Further along in Saul Bellow's novel More Die of Heartbreak, the narrator Kenneth Trachtenberg's Uncle Benn Crader is suddenly beset with doubts about his fiancée, Matilda Layamon.Staying in the Hamptons for a short time, Matilda suggests to Benn that they take in a movie in the nearby town.
“Why don’t we drive in to see Psycho?” she said. “The original Hitchcock one. I’ve seen only those sequels.”
“I saw it back in the sixties,” said Benn. “It made a negative impression. I understand it’s become a big thing—a cult. It doesn’t take much to do that.”
Matilda’s cajoling answer was: “Sitting next to me, you may think better of it than you did some twenty years back.”
So they drove in for the six o’clock showing. It was already dark, said Benn. Each day like an art exhibit of fields, fences, roads, woods, but closing earlier and earlier. Listening to Uncle, I must have been at my Frenchiest—long-faced, fitting in verses from the lycée: “Nous marchions comme des fiancés.… La lune amicale aux insensés.” At least one of the fiancés was tetched, it’s dead certain; I’m getting to that. And no, Benn didn’t think better of Psycho. The second viewing was much worse than the first. “It was a phony. I hated it. I hate all that excitement without a focus. Nothing but conditioned reflexes they’ve trained you into. That’s what stands out in the video films I’ve been watching at the Layamons’. Logical connections are lacking and the gaps are filled with noises—sound effects. You have to give up on coherence. They keep you uneasy and give you one murder after another. You presently stop asking, Why are they killing this guy?”
His memory of the picture was accurate nonetheless. He remembered the old tourist home resembling a funeral parlor, the tacky antiques, the terrible grounds. “All the bad ideas we have, the crippled thoughts we all think, producing a vegetation which is spiderlike. Coming up through the soil, part plant, part arachnid. That’s what was covering the ground in that nasty sunshine around that nasty house.”
Then came that pretty girl, the image of a sweet junior miss but a criminal herself, and on the lam. She rents a room, where she undresses and steps into the shower. There she’s knifed through the shower curtain—stabbed, stabbed, stabbed, and the camera is fixed on the lifeblood going down the drain. Feeling chilled (what need was there for summer air-conditioning well along in autumn?), he put his hands under his thighs for warmth. Matilda offered him the popcorn box. No, thanks, he didn’t like the stuff, it got between his teeth. He said that if he had been more alert he would have taken note of a vaporous haze of trouble forming inside his head and been forewarned. But you never know enough about yourself. He loathed the film; Matilda was enchanted. There was just enough light in the theater to show her elegant profile. Without having to look, she took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the salt and butter from her fingers.
The death of the pretty girl was followed by the murder of the detective who was trailing her. As the doomed man climbed the stairs, the camera concentrated on the back of a static figure that waited on the landing. This person, as improbable as the house itself, wore a long Victorian skirt, and a shirtwaist of dark calico was stretched over her shoulders. Those shoulders were stiff and high, unnaturally wide for a woman.
“Matilda!” Identification was instantaneous. That person seen from the rear was Matilda. This was as conclusive as it was quick. For Benn it would always be what it was at first sight.
Shocked at himself, rigid at the atrocity committed by his mind (perhaps by the “second person” inside him), he watched what he already knew was coming. In a moment the killer would go into action with a jump. Then you would see the barbarous face of a man, false hair piled on the head, a maniac. Murdered, dead before there was time for astonishment, the cop would fall backwards. Anticipating this, Benn said, he had already tried to take some evasive action, not so much against the “crime” (which after all was rigged) as from the association with Matilda. That was low! to see her in this transvestite. What was he trying to pull off here! Which of all the parties was the craziest? Benn said that if this had been one of the usual thought murders that go flashing through us—well, a thing like that can be set off by the sight of a kitchen knife on the sink. Just as great heights suggest suicide. We can deal easily with these flare-ups. No harm meant, not really. But merging Matilda with Tony Perkins playing a psychopath—that was a deadly move. It came from a greater depth and seemed to paralyze Benn. “I couldn’t distance myself from it,” he said. This wasn’t one of your fleeting mental squibs, or flirting, playing with horror; it was serious. The woman was his fiancée. The wedding was planned, invitations were being engraved. And this vision in the movie house told him not to marry her.
I am in total agreement with Benn about Psycho, which he calls "cynical Hitchcock camp laced with sexual inversion" and "Hollywood ptomaine."
