A Film Canon

Although Brian de Palma's body of work is littered with Hitchcockian quotation, it's largely his 80s output that transforms it into something more like appropriation, as he poetically envisages how Hitchcock might have filmed that extraordinary decade, as well as the extent to which the decade's cinematic aesthetic was itself determined by Hitchcock. Appropriately, de Palma commences this project with a tribute to Psycho, in which a transsexual killer haunts Dr. Robert Elliott's (Michael Caine) therapeutic practice, focussing his/her attention on beautiful patient Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), whose recurrent dream of being ravished and murdered in the shower opens the film. On the one hand, de Palma reifies Hitchcock's transvestism as transexualism, and his perennial psychoanalytic narrative as surgical procedure, in the form of the thwarted vaginoplasty for which the murders are ultimately a surrogate, a process of "castration, plastic reconstruction and formation of an artificial vagina". At the same time, this reification is offset by an identification of transsexualism as an emergent, cyborg technology, continuous with the binary circuit that Miller's son creates, and the portable technological inventions that drive his independent investigation of the crimes: "...instead of building a computer, I could build a woman - out of me!" It's this combination of physical reification and digital immanence - epitomised by the motifs of artistic investment against which the major set-pieces take place - that turns the transsexual into such a powerful aesthetic principle, and offsets any straightforward homophobic potential. In particular, it prompts a powerful reworking of Hitchcock's split-screen signature, in which the screen is split along a third axis that imbues the previous two with the convexity of one of the film's most iconic sight-lines, as if to queer the transcendence of mirrors with the anamorphic immanence of  mirrors in motion, or to crystallise the moment at which split screens alight upon the same, televirtual object.