Word: vertigoes
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Alfred Hitchcock is 76 now, and the bemused, nightmarish thrillers he has concocted over the years have accomplished more than the director ever intended, perhaps even imagined. Hitchcock will admit to no loftier ambition than entertainment. Nonetheless, his best movies-The Wrong Man, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds-reach into deep pockets of psychic guilt, creating not only a pleasant, fleeting rush of terror in an audience but also a lingering, fixed anxiety. He is a technical master. But the tense economy of his best scenes, the closely calibrated dynamics of his editing, have also shaped...
...disgrace. He then spends much of the film trying to hunt down and kill his own child, as if to win back community respect. Even a score by the usually excellent Bernard Herrman is of little help. Herrman did the music for many of Hitchcock's best films (Vertigo, Psycho). His participation in It's Alive lends it a fleeting and futile air of quality, like a concert virtuoso playing piano in a cathouse...
...theme is Hitchcockian: a demonstration of the way private sexual obsession has a way of spilling over into public, with murderous consequences (Vertigo). There are innocent bystanders drawn dangerously into a closely woven criminal web (The Man Who Knew Too Much). Even the murder that is the film's central incident-a perhaps too ghastly knifing-reminds us of the famous shower-bath murder in Psycho, as does a splendid, spooky score by that film's masterful composer, Bernard Herrmann. More important than these specific references to glories past, however, is the Hitchcockian discipline De Palma brings...
...modern youth ("an explosion of despair"), the art of Marcel Duchamp, Sade's philosophy ("His model is not a volcano, although he liked volcanoes very much, but cold lava"). Paz even notes the first feminist, Penthesilea, legendary queen of the Amazons, who ruled from "a throne of vertigo and tides...
...common disease of the cynic is Vicarious Vertigo-the dizzying belief that he can be someone else. Very well, then, let him be, say, Andre Watts or Artur Rubinstein. Every pianist is familiar with the tale of the Texan who asked an old man, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" and received the reply, "Practice! Practice!" Alas, repetition cannot guarantee a recital. But $2,000 can. For that amount, the cynic may rent the entire Carnegie Hall, with Steinway, to play Chopsticks all evening. After all, who's listening? The cynic can be Arthur Fiedler...