released 5/2/2025

Renowned film critic David Thomson talks about director Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho. Thomson discusses the effect the move to the United States from the United Kingdom had on Hitchcock and his films. Thomson suggests that film achieves a kind of unique synergy with American culture because of the way that the medium interacts with the opportunity, scale, and character of American dreams and the American Dream. It’s a powerful combination that brings exhilaration to Hitchcock and his viewers but darkness and danger as well, the flip side of the dream. Thomson describes the relation between dream and acting as the capacity to imagine and embody an alternative reality; for actors for whom this kind of practice constitutes livelihood, this phenomenon can subtly shift and distort their identity, but it poses questions for Americans whose lives are ever more saturated with people in visual media with whom they identify and care for and in whom they believe, and yet do not really know. The uncertainty is necessarily there in a different way with screen distance, and a consequent sense of loneliness is something that is not only experienced but displayed in popular culture. Hitchcock paints a portrait of one form of such alienation in the character of Norman Bates in Psycho, and he does so in such a way as to leave additional questions about the viewer’s enjoyment of watching it. It’s not simply the display of brokenness and violence that Hitchcock was after, but our response to it and what that means as well, or at least the asking of that question. But what does that mean? Thomson is the author of The Moment of Psycho: How Albert Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder (Basic Books, 2010). This interview was originally published on Volume 103 of the Journal.

33 minutes

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