Buy a new suit and get a new bit and nobody will notice if you look like you are doing good

[sovay]

Because the Somerville Theatre is showing a 35 mm double bill of Hitchcock this weekend and my friendlist is still turning up memorials to Angela Lansbury, I was reminded again of how much Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) associates himself in my mind with Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960). It's not just the likeness of men possessed in all applicable senses by their mothers, although the Momism goes hard even for the mid-century; it's not just the beauty of the men in question, although in each case it is considerable, absurdly and then terrifyingly so. It's the use of one in the service of the other, until the beauty itself becomes a kind of mask, a double-talk, a disappearing act. Norman Bates looks like the sensitive hero of his actor's star image, as normally troubled as anyone in his difficult straits; really he's a haunted house. Raymond Shaw hasn't been quite so thoroughly devoured, but it's only as the film closes in on its devastating valediction that we realize how little of him we have actually ever seen, the introduction of a military prig, the recollection of a fragile lover, the urgent confession of a man in possession of himself at last and at what cost. We can never appreciate the surface because what's underneath is not entirely a person but a mechanism, the assassin built to his mother's orders, as impervious as a terminator and yet so farcically vulnerable that we see it hacked twice by accident, because a lot of people play a little solitaire; it gets worse the better we understand that Raymond lives his life in a state of fearful self-control, his one defense that he clings to from childhood and the flip of a red queen can flick it all away. There's as much left of him at the end of his film as there is of Norman still breathing, that boyish ghost wrapped over an act of necromancy. I know neither is a story of the supernatural, but it is really not possible to interpret either in strictly psychological terms, as hard as they seem to try. They are different kinds of American haunting. It interests me what kinds of face they chose to hold up over it.

Comments

[asakiyume]

that boyish ghost wrapped over an act of necromancy. --That's a great way of putting it. Hollowing out the person who's actually there, keeping the husk, and making it move around the way you want.

[radiantfracture]

Do you know I've never seen /The Manchurian Candidate/? -- your review makes me feel it as an enormous oversight for this performance alone.

[gwynnega]

Now I want to see a mashup video of Norman and Raymond. (I feel like Raymond's mother could stand in for Norman's mom as well.)