This was submitted in late 2004 when Dr. Phil Skerry called out for testimonials from Hitchcock fans regarding their first exposure to the eponymous breathtaking moment for his book The Shower Scene in Hitchcock's Psycho: Creating and Building Cinematic Suspense. I have not read the book, because it is a $130 textbook, but if you would like more information you can get it here. Below is the complete text of my own submission; Dr. Skerry was kind enough to print it (I don't know how much) in his book and was very encouraging about it. I would only add today that I regret one point I made, the assertion that the shower scene has no power outside of its intended context. It doesn't have the same resonance, but is at any rate an astonishing achievement, stand-alone or not, and one of the most beautiful sequences in film history. I am rather proud to say that my contribution was given the immense honor of a mention by Ken Mogg on his New Publications page. It's enough to make someone's week, ya know?

Dear Mr. Skerry,

I am not certain that you will be interested in the PSYCHO reaction of someone who first saw the movie over three decades after it wrapped production, but nevertheless I couldn't resist offering something.

Everyone born after a certain point and tuned in remotely to any kind of pop culture grew up with the shower scene. Every edit, every cut (pun intended), every note of music, every scream, and every sound effect is practically subsconciously implanted in us early in life. How many films have a scene like that? There's no moment like it.

I'm writing you mostly because this reaction always mystified me. Despite being intensely fond of VERTIGO and LIFEBOAT and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," I couldn't imagine that the scene as described to me could have so much significance.

I finally figured out why when I at last originally saw PSYCHO. I'm afraid I can't recall the year but it would have been at some point in the mid-'90s and I would have been somewhere between twelve and fourteen. Knowing full well that Janet Leigh would be gone before the film was halfway finished, I still found myself consumed by her journey, her errors in judgment, her moral dillema, her maddening struggles with guilt, police, and salesmen. By the time I got to the scene at the car lot, with the cop standing across the street, I forgot this was the famous shower movie, the Bates Motel movie, one of the movies everyone's seen and everyone knows back to front.

I was seduced by Anthony Perkins' character when he appeared. People often speak of the suave charm in Hitchcock's villains, but Norman Bates is the only one who caught me off guard entirely. He's almost a little boy. "Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies." You can't imagine that he's a murderer. You refuse to believe it. And keep in mind, this is PSYCHO -- no one, _no one_ sees PSYCHO today without knowing who Norman is and what he's going to do. I had seen images from the film all my life and yet the movie's spell was cast and I believed the guy was just a victim. My mind was not on showers. It was on Leigh and the way she saw herself in Perkins, the way she understands him and wants to escape his fate. As he says, "We're all in our private trap."

Then along comes The Scene. It rips through you and the rest of the movie. It destroys your impressions and wrecks everything you've learned thus far in an instant of pandemonium. It is terrifying, orgasmic, hilarious, senseless, unexpected, and inevitable. You sit down to watch PSYCHO for the first time and you know it's coming, you sit down to watch it the twentieth time and you know it's coming, but you still don't expect it. It isn't even "Somehow this time it won't happen," it's "It simply won't happen."

I think what's special about the scene -- and what shook me about it -- doesn't actually lie within it. The editing is brilliant. The music is even more so, and the execution on every front is flawless. But look at it on its own and I don't think it amounts to much. It's technically brilliant, but emotionally it has no resonance. It is because of the morality play before it, unfolding almost like an episode of Hitchcock's TV show, that it carries its remarkable weight. It is a testament to the delicacy of craft that goes into making a film, certainly to Hitchcock's virtuosity with just that. I think it's the subtlety of PSYCHO that gives the shower sequence its hot-knife-through-butter effect... and as good as the remainder of the movie is, you're still recovering from that one massive loss when you leave.

Hitch's films are full of these iconic sequences. They were clearly designed to be iconic -- whether death-defying fights on the Statue of Liberty and Mt. Rushmore or chases through the British Museum -- and they still seem fresh to me, but I think this portion of PSYCHO holds something unique because of its interior conflict. You love it and you dread it, and no matter what you think, you're still not ready. Because I first saw PSYCHO with the baggage of all my prior knowledge about it already securely upstairs, and it had of course built three decades worth of a reputation, I think it says a great deal that I was completely taken aback by this single jolt of power. I cannot begin to imagine the sensation of witnessing this stunt in a theater in 1960, but I do know that it left me reeling alone in my room eons later. I don't think that's a small achievement.

I realize this rather vague rememberance doesn't fit precisely within your guidelines, but I thank you for the chance to say a lot of this, however trite it perhaps is, and I wish you the best of luck on what sounds like a wonderful book.

n.

[Later:]
One thing I was going to mention and forgot is that I feel the shower scene, intentionally or not, is a microcosm of the film itself as a completely disarming rebellion against the studio system. The context is terribly important. Building a DVD collection recently, I finally had the chance to see quality prints of most of Hitchcock's British films and they seem to me his "purest" work, at least from "The Man Who Knew Too Much" through "The Lady Vanishes." I think he acknowledged that he had much more trouble working with the people he wanted to work with and filming the things he wanted to film once he came to Hollywood. As proud as I'm sure he was of, say, "Rebecca" or "Rear Window," he always seemed discouraged about the films he acted the most excited about being the least successful at the box office. You see this in "The Trouble with Harry," possibly "Marnie," "Rich & Strange" from the British period, and above all, "Vertigo."

"Vertigo" in particular is important because it is an entirely unique experience and it's impossible not to notice how much its director cared about it. When it was not a major hit, I think he actually revolted not only with "Psycho," but three times, with "North by Northwest," "Psycho," and "The Birds." That first one almost seems sarcastic to me, taking all the ingredients of his popular thrillers and shoving them to an over-the-top extreme. "The Birds" has the same revealing ironies and audience relationship as "Psycho," but needless to say "Psycho" is the most outrageously brutal of the three, in its lack of star power, its conscious ignorance of dramatic structure, and even details like the black & white photography and the B-movie sheen of it all.

Your argument that the shower scene is the most important in film history is, I think, absolutely correct for the simple reason that it marks the precise moment of transition to the decade that would supply us with new perspectives on film as entertainment. Obviously it had a massive influence on the suspense and horror genres, but you can see the impact of this filmed murder in the most unlikely places. It strikes me in retrospect as a metaphor for the future and the rebirth in American and British cinema: "Dr. Strangelove," "A Hard Day's Night," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Graduate," and numerous others would not have been possible ten years prior. Who better to open the doors for this than the most revered of all directors, rejecting the establishment that made him his fortune. I don't have to tell you that even if all of "Psycho" has this effect, it is this specific encounter between "mother" and prey that emphasizes it.