Hitchcock's peak period was in the 1950s and 1960s, and his films have grown up with a generation during these two decades and have become immortal classics. But no one has thought about how a classic genre film becomes a classic.
The reason is very simple, it is essentially the times. The higher the degree of conformity of a movie with the trend of the times, the higher the degree of classicism. If it can penetrate into the world of human consciousness, it can become an immortal masterpiece. Obviously, "Psycho" is like this.
Back to the topic, the classicity of "Psycho" is not a gimmick of psychopaths. This element has appeared as early as the German Expressionist period, and "Dr. Caligari's Cabin" is a typical example. In many literary and artistic works throughout the ages, those people who behave strangely and are depressed or who are said to be ghosts are actually mentally ill.
The classicity of Psycho is that it alludes to humanity under the Cold War. This kind of human nature is fear, and the villain Norman can be said to be a representative figure of fear, because of fear, he clings to his mother, refuses to grow up, and refuses to accept the outside world. People under the shadow of the Cold War also lived in fear like Norman, unable to extricate themselves. Over time, human nature became more and more distorted, forming extremely morbid social relations. The son's reluctance to leave the mother, and the mother's efforts to control the son, symbolizes the unwillingness of growing up and the controlling parent, a relationship that develops in the end to be extremely destructive.
By the mid-1960s, those young people who were unwilling to grow up began to reshape the world in their own way. The explosion of the hippie movement and the anti-war movement can be said to be the best annotation for this film. Young people who don't want to grow up and their controlling parents will eventually break up. I wonder if Hitchcock had foreseen the division and confrontation in American society.
Hitchcock's films are not as devoid of political metaphors and ideology as some people understand them to be. In fact, on the contrary, Hitchcock merely concealed this expression. As a creator, no one wants to express, especially a writer-director like Hitchcock. Hitchcock's form of expression is extremely special, he did not use the plot to express, but to use the characters to express. The character itself is the best prop, and Hitchcock used another prop to symbolize this character - the eagle. Why an eagle? Take a look at what the national emblem of the United States is, and you'll understand. Although Norman's mother became a mummified corpse, she still controlled Norman's spirit. The dead person controls the living person, and the dead person symbolizes the Nazis. In fact, the shadow of the Nazis has never disappeared. The behavior of the United States and the Soviet Union in the 5060s is almost a replica of the Nazis.
As a director of commercial films, Hitchcock never went back and chose to please the official ideology. What he aimed at was always the change in popular ideology, which is also the reason why he has always been despised by the American film industry. The intellectuals in the film industry don't like his pleasing to the public, and the intellectuals most hope that others will please them. Oscar and Cannes are flattering these intellectuals. In intellectuals, ideology is just a tool, a tool used to seize power. Hitchcock's type of director did not agree with them, and later young film directors were much smarter. Learn to make commercial films while courting intellectuals, and have a good reputation at the box office. The current situation of political correctness and hegemony in the American film industry is also their own fault.
But what is certain is that Hitchcock's films are still classics, and those opportunistic directors may not. Last year, Martin Scorsese's article caused an uproar, but he could only target Marvel, and he still did not dare to object to those special award-winning films. After all, he himself was one of the initiators of the current situation. The dilemma that the film art has developed to the present is that he completely deviates from his own popularity and becomes. It has to be said that it is a kind of sadness to be an accessory of power.
At this point, only a restoration of the mass nature of cinema can bring the art back to life. The lack of classics in this era is not because people don't work hard, but because they work in the wrong direction, which puts the film in an extremely embarrassing situation. Our real direction should be to bravely face this era, pay attention to this era, understand this era, and not just think about winning awards. To be honest, I don't think box-office movies are low-level, and labeling box-office movies low-level is an extremely stupid behavior.
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