The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos
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Frank Kelleter
Frank Kelleter is Chair of the Department of Culture at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His research centers on the American Enlightenment, cultural theory, and American media and popular culture since the nineteenth century. His publications includeCulture²: Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century (ed. with Alexander Starre, 2022),Media of Serial Narrative (2017),David Bowie (2016), andSerial Agencies: “The Wire” and Its Readers (2014).
Abstract
This essay explores “continuations” of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, with a particular focus on Gus Van Sant’s 1998remake, which is analyzed as an experiment in media self-reflection that challenges both the concept of the cinematic artwork and the commercial logic of filmic continuation. The first section examines Hollywood’s tradition of sequels and remakes, addressing their commercial-aesthetic functions in a production culture that thrives on seriality. The essay describes the specific seriality of Hollywood feature films as a “second-order” form of seriality that shifts seriality’s “operational” aesthetic from narrative immersion to media immersion. The second section traces the impact of Hitchcock’s Psychoon the horror genre, particularly its influence on the slasher film cycle from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The third section examines the sequels within the Psychofranchise, emphasizing their privileging of storyworld over storytelling, and how this aesthetic turns narrative suspense into an issue of (re)mediation. The fourth section critically engages with Van Sant’s 1998 remake, exploring it as an untimely exercise in counterfactual media history, whose “mad” media fetishism prefigures the temporal derangements of digital (or post-cinematic) culture. In sum, the essay examines the interplay between narrative seriality and media seriality in the commercial aesthetics of Hollywood’s modes of continuation.
Abstract
This essay explores “continuations” of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, with a particular focus on Gus Van Sant’s 1998remake, which is analyzed as an experiment in media self-reflection that challenges both the concept of the cinematic artwork and the commercial logic of filmic continuation. The first section examines Hollywood’s tradition of sequels and remakes, addressing their commercial-aesthetic functions in a production culture that thrives on seriality. The essay describes the specific seriality of Hollywood feature films as a “second-order” form of seriality that shifts seriality’s “operational” aesthetic from narrative immersion to media immersion. The second section traces the impact of Hitchcock’s Psychoon the horror genre, particularly its influence on the slasher film cycle from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The third section examines the sequels within the Psychofranchise, emphasizing their privileging of storyworld over storytelling, and how this aesthetic turns narrative suspense into an issue of (re)mediation. The fourth section critically engages with Van Sant’s 1998 remake, exploring it as an untimely exercise in counterfactual media history, whose “mad” media fetishism prefigures the temporal derangements of digital (or post-cinematic) culture. In sum, the essay examines the interplay between narrative seriality and media seriality in the commercial aesthetics of Hollywood’s modes of continuation.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
