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Article Excerpt
The most famous cue in movie history, "The Knife" in Psycho's shower scene, has been ripping through our culture ever since Bernard Herrmann secretly created it. This is the cinema's primal scream, deeply imbedded in our moviegoing subconscious. Anyone who teaches film knows that it is the one piece of movie music all students, even the most clueless, instantly recognize. (John Williams's laws is the possible exception, which Hitchcock shrewdly divined when he hired Williams as his final composer just after the release of Spielberg's film.) Psycho's strings scream through everything from the disco version in Re-Animator to kitschy parodies in The Simpsons, Daddy Day Care, and Inspector Gadget II. Just as Vertigo is the definitive sound of obsession, Psycho is the sound of primordial dread.
Herrmann's music is inseparably linked with the film in the popular imagination; indeed, without it, Psycho would probably not exist. As we shall see, Hitchcock came to dislike Psycho so much that he was about to slice it up for television--until Herrmann's shower cue made him change his mind. Herrmann, who was on the set frequently, believed in the project; he instinctively knew Psycho's potential and fought to get it released.
When someone asked Herrmann what the shower cue meant, he simply said "terror." (1) This is exactly correct. Edmund Burke, Anne Radcliffe, and other eighteenth-century theorists of the high Gothic linked terror with the Sublime, a force evoking not superficial shock but a terribleness deep and abiding, not only sudden catastrophe but a fundamental treachery in life, a sense that the world is infinitely dangerous. In the state of terror, no safe haven exists, even in a comfort zone such as a shower. Herrmann might have answered "horror," which is contained in terror, but that is a more physical, present-tense emotion, a temporary effect of terror. The dread we take away from Psycho is lasting and has continued to haunt our culture since its creation in 1960. Sometimes horror is all we can bear. Burke's advice is to enjoy it, at least in our imaginations, to "fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime." (2)
The awesome dissonance of Psycho works independently even as it instantly evokes Norman Bates's stabbing knife and Marion Crane's helpless scream. Once again Hitchcock overturned the convention that music must remain subliminally in the background of a film: in the murder scenes it is a force of aggression as frightening as the flashing knife; in its quiet moments, it roams grimly wherever it pleases, investing the most banal images--a toy, a car on an empty highway, a suitcase on a bed, a tchotchke of folding hands--with dread.
Psycho has received so many complex exegeses and ideological spins that it is hard to reconstruct the original delightful horror that initially made it so special. Those of us who saw it in 1960 remember something very different from the critics' musings on phallocentrism, patriarchal hierarchies, and male gazes. Not that gender is irrelevant. Males remember falling out of their chairs when they saw Janet Leigh in a brassiere, then diving under them when "The Knife" cue commenced. Females, including Janet Leigh, remember not being able to take a shower for a very long time. It is easy to forget that Hitchcock conceived Psycho as a high-end variation on a low-end genre, a shocker that would enable him to "direct the audience" for maximum thrills and box office. Moviegoers were eager to be directed, lining up in record numbers, ignoring the pious outrage of critics who denounced both the movie and its director, many claiming he had harmed his reputation irreparably. With Psycho, Hitchcock again accurately took the pulse of the American public, which was imbibing the tacky thrills of American International double features and Roger Corman schlock, as well as the salacious scares of Britain's Hammer Productions.
Part of the magic was that audiences were not allowed into the theater after the movie started. Unlike today, when we pick apart and dissect any scene we want on video or DVD, Psycho, including its deftly structured score, had to be experienced from start to finish, in a dark theater on a big screen. (The critics had to see it that way too, a major reason they panned it.) The moment the music started, with its slashing dissonance and manic pulse, audiences knew they were in for a stomach-churning roller-coaster ride they could not get off unless they left the theater.
From the era of Poe and Hawthorne to that of Anne Rice and Stephen King, America has been entranced by horror. Psycho is the most artful cinematic specimen of the genre, the score its greatest music. Steven Sondheim, whose Sweeney Todd is an homage to Herrmann, once pointed out that music is more important in horror than in any other type of cinema, cuing the scares and their buildup. (Sweeney Todd's opening chorus, with its indeterminate chords, functions the same way as Psycho's Prelude.) There are other distinguished director-composer examples in the genre--James Whale and Franz Waxman, Val Lewton and Roy Webb, Jack Clayton and George Auric, Roman Polanski and Chick Corea, Ridley Scott and Jerry Goldsmith, David Cronenberg and Howard Shore, M. Night Shamalayan and James Newton Howard--but Psycho retains its power more than any of these. So eternally popular is this film that it is linked...
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