Nude Woman + Cow
When the Detective gets his,what the hell was that all about?no such thing in the original????????
shareNo, those two images as Arbogast descends the stairs are not in the original. Yet they were eye-catching.
Be seeing you...
My understanding was that these shots, as well as the similar ones in the shower scene, were to show the disturbed and messed up state of "Mother"'s mind.
shareVan Sant never said, but this much we know:
The shot of the woman(she is blindfolded) is re-staged from a music video by Nine Inch Nails called "Closer." Van Sant evidently liked the shot. In "context" here, it could be from Norman's mind...or it could be the detective's dying memory of the best sex he ever had.
The shot of the cow(a calf, actually, seen through the windshield of a car) is rumored to have been all that's left of Van Sant's original intent to intercut the killing of the detective with shots of a cow getting slaughtered.
In "context" here, it could be from Norman's mind...or it could be the detective's dying memory of the best sex he ever had.
One of the things that annoyed me about this version of Psycho was it's supposed faithfulness to the original material. The inserts of "Mother's" state of mind completely blew that out of the water though, since the more extreme or overt references to homicidal mania or mental disturbance are pretty much kept from the viewer until Norman is revealed as the dress wearing killer and then of course in the doctor's summing up of Norman's psychosis.
The possiblity that the murder of Marion was a crime of passion, jealousy by Norman's mother (who we assume is the killer right till the end) is credible enough but when the true killer and their motivation is revealed, the real story is all the more shocking (and frankly makes the jealous mother idea slightly mundane by comparison), even despite Norman's strange behaviour througout the movie.
The psychotic, hallucinatory inserts during the murder scenes are too much of a hint at there being more to the killings than just jealousy and therefore denies the reveal at the end being as big a bombshell as it was at the end of the original.
I think they are just random stuffs to add on to enhance the mystery. But I love this addition, these shots scared the crap out of me when i first watched the movie.
shareI've read that in the early Russian movie POTEMKIN, the scene of tsarist military officers massacring a crowd is intercut with some other shots, including some cows being led to slaughter. So maybe the director was doing the same thing, for some reason.
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