Inside No. 9 '22: Wise Owl (aka Bird of Prey)

Content warning: child abuse 

Earlier this month we bid farewell to the BBC series Inside No. 9, a show that could be aptly described as the modern-day successor to Tales of The Unexpected, but with plenty of personality and devilish ingenuity all of its own. Like ToTU, it was comprised of half-hour stand-alone comic dramas exploring the meaner side of human nature, typically with some kind of ghoulish twist at the end. Creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who'd previously collaborated on the gleefully grotesque cult comedies The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, tended to star in each story, although always as different characters; occasionally they took a backseat, and at least one episode, "3 by 3", did not feature them at all. The one major constancy was that every episode took place in a venue that in some way pertained to the number 9. Usually this denoted the house or apartment number, but Shearsmith and Pemberton also liked to think outside of the box in terms of how to work in that titular number (for example, in one episode, "Diddle Diddle Dumpling", it referred to the size of a shoe that formed a pivotal plot detail). The genre of the series was also perpetually shifting - some episodes were flat-out horrors, others were surprisingly tender tales of human vulnerability. One of the thrills of the series was entering into each weekly 9 and never knowing exactly what you would find. Besides the 9, there were really only two guarantees - a) every episode contained a "hidden hare" (literally an ornamental leporine slipped somewhere into the mise en scene) and b) the toilet and its related bodily functions always featured to some capacity, usually as a revolting observation on the side. Actually, I can't claim to have gone through the entire series with a fine enough comb to say for certain that the latter applied to absolutely every episode, but I feel confident in saying that episodes devoid of shit, piss or fart jokes were a whole lot rarer than episodes where nobody dies, and those constituted a slim minority. Shearsmith and Pemberton may be creative geniuses, but their trains of thought never seemed to venture far from out of the toilet bowl. And that's grand - the toilet has long served as a beautiful shorthand for everything ugly and forbidden about the human psyche, the matters we'd sooner flush into oblivion and not give a second's thought. We might recall the specific ground that Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho broke in 1960, with its unusually prominent focus on a flushing toilet.

Psycho, most appropriately, was given the tip of the hat quite a few times throughout Inside No. 9. One episode, "Private View", opens with a "Psycho moment", where a popular guest star is introduced and abruptly killed off. In "Merrily, Merrily", a character who mentions having studied psychology is met with the plebeian response, "Yes, I've seen that. Where she gets stabbed in the shower..." And of course, it's hard to not have the Bates in mind through much of "Death Be Not Proud", watching David's morbid relationship play out with his own gruesome mother (itself transplanted from Psychoville); they are gleeful caricatures of the very archetypes the Bates helped cement in popular consciousness. The most substantial of all these Psycho homages, though, occurs in the series 7 episode, "Wise Owl", which was directed by Louise Hooper and first broadcast on 1st June 2022. Its protagonist, Ronnie Oliver (Shearsmith), is an obvious counterpart to Norman Bates, albeit one who lurks in a suburban home in Rochdale (numbered 9, of course), rather than an isolated pocket of the Californian highway. He is yet another socially maladjusted figure who practices taxidermy, has a thing about birds and mentally has never escaped the shadow of the parental figure who dominated him throughout childhood. The particulars of the plot, however, are less evocative of Hitchcock's film than of the Richard Franklin-directed sequel, Psycho II (1983); Ronnie, like the middle-aged Norman, has returned to face his childhood demons following a lengthy period of hospitalisation. There are also echoes of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, with Pemberton playing Derek Blenkin, a client who tasks Ronnie with resurrecting the deceased pet of his five-year-old daughter, an albino rabbit named Ferrari. Like King's protagonist, Blenkin is hoping to delay a conversation about death with his daughter, confident he can pass the stuffed rabbit off as living by telling her it's always tired. His concern for his daughter's feelings is comically undercut by his desire to secure to the cheapest possible option, suggesting to Ronnie that he might leave off the rabbit's legs if it will spare expenses.

Now that the series has formally concluded and I've seen every installment, I have few qualms in declaring "Wise Owl" my personal pick of the bunch. It is, in my eyes, an unmitigated triumph. Given my fondness for all things Psycho, the Bates allusions alone might have been enough to get it into my good graces. But what really elevates this one to such immaculate heights is that it doubles as Shearsmith and Pemberton's affectionate tribute to yet another subject near and dear to my heart - the public information film. Shearsmith and Pemberton were clearly hotly attuned to the impact that such films had on the legions of tender young minds raised on their sombre teachings, tensions that lingered well into adulthood. They wove a beautiful, smartly-observed little horror yarn from that idea, one powered by a rich plethora of creeping disturbances but also an undercurrent of genuine pathos. "Wise Owl" is centred around a fictitious series of public information films that existed in a parallel version of the 1970s, an era that boasts particular infamy for the array of shocking and psychologically scarring educational films that found their way onto UK television screens, a lot of which played like miniature horrors and were specifically intended to be seen by younger viewers. The decade has, in recent times, acquired quite another infamy, as an era in which certain celebrated public figures were able to commit sexual offences with impunity. In a few cases, those infamies have intersected, with some of the most memorable PIFs of their day featuring since-disgraced figures who were then deemed credible as the voice of reason. There was a time when "Teach Them To Swim" was considered such a gentle and wholesome PIF, up against the barbaric likes of "Lonely Water", but now it's every bit as cursed, if not more so. Such apprehensions haunt "Wise Owl" to the core.

"Wise Owl" opens with an animated segment, a faux PIF presented with all the grain and crackle of a 1970s artifact. A brother and a sister (the voices of Dylan Hall and Isabelle Lee Pratt, respectively) are out playing with a kite. The boy, the older of the two, states that he's been asked by his mother to keep guard of the situation, something he immediately blows by demanding a go with the kite, causing it to fly away and get caught against a pylon. The boy thinks it's a perfectly a sensible idea to climb the pylon and retrieve the kite, but is stopped by Wise Owl (voice of Ron Cook), a friendly talking strigine, who advises him of the dangers and why he should not mess with electricity. The sequence beautifully nails down the qualities that made these vintage PIFs so indelible to the children who had to accommodate them amid their regular teatime viewing - in particular, that haunting sense of childhood innocence on the cusp of some awful, irreversible disturbance. The danger the children are in is made all the more stark with the knowledge that it is the little girl's sixth birthday, and the kite that lures them to that dreaded pylon an item of particular excitement for being her present. As a pastiche of a 1970s public information film, it plays itself almost entirely straight, to the point where I could have bought it as a genuine specimen of the era. The only part that doesn't quite ring true is when Wise Owl retrieves the kite himself by blowing in its direction, providing a facile solution to the problem of the girl's lost present, so that the character goes from being authoritative to super-heroic. For now, a pivotal dynamic is established. Wise Owl is the voice of reason; vigilant, trustworthy and benevolent, a parental surrogate who can be counted on in the absence of adult supervision. The boy is foolish and courts disaster. The girl is innocent and helpless.

The look and the tone of the "Wise Owl" animations was blatantly inspired by the "Charley Says" series, in which a young boy named Tony was prevented from making stupid decisions by a cat named Charley (who, unlike the Owl, couldn't speak English, only a discordant garble of purrs and yowls, which Tony inexplicably understood). Two of the Charley shorts are recalled directly at later junctions in the episode - the one where Charley stopped Tony from playing with a box of matches, and the one where he stopped him from going off with a sinister figure who'd approached him in the playground with the (undoubtedly false) promise of taking him to see some cute puppies. There was, however, never a Charley short devoted to the dangers of scaling pylons - the inspiration for the opening sequence (and the use of an owl in general) looks to have been drawn from the 1978 film Play Safe, where a cartoon robin was lectured by an owl on the dangers of electricity, citing grim examples of children who met horrible fates by playing too close to live wires and substations (including one particularly infamous interlude with Jimmy and his Frisbee).

As Ronnie goes about his business inside the house (which includes a harrowing moment, the story's analogue to the Psycho shower scene, where he contemplates suicide by climbing into a filled bathtub with a mains-powered radio), his routine is interspersed with further animations starring Wise Owl and the children. But unlike the opening sequence, both contain obvious disturbances to the formula, suggesting a breakdown of the security Wise Owl supposedly upholds. In the second PIF, the boy and his sister are enjoying a day at the beach. The sister goes off with their mother to paddle in the waves, while the boy, left alone to dig sandcastles, is approached by a strange man who offers to show him a starfish. He nearly accepts the invitation, but is once again saved by the interventions of Wise Owl, who advises him that the man's intentions might not be as friendly as his appearance (which is really not at all friendly, since he's literally a looming shadow in a trench coat and fedora; he actually looks a lot like the stranger in that illustrated edition of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" I covered a couple of years ago). As a pastiche, it doesn't play itself quite as straight as its predecessor, with the added bit of blackly adult humor in the stranger's upfront observation that the boy looks "nice and shiny". It's also a little more on the nose with its nightmarish imagery - unlike its "Charley" equivalent, in which the playground prowler gave up the instant he was called out, we here get the extra sordid detail of the stranger's dark, gangly hand reaching out to seize the boy, prompting a violent response from Wise Owl, who swoops in and bites the hand. With the boy spared, Wise Owl turns and delivers the relevant lesson to the camera: "Don't be a Twit You! Always stay safe with your mummy and daddy! Wise Owl knows best!" The sequence doesn't end there, however. It rounds off with an unsettling epilogue, where Wise Owl flies away, leaving the boy alone once more, shaken and crying out for his mother.

An even more disturbing subversion occurs in the third film, which takes place, once again, on the girl's sixth birthday. Impatient for their mother to arrive home and to light the candles on her cake, the children retrieve the matches themselves from the mantelpiece. But on this occasion, no Wise Owl appears. No cat named Charley either. No voice of authority at all, in fact. The children are simply left to their own devices. The boy, ever the instigator of disaster, strikes one of the matches and holds it close to his face, smiling at the camera while the little flame dances ominously atop the head. We then cut back to Ronnie, who is studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror, stroking back the greasy curtain of hair around his ear to reveal the cluster of burn marks obscured underneath. It now becomes apparent that Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same. The sequences we've seen are conflations; Ronnie has remained so subjugated by the Wise Owl and his teachings into adulthood that he's obliged to filter his own childhood memories through the form and imagery of the character's PIFs. Although Ronnie is now in his 50s, he is still identifiably a child, and lives his life according to the rules laid out by the Wise Owl. Safety consciousness is baked into his psyche, to an obsessive degree; he responds to a buzzing fridge by unplugging most of the house's electrical appliances, removing all the light bulbs and retiring in the darkness. He also makes a point of never talking to strangers. When Blenkin shows up at his door, he accepts the rabbit but avoids engaging with him on any conversational level. The girl who appears alongside him in the animated sequences is identified as his sister, Joanne, and before long we've discovered the terrible reason why it seems to be perpetually her sixth birthday in his memories. It's a date that will forever haunt Ronnie, the day when the kind of catastrophic, worst-case-scenario nightmares outlined in public information films spilled over into his reality. It seems that Ronnie really did attempt to light the candles on Joanne's cake without adult supervision, and it all went horribly wrong. Ronnie was burned and Joanne did not survive. Ronnie has lived with the guilt ever since.

A common theme throughout the animated segments is the absence of the children's mother, and Ronnie's apparent inclination to make bad decisions when left to manage his own welfare and/or his sister's. In the present, Ronnie receives a video call from his mother (Georgie Glenn), who still worries about the possibility of Ronnie doing something stupid on his own. She reminisces about a childhood pet of Ronnie and Joanne's, a cat named Mimsy that was eventually evicted on account of Ronnie's allergies. She then asks Ronnie if he'll be coming to see her on Monday for an important family anniversary. Ronnie responds by referencing that other parental figure whose whereabouts have, up until now, remained unaccounted for. "Will Dad be there?", he asks. Her answer suggests that he is elusive and doesn't involve himself in family matters. "You know what he's like." Ronnie may be without parental oversight, but watchful authority is omnipresent through the eyes of the various stuffed cats, lambs and badgers that adorn the shelves above and are ever peering down on him (in that regard, they fulfil a similar purpose to Norman Bates' stuffed birds). Explicit note is made of the fact that there are no owls in the macabre menagerie, although Ronnie gets a nightmarish visitation from something even more grotesque (and darkly comic), in the form of a monstrous man-owl hybrid that steps into the living room during the night, head rotating and genitalia on full display.

The following morning, Ronnie begins work on stuffing Ferrari the rabbit, and we get a fourth "Wise Owl" PIF, only by now the pastiche has given way into full-blown parody. In this sequence, Ronnie and Joanne are mourning the death of their pet cat, when Wise Owl appears and instructs them on how to preserve their beloved friend forever, guiding them through the taxidermy process in lurid detail. I mentioned that some level of bathroom humor was a requisite for every episode of Inside No. 9, although "Wise Owl" is actually one of the mildest examples on that front. All we really have (besides the toilet's inevitable showing in the backdrop of the bathtub scene) is Ronnie's mother's recollection that Mimsy "had a way of looking at you...like you were muck on its shoe". We do, however, get plenty of uncomfortable gross-out bodily humor in watching this cartoon cat be skinned, its eyes gouged out, its body incinerated and its tanned hide stretched across an artificial skeleton (in Ronnie's words, "Like putting a sausage into its skin"). The cat is, troublingly, identified as Mimsy, although I don't take to mean that the cat was actually killed and stuffed in real life. Rather, an allusion is being drawn between the childhood pet and childhood innocence; once dead, it cannot be restored to what it was. We know that, despite Ronnie's declaration at the end of the PIF that Mimsy is "good as new", that a stuffed animal is in no way the same as a living pet. Blenkin's plan to pass the stuffed Ferrari off as a live but perpetually tired rabbit is obviously doomed to failure, a facile attempt to mask over a painful reality. How doomed, however, comes as a bit of a shock. As the PIF ends, we see the end-results of Ronnie's real-life taxidermy session, revealing a pronounced difference between himself and his Hitchcockian counterpart. Norman Bates was, among other things, a skilled taxidermist. Ronnie is anything but. The body of poor Ferrari the rabbit gets absolutely desecrated in his hands. In death, the creature is afforded no dignity.

Unfortunate, because it's right at this point that Blenkin reappears at the door, wanting to get Ferrari back in the same condition in which he left him. He seems much more agitated than on their previous encounter, having learned from speaking to a neighbour that resident taxidermist Mr Oliver is a man in his 70s, and he might have entrusted his daughter's pet rabbit to an imposter. Naturally, he's horrified on seeing what's become of Ferrari. While he's absolutely right in asserting that any child presented with Ronnie's "Franken-Rabbit" would have nightmares, it's hard to imagine how his tactic of giving his daughter a preserved rabbit hide would have worked out any better in the long run. Ronnie, then, is only an amateur taxidermist, and he is not the regular occupant of this particular no. 9. That is one of the story's twists. It is not made explicitly clear why he accepted Blenkin's job and attempted to stuff the rabbit himself, although it seems that he does, at heart, only ever want to do the right thing and please people. His disinclination against interacting with strangers was potentially overridden by the knowledge that the innocence of a small girl, not much younger than Joanne, was hanging in the balance. But he isn't able to protect her from the bleakness of the world, any more than he was Joanne.

Later that evening, the regular seventysomething Mr Oliver returns home, having been away on business for the weekend. He is of course Ronnie's father, Wilf, and he's played by Ron Cook, who is also the voice of Wise Owl. That is yet another of the story's twists. Just as Ronnie and the animated boy are one and the same, so too are his father and Wise Owl the exact same entity. Wilf really was the voice of Wise Owl in the series of public information films that existed in-universe, and Ronnie has never been able to separate them in this mind. Wilf was not expecting to see Ronnie. "You'll have to give me money for that window", he states, indicating that Ronnie has forced his way into the property. He speaks with a distinct lack of affection for his son, dropping the first casual reference to Ronnie's having been institutionalised for much of his adulthood ("Did they have a telly in...where you were, or were you not allowed?") and unrepentantly acknowledging that he maintained no contact with him within that time. He never visited Ronnie; when asked if he received any of Ronnie's letters, he takes the opportunity to berate him: "I couldn't read half of them. Your handwriting's shocking!"

Even before Wilf shows up in the flesh, his animated counterpart has undergone a significant degeneration, transmuting from the benevolent voice of reason to an increasingly sinister being with each new appearance. Take that moment in the second PIF where he bites the stranger's outstretched hand. Within context, it's ostensibly framed as a heroic action, but it calls attention to the owl's potentially vicious nature, underscoring that central irony that Ronnie is receiving advice about avoiding predators from an animal that is itself a predator. True, you could lay the exact same charge against Charley the cat (in his own "Strangers" PIF, he reduces a fish to a skeleton in the blink of an eye), but a cat's domesticated, and not a critter it seems particularly unusual to depict hanging around with small children. An owl's a creature of the wilderness, which is suggestive of a whole myriad of unknown and hidden dangers. His instruction on not talking to strangers seems like sound advice to give to a child, but has a darker echo in a later sequence, when Ronnie recalls being asked by his distraught mother why he lit those matches, and is again visited by Wise Owl, who simply tells him, "You mustn't say anything." The message Ronnie is being fed is that silence is his only recourse. Even Wise Owl's catchphrase, "Don't be a Twit You!", while sounding amusingly plausible as the kind of trademark saying a character from a public information film would have, takes on harsher tones, in mirroring Wilf's evident tendency toward bullying and rebuking Ronnie. Cook's dual performance is terrific - as the owl, he's hauntingly convincing as an authoritative voice from yesteryear. As Wilf he's spookily mean, but not to a point that precludes the character's discernible wretchedness. When they merge together, the results are both unhappy and uncanny.

Since the "Wise Owl" series ended, Wilf (whose name is, incidentally, only a letter away from that of another predatory wild animal) has gotten intermittent gigs playing to the nostalgia crowd (most recently an event at a toy museum, which had him in the stellar company of "Ray Brooks, Nigel from Pipkins [and] one of the Bungles - not the scary one") but taxidermy is now his bread and butter. He tells Ronnie, "You'd be surprised how many people want to preserve something of the past, keep a memory alive. Freeze-frame of a happy moment." The taxidermy motif serves a string of purposes throughout the narrative. It is, most obviously, an allusion to Psycho, that classic tale of an abusive parent and their damaged offspring, but on that score it is also something of a misdirect. On our first viewing, knowing the series' predilection for gruesome and disturbing endings, we might suspect that this is building towards the shocking revelation that one of our two taxidermists, be it the professional or the amateur, has applied that same process to a human subject (as Norman infamously did with his mother), most likely the body of the long-deceased Joanne. But that revelation does not come. Instead, the taxidermy is used fundamentally as a metaphor for what Wilf has done to Ronnie, in keeping him perfectly preserved, forever a child under the Wise Owl's rule, only a shell of what he might once have been. With hindsight, the macabre instructional film on stuffing Mimsy the cat becomes a grisly allegory for the violations Ronnie has endured at his father's hands; in the aftermath, it would be a flagrant pretence for either Mimsy or Ronnie to be described as "good as new", with Ronnie's botched job on Ferrari the rabbit signifying a more honest representation of the ugly realities. And intensely ugly they are too. Ronnie reminds Wilf that Monday will be the 44th anniversary of Joanne's death; if she'd lived, she would have been turning 50. He's come to Wilf because he has questions regarding what really happened on that fateful day. There follows a replay of the earlier "Matches" PIF, only this time the live action Ronnie is intermixed with the animated Joanne, suggesting a puncturing through of the illusion. Ronnie recalls that she'd received a doll, a tea set and a kite (there's another predatory bird). "Wise Owl" is revealed to have been present after all, only now he is depicted as the abusive and negligent figure that Wilf was in real life. Joanne wants to light the candles herself. Ronnie tells her that she shouldn't, but is shouted down by Wise Owl, who mocks Ronnie for needing to ask permission for everything and tells him to grow some balls. Joanne is left without supervision while Ronnie is ominously ordered to follow the predatory bird upstairs into the bedroom, with the reminder that "Wise Owl knows best". Ronnie was conditioned to always follow his father's instructions, much as he was conditioned to always follow the teachings of the Wise Owl. Wilf abused both of those authorities at once, creating a climate in which the innocence of both of his children was prematurely snuffed out.

With that in mind, we can see how the scenario in the earlier "Strangers" PIF was really being turned completely on its head. The danger lay with the supposedly safe authority figure all along. The message never to talk to strangers becomes an admonishment against ever reaching out to the outside world for help, against Ronnie being able to vocalise what he was going through. This is a chilling inversion of the alleged purpose of a public information film, in which the authority's words are clearly designed to protect its own interests and not the subject's.

The story climaxes with a reversal of this dynamic, as Ronnie holds his father at knife point and forces him to accompany him upstairs. As he goes, he has one more flashback to Joanne, now a flesh and blood child (the girl who plays her is not credited), cheerfully lighting the candles on her cake, the last time he ever saw her alive. He takes Wilf to his childhood bedroom, and confronts him on why he allowed him to take the blame for the fire. Wilf responds that he had his career to think about, morbidly observing that for a renowned PIF voice-over's daughter to die in a fire of his causing was "not very on brand". Ronnie insinuates that Wilf betrayed his trust in him, and the Wise Owl, to which Wilf responds, "That was only a game. You enjoyed it." He then attempts to subdue Ronnie by evoking the lexicon of the Wise Owl: "Don't be a Twit You. Give your old man a hug." Ronnie looks as though he might comply, but instead raises the knife and slashes through an adjacent pillow, causing feathers to violently spill. Wilf hits back with the threatening reminder that such behaviour could potentially get Ronnie reinstitutionalised, assuring him that if he stops now then he won't say anything. Ronnie responds, "But I will", and goes his own way, clear in his mind over what he needs to do next. He's going to go to his mother and tell her everything. Wilf makes a further effort to dissuade him, by slipping back into the persona of Wise Owl ("Wise Owl won't let you...and we must always do what the Wise Owl says, mustn't we?"); in a deliberately on the nose detail that straddles the border between the unsettling and the just plain absurd, he does so with several feathers still hanging off of his body. The spell is broken, however. Ronnie no longer answers to the Wise Owl, having seen him for the wretched fool that he is.

It's tempting to conclude that "Wise Owl" was conceived as a measured response to criticisms of how the series had previously depicted trauma victims and characters with mental illness, which is to say, as ready to kill their abusers and liable to hurt others; for examples, see "Tom and Gerri" (which is a really good, really tense little character piece, although the ending might not please everyone) and "Thinking Out Loud" (for myself, the low point of the series, for a myriad of reasons). In that regard, Shearsmith and Pemberton aren't necessarily offering up anything more egregious than any number of horror-based media, which has an ingrained tendency towards treating the psychologically troubled as outcasts and objects of fear and suspicion (for all of its merits, Psycho is absolutely included; the film's title alone is a dead giveaway) ^[1] - although, correct, by the 2020s we really should be doing a whole lot more to challenge those preconceptions, and "Wise Owl" feels like a refreshing step in the right direction. To an extent, it is another exercise in rug-pulling from a series smart enough to use its own perceived formula to its advantage. In establishing Ronnie as an obviously mentally ill protagonist and coding him according to such a familiar archetype, it engenders a deliberate set of expectations, only to subvert them - in addition to the aforementioned misdirect with the taxidermy, there's also a fake-out moment where it looks as though Ronnie intends to stab his father, when in the actuality he's going for the pillow. But more than merely surprising, it reaches a genuinely affecting and cathartic resolution, one that eschews brutality and shocks in favour of conveying a sincere sense of Ronnie finding a way forward from his traumas. The cycle of horror and despair does not ultimately claim him. As he walks away at the end, we have every reason to believe that a more hopeful future lies ahead.

"Wise Owl" concludes with one final animated sequence, in which Ronnie the boy leaves the house and, freed from his father's toxic influence, takes his first real steps toward adulthood; in doing so, he visibly transforms from a boy into a man. The traumas that have dogged him for most of his life have not entirely receded; Wise Owl continues to follow him, and to berate him with the usual cry of, "Twit You! Twit You!" But he's merely an irritating speck at the back of Ronnie's head, not the dominating figure of the past, and Ronnie is fully capable of dismissing him. "Get stuffed!" Ronnie retorts, and keeps on walking.

 [1] For an example of how persistently accepted such ideas still are in the modern horror landscape, you might look to film critic Mark Kermode's rather tone-deaf response to a listener's charge that the 2022 film Smile perpetuated those very stigmas. I'm only bringing this up because I was somewhat taken back at how he brought Psycho into the conversation, to make the case that Smile shouldn't be singled out, without acknowledging that Psycho was made a whopping 62 years before Smile. You might very reasonably have expected attitudes to have moved on since then.

Gerry (aka Passion In The Desert)

Gus Van Sant has had quite the chequered career. One of the most prominent figures in the emerging queer cinema movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Portland-based director got his start with such singular independent fare as Mala Noche (1986), Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). His initial attempt to play around with an expanded budget went over poorly, with the ill-fated adaptation of Tom Robbins' cult novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1993), but he rebounded in 1995 with To Die For, a blackly comic media satire starring Nicole Kidman. Having achieved real breakthrough success with the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting in 1997, still his most popular and well-known film to date, Van Sant followed things up with what many would deem to be his all-time career low, a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which flopped both critically and commercially and has lingered in the discourse purely as its yardstick for an exercise in confounding pointlessness (although if you ask me there's a whole spate of recent Disney pictures that give it a run for its money). Now, Psycho '98 is one of those films that I probably could say a whole lot more about at a later date, given my deep reverence for the original, and for Anthony Perkins' Norman, but I am conscious that it's been many years since I saw it and my enthusiasm is not such that I can see myself revisiting it any time soon - and besides, I suspect that my observations would ultimately boil down to the most predictable criticisms imaginable (William H Macy does a reasonable job, Viggo Mortensen and Julianne Moore are both pretty bland, though arguably no more so than John Gavin and Vera Miles...but holy shit is Vince Vaughn woefully miscast as Norman). Van Sant's great transgression, of course, was less in making an ill-received picture than in taking a wide, salivary bite out of one of Hollywood's most sacred cows in the process, and in an effort to clear the soured air his next step was the moderate hit Finding Forrester (2000). Nevertheless, the mainstream arena seemed to have already lost much of its lustre for Van Sant, as the new millennium saw him going in search of his indie roots with a string of aggressively anti-Hollywood projects that would be come to be affectionately known as his "Death Trilogy" - Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005). A threesome of films that, as their collective term implies, all have human mortality on their minds, but also lengthy silences, unhurried pacing and narratives stripped down to their most unrelentingly austere cores.

Gerry in particular is as brutally barebones a cinematic yarn as they come, a Man versus Nature tale comprised of very little other than a pair of human figures (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) traversing a seemingly unending landscape, searching for a route back toward a civilisation that remains wildly elusive. The characters themselves remain as blank and unchartered as their surroundings - over the course of the picture, we learn few of the finer details regarding who they are and what kind of lives they've inadvertently walked in from - which is not to say that either character is any more interesting or enigmatic for it. Hollywood convention has conditioned us to expect some kind of grand revelation in the midst of crisis, in which heroes come to understand themselves better and how to navigate through some broader personal dilemma - a convention roundly mocked in one of the film's more prominent contemporaries, Spike Jonze's Adaptation. (2002) - but none occurs here. We don't even learn their names, really - the characters refer to one another by the common moniker "Gerry", but then they seem to refer to just about everything as "Gerry". It is a catch-all term in slang that might well have been concocted exclusively between them. Gerry is a picture that runs on its own terrifying emptiness. The only obviously Hollywood-friendly aspect of the picture is in the presence of Damon, who had accumulated significant star power in the years between Good Will Hunting and Gerry (Affleck, who had previously worked with Van Sant in To Die For, was still a relatively minor name at this point).

Gerry was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, but would not receive a theatrical distribution until the following year. Overall, reception was less enthusiastic than it was for succeeding "Death" installment Elephant, a fictionalised interpretation of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre that netted Van Sant the Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. Elephant stood out, in part, for having topicality on its side - it had the advantage of appearing to be about something, whereas Gerry (despite also taking inspiration from a recent real-life killing, albeit loosely) appeared to be, quite literally, about nothing. The characters disappear into a vacuum between two seemingly arbitrary narrative poles and the viewer gets the experience of disappearing along with them. Another exercise in confounding pointlessness, then, like Van Sant's earlier misadventure in resurrecting the timid taxidermist? Or does Gerry tease us with the slightest possibility of a hidden depth, if we're willing to gaze long enough into its arid abyss? Critics have certainly attempted. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw proposes that the film might be perceived as a commentary on the demise of the American dream - "there's something parodically American in their horror of the vast and implacable emptiness of an uncivilised landscape which in the 21st century is no longer fertile with opportunity but merely a concealed abyss of fruitless inconvenience and danger." Donato Totaro of online film journal Offscreen interprets the film as a "a studied play on cinematic seeing and hearing, more accurately how the camera, character, and spectator ‘see and hear’ differently. I don’t think the location choice of the desert, land of illusion and mirage, was a coincidence." Speculation has been made over Van Sant's probable influences, including Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot (a play where, in the words of contemporary critic Vivian Mercer, nothing happens, twice) and Hungarian film-maker Bela Tarr, from whom Van Sant borrows the technique of almost unbearably stretched out single takes.

It goes without saying that Gerry is not to all tastes. You can probably tell from reading the plot outline whether or not it's for you. Personally, I have long championed it as Van Sant's masterpiece. This could indeed be a film about absolutely nothing. But I would argue that "nothing" does not automatically equate to pointlessness in the vein of Psycho '98. Oblivion is one heck of an enthralling subject, after all.

Gerry opens with our protagonists driving to a location vaguely defined as the "Wilderness Trail", with the half-hearted intention of reaching the even more vaguely defined "thing", a lacklustre term that seems designed to discourage the viewer from forming even the slightest whisker of narrative curiosity as to what it might be. Geoff King, who brings up the film in his book American Independent Cinema, describes the opening sequence as "deliberately arbitrary and unconvincing" (p. 147), by which I presume he's referring to the transparency that neither Gerry has very much interest in finding "the thing" in the first place. The film does not devote too much time in trying to convince its audience that it's headed for anything particularly solid or defined. Totaro suggests that the "thing" might be seen as a nod to the mainstream Hollywood conventions the film so determinedly avoids: "The characters/film ‘strays’ from the sea of Hollywood conformity (of which Van Sant was himself trapped with Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester [2000]) and becomes ‘lost’ in an oasis of personal, visionary cinema." In other words, the "thing" signifies the plot we might have expected to develop in a more conventional picture; the protagonists' total indifference is both a teasing concession to that expectation and a mistrustful dismissal of the value of narrative convention - the film goes through the motions at the point where it feels obligated to develop some kind of perfunctory narrative trigger. As Affleck's character proclaims, "Fuck the thing!" Does anybody care about the thing, really?

The more intriguing narrative puzzle occurs at film's climax, when Affleck's Gerry informs Damon's Gerry that "I'm leaving", whereupon Damon's Gerry proceeds to strangle him, a seemingly unmotivated action, and go the rest of the journey alone. As it turns out, he does not have far to travel. No sooner has he abandoned Affleck's freshly-strangled corpse than do the miniature shapes of distant vehicles appear on the horizon, and Damon realises that he is within reach of an adjacent road. Damon makes his long-awaited reconnection with civilisation by hitching a ride with a parent and child. No words are exchanged between them. The characters sit in an uncomfortable silence, barely even acknowledging each other. The closest we get to any interaction between Damon and his saviours is in the voyeuristic glimpse the driver sneaks at him in his rear view mirror, shortly before the picture fades to blue. The final word, appropriately, goes to the landscape itself; we get another extended shot of the desert from the perspective of the car window. Its presence continues to dominate and haunt the surviving Gerry, and he regards it with such a manner suggesting that it is now the world with which he is better able to identify.

The film's baffling final outcome - the inexplicable slaughter of one Gerry by the other - was later echoed in Elephant, where one of the two shooters abruptly turns his gun on his own partner (with whom he had prior shared an intimate kiss) while their massacre is still underway. Unlike Elephant, which makes the bold and unsettling move of ending before the massacre does, Gerry bows out on a relatively conclusive note, with the restoration of one of its two protagonists to the world from which they diverged. The film has a cyclic structure, opening with the two main characters on the road and closing with Damon's character riding along inside a vehicle once again. Noteworthy is that Damon is the passenger in both cases - although he is clearly the more dominant and emotionally composed of the two Gerrys throughout the crisis, he is not, at the beginning or end, behind the wheel and in charge of where he is headed. Affleck, meanwhile, visibly the younger of the two Gerrys, emerges as the more desperate and misfortune-prone of the two - if the ending comes in any way as a shock to us, it is certainly no surprise that this particular Gerry would be the one dispatching this particular Gerry. It is also Affleck with whom the viewer is more likely to sympathise; his vulnerability and barely-concealed despair in the face of endless uncertainty seems more relatable than Damon's stoicism. Affleck's vulnerability is further enforced during a monologue from early in the picture, the most substantial portion of dialogue we experience from either character, and the only real illumination we get into the world our world have left behind. Only even then, it is a fantasy life that Affleck has experienced via a video simulation - he mentions to Damon that he has "conquered Thebes" and describes how, due to his failure to appease Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest ("she got really pissed off, she made my fields infertile"), his empire slowly crumbled. It is not explicitly acknowledged, but he is talking about his fortunes in playing the video game Civilization. The specifics of Affleck's dialogue tend not to elicit much curiosity from commentators - it has no bearing on the story and seems almost absurdly detached from the reality of their situation. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that Affleck is describing the process through which human conquest is thwarted by the forces of nature, and the various individual threads that, when pulled, cause society to collapse completely. The fragile barrier that stands between civilisation and barbarity is echoed in the startling ease with which he and Damon take a few too many steps off the beaten track and wind up right in the belly of oblivion, and is especially salient if we interpret Gerry as a parable where Nature unleashes a retribution on Man, albeit with an eerie passivity. When Affleck insists that he had, technically, conquered Thebes before his fall, he comes off as ridiculous, particularly for as little and overwhelmed as he is out here in the world - we know that he has no more conquered Thebes than he was ever in control of his own destiny, despite his positioning in the driver seat in the opening sequence. Furthermore, his presentation of this desultory anecdote  suggests a tendency, however casually, to blur fantasy and reality, something that becomes genuinely threatening in later on when, in his dazed and dehydrated state, he struggles to distinguish between his physical surroundings and mirages.

The film's applicability to the "Death" trilogy refers to the ultimate outcome of the characters' journey, but also the geographical location, the film being partially shot in California's Death Valley. The location of the desert is never specified, in narrative terms - it is simply a vast, generic desert that seems to expand ever onward - but what the viewer actually sees is Damon and Affleck maundering across a variety of terrains, and not exclusively American. Van Sant and his crew had initially travelled to Argentina with the intention of filming the entire picture, but struggled with the local climate and wound up relocating parts of the production to Utah and California. The floating location may have made things easier on the production, but it also plays to the film's advantage. The desert's composite nature means that it has no fixed form or character, feeling less like a site to be crossed over than a rolling nightmare that morphs and expands with every step the heroes take, constantly deceiving them and spitting them out at another point entirely. The Bela Tarr influence is evident in the manner in which the film, at times, seems to play like the most low-key of horror stories, with the terror arising from the sheer monotony with which the characters are obligated to endure the apparently interminable (I had similar thoughts about The Turin Horse). In a sequence that seems plucked directly from more conventional horror cinema, a third Gerry momentarily appears on the horizon and heads in the protagonists' direction, a hazy, indistinct figure who is so out of focus as to not appear fully human, and whom the two "original" Gerrys do not seem to notice. In a dislocating twist, that hazy third Gerry transpires to be the "real" Damon, while the Damon with whom Affleck has just been conversing - living out another variation on his assertion of having conquered Thebes, in which he claims to have found water and figured out the location of their vehicle - has completely disappeared. It is here that Van Sant most obviously pits the subjective against the objective to create a sense of unravelling reality, and the extent to which the characters' already vaguely-defined identities are beginning to merge with their surroundings; the hazily-defined figure of the perpetually wandering Gerry, now an imprint on the landscape, becomes an approaching threat, a wraith lurching toward the ostensibly triumphant Affleck to commandeer the naarative trajectory and nullify his claims of heroism.

The most plausible explanation for the climactic murder is that Damon kills Affleck at Affleck's request - it is an assisted suicide carried out on the mutual understanding that Affleck is, whether physically or mentally, incapable of continuing the journey. The killing is prompted not merely by Affleck's cryptic final statement, but by his reaching out and touching the initially unresponsive Damon, an imploration that he enables him to make good on his assertion that his role in this futile non-narrative be ended then and there. Has his body already started to succumb to death, hence his insistence that he is "leaving", or is he (more likely) submitting his formal surrender - not merely to the elements, but to the narrative inertia? Perhaps it is the film's equivalent of one of the most haunting exchanges in Waiting For Godot, when Estragon insists that, "I can't go on like this", only in place of Vladimir's deeply foreboding response ("That's what you think"),  Damon answers his companion's plea with a silent humaneness that paradoxically necessitates his destruction.

If Damon's Gerry kills Affleck as an act of compassion, then is this ultimately rendered meaningless by the revelation that the characters were, apparently, only ten minutes or so away from salvation?  In this regard, the outcome bears ostensible resemblance to the ham-fistedly bleak conclusion of Frank Darabont's 2007 film The Mist - only whereas with that film the ending felt like a particularly harsh and mean-spirited joke at the characters' expense, Gerry doesn't offer the same sense of overwrought tragedy (or tragicomedy?). The ending does not seem designed to evoke a response of "If only..." Rather, one gets the impression that it is (somehow) through the destruction of his close companion that Damon himself is able to cross back into the civilised world. It is as if the elimination of Affleck has altered the very course of what lies head. Perhaps Affleck understands that some kind of narrative climax is necessary in order to progress to a conclusion, and he offers up his life in order to release them both from their entrapment. Circling back to the moment of tender intimacy shared by the young mass murderers of Elephant shortly before their killing spree, it is tempting to interpret the act of strangulation as itself an allusion to sexual intimacy. As Damon carries out the deed, Affleck raises his arms and grips Damon's back - a sign of resistance, if only reflexively? Or is he attempting to hold his companion in a final, loving embrace?The Gerrys have always been bound to one another throughout in terms of their destiny and common identity, but this is the first time we have seen them physically converge.

Multiple critics have picked up on the possibility that the Gerrys might in fact be two halves of a single entity. Bradshaw writes that, "it's tempting to think each is a hallucination the other is having, staring into a terrifying, existential mirror." Totaro compares the outcome to the Edgar Allan Poe story "William Wilson", in which a man murders his own doppelganger, and to David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway, observing that, "we start the film with the psychic split already having occurred; and only at the end is the psychic split healed, when the double is ‘killed’ and the character’s single identity restored." Something similar occurs at the end of the aforementioned Adaptation., in which Nicolas Cage plays a pair of identical twin "brothers", Charlie and Donald, the latter of whom is likely nothing more than a grotesque mirror image of the former (both are screenwriters, yet Donald indulges in everything that Charlie considers obnoxious and undesirable about their craft). Donald perishes during the film's climactic sequence while Charlie survives, and it is through Donald's destruction that he finds both the catharsis and the incentive he needs to navigate through his writer's block and finish the picture (both the one he is writing and the one the audience is watching). Charlie prospers by simultaneously conquering and embracing his demon, in the form of Donald; it is through the accommodation and mastery of his shadow self that he figures out how to thrive in the world. In Gerry, Damon's elimination of Affleck is succeeded by his own salvation (ostensibly, anyway), for Damon, like Charlie, discovers that he is now able to progress to something resembling an ending. But whereas Charlie appears to have successfully healed the gap between the two warring halves of his psyche, Damon is forced to leave Affleck's body out in the desert; the Damon we see riding the car at the end has not been fully restored but is instead represents one half of a former whole. We are reminded of the warning at the end of Poe's story: "from now on you are also dead - dead to the World, dead to Heaven, dead to Hope." So heavily bound is one Gerry's identity to the other that Damon's supposed survival has, in practice, amounted to his own destruction. Think back to poor Norman and to the war with Mother that he was always fated to lose.

The final image of Adaptation. is an optimistic, if somewhat troubling one. A sequence of time lapse photography shows a box of flowers thriving amid a bustling cityscape. The petals of the flowers open and close to the rhythms of day and night as a constant stream of traffic rushes past. Perhaps Jonze is being deliberately evocative of Koyaanisqatsi, but in a manner which suggests the ultimate prevailing of the natural amid the technological, much as Charlie learns to prosper in a world that seems overwhelmingly stacked against his personal and professional ambitions. The ending's sinister underside is conveyed in the tell-tale accompanying track, "Happy Together" by The Turtles, which Donald had previously planned to insert into his screenplay, a messy quagmire of Hollywood cliches about a character with (what else?) a split personality. It clues us in that the harmony is an uneasy one, and that the co-existence may eventually give way to reckoning. Compare it to the ending of Gerry, which also juxtaposes the natural with the technological, with the vehicle that carries Damon and these two strangers running alongside the desert that continues to dominate the picture until the very last frame. The aridness of the desert contrasts with the vitality of the flowers of Adaptation., in which the natural world signifies survival, an ability to thrive and move forward with which the neurotic human world has overwhelmingly lost touch. In Gerry, the natural world, for all of its awe-inspiring grandeur, is less a source of comfort and inspiration to its human cast than it is a frightening reminder of the omnipresence and inevitability of death. At one point, early on in their adventure, Damon speculates that, "Everything's going to lead to the thing, everything's going to lead to the same place", which makes me wonder if this mysterious "thing" and the desert really aren't just two sides of the same coin. The Gerrys amble along, in no particular hurry to reach their fated destination, and happen upon it far sooner than they'd anticipated.

Totaro proposes that Affleck's Gerry is the "mirage", hence why it is Damon who ultimately emerges, yet if I was going to advocate that only one of the two Gerrys is physically real, I'd be more inclined to take the the reverse position - that Affleck represents the corporeal half of Gerry, the half of him that lies motionless in the desert at the end, whereas Damon signifies Gerry's anima, represented throughout as an external character (and potentially even splitting into two figures at one point, as Affleck's grip on reality begins to fragment). Both of them cross through the Valley of Death, until Affleck finally succumbs, whereupon the road reappears and Damon finds himself headed for a new body or two with which to align himself. It represents a renewal of the cycle - a reincarnation, if you will. The final scene within the vehicle interior presents something of an enigma, for Van Sant omits what would be a crucial scene in a more conventional narrative - the rescue itself, coupled with some exposition on the identity of his rescuers. Instead, we jump abruptly to find Damon travelling with these two unknowns, leaving some uncertainty as to what, precisely, is going on. Has Damon really been rescued, or is this merely another mirage? It strikes me as significant that the child seated in the back of the vehicle with Damon (but with his gaze turned firmly away from him) looks like a younger version of himself; he seems as if he could pass for Damon's own son over the driver we would presume to be his actual father. This reinforces our sense of a rebirthing, that we are once again at the beginning of a cycle. Nevertheless, the suggestion of restoration is undercut by the obvious unease of the final arrangement - Damon's newly-acquired mirror image refuses to acknowledge him, as if disturbed by the vision of what he is fated to become, and when he looks toward the actual rear view mirror he is met with the unwelcome gaze of the driver, another supposed controller of destiny who regards this relic of a fallen would-be empire with both fascination and suspicion. Instead, Damon finds greater affinity out there in the desert, for what is important is that all routes eventually lead to it. This is something Damon understands at the end, as he contemplates his ostensible victory over the landscape - sooner or later, he's going to wind up right back there again.

Psycho: The Sinister Stuff

So I've talked in fairly extensive detail about Norman's handedness and why it's such a wonderful and critical component of the Psycho franchise, yet one that people either miss altogether or do not care to comment upon (I for one was disappointed to find no reference to it in Alexandre O. Phillipe's otherwise excellent 78/52*). Yet there's an obvious question prompted in all of this that I have thus far been dodging entirely. Norman's internal struggle - the battle between his independent urges and the part of his psyche that Mother has staked her posthumous claim on -  is represented by his ambidexterity. Norman is apparently left-handed, but the right hand exhibits a frightening will and autonomy all of its own. Norman's left hand is the more benign of the two, and the hand that's aligned with his own personality, so as long as his left hand remains the dominant one then you have little to worry about. It's when the right hand, the hand that keeps him anchored to Mother's omnipresent grasp, takes over that you may be in trouble. It's a simple case of left hand, good, right hand, bad. The question this begs is, isn't it traditionally the other way around?

It's no secret that numerous cultures all throughout history have exhibited an extreme bias for those who err toward the right-hand side over the left. In the eternal struggle that is central to many world religions between mankind's quest for a moral wisdom and his need to consolidate this with his capacity for darker, less desirable urges, the opposing sides of the body were cast as symbols of this duality, of the basic choices facing every individual human being, and it's hardly surprising that the right-handed majority were able to claim the better half for themselves. The right hand is the embodiment of all that is sturdy, correct and righteous; the left, by contrast, represents everything odd, treacherous and depraved about the human condition; not for nothing did the term "sinister", the Latin word for left, ultimately acquire new meaning in denoting something that is off-kilter to the point of being threatening. For an example of this hegemony, we need only look to cinema's most iconic proponent of the idea that the battle between good and evil within a man's soul can be boiled down to a literal tussle between one's hands; a character so devoted to the notion that he goes so far as to have the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on the knuckles of his right and left hands, respectively. I speak, of course, of the Reverend Harry Powell, the murderous minister portrayed by Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's 1955 thriller The Night of The Hunter. Says Powell: "Shall I tell you the little story of Right Hand, Left Hand - the tale of good and evil? It was with his left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low!" Whereas the right hand? "These fingers have veins that run straight to the soul of man! The right hand, friends! The hand of love!" According to Powell, the entirety of human existence ("The Story of Life" as he calls it) is defined by the battle for ownership of both body and spirit between the right and left hand - "The fingers of these hands, dear hearts, they're always a-tuggin' and a-warrin', one hand against the other!" - a battle which, Powell assures us, will ultimately result in the triumph of good over evil. Spike Lee's 1989 film Do The Right Thing features a sequence in which Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) relays the exact same analogy. In both cases, the fight is rigged so that the left hand loses, its suppression justified by the rationale that nothing good could come of it anyway.

Above: Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) in Charles Laughton's Night of The Hunter (1955). Below: Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989). Each weighs in upon the distribution of good and evil within the human anatomy. I don't know about you, but I'm sensing a slight prejudice here.

With this in mind, it might be tempting to conclude that Norman's left-handedness should be taken as an early hint that there is something very sinister (in both senses of the word) about him and that, being the classically deviant southpaw, he is not to be trusted. But you still have to account for the fact that it is invariably his right hand with which he exercises his intermittent bursts of homicidal fury. The left hand prefers to accomplish far more mundane tasks, such as popping candy and cleaning showers. For Norman, the struggle is reversed, and yet the outcome still echoes Powell's analogy in that the right hand is depicted as the inevitable victor. In the original film, it is the right hand, the hand aligned with Norman's Mother personality, that emerges as the stronger of the two, dragging Norman into the darkest depths of insanity while the left hand effectively retreats altogether. In Psycho II it is confirmed that the fight is indeed rigged; despite Norman's sincerest efforts to move away from the shadow of Mother and walk the straight and narrow, an assortment of external forces collude (wittingly and unwittingly) in the form of Lila, Mary and Spool, and successfully drive him back into his old habits. The right hand suppresses the left hand much as the right-handed have suppressed and stigmatized the left-handed throughout history. This is not the triumph of LOVE over HATE, but the domination of the merciless over the powerless.

In Norman's case the conflict is more Freudian in nature, less a straightforward battle based on traditional notions of good and evil as a struggle between the various contradictory aspects of the human psyche; the impulsive and unconscious drives of the id versus the learned social values and ideals imposed by the superego. The serpent in the garden, for Norman, is his sexual curiosity, which is awakened by Marion in Psycho and later by Mary in Psycho II, and invariably leads to disaster as it throws his loyalty toward Mother into question. The trigger for Norman's murderously psychotic behaviour is always the suggestion that he and Mother are at risk of being separated. Freud's model of the id, ego and superego posits that the human psyche is comprised of three components; in its rawest state, it is driven entirely by biological impulse, but this is complicated by the development of a sense that not all of our behaviours are acceptable and may entail undesirable consequences, which in most cases would come primarily from our parents or other caregivers. Hence, the dichotomy of the id and the superego, with the ego somewhere in between attempting to negotiate a middle path. We might expect the id to be the more treacherous of the two, and yet Psycho presents us with an unsettling example in which the superego is stifling and distorting the id. Any exercise of autonomy on behalf of the id creates the need to balance it out by eliminating the source of the disturbance (carried out with Marion and toyed with with Mary). By controlling his libido, Mother keeps Norman permanently infantilised and denies him the ability to function as a separate human being. It is a war between madness and sanity, or whatever semblances of sanity Norman still has remaining, in which the underdog is represented by the subjugated left hand.

Before we go any further as to why, in Psycho, Hitchcock might have chosen to reverse the roles assumed by the right and left hand in traditional assumptions about human duality, it's worth acknowledging that we could, if we so wanted, cut through such discussions with a particularly sharp Occam's razor, which is that Norman is left-handed because Anthony Perkins was himself left-handed. Although Perkins did adjust his handedness for some roles - Robert Mulligan's Fear Strikes Out (1957), in which he portrayed baseball player Jimmy Piersall and was required to learn to bat and throw with his right hand, presented particular problems for him - for Psycho it may be as simple as Hitchcock allowing him to use the hand that came naturally to him for most of the film, and determining from there that the wayward Mother hand would be played by his non-dominant right hand. In fact, I think that probably is what happened here. But such readings are obviously no fun from an analytical perspective.

If we insist on trawling for deeper significance, I think there are two possible schools of thought here, the first being that Norman's own identity being aligned with the left hand is an indication that he's the more feminine of the two. It's also no secret that, throughout history, the division of male and female has been yet another dualism of which humankind has been all-too consciously aware, with the female, like the left-hander, being widely dismissed as the inferior of the two, often within the same breath. In The Left Stuff: How the Left-Handed Have Survived and Thrived in a Right-Handed World, Melissa Roth notes that, "it is perhaps not surprising that both religious doctrine and mythology have tended to feminize the "lesser" side of the body." (p.30) Roth makes extensive reference to the early 20th century studies of French scholar Robert Hertz, which sought to investigate the widespread cultural favouritism for the right hand over the left. Writes Roth:

"In Hertz's study of nineteenth-century cultures, he also uncovered a gender relationship to handedness. Certain African tribes considered the right hand the strong "male" hand: good lively, and designated to offer food and make presents. The left hand was "feeble, feminine, wicked and deathful" and was used to take things away...The Waluwanga tribe of Australia used two sticks to mark the beat during ceremonies. "One is called the man and is held in right hand, while the other, the woman, is held in the left," wrote Hertz. "Naturally, it is always the 'man' which strikes the 'woman' which receives the blows; the right which acts, the left which submits."" (p.32)

It's not terribly hard to see how this line of thinking may apply to Norman, for Mother clearly wears the pants around the Bates household, and the distribution of power dynamics within their relationship is intended to be unsettling. A criticism that is frequently lobbied at Hitchcock's film in terms of its implicit gender politics (second only to some of the more troublesome implications of Marion's arc) is that the shy, sensitive and distinctly un-masculine figure of Norman was intended as a statement against the rearrangement of traditional gender roles; deprived of a patriarch at a very young age, Norman grew up with his screaming shrew of a mother as effectively his sole influence in life, and his psyche has been hijacked by the overpowering compulsion to emulate her. In The Ultimate Horror Movie Guide: 365 Films To Scare You To Death by James Marriott and Kim Newman, we are told that, "Norman's cross-dressing can be seen as parodic of [the] ideal of the sensitive man, in touch with his feminine side." (p.100) Meanwhile, the film's more conventionally masculine figure, John Gavin's Sam Loomis, is ostensibly depicted as the hero of the piece, in being the one who overpowers Norman during the final confrontation, superficially reaffirming the importance and supremacy of traditional models of masculinity (even before Sam gets to physically tussle with Norman, he maintains the upper hand during their nervy lobby exchange, where Norman tries to pack Sam and Lila off to Cabin 10 as quickly and as trace-free as possible, but Sam insists on all the formalities). Still, Marriott and Newman also make the astute observation that, "the unevenness of the film, which loses momentum after the death of Marion Crane, forces us to identify further with Norman rather than the drab Sam and Lila." (p.101) In the end, Sam doesn't qualify as the "hero" of the film because the audience isn't prompted terribly to get behind him. I've heard it said that Hitchcock didn't think too much of Gavin's performance as Sam and considered him the weak link of the film, although I think much of it comes down to the fact that Sam isn't amazingly compelling as a character; he's such a dull, clean-cut everyman as to be unidentifiable. One has to question if he was really worth the hassle that Marion put herself through to secure that stolen money for his benefit.  The fact is that the film does encourage us to sympathise with the gauche, sinister Norman over his more conventional counterparts, and that's because of his gaucheness, not in spite of it. Norman is so strange, off-kilter and visibly warped as to be entirely endearing; you feel for the screwed up loner whose left hand didn't know who his right hand was killing.**

The relationship between Norman and Mrs Bates is replicated, to a degree, in the parallel relationship between Mary and Lila in Psycho II. Once again, the patriarch has been displaced (here, that patriarch is none other than Sam himself, confirming that the conventional male is as mortal and destructible as anyone else), allowing the mother free reign in asserting her domineering control over her reluctant offspring. In Lila's case, she has a daughter, not a son, so the power dynamics may seem less offsetting from a traditional gender role perspective, but the tell-tale feature of Lila's debasement, even more so than her spiteful intentions for Norman, is the evident callousness with which she regards her own child, whom Lila is prepared to both endanger and corrupt for the sake of a particularly underhanded game of scab-picking. (I blame her marriage to Sam Loomis as much of the psychological fall-out from the events of the first film; that would be enough to crush anybody's spirits). For her part, Mary may have been spared the extreme psychological damage dished out to Norman, but she finds herself split between two compelling urges - her increasing affinity toward Norman's plight and her sense of familial obligation toward her mother. Going against her mother's wishes is clearly not something that comes naturally to Mary (at one point, she complains to Lila that "I've done everything you've asked for years"), but it is evident, both to the viewer and to Mary, that authority, for all its claims to moral righteousness, is steering her down a distinctively perverse path.

Which leads me onto the second school of thought, and the one that I personally find the more compelling of the two, which is that Norman's treacherous right hand is an implicit symbol of authority leading us astray, a demonstration that the forces in which we might ordinarily be inclined to place our trust may not actually have our best interests in mind. After all, Psycho is a film that revels in misdirection, and in luring its viewers repeatedly into a false sense of security, and nothing is more emblematic of our being wrong-footed than the right-hand side, which we are culturally accustomed to accept as safe, upstanding and reliable, offering us no refuge or stability. What's compelling about Psycho is the manner in which it leads us to a forked road and prompts us to identify with the overtly sinister, less conventional route. For Marriott and Newman, Hitchcock's foremost agenda is simply to deceive us, and our sympathies for Norman play directly into that purpose; they argue that the qualities that make him endearing amount to "less a sympathetic portrayal of madness  a la [Michael Powell's] Peeping Tom...than another way for Hitchcock to pull the rug from under our feet." I would argue, however, that the film's predilection for aligning the viewer with the strange over the ordinary goes a step further than mere beguilement. The journey that makes up the initial portion of the film, in which the viewer accompanies Marion from the crowded diurnal world of the city to the nocturnal, intensely isolated world of the Bates Motel, sends us hurtling head-first into the unfamiliar, and it's here that it insists on keeping us. There is no return journey back into the familiar, with the ensuing narrative leading us not into comfort and safety, but ever deeper into darkness and chaos (the dry, drawn-out denouement of Simon Oakland's character unfortunately comes as an upset to this trajectory, but it is nevertheless the psychotic Norman who gets the last word). It is an unsettling experience for sure, and yet a curious thing happens when we enter this dark and disconcerting world. The strange and uncanny becomes the new familiar, and we become attuned to the threats facing the odd from the ordinary, the vulnerability of the eccentric in a world governed by convention. So when the prying voice of reason comes calling in the form of Arbogast, and later in the brawny and imposing Sam, we as much as Norman feel the intrusion on our personal territory. The revelation that Norman is the killer only goes so far to offset this - rather than dramatically alter our perspective on Norman, it plays as the sadly inevitable conclusion to the sense we've had all along of Norman being subjugated by an offscreen authority that claims to have his interests at heart but has been ripping his every sense of reason and autonomy to shreds.

This journey into the strange has no return route, in part because the mere induction into this world changes us. Marion's ultimate mistake is to naively assume that she can just pick up, drive back and reverse the upset to the status quo she caused when she decided to grab the ill-gotten money and run; as she discovers, the weird and the eerie, having welcomed her in, does not intend to let her go. When, twenty-two years later, Marion's spectre returns to the motel grounds by way of Mary, her genetic and spiritual successor, with the intention of conquering the strangeness, she discovers that she is actually entirely at home here with Norman. Mary does better than Marion, at least in the short-term, although the situation ultimately proves to be more than she can control. This is the curious duality of the Bates Motel - it is a place where you go to find yourself but simultaneously lose yourself. In between, it offers something very precious, a meeting point for the waifs and the strays before they're veered toward their inevitable destruction (literally so in Marion and Mary's case, psychologically for Norman); it's in these fleeting moments of affinity that we feel that, though not exactly in safe hands, we are nevertheless right (ie: left) where we are meant to be.


* Actually, I do have some other nitpicks of 78/52 besides, but we can talk about those at a later date.

** It is interesting to note that the tagline of Peter Walker's 1976 film Schizo also casts the left hand as the innocent one in the equation.

Psycho II: One Hand Watches The Other (Supplement)

Previously, when I wrote my piece on Norman's handedness, its significance in Psycho and Psycho II and, more specifically, how it manifests in Norman's telephone-answering routine in Psycho II, I did not consider a sequence that occurs at the very beginning of the film, when Norman returns to his family house and has an early hiccup involving the telephone. I omitted this because it doesn't quite fit with the pattern of Norman's actions being in response to an incoming call, but it nevertheless merits its own discussion, for it is another deceptively simple scene that establishes so much about Norman's present day dilemma, including a sleight of hand in which screenwriter Tom Holland effectively telegraphs exactly where this new chapter is headed.

When Norman first arrives home he picks up the receiver of the upstairs telephone, not to answer a call but to confirm Raymond's assurances that the phone line has been reconnected. Raymond has advised Norman that, in the absence of any formal social support, the telephone is to be his lifeline ("Any trouble, use it"). In practice, the telephone proves to be one of the greatest sources of trouble for Norman throughout the sequel, allowing the intrusions of a meddlesome outside world to seep in and attack him in his private space (it is also the vessel through which Mother mounts her slow but steady return). This trouble is anticipated in this early scene, for the mere act of turning to the telephone for that momentary reassurance that all is right within his freshly-salvaged world has unexpectedly nasty consequences. Norman does not intend to make or receive a call. Oh, but he does get a response, for he discovers a note concealed beneath the telephone, apparently written by Mother. The note reads: Norman, I'll be home late. Fix your own dinner. Love, M. On this occasion (and in contrast to the routine established throughout the rest of the film) Norman lifts the receiver with his left hand, the hand more closely aligned with his own will and identity, and is caught unawares by Mother, who is all ready and waiting to resume their dialogue.

Unlike the fraudulent notes subsequently left by Lila and Mary, this one appears to be the genuine article, the faded writing and yellowing paper suggesting that it has been lying there dormant for some time, although whether it was actually written by Mrs Bates herself is another matter (odds are good that Norman unwittingly penned this to himself). In contrast to the angry, threatening missives that Norman later receives regarding his egregious bending of the rules in allowing Mary into the house, this one has a mundane, incongruously genial message, given the source. Still, we know that any form of dialogue between Norman and Mother is a bad thing, and the discovery of the note has a detrimental effect on Norman, who immediately relapses into a flashback in which he gets to relive the horrors of his matricidal youth. Mother has already succeeded in undermining Norman's newfound determination to be the master of the household, and she does so using nothing more than the legacy she left seeded in its walls many decades ago. As fiendishly underhanded as Lila's tactics might be, they seem relatively amateurish compared to the cruelty of this accidental encounter, which after a just a few moments of running wild with Norman's imagination exposes the fragility of everything he is desperately attempting to hold together. The sequence culminates in Norman knocking his suitcase down the stairs, spilling its contents in a chaotic sprawl that simultaneously recalls Arbogast's downfall in the original Psycho and anticipates Raymond's toward the end of Psycho II (and Maureen's in Psycho III!). Norman finds that his literal and emotional baggage have been gutted messily, announcing that the battle for dominance between himself and the specter of Mother is already renewing itself. And he has barely been home for more than a few minutes.

Psycho II is a film about cycles, about reincarnation and the renewal of life but also the repetition of old traumas and the extent to which the past keeps the present so paralysed as to deny it a future. Despite the fleeting promise of redemption offered by the sweet sincerity of Norman's friendship with Mary - two characters mutually bound by the sins of their mothers (and of their aunts) - it ultimately confirms Norman's nihilistic musings in the original Psycho about being caught in private traps and never budging an inch for all of our clawing. This early sequence shows Norman as being stuck in a time loop - the note was written decades ago and refers to an evening long in the past, yet it punctures through all sense of temporal distance with a startling asperity that speaks directly to Norman in the present. It is almost as if Mother planted the note with the intention of Norman discovering it only now, after his time away. More frighteningly still, it refers to what is coming in the future. Norman's ascension up the staircase marks the end of the journey he has been making within the twenty-two year gap between Psycho and Psycho II; his long, offscreen battle to reclaim his sanity and earn the right to return home is finally over, but having made it to the top, Norman finds himself not at the peak of a figurative mountain, but treading a harrowing loop which will ultimately lead him right back down to where he started. The message itself is entirely banal, and yet deeply ominous, for we would do well to heed the implicit threat buried in Mother's ostensible pleasantries. It acknowledges the current state of affairs - that Mother has vacated the premises and Norman is required be self-sufficient for the time being - but also promises that she will return and that Norman's (relative) freedom of her is only temporary. It functions both as a warning to Norman as to what lies ahead, but also a direct communication from Mother to the audience, cluing them in as to the film's trajectory and reassuring them that the status quo will eventually be reset. There is a particularly sly bit of fourth wall-breaking in her declaration that she will arrive home late, for Mother's homecoming will indeed occur, but only at the very end of the narrative.

One final curiosity - unlike the fraudulent letters left by Lila and Mary, which are signed "Mother", this note is signed only "M", leaving some ambiguity as to whom it really refers. Norman instantly connects it to Mother, but we know that she's not the only M from Norman's past who'll shortly be returning just to make his reintegration that extra bit more difficult. In this sense, the note serves as a dual purpose, telegraphing not only Mother's return, but also that of Marion, who is currently lurking not far up the road in the renewed form of Mary. How is the message "Fix your own dinner" pertinent to Marion? Well, Norman did initiate Marion into his twisted world by convincing her to eat with him.

Oh, and a small side-note: I'd also like to take the opportunity to officially retract what I said last time about Perkins' portrayal in the 2013 film Hitchcock being "unbelievably mean-spirited". I still have my problems with Gervasi's film, and with Perkins' portrayal therein, but I realise now that I overreacted somewhat. Since writing that tidbit I've taken the time to read Split Image, Charles Winecoff's 1996 biography of Perkins and I tell you, if any depiction of Perkins deserves to be called "unbelievably mean-spirited", it's Winecoff's. Anyone interested in reading Winecoff's book should keep in mind that it is essentially one big, leering exposé of the actor's various gay love affairs and (reportedly) promiscuous lifestyle. Winecoff barely attempts to disguise his indifference toward Perkins' professional output, and while he makes a perfunctory effort to pass the book off as a meditation on the difficulties of being homosexual in Hollywood within Perkins' lifetime, it possesses neither the depth or sensitivity to pull that off. It's less a biography than a drawn-out, 466 page-long catcall. Not recommended to fans of Tony, or to those with feline allergies.

Psycho II: One Hand Watches The Other

Here's a word to the wise - if you ever get tempted to watch Sacha Gervasi's 2013 film Hitchcock about the backstage drama involved in making Psycho...don't. I watched it last week and I can't recall the last time a film set my teeth so thoroughly and consistently on edge.* Among other things, the film's portrayal of Anthony Perkins (played by James D'Arcy) is so unbelievably mean-spirited, in that just about every line said by him or about him is a snide dig at his closet homosexuality. There's an extent to which everyone involved plays more like heavy-handed caricatures of their real-world counterparts than any actual human being who's ever walked the planet (because it is that kind of film), but whereas Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) are afforded the luxury of vague semblances of character development, Perkins is reduced to a mere running gag that's one hundred per cent at his expense. There's a bit where he says, "Mr Hitchcock, I can't count how many times I've seen Strangers on a Train and Rope," to which my response was, "Oh good grief, are we really going there?". While D'Arcy's Perkins is busy reeling off the Two Gayest Hitchcock Films of All Time, my eyes couldn't help but wander down to his hands (actually, I took a vested interest in D'Arcy's hands because I was curious to see if the film would be exacting enough to remember that Perkins was left-handed) and I noticed that as he said this he had his right hand wedged between his crotch. Real classy. Obviously, his mannerisms here are intended to mirror those exhibited by Norman in the actual Psycho during his dinner conversation with Marion (because Gervasi's film is keen to push the suggestion that Norman's eccentricities and Perkins' eccentricities were effectively one and the same) but given the context, the implication is blatantly that Perkins is well-accustomed to using the aforementioned films for relieving his own repressed homoerotic tensions. Is D'Arcy's Perkins left-handed? Frankly, he didn't get enough screen time for me to judge either way, although I did notice that while prepping for the parlour scene he was carrying the motel register in his left hand. So that's good at least. Although I'm still intrigued by the fact that it's his right hand that looks to be itching for a date with Rosie Palms during his meeting with Hitchcock. Was that intentional, I wonder? It is, after all, entirely in keeping with Norman's own characterisation that the right hand would be the one betraying those impulses that Perkins is so desparate to keep under wraps. Then again, perhaps I'm giving too much credit to a film that's so irritatingly flippant in its regard for Perkins (and to the fan of Anthony Perkins there can be few things more aggravating than seeing Tony subject to constant mockery in a film in which he's forever in the shadow of Anthony Hopkins...hang about, I'll explain**).

If I appear to be inordinately obsessive over such a pedantic detail, it's because handedness is a very big deal for Norman Bates. There is a wonderful strand of symbolism running throughout Psycho and its sequels (and which I touched on last time I wrote about Psycho II) in which Norman's hands function as antithetical forces, pulling him in different directions in accordance with how the balance of power is tipping between his split personalities. Once we are aware that Norman's handedness acts as yet another manifestation of his perpetual inner conflict, it becomes possible to read his hand movements as further indicators of how that interplay is functioning. Norman's hands have each aligned themselves with opposing sides of his personality, with his left hand being the more benign of the two, and the hand on which he is most reliant for carrying out menial tasks at the Bates Motel. For Norman is (among other things) a southpaw. He does everything with his left hand, apart from the one thing he is most famous for - that is, butchering dames in showers (and the occasional home intruder upon the staircase) while dressed as his deceased Mother. That special talent he reserves for his right hand, for this is the hand more closely aligned with Norman's darker impulses, ie: the Mother half of his fractured psyche (this is the only thing I'll admit to finding somewhat sinister about Norman, whom I otherwise regard as a highly sympathetic character - he's so committed to assuming his Mother's identity that he can apparently change handedness in the process, which frankly borders on the surreal***). Obviously, Hitchcock implemented this motif to emphasise Norman's split personality, and possibly to lead the more sharp-eyed members of his audience down a false trail. But there is more going on here than a simple game of switcheroo.

According to the denouement given by Oakland's psychiatrist at the end of the original Psycho, Norman has never been "all Norman" (although he has frequently been "all Mother"), and if we are attentive to Norman's hand mannerisms we can observe how Mother is constantly interjecting her way into the scenario even in those scenes where we appear to be in only Norman's presence. During Norman's sandwiches-and-milk dinner date with Marion, he spends much of the conversation wringing his hands together, which might be interpreted as nothing more than the awkward mannerisms of a shy, socially stunted recluse struggling to compose himself when blessed with the unexpected companionship of such a desirable woman. But this hand-wringing is also emblematic of Norman's inner struggle, for his hands are locked together in a physical tussle, which takes on particular relevance during the portion of their conversation where Norman talks about private traps. Here, his clashing hands become analogous to his observations that, "We scratch and we claw, but only at the air; only at each other. And for all of it we never budge an inch." Norman's dialogue takes a disturbingly nihilistic turn, conveying something of the overwhelming despair with which he contends on a daily basis. His specific references to scratching and clawing are early hints of his latently violent nature, for scratching at other people with sharp kitchen implements does indeed turn out to be one of his reflexive responses to the horrors of his own entrapment, but they also call attention to his fingers, which are currently engaged in the very kind of futile impasse he is describing. Norman carries out his worst kind of scratching with his right hand, but this is not to say that the left hand isn't susceptible to an aching fury all of its own. Norman's left hand is the one more closely aligned with his own identity, and as such it is the hand more capable of articulating the rage and resentment he feels at being permanently reigned in by his Mother, denied not only the pleasures of a social life and sexual gratification but also the capacity to be a complete and separate human being. When Norman admits to Marion that he often feels the desire to reject his Mother, he raises up his left hand in gesticulation of his suppressed yearning for rebellion (in reality, Norman had his moment of rebellion ten years ago and it failed spectacularly to release him from his private trap, for Mother had already succeeded in planting the seeds of her dominion inside his mind). Norman's entire parlor conversation with Marion reveals him to be a swarm of incompatible impulses and desires (to the extent he flat-out contradicts his statement on not minding his own private trap when challenged by Marion); mainly, his recognition that life with his Mother is bleak and stifling and his pathological dependency on her, which ultimately manifests in an overpowering hostility toward anything that might threaten to come between them (not least reality).

At the end of Psycho, Richmond tells us that the Mother half has finally achieved total dominion over the Norman half, and this is consistent with what we see in the final scene, where the balance of power looks to have tipped decisively in the right hand's favour. It is Norman's right hand with which he entertains (but withholds from) swatting a fly, while his left hand stays hidden out of view, as if having bowed out of the conflict altogether. Of course, Richmond's dire prognosis is not borne out at the beginning of Psycho II, for not only has the Norman personality since reasserted its being, but Norman may even have achieved the remarkable feat of finally becoming "all Norman". There is no trace of Mother in the Norman who leaves confinement ready for the 80s, so it appears that, with the help of Raymond (Richmond's less insufferable sequel counterpart), he was able to turn the tide and become stronger than his invasive Mother persona (although, as Norman later describes the psychiatric procedures during his toasted cheese sandwiches lament, he makes it sound more akin to undergoing an involuntary surgical excision than to any conscious victory on his part). Mother's dominion has been defeated (for now), but we can still see Norman at the crossroads during his sandwiches-and-milk dinner date with Mary (who, unbeknownst to Norman, is Marion's second coming). The nature of Norman's inner conflict has changed, for it is no longer about the battle of wills between his contradicting personas, but rather his conscious awareness of what he used to be versus what he aspires to be now. The paradox Norman faces in attempting to live a life of normality is that it requires him to somehow accommodate the knowledge that his psychosis caused him to kill seven people. Fortysomething Norman is still deeply haunted by the past, but the past that currently hangs over him is the present of the original Psycho, and the revulsions of that sandwich-preparation sequence arise mainly from the challenges of assuming a routine of banal domesticity against a backdrop of such iconic horror. Still, there is a minor disturbance to the supposition that Norman's darker impulses have been entirely excised along with his Mother persona, for his hands reveal a slightly different story - when tasked with cutting the sandwich for Mary, he retains the knife in his left hand and slices it without incident, but the right hand still gets to exercise its say, in moving the plate, and by extension the knife, just an inch closer to the unsuspecting (or not) Mary. It's subtle, but it's there.

The threat of Norman's wayward right hand resurfaces, more prominently, around the midway point (after his grip on reality has already taken quite a beating, thanks to the combined - if opposing - vigilante tactics of Lila and Spool). Believing that Mother has returned to the house, Norman offers to remain at Mary's bedside and protect her while she sleeps, only to find himself unconsciously passing the knife from his left hand into his right as he watches over her and, disturbingly, steering the blade in her direction. Why does Norman appear momentarily gripped by the temptation to resume his old habits and give Mary a good skewering? The very same reason he was compelled to butcher her aunt twenty-two years ago; he feels sexually aroused by her, and that brings on Mother's tyranny. Analyses of the shower sequence from the original film interpreting the knife as a phallic symbol (complete with ejaculatory spurts of blood/chocolate syrup) are of course ten a penny, but it's hard to deny that such symbolism is present here. Norman raises the blade above Mary as an act of aspiring penetration, as he finds himself approaching that same treacherous intersection that had him hopelessly bisected all those years ago. Norman's attraction to Mary is all good and innocent so long as Mother isn't around to disapprove, but now that Norman is on the verge of abandoning his acceptance that he killed her, he finds that his loyalties are once again tested. Significantly, although the knife has found its way into the right hand once more, Norman keeps both hands clasped against it, and when he later stands by the window and asks Mary if he is becoming "confused" again, he has his fingers locked together around the handle in a manner reminiscent of his constant hand-wringing in the original. His psyche is once again a tangle of conflicting impulses born of dread, desire and desperation, and the knife hangs ominously in the midst of all that, ready to be wielded in whichever direction Norman is ultimately swayed.

And yet, there is one complicating factor which would appear to belie the fairly straightforward implication that Norman's left hand represents his benign side and his right hand his harmful one, for Psycho II also presents us with a scenario in which the reverse would appear to be the case. Whenever Norman answers the telephone (one of the sequel's key devices for charting his slow but steady regression from relative stability into violent insanity), he always does so with his right hand, but it's when things start to go wrong that his left hand takes hold of the receiver. This happens four times, for Mary twice attempts to intervene by taking the receiver from Norman, and every time it finds its way back into Norman's hands, he consistently makes a point of taking it with his right hand and then passing it over to his left. Clearly something strange is happening here, but what?

Norman answers the phone three times throughout Psycho II (and we are prompted to believe that he has been fielding numerous other calls off of screen). The first instance occurs immediately after Norman has encountered Toomey for the third (and final) time, so Norman assumes that the call is yet another of his low-blow harassment tactics. Norman is unnerved by the call, but since he is able to rationalise the situation he remains entirely in control throughout. He even produces a snappy comeback, in which he uses his history of disturbed behaviour to his advantage: "Mr Toomey, if this is you then you're sicker than I ever was." (The evidence suggests that it's actually Lila Loomis on the other end, but the same principle would apply.) Norman keeps the receiver in his right hand for the entirety of this call.

The second onscreen call occurs much later on, after Norman has learned from Raymond that Lila has been making the hoax calls and as he is confronting Mary about her complicity in this. Norman picks up the phone with his right hand and immediately greets the caller, whom he presumes to be Lila, then stops eerily short and switches the receiver over to his left hand. He then starts up a one-sided conversation with Mother. Mary attempts to interject, but when she listens in she hears no one on the other end. At this point, there is ambiguity as to whether Norman has been talking to Spool (who was canny enough to keep mum whenever Mary stuck her oar in) or if Norman's sanity slippage has reached its breaking point, but given that all of the information he apparently obtains from this call is verified by the end of the film, the answer is...both, maybe?

The third call, which acts as a precursor to the climax, is the only instance in which we actually discover who is on the other end of the line, presumably because it's the one character in the film's four-way conflict who doesn't have anything to hide - Raymond calls Norman from the motel lobby to let him know that he has located the source of the nuisance calls. Only Norman really has lost the plot at this stage; there is no longer any question of this from the viewers' perspective. He answers with his right hand, expecting to hear Mother on the other end, then passes the receiver over to his left hand and immediately resumes their conversation from earlier. He continues to talk to "Mother" long after Raymond has abandoned the call (on learning that Mary, whose game Raymond is wise to, is still with Norman) and that's when things take an acutely more sinister turn (particularly as we know for sure that Norman is now conversing with a dead line).

Is there any analogue to this in the original Psycho? Kind of. We never see Norman talking on the telephone but we do see him immediately after receiving a call from Sheriff Chambers (John McIntire). He still has his hand on the receiver, and it is his left hand. This occurs right before he goes upstairs to confront Mother about the need to move her down into the fruit cellar.

The habitual receiver switching is a reminder that Norman's psyche is comprised of multiple contradictory impulses and, as with the knife pointing incident from earlier, when Norman seemed momentarily caught between his resolve to protect Mary and his latent desire to have his way with her, an indicator that some form of inner conflict is worming its way up to the surface. In the case of his rather baffling telephone routine, the conflict is a temporal one, for the fortysomething Norman is finally going back to his roots and renewing the cycle he was previously so bent on breaking free of. What we are witnessing in these moments is the disintegration of Norman's newly-established identity as a recovered psychotic eager to start anew, as he slowly reconnects with the emotionally warped mama's boy he's spent the entirety of the sequel thus far attempting to discard all traces of. Initially, when Norman is able to assert himself in the face of Toomey's derision (or what he believes to be Toomey), he does so using his right hand, the hand that ordinarily symbolises his darker nature, and we are prompted to see this as a testament to his newfound ability to maintain control of the situation. It is our best evidence so far that Norman may have successfully vanquished Mother, whose prospective return (down the telephone line) he is still balanced enough to reject at this stage. Crucially, this follows on from Mary's underhanded efforts to undermine his stability with her openly announced showering activities, which Norman had successfully countered by retreating to his piano in order to occupy his mind with a rendition of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". We see that Norman is doing what he can to weather any and all challenges to his aspirations of achieving normality. Several hoax calls, one local murder (that he's aware of) and an uninvited basement dweller later, and Norman's resistances begin to wear down. Faced with the increasingly impossible task of maintaining his sanity in a world that seemingly doesn't want him to have it, Norman becomes ever more nostalgic for the "normality" with which he was once familiar. The chaotic receiver movements signify this confusion, and the blurring of his better judgement with his almost infantile longing that everything can perhaps be restored to as it was before the outside world intervened. At this point the right hand takes its cue to reassert its perverse influence; when it passes the receiver to his left hand, it does so not as a relinquishment of control, but as means of subjecting the left hand (and by extension, Norman) to Mother's voice and authority. Norman's left hand is his dominant hand, but conversely it is also tied up with the more submissive side of his psyche, the side that longed to curse Mother or at least defy her and leave her forever but likewise knew that he couldn't. For she's always scratching right back at him with the adjacent hand.

In a nutshell, whenever Norman's hands appear at odds, it's an indication that he's deeply at odds with himself. And when the left hand doesn't know who the right hand is killing...well, we'll get to Schizo.


* Oh wait, yes I can. It would be that live action Beauty and The Beast remake from last year. Ah well, Hitchcock wasn't quite THAT bad I suppose.

** Sad but true. When you're an Anthony Perkins fan there's a part of you that does somewhat inevitably develop a slight grudge against Anthony Hopkins, against your better judgement, purely because of the high number of people who tend to get the two confused. I know that's unfair, as it's totally not Anthony Hopkins' fault, but if I had a penny for every time I came across someone referring to "Anthony Hopkins' ground-breaking performance in Psycho" I'd certainly have enough for at least a matinee and a small soda by now. I appreciate why people get them mixed up, to point - not only are their names kind of similar, but people have them subconsciously logged away under the same file because between them they excelled at playing arguably the two most infamous and celebrated cinema serial killers of all-time. Still, Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates are two distinctly different breeds of cinema serial killers  - we're talking the Godzilla and the Bambi of cinema serial killers, respectively.

*** With apologies to ambidextrals.