Anyway, there's something un-reproducible about the texture of late-'50s black-and-white stock, something that makes the whole project seem grimy and low (perhaps this is merely the critic's overwhelming attachment to the films noirs of the period coming out), and perfectly serving its story. The key difference between the two, I have indicated, is that Hitchcock's film was in black-and-white and Van Sant's is in color: this is the chief way that the later film completely shifts our understanding and appreciation of the original film, and if I airily assert that Hitchcock's film is "better" in this regard - which it fundamentally, absolutely is - that's missing the point to a degree sure, the film's success as a genre work plummets from the change, particularly in the shower scene, which becomes garish, silly, and ineffective with the cherry-red stage blood (augmented by computers) that seems to coat the bottom of the tub: I would say that being shot in color is far more deleterious to the scene's effect than the odd use of slow-motion and the outlandishly dumb insert shots of thunderstorms. We have no framework for "covers" of movies, except in things like Quentin Tarantino's pastiches, which are different anyway (though it's surely no accident that this Psycho came out in the '90s, when pop-culture regurgitation was at its height). Van Sant, in essence, has made the material seem current and alive again, rather than safely couched away in classic cinema it's like a really bold cover song or a terrific new staging of an old play, and I think it's because cinema is so unlike popular music (in that its audience typically has a greater understanding of the medium's history) or live theater (which cannot be reproduced) that the 1998 Psycho was received, at the time, with such disgust and horror. What Van Sant's film does, tremendously well, is make the material foreign again: the same lines, story beats, and images, only done with different people in sometimes very different performing styles, and especially done in color, become suddenly disorienting and new by virtue of being distractingly different.
Indeed, to a very distinct degree, what Van Sant's Psycho does, is to freshen up material that had long since grown too comfortable to shock us - after all, the mere fact that people who have not seen the original Psycho, and wouldn't bother with a black-and-white film anyway, still know that Marion Crane is killed violently in a shower, and that Norman Bates goes crazy and dresses as his mother, is all the proof we need that Hitchcock's film has been so thoroughly absorbed into culture that its groundbreaking technique and structure have lost most, if not all, of its taboo power. The idea of coming to the film cold is virtually impossible for me to even conceive of it is a film that exists almost entirely in respect to an early version of the same story told in very much the same way, and rather than trying to make a movie that works by itself, Van Sant made a movie that works (by which I mean the way it functions, not the way it succeeds the concept of "success" is sort of immaterial to this exercise) because it calls upon the viewer's awareness of the 1960 film. I do, however, take it as given that Psycho '98 is basically "pointless" as a thing unto itself, and my suspicion is that Van Sant never intended it to be taken that way. What this means is not that Van Sant's film is utterly pointless, as is almost always said but that things like the cast, sets, costumes, and color are the point. Because the differences in framing and blocking are very often very subtle, and much of the film is shot-for-shot identical to the earlier film, with a different cast and sets and costumes, and in full color. It is an extremely faithful remake, you understand, and if you didn't watch the two movies right in a row, as I did in preparation for this essay, I imagine you'd have a hard time pointing out any more than the two scenes where Van Sant obviously breaks with the original (the shower scene, and the reveal of Norman's little secret). It cleans away some of the more rickety dialogue, and replaces a dirty joke that the original film was obliged to censor ("Bed? Only playground that beats Las Vegas"). The first thing is to discard a misconception: Gus Van Sant's 1998 Psycho is not, in fact, a shot-by-shot remake, nor even a line-by-line remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, one of the defining films of narrative cinema. Be sure to check out the companion review of the 1960 original!
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