20. MAN, YOU GOT SOME ‘SPLAINING TO WATCH: Characters, or even whole movies, who feel compelled to explain everything. “Educate” yourself with one of those.
This one is from Adam Hursey.
In late 1997, Gus Van Sant could do anything he wanted. Good Will Hunting had climbed to the upper rung of the box office, harvested Oscars and given Miramax enough prestige currency to burn for a decade. The suits at Universal knocked on his door, cash in hand, asking what shiny blockbuster he wanted to helm next.
This is what he picked.
Universal agreed to let Van Sant remake Psycho, mostly because they assumed it was an easy legacy cash grab. What they didn’t realize was that they were bankrolling a $25 million piece of conceptual performance art. Van Sant wasn’t trying to out-Hitchcock Hitchcock. He was executing the ultimate Hollywood flex: using studio money to test a theoretical hypothesis about the nature of cinema itself.
Why remake a movie that is universally acknowledged as a masterpiece?
Van Sant answered: “So no one else would have to.”
It’s an arrogant, brilliant, deeply acerbic statement. The late 90s were the dawn of the hyper-corporate remake engine—studios rummaging through their dusty vaults to repackage old IP for younger audiences who refused to watch black-and-white film. It’s still going on right now. But Van Sant beat them to the punch by taking the concept of a remake to its absolute logical extreme.
It is the cinematic equivalent of Marcel Duchamp signing a urinal or Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, where a fictional writer attempts to recreate Cervantes’ masterpiece line for line, only for time to completely alter its meaning. Van Sant set out to prove that even if you copy the camera angles, focal lengths and blocking down to the exact frame, you cannot duplicate the spirit.
To pull off this audacious stunt, Van Sant brought a DVD player to set and constantly scrubbed through the 1960 original to match camera placements. If Hitchcock’s crew made a mistake—like a door opening without a key turning—Van Sant deliberately duplicated the error. Yet, for a film famous as a “shot-for-shot” carbon copy, it isn’t one. The 1998 cut runs noticeably faster, paring down the pacing and trimming the psychiatrist’s (Robert Forster) infodump monologue at the climax.
Van Sant fulfilled Hitchcock’s original vision. In 1960, Hitchcock wanted a continuous, uninterrupted tracking shot zooming from the Phoenix skyline straight into Marion Crane’s hotel room window, but 1950s technology required multiple dissolves. In 1998, Van Sant finally executed the smooth, uninterrupted camera move Hitchcock originally dreamt up. He also threw in a meta-cameo: during the famous scene where Hitchcock made his blink-and-you-miss-it appearance outside the real estate office, Van Sant stands in the same spot, getting chewed out by a man in a cowboy hat acting as the ghost of Hitchcock.
Where Hitchcock’s film offers stark, claustrophobic black and white, the 90s color palette often feels sickening. It also makes me realize how much we need Janet Leigh in this, as Heche feels detached and almost against everyone. We know she’s a criminal before she even does it. Are we denying her character the agency she demands because we already know who she is, before she’s even given a chance to show us?
Most importantly, Hitchcock gave us implied violence and chocolate syrup blood, while in the future- now our past- the Xerox has explicit stab wounds, red blood and surreal imagery. Even at the end, the film intercuts Norman’s voice with his mother’s from the 1960 movie.
The tone shifts drastically in three key areas:
1. The Death of Subtlety: Where Hitchcock operated under the Hays Code—forcing him to rely on masterful editing and suggestive camera angles—Van Sant had no such restrictions. During the shower scene, we see visible stab wounds in Marion’s back, blood trickling down the tile work and cuts of her lifeless buttocks. When Norman peers through the wall, Van Sant adds wet, squelching sound effects and audible groaning, removing any ambiguity: Norman isn’t just looking; he’s spilling his seed.
2. Flash-Cut Surrealism: During both Marion’s and Arbogast’s murder scenes, Van Sant inserts bizarre, subliminal imagery—storm clouds, sheep in the road, surreal non-sequiturs—flashing across the screen for fractions of a second. They function like dying brain cells firing off random memory fragments, injecting an avant-garde art-school sensibility into a mainstream thriller. Or maybe some of the 90s.
3. Misaligned Energy: Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates is a fundamental misfire—or a brilliant joke, depending on how cynical you are. Anthony Perkins brought a delicate, birdlike vulnerability that made you feel sick for him. Vaughn brings a wide-shouldered, giggling creepiness that makes you want to call the cops the second he steps on screen.
If Van Sant’s film was the initial thesis, Steven Soderbergh provided the ultimate conclusion 16 years later. In 2014, Soderbergh quietly posted a fan-edit titled Psychos on his site. He desaturated Van Sant’s version back to black-and-white (except for the shower scene’s red blood) and spliced the 1960 and 1998 films together into a single, synchronized nightmare. When you watch Psychos, the conceptual brilliance of what Van Sant did finally clicks. You watch Anthony Perkins turn a corner, only for Vince Vaughn to finish the step. Janet Leigh steps into the shower, and Anne Heche falls to the tile floor.
Was 1998’s Psycho a good movie? It’s thoroughly unnecessary as narrative entertainment. Roger Ebert was right when he noted that the film proved “genius resides between or beneath the shots.” But does it even have to be a good movie? Or does its failure prove its second creator right as he extols the virtues of its first maker?
