As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a big fan of Hitchcock, the kind-of quasi biopic concerning the late film director of the same name, starring Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins, written by John J. McLaughlin, and directed by Sacha Gervasi. I understand that in the dramatizing of real events that factual liberties are taken all the time, and have been since (I know, I know) the days of Shakespeare and before. So I understand then too that to complain about factual liberties taken here is to court accusations of,among other things, humorless literal-mindedness. But as I said in my review of the movie for MSN Movies, had the liberties taken with the facts resulted in a motion picture that was either illuminating or entertaining, or both (a lot to ask, I know) that would have gone a long way to forgiving those liberties. I got up early this morning to watch my friend Matt Singer of Criticwire talk Hitchcock, and Hitchcock, on the CBS This Morning program. The clip they showed from the new film features Hopkins and Mirren, as Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, going over footage of Psycho’s shower scene in the editing room. Looking carefully at a single frame, Mirren’s Reville coos “Ooh, you imp! You’ve got nudity in there!” to which Hopkins’ Hitchcock replies with an exaggerated air of sang froid, “Well her breasts were rather large, it’d be a challenge not to show them.” Most of the dialogue in the film is determined by the same juvenile notion of what constitutes breezy adult banter as that example. So, you know.
Sometimes you will read a review of a motion picture and wonder if the person writing actually saw the same film you did. In the case of my friend Richard Brody, I have no doubt that we saw the same Hitchcock, as we sat next to each other at the press screening. But he came to some vastly different conclusions than I did, which he lays out in a typically detailed, incisive, provocative, and, for me, exasperating post at his New Yorker blog. He covers a lot of ground in this post, and seems most particularly pleased with the way Hitchcock demonstrates “the personal significance of the story of Psycho.” Now, as I understand it, Brody’s baseline idea isn’t hugely different from Andrew Sarris’ definition of Pantheon Directors, that is, those who “have transcended their technical problems with a personal vision of the world.” Brody sees an innovation in this biopic, born of his perception that “Gervasi rightly suggests that Hitchcock is no mere puppet master who seeks to provoke effects in his viewers.” In discussing the technical aspects of his own films, Hitchcock took not-unjustifiable pride in the fact that with his effects he could, yes, traumatically “play” the audience, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, Hitchcock himself DID acknowledge, and publicly at that, that within that component of his art there was a strong element of self-expression, so it’s not really as if Gervasi has stumbled on to anything particularly new. (Then, of course, there are the reams—more like libraries—of detailed critical studies of Hitchcock’s work.) Brody continues: “[Hitchcock is] converting the world as he sees it, in its practical details and obsessively ugly corners, into his art, and he’s doing so precisely because those are the aspects of life that haunt his imagination.” This is all unobjectionable. Where I think Richard goes a little off is in his praise for what he considers the “shaky but bold artistic limb” Gervasi goes out on by introducing the midwestern murderer Ed Gein into Hitchcock’s consciousness, making him the stuff of daymares and imagined psychiatric consultations and even forays into marital jealousy that find Alfred crawling about the floor of his bathroom collecting grains of sand with which to confront Alma, who hasn’t told him that her writing sessions of late have been taking place at a collaborator’s beach house.
“I have no idea whether Hitchcock gave much thought to Gein, but it doesn’t matter,” Brody writes. “[I]f it wasn’t Gein that obsessed him, it was surely much that was Gein-like.” Leaving aside that perhaps overly-confident “surely,” I would argue that whether Hitchcock gave much thought to Gein certainly does matter, or at least it matters within the context of this film, because the portrayal of Gein therein is almost by necessity a kind of burlesque. At the time that Robert Bloch wrote the novel upon which Psycho was based, Gein was not the kind of household world that he has since become. As awful and appalling as his crimes were, the singularity of his atrocities underwent a certain diminishment as he was transposed over the years into a kind of pop-culture “brand.” The wild-eyed, Midwestern, possibly cannibalistic serial killer, after roosting as a kind of Chiller Theatre Expo hipster icon since some time well before G.G. Allin shuffled off this mortal coil, has since become a sort of post-modern kitsch object. The only way for such a figure to inspire anything resembling real terror in a cinematic context anymore is to stretch him beyond, and then further beyond, reason, as Lynch did with “BOB” in Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me and certain episodes of the Twin Peaks television series. In any event, in Hitchcock, the way Gein, almost inescapably, comes off, Michael Wincott or no Michael Wincott, is as serial killer vaudeville.
In a comment to a prior blog post, the great critic and biographer Joseph McBride, before recounting his own late ’50s Gein-tourism experience, chides me a bit: “How can anyone not like a movie in which Alfred Hitchcock hangs out with Ed Gein?” I understand what he’s getting at, and had Hitchcock been conceived and executed thoughout as a kind of burlesque, in the style of what McBride’s old pals Allan Arkush and Joe Dante often had a go at in the Corman days and beyond, Hitchcock could have been good disreputable/affectionate fun. But that’s not what Hitchcock is up to. Brody states that Gervasi recognizes Psycho as a great artistic acheivement, but he doesn’t, or rather the movie doesn’t, not really; art never enters into this movie’s argument, or algebra. Rather, Hitchcock recasts the making of Psycho through a tired Hollywood template: the story of a dreamer with a vision that everybody around him thinks he is—you’ll excuse the term—crazy for entertaining, and how that dreamer proves the naysayers wrong…here, not by making a great work of art, but by concocting a motion picture commodity that slays them at the box office. And in the process of grinding out this particular narratvie sausage, Hitchcock also manages to be astonishingly patronizing to its principal characters. In her own clearly ticked-off New York Times review of the movie, another friend, Manohla Dargis, writes, “Hitchcock, you are meant to believe, was himself a little psycho and could only work from a place of madness.” She continues: “The real Hitchcock’s great flaw, apparently, was that he was at once a genius and a private man, a combination that has allowed some filmmakers to have their insultingly imaginative way with him.” She goes on to dismiss “dim fantasies” that to her smack of “spiteful jealousy.” I’d say that’s pretty spot on. Except I don’t even think that Sacha Gervasi understands enough about Hitchcock to know that he maybe should be jealous of him. (There are several interviews with the director that bear this notion out, I’ll leave it to readers curious enough to seek them out to do just that.)
As for Hitchcock himself…like DeMille, whom he admired, he was something of a self-made showman, and pronouncements such as “some films are slices of life, my films were slices of cake” were a part of his presentation. As Dargis said, he was a private person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he worked exclusively and consciously in a vacuum of his own unexamined fancies. As much of a front as he put up, one often doesn’t need to read too far between certain lines to understand his own understanding of where his themes came from. In other words: he knew that cinema was the stuff of obsession. There’s a droll and poignant passage in Luis Buñuel’s autobiography in which the Spanish director recounts a Hollywood lunch in his honor, at which Hitchcock rhapsodized, practically in a swoon, over a particularly salient detail in Buñuel’s Tristana: ” ‘Ah, that leg…that leg,’ he sighed, more than once.” In the final revised edition of Hitchcock/Truffaut, Truffaut, recalls watching Vertigo and seeing Jimmy Stewart’s Scotty trying to remake Kim Novak’s Judy Barton into “Madeline;” he writes of experiencing a certain sad frisson knowing that it was Vera Miles, not Novak, that Hitchcock had wanted for that crucial role, and Truffaut sees Hitchcock in Stewart with a kind of sad clarity. In other words, you don’t need a bad cartoon—which, finally, I’m convinced Hitchcock is—in order to get it.
A few citations. Here’s a pretty salient passage from the above-mentioned Truffaut study of Hitchcock:
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. Mr. Hitchcock, this morning you mentioned that you had had a bad night and indicated that you were probably disturbed by all of the memories that our talks have been stirring up these past several days. In the course of our conversations we’ve gone into the dreamlike qualities of many of your films, among them Notorious, Vertigo, and Psycho. I’d like to ask whether you dream a lot.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Not to much…sometimes…and my dreams are very reasonable.
In one of my dreams I was standing on Sunset Boulevard, where the trees are, and I was waiting for a Yellow Cab to take me to lunch. But no Yellow Cab came by; all the automobiles that drove by me were of a 1916 vintage. And I said to myself, “It’s no good standing here waiting for a Yellow Cab because this is a 1916 dream!” So I walked to lunch instead.
F.T. Did you really dream this, or is it a joke?
A.H. No, it’s not a gag; I really had a dream like that!
F.T. It’s almost a period dream! But would you say that dreams have a bearing on your work?
A.H. Daydreams, probably.
F.T. It may be the expression of the unconscious, and that takes us back once more to fairy tales. By depicting the isolated man who’s surrounded by all sorts of hostile elements, and perhaps without even meaning to, you enter the realm of the dream world, which is also a world of solitude and danger.
A.H. That’s probably me, within myself.
F.T. It must bem because the logic of your puctures, which is sometimes decried by the critics, is rather like the logic of dreams. Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest, for instance, are made up of a series of strange forms that follow the pattern of a nightmare.
A.H. This may be due to the fact that I’m never satisfied with the ordinary. I’m ill at ease with it.
F.T. That’s very evident. A Hitchcock picture that doesn’t involve death or the abnormal is practically inconceivable. I believe you film emotions you feel very deeply—fear, for instance.
A.H. Absolutely. I’m full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm. I don’t want clouds overhead. I get a feeling of peace from a well-organized desk. When I take a bath, I put everything neatly back in place. You wouldn’t even know I’d been in the bathroom. My passion for orderliness goes hand in hand with a strong revulsion toward complications.
F.T. That accounts for the way you protect yourself. Any eventual problem of direction is resolved beforehand by your minute predesigned sketches that lessen the risks and prevent trouble later on. Jacques Becker used to say, “Alfred Hitchcock is undoubtedly the director who gets the least surprises when he looks at rushes.”
And here is Hitchcock describing his childhood to Truffaut: “I was what is known as a well-behaved child. At family gatherings I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and I observed a good deal. I’ve always been that way and still am. I was anything but expansive. I was a loner—can’t remember ever having had a playmate. I played by myself, inventing my own games […] I was put into school very young. At St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in London. Ours was a Catholic family and in England, you see, this in itself is an eccentricity. It was probably during this period with the Jesuits that a strong sense of fear developed—moral fear—the fear of being involved in anything evil. I always tried to avoid it. Why? Perhaps out of physical fear. I was terrified of physical punishment. In those days they used a cane made of very hard rubber. I believe the Jesuits still use it. It wasn’t done casually, you know; it was rather like the execution of a sentence. They would tell you to step in to see the father when classes were over. He would then solemnly inscribe your name in the register, together with the indication of the punishment to be inflicted, and you spent the whole day waiting for the sentence to be carried out.”
And perhaps we should give the last word, for now, to Robin Wood, and this passage from 1989’s Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. The film to which Wood refers is, of course, Psycho (which I think I might watch this afternoon): “No film conveys—to those not afraid to expose themselves fully to it—a greater sense of desolation, yet it does so from an exceptionally mature and secure emotional viewpoint. And an essential part of this viewpoint is the detached sardonic humor. It enables the film to contemplate the ultimate horrors without hysteria, with a poised, almost serene detachment. This is probably not what Hitchcock meant when he said that one cannot appreciate Psycho without a sense of humor, but it is what he should have meant. He himself—if his interviews are to be trusted—has not really faced up to what he was doing when he made the film. This, needless to say, must not affect one’s estimate of the film itself. For the maker of Psycho to regard it as a ‘fun’ picture can be taken as a means of preserving his sanity; for the critic to do so—and to give it his approval on these grounds—is quite unpardonable. Hitchcock (again, if his interviews are to be trusted) is a much greater artist than he knows.”
An exceptionally salient Robin Wood quote – save for the finish. Nothing in Hitchcock suggests at he didn’t know precisely how great an artist he was. Into the commerical cinema he carved out an individual career, bolstered by filmmkaing techniques that have never really been duplicated. Non one renders subjectivity ike Hitchcock.
As for “Psycho” while it stands out as a particular achievement, itought to be regarded in relation to Hitchcock’s overall interest in crime. Prior to Norman Bates there was Bruno Anthony in “Strangers on a train.”
It should never be forgotten that this, Highsmith’s very first novel, was not only a massive hit on its own – made more so by the film – but sprang directly from her efforts to get someone to kill her own hated father for her.
How can Richard Brody wrong when he says Hitchcock was obsessed with “much that was Gein-like”?
His movies are full of stranglings, rapes, and attacks on women, from first to last.
He grew up knowing all about Jack the Ripper and reading about the latest murder trials in the newspapers; he even went to the Old Bailey crime museum.
Hitch even discusses real life serial killers in the Truffaut book.
One glance at the rape-murder scene in Frenzy lets you know this was a man fascinated by sex maniacs and the dark side of human nature.
Yeah, count me as another who isn’t that bothered by the implication of camaraderie between Hitchcock and Gein. I wish the movie presented it with more wit, but given Hitchcock’s tendency to torture women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and occasionally their daughters), it seems pretty apt. Obviously, one can artistically present scenes of rape or murder without any desire to do either, but I think it does cinema history no disservice to be aware that Alfred was a deeply creepy fellow who did some appalling and unmistakably sexualized things to women.
What’s interesting about Psycho is the way it reveals the skull beneath Hitchcock’s “wrong man” trope. Lots of his films generate audience sympathy for a man hunted by the authorities, and Hitchcock alluded in the Truffaut interviews to his own terror of police. For most of Psycho, the viewer thinks it’s the same classic Hitchcock plot, similar to Strangers on a Train, with poor hapless Norman frantically covering up for the real killer. Only at the end to we discover that it wasn’t a wrong man story at all, except in Norman’s fucked-up head.
And that may account, on a vulgar biographical level, for the extra charge of personal investment that screeches through Psycho. Hitchcock did many things that skirt perilously close to prosecutable offenses; at the very least, his antics would’ve gotten less powerful men roundly beaten by the young lady’s brothers. He had spent his life avoiding the punishment he pretty much deserved, all while imagining a world full of innocent men wrongly persecuted. Only in Psycho (and perhaps Vertigo) does he focus on a man who’s *rightly* persecuted, and whose protestations of innocence are revealed as a craven sham.
“I wish the movie had presented it with more wit.”
“More?”
I wish I could be amused by the perverted sense of justice that deems a shitty movie is justified by the degree of political correctness with which on can project the treatment of its subject.
Heh, yes, any would be a start. Though as McBride noted, the idea is so amusing it gets at least a half-point added to the score, however execrable the execution. Beyond that, I don’t think it’s “politically correct” to note that Hitchcock was both a great filmmaker and a real-life serial torturer of blondes; it’s just a fact of life. Doesn’t make the movie any good, of course, but it means the objections are of aesthetic execution, rather than fairness to the subject (if anything, the movie seems a little too generous towards that deeply unpleasant man).
He certainly did seem to grow less pleasant as he got older.
I’d like to read a biography of Hitchcock that charted the mutation of his behavior in some coherent way. It’s been a while since I read the Spoto from cover to cover but I don’t think that does the trick. Aside from Selznick’s famous pronouncement that Hitchcock didn’t seem like an ideal companion for a camping trip (was Selznick a big outdoorsman himself?), it seems that during the early Hollywood days he had better-than-cordial relations with actors and actresses (very friendly with Carole Lombard, who did not exactly lack for blonde sexual magnetism). Then an odd cat-and-mouse thing with Grace Kelly, and then a series of sick power-struggle scenarios involving actresses under contract. If you read, say, Scotty Bowers’ memoirs, you get a sense of golden-age Hollywood as a place where fetishists with sufficient money and power could wet their beaks practically without end, so Hitchcock’s compulsion to bring his fetishes to the office, as it were, besides making him more unpleasant, and causing him to act in potentially actionable ways, seems also ultimately entirely self-defeating.
What we know of our most revered artists, what we’d like to believe of our favorite artists…it’s all a weird ball of wax when it comes to both fandom and critical thought. The recent memoir by Pauline Butcher, who worked as a secretary to Frank Zappa from the “Lumpy Gravy” era through the early ’70s, incidentally contains an incredibly ugly anecdote concerning Billy Wilder.
Glenn – Billy Wilder? Really? What is this anecdote? Or maybe there’s a post in it. I love Billy Wilder and I don’t know why I am rushing to hear an awful story about him but, there it is, now I am curious. I certainly know he was not always a nice dude either.
I re-read a bunch of Spoto recently and he makes that very point, that Hitchcock could have assuaged whatever physical needs he had in any way he wanted, and yet he apparently did not. Spoto speculates about the reasons–Catholicism, the lure of the unattainable that was such a big thing for Hitchcock, etc. etc., but I’d agree that it doesn’t quite do the trick and I am not sure what would.
I will never ever forget the story Kent Jones once told in this very comments section, about someone going to dinner chez Hitchcock and being shown around the house by the great man himself…“here is the drawing room, here is the library…” They go further into the house and Hitch opens a door with, “Here is the bedroom…” and in the room is Alma sitting on the bed in her housecoat, and Hitch closes the door with, “…where nothing ever happens.”
“If you read, say, Scotty Bowers’ memoirs, you get a sense of golden-age Hollywood as a place where fetishists with sufficient money and power could wet their beaks practically without end, so Hitchcock’s compulsion to bring his fetishes to the office, as it were, besides making him more unpleasant, and causing him to act in potentially actionable ways, seems also ultimately entirely self-defeating.”
Well, if we go back to Uncle Siggy’s definition of sexual sublimation per teh Wikipedia, we get: Sublimation is the process of transforming libido into “socially useful” achievements, including artistic, cultural and intellectual pursuits.
So Hitch didn’t wet his beak, some actresses were subjected to unacceptable abuse as he aged, and we got a whole flock of seagulls of incredibly great movies as a result.
Siren, the anecdote comes from Butcher’ days working at a modeling agency in Swinging London immediately prior to getting the Zappa gig. She talks about going out on a date with a friend, Sarah, a “Jean Simmons look-alike” and meeting Wilder and two “overweight moguls” at a suite in the Dorchester Hotel. They dine, the Hollywood guys make disparaging remarks about “Blow ‑Up,” then they all adjoin into the bedroom. I now quote from Butcher:
“Two of the men dropped into lavish armchairs while the one with the paunch threw himself on the bed. He called out, ‘Come on in girls. Make yourselves comfortable.’
“Immediately on my guard, I hovered in the doorway. “Excuse me?”
“ ‘Come on in,’ he beckoned kindly, ‘get your clothes off.’
“All three of them gazed expectantly at me and my hackles rose. Obviously, we’d walked into a lair of vultures, though Sarah was now perched prettily on the edge of the bed. I snapped, ‘We’re not taking our clothes off.’
“ ‘What did she say?’ he asked, as if I was talking Japanese.
“ ‘Sarah, I think we should go.’
“She stood up, hesitating, while the guy with the bald head got out of his chair and snarled, ‘Are you kidding?’ ”
And it goes on like that a bit more, rather frustratingly not assigning names to any of the men speaking the dialogue (is the man with the bald head Wilder?) and the punch line is that Sarah had wanted to go through with it because that was the condition upon which she had been promised a part in the film. The actions of Zappa and his bandmates seems…well, not positively chivalrous by comparison, but, um, different.
Glenn, ew.
Wilder was, of course, married.
Aside from that, WTF does everybody have against Blow-Up? I love that movie.
I love it too. But I imagine Old Hollywood hands were quite upset that Antonioni got to how off Jane Birkin’s and Vanessa Redgrave’s breasts and “got away with it.”
Glenn your anecdote doesn’t make it at all clear what Wilder may or may not have done at the Dorchester.
It can be a shock to learn our artistic heroes weren’t always “nice guys.” William Friedkin comes across as an utter monster in “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.”
And David Thomson seems to think John Huston had some involvement in the Black Dahlia murder case, if only by knowing more than he let on. Read this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/film-studies-who-killed-the-black-dahlia-415428.html
Wilder nailed everything that moved. Tura Satana during IRMA LA DOUCE, for one.
Funny how so little of such “the antics” come out in a biography channel showing. Yes it is very disappointing when the movie heros we all love to watch on sceen turn out to be a lot less than perfect. I’m not much into naming names but one such person comes to mind – Initial E.F.
“Alfred was a deeply creepy fellow who did some appalling and unmistakably sexualized things to women.”
Wow.
* * *
“Mr. Wilder? There is a Ms. Nomi Malone asking for you at the reception. Shall I send her up to your room?”
More like Tura Satana nailing Billy. We’ve all seen Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! you know.
Now AJ’s got me wondering about “E.F.” Eddie Fisher? Eddie Foy? Edith Fellows? Edward Furlong? Elle Fanning? This is driving me nuts. To take my mind off this, I think I’ll go pop in my Blu Ray of “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
I may have mentioned this before, but Tura Satana was my girlfriend’s foster father’s aunt. I never got to meet her, but I’ve seen home movies of her at various holiday get-togethers, so I know it’s true.
I guessed Errol Flynn.
Whoops, should have read jbryant’s post more clearly. Whoosh! Sorry.
Siren: I’ve heard that Hitchcock was actually stunned at how good BLOW-UP was.
I could see Hitchcock admiring “Blow-Up.” Like “Psycho,” it’s in many ways an exercise in pure cinema. It picks up Hitchcock’s modernism and takes it to a place the Master could not, for a variety of reasons, one of them having to do with that Richard Lester you-stop-taking-the-bus metaphor I’m so fond of trotting out.
And: wow, that Thomson “Black Dahlia” piece is disgracefully hackish even by HIS ever-slippery standards. I wonder if he was drunk when he wrote it. I’m not saying that to be a smart ass; that’s how it reads.
The Thomson piece appalled me too, Glenn.
There’s no doubt Huston could be unpleasant, especially if you weren’t part of his inner circle of boozing friends (like Bogart and Bacall). His sadistic treatment of Ray Bradbury, during the writing of “Moby Dick“ ‘s screenplay, is well known. It led the mild-mannered Bradbury to punch Huston in the face.
But to imply Huston was involved in a notorious murder – if only by knowing who did it, and not going to the police – is over the top. Was the EDITOR drunk when that reckless piece was turned in?
“Was Huston a part of the circle? Can an artistic hero have been that close to murder? Will anyone take advantage of the UK’s loose libel laws on this? Did Orson Welles secretly direct The Third Man? Was Christopher Marlowe actually William Shakespeare? Is the sky mauve? Could the earth have been created in 6 days? Am I actually sleeping with Nicole Kidman? I don’t know. But I am a strange man.” ‑David Thomson
Forget Huston. There’s a whole book accusing of Orson Welles of being responsible for the Black Dahlia murder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Dahlia_suspects#Orson_Welles
http://www.salon.com/2000/08/16/dahlia/
From one of Elizabeth Short’s neighbors (who was12 years old at the time)
The theory even gets a mention in Simon Callow’s biography, but obviously he dismisses it
Partisan, that makes me very happy.
As for Thomson, note that up top Thomson implicitly mocks the notion of Orson Welles’ magic-act-sawing routine saying anything about whether Welles was involved in the Dahlia case. Then, in the kicker to his penultimate graf, with a flourish Thomson drags out…Noah Cross.
OTOH, anyone who can get a creepy, book-length mash note to Nicole Kidman published must have something going for him!
There’s also a theory that Orson Welles was the Dahlia killer. You can see the clues in “Lady from Shanghai,” if you watch in a state of advanced inebriation.
Hitchcock to Charlotte Chandler in 1978: “Those Italian fellows are a hundred years ahead of us. BLOW-UP and 8 1/2 are bloody masterpieces.”
I’ve read a similar quote from somewhere I can’t remember, with AH basically saying the same thing back in 1960 about L’AVVENTURA (“decades ahead of me in style” or something like that), noting that this led to some of his experiments in the early ’60s. I’ve also read (again, can’t remember where) that he had fallen OUT of love with Antonioni’s work around the time of BLOW-UP, but maybe that was mistaken, or he had changed his mind again by ’78.
HITCHCOCK seems like a film that couldn’t possibly imagine that Hitch was actually watching what else was going on in the world of cinema 1960 and finding how to connect it to himself and his own work.
There is still a more risible David Thomsom-related rumour: it’s perpetuated by anybody who refers to him as “our greatest living film critic.”
Excellent article. But am I the only one who was bothered by the multiple typos (before you re-watch Psycho “this afternoon,” copy-edit!)?
I’m sure you all know about the book that claims Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper. If not, seek it out. It’s magnificently unconvincing.
I remember the ridiculous Huston/Dahlia connection came up on some crime newsmagazine show years ago. Two adult siblings wanted the world to know that their rich father had been the killer, based on no evidence, and while incriminating lots of dead people they threw Huston onto the pile. Might as well, right?
Update, for those playing at home, the piece has been re-gone-over and typos fixed. All of them, I hope. Anybody see any, please do drop me an e‑mail. Sorry. GK
>I’m sure you all know about the book that claims Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper. If not, seek it out. It’s magnificently unconvincing.
That book is amazing. The effort that guy must have put into unscrambling a bunch of fictional anagrams…
Amusingly, I just bought a house, and was informed that the former owner (now deceased) was a friend of John Huston, who spent a lot of time drinking bourbon in her basement rec room. Photographic evidence of this was provided, and he left his pipe behind. Digging into the story a little, come to find out that she was actually his long-time mistress (or one of them).
I plan to gut the basement and turn it into a home theater.
“Black Dahlia Avenger” was the book whose author, Steve Hodel, claimed his father was the killer. He obviously convinced Thomson, and he also convinced James Ellroy, who wrote an introduction to the paperback edition saying the mystery was solved, as far as he was concerned.
In that paperback edition, Hodel “ties” his father to about a dozen other unsolved murders, including that of Ellroy’s mother. What irony – the “Black Dahlia” novelists’s own mother was slain by the Black Dahlia killer! If you believe this theory.
Ellroy also says that he doesn’t really care (anymore?) about who killed Elizabeth Short and usually refers to Larry Harnisch, who was very critical of the Hodel theory, when it comes to genuine theories about the identity of the killer.
Hodel’s book is fairly convincing until that last part, when he ties his dad to just about every unsolved slaying in the Los Angeles area during the ’40s and ’50s. Maybe someone told him that serial-killer books sell.
If ZODIAC has taught us nothing else, it’s that the thing about these things is how *many* incredibly convincing theories there are. But they can’t all be right.
Ellroy also said that “closure is bullshit.” I think he’d rather stand by that then “Hodel did it.”
Can we have another “Zodiac” lovefest now? It’s been almost three years. Or maybe dream about Fincher adapting “The Big Nowhere”.
I would watch that movie as many times as possible. And it’s only been a couple of months since I last saw ZODIAC. I put it on thinking it would work as background while I did other things. I did no other things.
I think the most insightful moment in that whole film is when Paul Avery is pointing out to Graysmith how few deaths, or mysterious, creepy little details, can actually be attributed to the Zodiac Killer, and when Graysmith’s face falls Avery says “You look almost disappointed.” That moment, or that little bit of psychology, is never commented upon after that, but even in my non-obsessive, entirely amateur-hour interest in the Dahlia case, or more specifically (in my case) Jack the Ripper, I’ll be damned if that didn’t hit home in a big way.
My little “Zodiac” moment is when Graysmith asks Toschi about how he can get in touch with Armstrong and he says “You don’t”. Something about that line just always gets to me. There is this vision of “decency” existing just on the margin of the main action that is just so powerful. And maybe “You look almost disappointed” is the flipside of that.
Yes, there’s a very clear “You’re doing this for yourself, and you’re annoying everybody” message in that line.
Also, watching it again recently, I picked up on a very strong vibe that in the Charles Fleischer scene, which I’ve always been ambivalent about, Fleischer, who is innocent, realizes that this dope is now thinks he’s the Zodiac for, essentially, no really good reason, so he’s decided to mess with him. You can see the idea occur to Fleischer at one point. Anyway, that’s how it seemed to me.
That’s another thing. When Graysmith comes home after the Fleischer scene, he mutters to himself something like “two killers” – and then immediately forgets it because his wife has left him. It never comes up again. I like this idea that the “puzzle” can’t be solved not only because of the elusive nature of truth and all that, but also because, in the words of Toschi, “people get old, they forget”.
Not that I think that Rick Marshall is supposed to be the Zodiac, but that it’s another tunnel Graysmith – and probably we, as obsessive viewers – could get lost in. Who knows. He was Ken Narlow’s favorite suspect in the whole case after all.
I rewatched MARNIE yesterday, and seeing it again, I have to say my problem with that movie is that I find Tippi Hedren decidedly unerotic.