At the movies: REAR WINDOW and PSYCHO
My wife says we’ve seen Rear Window five or six times in the theater, but I only recall having caught it once, the first time I ever saw it. It was long before I met her, when a restoration print came to the now-defunct Movies on Exchange in Portland, Maine, in 1998 or 1999. I was a teenager, and it did something for me.
Often, when I’m lucky enough to get to a theater for a favorite movie now, I find myself chasing an earlier experience, trying to recapture how I felt years ago when I saw the film for the first time, rather than trying to simply enjoy it again on whatever terms present themselves. If the movie is good enough, though, the viewing experience beats out my useless nostalgia and I react to the picture as though it’s new to me.
Rear Window obviously is good enough, as is Psycho, which, despite subtle spousal suggestion that we could skip the former, we went to see in a double bill at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on a Saturday night. I’m glad we did. Even Rear Window’s most memorable moments — the creepy red glow of Raymond Burr’s cigarette in the dark apartment, Jimmy Stewart’s voyeurism backfiring as he’s forced to watch Grace Kelly trapped in life-threatening circumstances — resonated anew. Others — the plight of Miss Loneyhearts, Miss Torso’s exhausting evenings — seemed complex whereas I’d previously found them one-dimensional or gaggy. Don’t tell any of the others (especially not Vertigo, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Trouble with Harry), but I think Rear Window has remained my favorite of Hitchcock’s movies since that night back in the late nineties.
I don’t think I’d ever previously seen Psycho in a theater, not counting during film courses in college, and Ella had never seen it at all. With no relevant teenage memories to revive and romanticize, I began to wonder during the opening sequence what it would be like to see that movie knowing nothing about it but its title. It was fun to imagine all the directions it might have twisted into rather than the one it does. If it weren’t for the Bates Motel, who might be revealed as the titular psycho? Sam, the boyfriend? The rich businessman from whom Janet Leigh steals the forty-thousand dollars? Janet Leigh herself? The highway patrolman who follows her to the used car lot?
This was a fun game, but, of course, what makes Psycho so unforgettable— beyond the iconic scene in which every element of cinema is perfectly and harmoniously utilized—is that it does become such an improbable movie. It isn’t just the abrupt death of the film’s apparent lead; it’s that it evolves from a crime thriller into a true horror movie that marries pure Hitchcock style with a bizarre pop-psychology nightmare of a plot.
And my game, anyway, could only have been that: a game. When the lights came up, Ella told me that because Psycho looms so large in our culture, she’d known about every single turn before it happened on the screen. But she did manage to experience it as though for the first time.
