Epilogue Psycho (1960) and the New Domestic Gaze
By the time Fort Apache appeared in theatres, the Hollywood studios were in deep crisis. As Schatz puts it, “business was declining rapidly. In fact, the fall- ing gross revenues and profits for all the studios would not only continue but accelerate over the coming years” (1999: 331). When the studios did begin to recover, Hollywood had lost its monopoly on the moving sound image. Television began to penetrate everyday life. So, in the late 20th century, cinema was no longer as central to the habits and practices of Americans as it had been during the period in which it alone had the power to move pictures, and thus people. In response, cinema began to dramatize this very transformation through its interrogation of the cinematic gaze.
The Gaze
Rather than defining the “cinematic gaze” in conceptual terms, let me describe the picture that most famously theorizes this gaze. I’m thinking of course of that seminal moment from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) that takes place about 45 minutes into the picture. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) has arrived at the Bates Motel with a bag full of money stolen from her employer. After having dinner with Norman, she decides to shower, presumably to wash away her guilt. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), in an adjoining room, takes a painting from the wall. Behind the frame, a hole in the plaster through which Norman watches Marion undress. Here I offer the context, but the scene is important not only for its function in this specific narrative, but because of its formal structure; what that structure says about cinema itself, and about the viewer’s symbolic participation in cinematic violence. Norman looks at the hole in the wall. Then the camera angle changes, so that Norman is seen in profile. He slowly moves his face toward the peepshow. Around him, all is darkness. But his eye is illuminated from the light coming through the break in the plaster. Cut to Marion undressing to her undergar- ments, the picture oval framed by the black plaster so that it looks like some effect from a D.W. Griffith film. Then back to Norman’s eye, now in extreme close-up and fully illuminated by Marion’s room. This shot only lasts a few seconds. But it’s no accident that Norman’s eye looks much like a film projector, projecting images into the darkness. Here Hitchcock offers, in allegorical form, a theory of cinema spectatorship.
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Norman Bates is simultaneously the projector and the receiver of the image. Hitchcock argues the spectator is intimately implicated in the spectacle, in the construction of cinematic “reality.” While it’s true that the spectator, the audience member, does not create the image, the viewer nonetheless participates in that image. In the particular case of Psycho, Hitchcock seems to be asking a question: Why do spectators enjoy the spectacle of violence? And he answers that ques- tion: It satisfies something in their psyche, some dark and unacknowledged self that is every bit as bloodthirsty as Norman Bates. In the play of shadow and light, every audience member becomes a murderous psycho. But there’s something more to say about this theory of the cinematic gaze. From Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Psycho, as well as Michael Powell’s masterwork, Peeping Tom (1960), to contemporary horror filmmakers, this gaze has been directed toward women. In fact, Psycho’s reflexive gaze impli- cates the viewer in the torture and murder of women. While there are certainly exceptions to this genre rule, often (especially in the “slasher” genre Hitchcock and Powell pioneered) the cinematic gaze is an unguarded expression of mas- culine domination that both reinforces domination and is reciprocally fueled by the energies of patriarchy circulating within the cinematic audiences (Bourdieu 2001). Thus we arrive at the sociological significance of Psycho’s cinematic gaze. This gaze signifies the spectator’s participation in cinematic violence (directed, here, against women), while, at the same time, suggesting that the spectator is, in turn shaped (interpellated) by the cinematic object itself. In other words, the film looks back at the spectator. In doing so, the film calls the spectator into a certain system of domination. Thus, cinema creates the audience, even as the audience, reciprocally, creates the cinematic object by participating in its vio- lent spectacle.
Interpellating Community
Writing on popular song as folklore, Gramsci argues that “what distinguishes a popular song…[is] the way it conceives the world and life, in contrast to official society” (Gramsci 1985: 195). True, cinema is not “popular song.” But consider Gramsci’s definition of the latter: “those [songs] written neither by the people nor for the people, but which the people adopt because they conform to their way of thinking and feeling” (ibid.). Now it becomes much easier to think about cinema through this Gramscian lens. Film is mediated by political and economic constraints, but within those constraints, certain films become pop- ular, while others hardly seem to exist. This suggests that viewers, to some