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Robert Kolker, ed., Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho: A casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 272 pp. $18.95 paper.
In a fit of college-age hubris, while arguing that Vertigo and The Birds are superior films, I was once foolhardy enough to claim that Psycho, though no doubt superb, gave up its secrets too easily. Perhaps the narration's willingnesseven hunger-to reveal itself, to structure itself with an eye toward the viewer's habitual complacency, allowed me to believe that the film's humor and artistry offered the possibility of redemption, or at least escape, from its unforgiving depiction of postwar American life. I should instead have heeded the film's own warning: the smug and self-satisfied are exposed to being attacked when they least expect it, vanquished by the forces of the irrational, and sent reeling backward down a steep flight of stairs. Had I not already come to my senses, reading Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho: A casebook, edited by Robert Kolker, would be enough to convince me that this picture's mysteries are bottomless, and the perspectives one can apply to it practically innumerable.
Oxford University Press's casebooks in Criticism series has been primarily a literary venture, concentrating on novels by modernist authors such as James Joyce and William Faulkner. The publishers would have been hard-pressed to select a more appropriate film for this inaugural foray into cinema, and Kolker wisely constructs this volume to illustrate the development of cinema studies itself in the years since the picture's release in 1960. Familiar material, such as excerpts from Robin Wood's and Raymond Durgnat's auteurist studies, as well as from the Hitchcock/Truffaut interview book, offers new possibilities for reflection and expansion when placed in such close proximity both to one another and to strong subsequent work by critics such as Kolker and Linda Williams.
Fully half of this volume is comprised of essays published within the past decade. Kolker's selection implies that the 1970s-vintage psychoanalytic approach remains of little more than historical interest to today's readers; the one essay derived from that theoretical model, the epilogue to Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory by Robert Samuels (originally published in 1998), is surely the collection's weakest. Samuels' reliance on Freudian theory causes him to jump to conclusions without presenting sufficient evidence: "We...