My Year of Flops (41 page)

Howard The Duck
has more on its mind than generating sexual tension between a three-foot-tall anthropomorphic duck and a rock
vixen so dense she regularly transgresses the thin line separating spacey from mentally challenged. For it seems the ray that brought Howard to Earth has unwittingly unleashed one of the Dark Overlords of the Universe. In its bid for world domination, this Dark Overlord takes control of the body and mind of Jeffrey Jones, transforming him into a fiendish beastie with a sinister rasp that suggests he has also been invaded by the demon Pazuzu of
The Exorcist II: The Heretic
.

The Dark Overlord subplot provides the film's lone moment of glory. In its true form, the Dark Overlord ranks as a triumph of old-fashioned moviemaking magic, a nifty monster that looks like a fearsome cross between a Tyrannosaurus rex and a scorpion. In this lonely island of awesomeness in a sea of bad ideas,
Howard The Duck
briefly redeems Lucas' regressive vision of a cinema rooted inextricably in the sugar-rush highs of his early years as a movie-mad kid. But no film should subject audiences to two hours of labored duck jokes for the sake of a cool-looking monster.

Universal president Frank Price was asked to resign following
Howard The Duck
's failure. In a noble act of executive seppuku, he acquiesced. Price got off easy: In many cultures, a man would be tarred and feathered for professionally midwifing such a film. If, as its narrator suggests, there are galaxies in which “every possible reality exists,” then in some alternate universe,
Howard The Duck
qualifies as a Secret Success instead of a Failure.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Pointlessly Postmodern Case File #103: Psycho

Originally Posted January 20, 2008

The triumph and tragedy of Anthony Perkins' career is that he could never stop being Norman Bates. When you're famous for playing a
crazy baseball player (1957's
Fear Strikes Out
), a crazy motel proprietor (1960's
Psycho
), and a crazy crazy person (1968's
Pretty Poison
), romantic leading-man roles are out of the question. The
Tiger Beat
demographic was forever out of his reach.

The unexpected triumph of Vince Vaughn, meanwhile, is that he couldn't convincingly be Norman Bates even for 105 minutes.

For Perkins, Bates was a cross to bear, an identity he couldn't shed, a blessing and a curse. For Vaughn, the role was but a bump in the road, a part he played and discarded on his way to big paychecks for playing variations on his finely honed persona as the charmingly obnoxious overgrown frat boy who fucked your girlfriend.

Bates haunts Perkins even in death. Watching Gus Van Sant's interesting-in-theory, painful-in-practice remake of
Psycho,
I was struck by a strange notion: Why didn't they have Perkins play Mama Bates' skeleton? It would have been a big improvement over the skeleton they ended up using, which looks like it was stolen from a low-rent haunted house.

All Van Sant would have to do is get some production assistants drunk, then offer to read their screenplays, and possibly even show them to his close personal friend Ben Affleck, on the condition that the PAs dig up Anthony Perkins' corpse, slip a dress on his skeleton, and deliver it to the prop department. Some folks have no commitment.

Van Sant's perversely faithful yet strangely disrespectful remake of
Psycho
engages in a less elegant form of cinematic grave robbery. Van Sant famously vowed to make a shot-by-shot remake of
Psycho
that would be
exactly
like the original, except for the parts that would be different. It would be entirely the same, only not.

Though the scripts and shots they chose are essentially identical, Hitchcock and Van Sant approached the material from antithetical places. When he made
Psycho,
Hitchcock was a classy filmmaker happily slumming with a nasty shocker shot on the cheap in black and white using the low-budget crew of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
. The brown paper bag of a title says it all: This was pure pulp, a cinematic
gut punch from a filmmaker who generally opted for a more sophisticated brand of suspense.

Hitchcock's
Psycho
provided a master class in misdirection. The predatory antiheroine who steals a small fortune becomes the prey, while the meek victim of an innkeeper is revealed to be a deranged murderer. A white-knuckle, hard-boiled noir about a scheming woman on the run morphs unexpectedly into a psychological horror film. The protagonist never even makes it to the halfway point, and a seemingly key supporting character—the innkeeper's demented, hectoring mother—is revealed to have died a decade earlier.

Van Sant, in sharp contrast, was making the film as an art school lark, a self-indulgent postmodern experiment made possible by the unexpected success of
Good Will Hunting
. Indie film darling Van Sant suddenly had Hollywood cooing into his ear, “You're the man now, dog!”

Van Sant's artsy debacle asks intriguing, easily answerable questions about the nature of art and genius. Can genius be replicated? Can it be cloned using the creative DNA of an earlier masterpiece? Or is true genius ineffable, tricky and elusive, as difficult to pin down as a whirlwind? The answers, respectively, are no, no, and yes.

Van Sant's miscalculations begin with casting Anne Heche as a woman with a dark secret at a time when Heche was notorious for not being able to keep anything about herself secret. I could be misremembering, but I vaguely recall Heche and Ellen DeGeneres unexpectedly showing up at my apartment in Madison sometime in the late '90s to deliver an hour-long presentation on their sex life. It was all part of Heche's campaign to educate America about what was going on with her vagina.

Heche plays Marion, a bored career gal who impulsively decides to make off with $400,000 from her employer. While hotfooting it out of town, Marion stops for the night at creepy old Bates Motel, where she and fidgety proprietor Norman Bates share a drink they call loneliness because it's better than drinking alone. Vast universes divide these two lost characters, yet they're united by isolation. Marion's
loneliness is temporary, however; it's the alienation of having done something criminal that she can't possibly share with the world. For Bates, that loneliness is permanent. It defines him.

This scene marks the pinnacle of Vaughn's otherwise misfiring performance. Part of the problem is physical. Much of what made Perkins such an effective and surprising killer is that he's unassuming physically. He looks like someone who wouldn't harm a fly. Though tall, he's slight and creepily androgynous, whereas Vaughn looks like a college wrestler. There's an underlying vulnerability and sadness to Perkins' performance that Vaughn recaptures only during his scenes with Heche, and then only fitfully. Vaughn can't get inside the character's tormented psyche; his laugh, a sort of trilling, high-pitched, nervous giggle that gets stuck in the throat, feels theatrical and forced. It's a jock's feeble attempt to channel what it must be like to be the weird kid at the lunch table, the one whose mom writes Bible verses on his lunch bag. Once Heche exits the film, Vaughn's Bates seems less tragic and tormented than pissy and unpleasant.

Also, there is masturbation. And bare asses. Lots and lots of bare asses—male and female. In the film's biggest detour from the original—other than being in color and sucking—Bates gazes at Marion through a peephole and engages in feral, simian masturbation. In what universe does artlessly spelling everything out qualify as an improvement over subtext and intimation? It'd be like remaking
Citizen Kane
but changing the protagonist's last words to “Rosebud … which incidentally was the name of my childhood sled, which represents a lost childhood Eden of innocence and purity that throws the materialist emptiness of my adulthood into even sharper relief. Alas, I've said too much and now I must die, mysteriously. Or not.”

Then comes a riotously anticlimactic shower sequence. Arguably the most famous bloody scene of all time is rendered paradoxically bloodless and lifeless. In Van Sant's retelling, it feels like a bad cover song; the notes are the same, but the soul is sorely lacking.
The shower scene highlights another of the film's fatal flaws: The novelty and surprise of the original are gone. Audiences were understandably shocked to see a heroine get brutally murdered halfway through a film back in 1960. Audiences in 1998 were waiting patiently to see how Van Sant would handle one of film's most iconic sequences.

After Marion's disappearance, sharp-witted shamus Milton Arbogast (William H. Macy) goes looking for her, as does Heche's sister, Lila (Julianne Moore), and Heche's lover, Sam (Viggo Mortensen). In a 2001 interview with
The A.V. Club,
Macy argued that his primary job as an actor is bending other actors to his will. In his only scene with Vaughn, he bulldozes over the innkeeper's evasions and stonewalling. Yet even here, Macy's perspicacity works against him; he's such a smart cookie, I half expected him to haul Bates off to the police station minutes into grilling him for the first time.

When Bates murders Arbogast, Van Sant indulges in a pair of shock cuts from Macy's character plunging backward as Bates stabs him to jarring, brief images of a masked, nearly naked woman in a sordid erotic tableau and a cow in the middle of the road, footage apparently left over from Van Sant's first student film or a Marilyn Manson music video. It's an addition that adds nothing. The part where Moore's Lila says, “Let me get my Walkman,” however, came close to single-handedly redeeming the film; I can't imagine why there weren't more references to Walkmans in the original.

From there, it's simply a matter of biding time until the big reveal about the true nature of Momma Bates and her loving son, and Dr. Fred Simon (Robert Forster) explaining to the audience that poor old Norman Bates went a little nuts after killing his mom and her lover.

Gus Van Sant's
Psycho
never feels like anything other than a dry academic exercise. Van Sant's much-maligned folly ultimately belongs not in a movie theater or a drive-in but in a conceptual art museum in a wing devoted to pretentious experiments in pointlessness, where it could join a real 1993 museum project called
24 Hour Psycho,
an
installation that slowed the film down over 24 hours and provides a major setpiece in Don DeLillo's
Point Omega.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco