washing your hands and fingers til your mind is clean
So Strangers On A Train by Patricia Highsmith, the book behind the totally fucking brilliant Hitchcock classic. Cos as soon as I read that Hitchcock actually toned DOWN the homoerotic subtext, I was liek "Oh fuck. Must Have!" And Kino kindly cooperated by having what seems like the whole range of Patricia Highsmith novels in these very cool black and white and primary colours paperbacks.
I finished it last week and have been pretty much too paralysed with admiration to post. I'm not even sure what to say, it was so marvellous in terms of inner texture of psychology, in terms of outer terror and suspense, in terms of the homosexual subtext which pressed so insistently against the text that eventually it did burst through and Guy didn't run, didn't run until he was put off by the callousness of Bruno. Only then did he leave the table and the restaurant. If anything, he knew first and knew better how much they meant to each other.
And it was so marvellous in all the differences from the film, that Guy is not a frivolous dumb sportsman but a rational precise ambitious artistic architect. He's a fascinating character, his inner life so rich and so dark and just as raddled with corruption as Bruno. It's just that Guy passes and Bruno physically manifests all the poison inside him, did so right from the very moment we see him and are introduced. And Patricia knows it as clearly as Guy.
And that the time is extended so wonderfully, the action spaced out as naturally as it would in real life, ebbing and cresting and receding again, the peaks and lulls of anxiety and complacency just as in real life. Which paradoxically totally heightens and tautens the suspense of "will they, won't they, can they get away with it?"
What does folie a deux mean? I must look it up. Ah. Madness shared by two. All right, then. Quite literal.
And oh, the writing itself. The curious powerful tension of Patricia Highsmith's rather classically beautiful imagery and sentence structure juxtaposed with this glaringly modern scouring of the inner workings of the psyche and the almost vulgar slang of her dialogue. Even if phrases like "Cheeses" can seem quaint to my twenty-first century eyes and ears.
She's so fucking marvellous. How she did all of these things in the one story --- the terror, the crime, the forbidden subtextual relationship, the psychological evisceration of not just sexuality but filial betrayal and how the two interlace in such nauseating Freudian messiness.
She wrote this in 1950. I can't believe this so viciously homosexual novel was actually published in 1950! Did nobody notice?! Or did they notice and write the homosexuality off as an aberration as heinous as the murderous intent?
And oh how I loved the ending, that whole final section where suddenly Gerard becomes a nemesis closing ever tighter around them. Maybe I don't read enough crime but that tension of wanting them to be caught and not be caught at the same time was sheer delight, almost an agony of ecstasy.
That scene when he's interrogating the two of them together and you keep expecting one or the other to slip up in some way and then apparently neither do was brilliant. I thought "My God, they actually didn't betray each other! Guy didn't wuss out and Bruno didn't flare up, omg!" It's that thrill of realising Kimble really didn't twig to Bateman. Liek woah.
And then that curious tragic almost beautiful but certainly painful way that Bruno dies. It fit the novel so well, the yearning of him, the betrayed heart that will never get what it wants and prolly doesn't even fully know what it wants, that's cannibalised by its own moral corruption and absence of real humane compassion and how it all manifests in his chronic awful alcoholism. It was so chilling to see how carefully Patricia detailed the alcoholic decline.
It hurt me when he died, whether accident or suicide, and so it was right and even more heartbreaking to see how Guy grieved him. You knew without being told that it's entirely possible Bruno's death is mourned by only one person in that book and it's Guy who could be his victim but really really isn't. When I re-read it eventually, I must pay close attention to any clues as to whether it was accident or suicide.
Bruno in the book is so very different to Bruno in the film and I'm inclined to give all that credit to Robert Walker even though objectively I'm sure it's all Hitchcock. It didn't surprise me one bit that Guy in the book was much more interesting than bloody insipid bewildered Farley Granger. No wonder the fucking wuss didn't even follow through on his part of the deal, the ass. But then of course Hollywood audiences of the time couldn't accept that.
But how weird, it's only just dawned on me that in effect, knowingly or not, Hitchcock sort of switched the two.
In the book, Bruno is the young man with an even more adolescent personality, physically repulsive from the get-go, incapable of fully realised masculinity and all the seductive possibility of that. He's quite neutered in this strangulated aggressive way, very much like the classic profile of a serial killer. While Guy is the goodlooking responsible man's man who wants to marry his mistress and wants a woman worthy of him like Miriam clearly isn't.
This may be just me but I found Robert Walker so much manlier and attractive than the weedy pretty boyishness of Farley Stupid Granger. I mean, the seductiveness of him just radiates off the screen, that golden debauched highly intelligent slick sexiness is nowhere in the book! The attraction between them in the book is so much more of spirit, a common desperation of the heart rather than one person twisting another to his purpose. But then maybe that's the luxury of the page as opposed to the ruthless economy of the screen.
The very end was so shocking, though. The total horror crashed down upon me and now I realise it was a horror that never happened in American Psycho even though it could have. Two quite different books with a similar core but the weird thing is this made me shake in horror at the society we've become whereas that made me smile grimly from the start at the society we are.
I guess it's all in intention. I began that book with the knowledge of Easton Ellis making a social statement through one person's psyche. I began this book with the expectation of exploring two persons' psyches. So the social statement that exploded out of the last scene distressed the fuck out of me.
It was absolute perfection. The reader in me was weeping and railing for Guy. The writer in me was just weeping with awe. There was no other way his confession could have gone, no other way its reception could have been this powerful, this earthshattering. I mean, really it's a double punch. Because we know what he's about to confess, our focus is not on him but the person he's chosen as confessor, the identity of whom is a shock in itself. Then when the lover reacts in entirely un-lover manner, it's completely appalling. Good God, it's like Guy felt more anguish at his wife's murder than the lover did! Not 'like', it exactly is.
Fiendish brilliance and there's such a great symmetry to it that I can't quite unravel and don't really want to. I just know it's beautifully balanced and rounded out like a true Campbell archetypal myth.
But unlike Easton Ellis, Guy's confession is rescued at the very last minute and given meaning by Gerard listening at the door. So both he and the reader get the absolution Bateman is denied. And really that final paragraph reminds me so much of the beautiful soul relief at the end of The Book Of Revelation, that "yes, finally someone believes me, someone acknowledges what I've done." Only rather eerily, here Guy is the perpetrator and not the victim. Oh, Rupert. Oh, Patricia. *glomps you both*
Of course, the sexual aspect is totally fascinating even in that very last phrase. He holds out his hands to Gerard and says "Take me." Ha. Says it no less to the only powerful father figure in the novel, one that transcends even Bruno's abhorred absent father. Gerard is effectively the Big Authoritative Daddy who will discipline both Bruno and Guy in the form of Guy.
Because I'm almost sure Bruno was never man enough to acknowledge authority and maybe that's why he had to die, suicide or accident, on his own terms or a pathetic joke of fate, wretched and inadequate and unloved to the very end. Oh, Bruno. *cries* He was always the defiant child, the rebel incapable of healing himself. Whereas Guy as an architect and a twice married man owed his own separate allegiance to law and order and the ruled precise line, the pillar and structure of society. He understood the need for order.
I can see why Hitchcock made the changes he did. And really I'm quite admiring of how he ruthlessly distilled a long tense book into a short brutal film. The tennis thing I don't get. But the way Bruno dies under the carousel, brilliant. Basically, Hitchcock narrowed the focus and sometimes that's the best thing to do with a novel adapted to film, sometimes the only thing. And unlike the debacle of Prisoner Of Azkaban, he did it fairly well.
I just totally and utterly prefer the book. If only we could put Robert Walker into the book. *sigh*
You know, maybe it is time for a remake, this time following the novel all the way to the end. Ooh yes. With McAvoy as Bruno! Okay, he doesn't actually fit the physical description but he could dye his hair and they could do it that way. God, I hope. *flails* I hope some bigwig actually took note of that Vanity Fair photoshoot.
I suppose this means someone may have.
Eeeee! Set it in the Fifties, keep the costumes, the period detail, oh god maybe even shoot it in black and white to heighten the noir aspect. And just go to town with the homoeroticism and the murders. Oh fuck yes. *convulses wif happiness*
I think I may just try the Ripley books next. Cos omg, Patricia Highsmith. The book is totally distorted at the moment cos of the many many dogeared pages, way way way too many wonderful sentences to post.
So. Awesome.
I finished it last week and have been pretty much too paralysed with admiration to post. I'm not even sure what to say, it was so marvellous in terms of inner texture of psychology, in terms of outer terror and suspense, in terms of the homosexual subtext which pressed so insistently against the text that eventually it did burst through and Guy didn't run, didn't run until he was put off by the callousness of Bruno. Only then did he leave the table and the restaurant. If anything, he knew first and knew better how much they meant to each other.
And it was so marvellous in all the differences from the film, that Guy is not a frivolous dumb sportsman but a rational precise ambitious artistic architect. He's a fascinating character, his inner life so rich and so dark and just as raddled with corruption as Bruno. It's just that Guy passes and Bruno physically manifests all the poison inside him, did so right from the very moment we see him and are introduced. And Patricia knows it as clearly as Guy.
And that the time is extended so wonderfully, the action spaced out as naturally as it would in real life, ebbing and cresting and receding again, the peaks and lulls of anxiety and complacency just as in real life. Which paradoxically totally heightens and tautens the suspense of "will they, won't they, can they get away with it?"
What does folie a deux mean? I must look it up. Ah. Madness shared by two. All right, then. Quite literal.
And oh, the writing itself. The curious powerful tension of Patricia Highsmith's rather classically beautiful imagery and sentence structure juxtaposed with this glaringly modern scouring of the inner workings of the psyche and the almost vulgar slang of her dialogue. Even if phrases like "Cheeses" can seem quaint to my twenty-first century eyes and ears.
She's so fucking marvellous. How she did all of these things in the one story --- the terror, the crime, the forbidden subtextual relationship, the psychological evisceration of not just sexuality but filial betrayal and how the two interlace in such nauseating Freudian messiness.
She wrote this in 1950. I can't believe this so viciously homosexual novel was actually published in 1950! Did nobody notice?! Or did they notice and write the homosexuality off as an aberration as heinous as the murderous intent?
And oh how I loved the ending, that whole final section where suddenly Gerard becomes a nemesis closing ever tighter around them. Maybe I don't read enough crime but that tension of wanting them to be caught and not be caught at the same time was sheer delight, almost an agony of ecstasy.
That scene when he's interrogating the two of them together and you keep expecting one or the other to slip up in some way and then apparently neither do was brilliant. I thought "My God, they actually didn't betray each other! Guy didn't wuss out and Bruno didn't flare up, omg!" It's that thrill of realising Kimble really didn't twig to Bateman. Liek woah.
And then that curious tragic almost beautiful but certainly painful way that Bruno dies. It fit the novel so well, the yearning of him, the betrayed heart that will never get what it wants and prolly doesn't even fully know what it wants, that's cannibalised by its own moral corruption and absence of real humane compassion and how it all manifests in his chronic awful alcoholism. It was so chilling to see how carefully Patricia detailed the alcoholic decline.
It hurt me when he died, whether accident or suicide, and so it was right and even more heartbreaking to see how Guy grieved him. You knew without being told that it's entirely possible Bruno's death is mourned by only one person in that book and it's Guy who could be his victim but really really isn't. When I re-read it eventually, I must pay close attention to any clues as to whether it was accident or suicide.
Bruno in the book is so very different to Bruno in the film and I'm inclined to give all that credit to Robert Walker even though objectively I'm sure it's all Hitchcock. It didn't surprise me one bit that Guy in the book was much more interesting than bloody insipid bewildered Farley Granger. No wonder the fucking wuss didn't even follow through on his part of the deal, the ass. But then of course Hollywood audiences of the time couldn't accept that.
But how weird, it's only just dawned on me that in effect, knowingly or not, Hitchcock sort of switched the two.
In the book, Bruno is the young man with an even more adolescent personality, physically repulsive from the get-go, incapable of fully realised masculinity and all the seductive possibility of that. He's quite neutered in this strangulated aggressive way, very much like the classic profile of a serial killer. While Guy is the goodlooking responsible man's man who wants to marry his mistress and wants a woman worthy of him like Miriam clearly isn't.
This may be just me but I found Robert Walker so much manlier and attractive than the weedy pretty boyishness of Farley Stupid Granger. I mean, the seductiveness of him just radiates off the screen, that golden debauched highly intelligent slick sexiness is nowhere in the book! The attraction between them in the book is so much more of spirit, a common desperation of the heart rather than one person twisting another to his purpose. But then maybe that's the luxury of the page as opposed to the ruthless economy of the screen.
The very end was so shocking, though. The total horror crashed down upon me and now I realise it was a horror that never happened in American Psycho even though it could have. Two quite different books with a similar core but the weird thing is this made me shake in horror at the society we've become whereas that made me smile grimly from the start at the society we are.
I guess it's all in intention. I began that book with the knowledge of Easton Ellis making a social statement through one person's psyche. I began this book with the expectation of exploring two persons' psyches. So the social statement that exploded out of the last scene distressed the fuck out of me.
It was absolute perfection. The reader in me was weeping and railing for Guy. The writer in me was just weeping with awe. There was no other way his confession could have gone, no other way its reception could have been this powerful, this earthshattering. I mean, really it's a double punch. Because we know what he's about to confess, our focus is not on him but the person he's chosen as confessor, the identity of whom is a shock in itself. Then when the lover reacts in entirely un-lover manner, it's completely appalling. Good God, it's like Guy felt more anguish at his wife's murder than the lover did! Not 'like', it exactly is.
Fiendish brilliance and there's such a great symmetry to it that I can't quite unravel and don't really want to. I just know it's beautifully balanced and rounded out like a true Campbell archetypal myth.
But unlike Easton Ellis, Guy's confession is rescued at the very last minute and given meaning by Gerard listening at the door. So both he and the reader get the absolution Bateman is denied. And really that final paragraph reminds me so much of the beautiful soul relief at the end of The Book Of Revelation, that "yes, finally someone believes me, someone acknowledges what I've done." Only rather eerily, here Guy is the perpetrator and not the victim. Oh, Rupert. Oh, Patricia. *glomps you both*
Of course, the sexual aspect is totally fascinating even in that very last phrase. He holds out his hands to Gerard and says "Take me." Ha. Says it no less to the only powerful father figure in the novel, one that transcends even Bruno's abhorred absent father. Gerard is effectively the Big Authoritative Daddy who will discipline both Bruno and Guy in the form of Guy.
Because I'm almost sure Bruno was never man enough to acknowledge authority and maybe that's why he had to die, suicide or accident, on his own terms or a pathetic joke of fate, wretched and inadequate and unloved to the very end. Oh, Bruno. *cries* He was always the defiant child, the rebel incapable of healing himself. Whereas Guy as an architect and a twice married man owed his own separate allegiance to law and order and the ruled precise line, the pillar and structure of society. He understood the need for order.
I can see why Hitchcock made the changes he did. And really I'm quite admiring of how he ruthlessly distilled a long tense book into a short brutal film. The tennis thing I don't get. But the way Bruno dies under the carousel, brilliant. Basically, Hitchcock narrowed the focus and sometimes that's the best thing to do with a novel adapted to film, sometimes the only thing. And unlike the debacle of Prisoner Of Azkaban, he did it fairly well.
I just totally and utterly prefer the book. If only we could put Robert Walker into the book. *sigh*
You know, maybe it is time for a remake, this time following the novel all the way to the end. Ooh yes. With McAvoy as Bruno! Okay, he doesn't actually fit the physical description but he could dye his hair and they could do it that way. God, I hope. *flails* I hope some bigwig actually took note of that Vanity Fair photoshoot.
I suppose this means someone may have.
Eeeee! Set it in the Fifties, keep the costumes, the period detail, oh god maybe even shoot it in black and white to heighten the noir aspect. And just go to town with the homoeroticism and the murders. Oh fuck yes. *convulses wif happiness*
I think I may just try the Ripley books next. Cos omg, Patricia Highsmith. The book is totally distorted at the moment cos of the many many dogeared pages, way way way too many wonderful sentences to post.
So. Awesome.