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fter its famous opening series of helicopter-shot, panoramic vistas of Phoenix, Arizona, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho gives us an illicit view of post-coital lunchtime lovers in a hotel room, he shirtless, she in her bra and half-slip. “The sex angle was raised,” François Truffaut remarks in one of his famous interviews with the director, “so that later on the audience would think that Anthony Perkins is merely a voyeur. If I’m not mistaken,” Truffaut continues, “out of your fifty works, this is the only film showing a woman in a brassiere.” Hitchcock confirms that his choices reflect his awareness that the “audiences are changing.”1 Through such innovations as the bared brassiere, the film announces itself as daring and modern, “a new— and altogether different—entertainment,” as the poster for the film, which shows Janet Leigh in her white bra and half-slip only, proclaimed. Determinedly breaking taboos in terms of what can be shown and inferred in a movie, Psycho shows us more than movies had before: more flesh, more violence, and for the first time in American film, according to its makers, a flushing toilet. Hitchcock may have been teasingly manipulating the audience, as was his custom . But in no Hitchcock film is a character “merely” something as momentous as a voyeur. Voyeurism emerges as one of the major themes of Hitchcock’s mature work, from the 1950s forward. In Psycho, the comparatively teasing, playful evocation of voyeurism in Rear Window (1954)—which certainly prefigures the C H A P T E R 3 B L A N K S C R E E N S Psycho and the Pornographic Gaze P S Y C H O S E X U A L 90 later film’s bleakness—takes on an especially anguished and murderous character. Viewed, at the film’s midpoint, by Norman Bates through the peephole in his office , Marion Crane is clad in a black bra and black half-slip, in contrast to the white undergarments of the first scene. She wears the color of her sin—the infamous stolen $40,000. If we stick with this moral framework, as Hitchcock himself did, one might ask about Norman’s sinful spying. Hitchcock will show us that Norman is in a hell of his own making. In any event, Norman’s pornographic voyeurism does not lead him to pursue Marion romantically or sexually. Indeed, if anything, it presages his murder of her. Moreover, and this is a crucial point, Norman’s illicit looking at Marion does not proceed from any clear-cut, defined sexual orientation. It is a kind of sexually blank, though intimidating and invasive, looking. If Psycho foundationally indicates a new sexual openness, part of this openness is the inference of pornographic viewing in certain key scenes. Indeed, Psycho heralds the emergence of the pornographic gaze in mainstream narrative film. In the Hitchcockian context as well as in many of the films that have been inspired by his work, the pornographic gaze is associated with these qualities of blankness and violence at once, and, most palpably, an overwhelming sense of isolation. Psycho frames the pornographic in its incipient emergence in narrative film as a symptom of what ails American men. Hitchcock figures the pornographic gaze as the domain of men whose empty looking matches their emotional, sexual, and social emptiness. It is Hitchcock’s depiction of the pornographic gaze as indicative of social and sexual disconnection and emptiness that will prove so influential for later films. Drawing a Blank: Pornography and Eros As John Orr puts it, “for Hitchcock Eros is usually inseparable from love. The opening of Psycho may be steamy but there is also a deadness in the knowing solitude of its lovers, an excess of familiarity where love and Eros are dying simultaneously .”2 The damaged, decaying, and dying levels of love and eros in Psycho characterize both heterosexual and homosexual possibilities. Psycho’s representation of masculinity as fundamentally split, with its implications for a fraught hetero-homo divide, and its themes of voyeurism, homosexuality, and the emergent technology of pornography, figured as reflective of a larger deadening of social ties and individual subjectivities, will be endlessly repeated in the New Hollywood, as the following chapters will show. If the cinematic output of the New Hollywood was, indeed, male-dominated, as Peter Krämer has argued, the very term “male-dominated” would undergo a thorough and unflinching critique . Shown to be the locus of...

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