirty as sex in the eyes of some code reviewers. So, in 1960 Hollywood still felt the need to have moral guardians.

Meanwhile, on Television, in something as buttoned-down as the news, violence, real graphic violence, began to be common place: how many times was the Zapruder film shown in slow motion? And by the end of the decade, the napalm of Vietnam and a summary execution of a supposed Viet Cong Agent by a Vietnamese Military Official would bring death and violence into the small box in front of the TV tray as news was watched over Swanson's Saulisbury Steak and Potatoes.

And the Code Office was worried about glimpses of moleskin and chocolate syrup.