Saturday, February 10, 2018

[ztqmslvh] Psycho XXX

Consider creating a porn parody of Hitchcock's Psycho.  Easy: just expand the peephole scene and cut out the rest of the extraneous filler.  The motel should get a sexually suggestive name -- oh wait it already has one...

Was Hitchcock creating straight-up porn?  In order to do so, he would have had to comply with the Hays Code of the time.  Of course, don't show too much skin, which Hitchcock complied with: definitely far less skin than today's standards of porn, though he was pushing the boundary at the time.  More subtly, the Code roughly required that only bad people do anything sexual.  Being the subject of a peep show is sexual: Marion Crane had been established as a dishonest office worker who steals a tremendous amount of money from her firm.  This plot point had always seemed irrelevant: the suspense and horror would have worked just fine without it.  However, it does make sense if Hitchcock was needing to comply with the Hays Code.  What else about the movie is there just to avoid the whole thing being censored?  Maybe all the suspense, mystery, and horror -- the things that make it one of the greatest films of all time -- was just extraneous filler to distract the censors from the real point of the film.

Tangentially, it would have been cute if Tom Cassidy reappeared later in the film.  Upon learning his money had been stolen, he subverts expectations and does not get angry.  He simply pays out another 40K (this time with a check), staying true to his earlier statement that the earlier cash 40K was "money he could afford to lose".  He even assumes the best of Marion Crane, that she is putting stolen money to good use to "buy off unhappiness", and even takes some pleasure in helping someone he fancied accomplish that.  He sends a private investigator after her not to recover the money but out of genuine concern for her well-being after her mysterious disappearance.  (Of course, such a plot would not be Hays Code compliant.)

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