On Media Poetics and Mutations in Perceptual Space…
I reflected on “the true life” with a recollection from Don Delillo’s Point Omega introducing the psyche of a man in the desert. That same book begins with an eerily meditative scene describing a man who is witnessing an art exhibit by Douglas Gordon titled “24 Hour Psycho,” which was a real installation that played at the MoMA, among other locations, in 2006. 24 Hour Psycho slows down the Hitchcock film so that the whole thing plays over the course of 24 hours, and it continues looping. This ends up being a very different way to experience the film, and DeLillo describes a man standing in the shadows, closely watching, as museum visitors come and go, meta-aware of the whole gestalt, the play of perspectives and shadows.
So we have an author creating dramatic fiction based on a conceptual film artist’s reframing of a legendary auteur-director’s adaptation of the an original work of fiction, which we are reflecting on the emergent totality of in this forum. One can witness how the idea transforms through the different media, and with some thinking, what each form of expression adds, subtracts, and reformats in our perceptual space. The time in which things happens—the duration—where attention lingers and where it jumps to, is significant. Where the “cuts” are made, and who directs these cuts, becomes decisive.
I thought it was significant that while the shower scene shows us an event in the dramatic action of the film, the whole creative challenge actually centered on how to make us (the audience) think we saw something that we didn’t actually see. It is akin to being in Plato’s cave. No matter what a prisoner is seeing phenomenologically, they are only really deluded if they think they are seeing a real reality. Seeing the shadows on the wall as shadows, they would not be deluded.
I probably first saw Psycho on the TV as a kid; it played occasionally on some of the old classic-movie cable channels. But a few years ago I went to see in the theater—I think it was being shown again for an anniversary with some critical retrospectives. I remember it was particularly disturbing in a way that regular movies are not. I find now that the scene is truly brutal and not something I want to see. But did I ever really see it? Or did I just think I saw it? And what if I saw it differently, at a different tempo? How might my mind fill in the gaps (resonant intervals?) differently between the film director’s cuts?