Reviews for Non-Existent Movies by Eric Goulden Kimball is out today and available in Kindle and paperback formats here!

In order to observe this auspicious occasion, we offer below another excerpt. Some quick context: This very site had previously posited a Borgesian approach to LDS readings (not to mention a Weird Al approach); this latest excerpt from Reviews for Non-Existent Movies takes that Borges allusion literally, through a deft parody of the already-parodic Borges short-story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

Review: Peter Ménard’s Psycho Breaks New Ground By Not Breaking Any (Grade: A+)

When Paramount announced that they were remaking the old Alfred Hitchcock classic Pyscho, a collective groan rippled across the American movie-going public—not only because it proves yet again that there is no known-property that can go un-rebooted these days, but because this exact same film had already been remade once before.  The 1998 Pycho, directed by Gus Van Sant, is nowadays notorious in the annals of American cinema as an exceptionally pointless remake even by the standards of pointless remakes: it is infamously a shot-for-shot recreation of the original that adds absolutely nothing except color, a gratuitously bloodier shower scene, and a pre-fame Vince Vaughn.   Ever after, Van Sant’s Pyscho has been Exhibit A for how you can never capture lightning in a bottle twice, nor recreate genius by crudely aping it. 

The announcement that newcomer Peter Ménard would likewise be pursuing a shot-for-shot remake elicited further eyerolls—that is, until his finished product debuted before our eyes. Now, to be clear, this new Psycho is indeed a shot-for-shot remake of the 1960 Hitchcock original, but that still undersells the magnitude of Peter Ménard’s achievement.  To say that it is yet another shot-for-shot remake is like saying the Irish Book of Kells is a but reprint of the Gospel of John, or that Andy Warhol merely repainted a Campbell’s soup can.  That is, this is a fundamentally different kind of shot-for-shot remake than we’ve ever seen before!  Let me explain.

It will be necessary to first review exactly who Ménard is, and hence why his approach in particular is so revolutionary.  A quick stroll through his imdb page reveals that although he is a relative ingénue as far as the Hollywood machine is concerned, the auteur has a rather impressively eclectic resume that has uniquely prepared him for this film in particular.  His past credits include, in no particular order:

1. MMM, an hour-long time-lapse of a mega-damn construction site in Shenzhou province, China that is self-edited by computer algorithm in order to synch up with the entirety of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music played on shuffle.
2. Philosophy of the World, a dry-humored mockumentary on the making of The Shaggs notoriously-terrible 1969 album of the same name, which claims that their hilariously-poor musicianship is actually a secret polyrhythmic spiritualist code that predicted the Watergate scandal, the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the 2008 stock crash, and the 2020 pandemic; most controversially, the film also claims their lone album not only foresaw the death of Kurt Cobain, but also his resurrection as a Messianic figure to cleanse Seattle, and then the world, from sin in an as-yet-unfulfilled apocalypse (a small-but-growing segment of the internet claims this is not a mockumentary at all).
3. Traffic Redux, a spoken-word performance of Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial work of found-object uncreative-nonfiction Traffic, which consists of traffic radio reports transcribed over an unspecified holiday weekend in New York City.  Goldsmith’s text is here broadcast in a number of yellow Taxi-Cabs wherein the tear-filled confessionals of the passengers are drowned out by the traffic-reports on the radio.
4. [Untitled], seven hours of South Korean knee-surgery videos submitted without context to Cannes (the tiny community of Ménard superfans is fiercely split as to whether this submission was a Dadaist prank, a sublime meditation on the frailty of mortality, an extended critique of the tedium of body mutilation endemic to Korean J-Horror, or merely a happy accident after the film reels were mistakenly swapped at CDG airport).
5. Two Days to Disneyland (which won a Palm at Toronto), a 5-minute animated short of a child in the backseat of a car watching an imaginary acrobat clear obstacles on the roadside, all while his parents speed down the I-5 in California on their way to Anaheim.
6. Another short entitled “Watching Paint Dry” in English and “Le Grotte de Platon” in French, wherein a pair of weary septuagenarians sit in their lawn chairs to watch a recently-repainted barn-wall dry—but the shadows cast thereon imply that a drug-deal gone south, a marriage proposal, a rally, a riot, and a nuclear detonation, are all occurring right behind them (and by extension us, as well).
7. Nirvana II, a variation on the Groundhog’s Day theme in which, instead of repeating a single day, the protagonist repeats an entire lifetime; the film follows how he uses his accumulated knowledge through each new rebirth to become in turn a child prodigy, a musician, a scientist, an author, an investor, an inventor, a playboy, a prophet, a hedonist, a philanthropist, a genocidal dictator, a serial killer, and finally a religious hermit—with an ending that leaves ambiguous as to whether he finally escapes his endless cycle of rebirths, or if they still repeat within the film reel itself.
8. A guerilla film adaption of Wittgenstein’s Mistress that likewise leaves ambiguous as to whether Kate merely thinks she is or actually is the last human alive on earth (there also remains fierce debate as to whether the giant barrel of tennis balls she pours down the Spanish Steps was done with or in spite of the cooperation of the Rome, Italy polizia).
9. Most notoriously—and what finally caught him the attention of Paramount—his completely unauthorized film version of House of Leaves that goes to extreme lengths to always black out the title and the character’s names so as to avoid copyright infringement (the ever-mercurial Mark Z. Danielewski was reportedly so charmed by this adaptation that he later gave it his blessing).

I could go on.  My point simply is that Peter Ménard is that rarest of unicorns—a genuine auteur who makes independent cinema not merely as a calling card for the Big Wigs recruiting for their next comic book extravaganza, but a genuine provocateur, one whose works not only challenge all assumptions about what art is or can be, but does so solely through repetition, re-contextualization, and pastiche.  Trust me: If he agreed to make yet another shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, it is because he had something genuinely astounding planned.

And indeed, according to all of the chatter, gossip, interviews, and press releases that trickled out over the course of Psycho’s production, Ménard was initially not content to simply reshoot Psycho, but to actually make the original Psycho.  The difficulties were immense: by many accounts, he shaved his head, overate and grew out a gut, started wearing dark suits, adopted an exaggerated British accent, started terrorizing his cameramen and actors, and reportedly even tried to produce Cold-War versions of North by Northwest and Vertigo first, all in his crazed quest to truly inhabit the mind of Alfred Hitchcock, to a level that shocked even the most demented of method actors.

But even that was not enough: Psycho was produced in 1960, and hence there was approximately 59 years of intervening history for him to forget.  He collected old world maps and globes that still featured the Soviet Union; he had to formulate opinions on Kennedy vs. Nixon as though they were still living and running for President, with no foreknowledge of Watergate or Dallas; he bought a vintage turntable and refused to stock his library with any LP more recent than Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.  Everything from Sketches of Spain to Bitches Brew was erased—along with the complete discography of the Beatles, “Classic Rock”, the rise of Disco, House, Punk, Hip Hop, all of which were all stricken from existence—and that’s before we even get to all of the intervening cinema!  He had to behave as though Stanley Kubrick had never recovered from the blacklist—there would be no visual language from 2001, The Shining, or A Clockwork Orange to draw upon. The entire genre of slasher-horrors that Psycho gave birth to was also supposed to be stricken from his memory; he had to pretend that he had never seen Star Wars, Jaws, MCU films, and all the other summer-blockbusters that Pyscho prophetically presaged.  Third-wave feminism, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Stonewall Riots, he also had to pretend had never yet happened—and may never—in his private alternate timeline.

Of course this was all impossible: Ménard reportedly even tried electroshock therapy to cleanse his mind, until he remembered that Sylvia Plath had described the very same in 1963’s The Bell Jar—three years after Psycho came out, and hence still too suggestively anachronistic.  He tried to scramble his brain with LSD, till he remembered that that wasn’t popularized by Timothy Leary till much later in the ‘60s as well.  He even reportedly tried the Somewhere In Time trick of surrounding himself solely with artifacts of the late-‘50s and engaged in self-hypnosis as a way to forcible time-travel back to 1960 directly, till he remembered that Somewhere in Time came out in 1980, two full decades too late, and so wouldn’t do either.

Finally, according to all of the Hollywood Insider reports that circulated across the message-boards, Ménard abandoned trying to make Pyscho as though it were still 1960; not because it was impossible (it was always impossible), but because there was a much more interesting impossibility that he had been unconsciously avoiding: that of making Pyscho—shot by shot, frame by frame—as though it were the 2020s.

This process was, by all accounts, infinitely more difficult.  The original Pyscho, for example, makes a lot of hay from the fact that the Bates Hotel is located off the beaten-path because the recently completed Eisenhower freeway system bypassed the old highways entirely, marginalizing and leaving behind certain sectors of rural America entirely.  There was a sort of perverse nostalgia for a rapidly fading America in Hitchcock’s Pyscho, as though this senseless murder were rural America’s last gasp of defiant revenge before fading into oblivion.  But in the 2020s, not only has this older America long since disappeared entirely, but the hyper-connectivity of the internet has made it all but inconceivable (even in the middle of Arizona, it is impossible to be alone if you have WiFi).  To reconstruct the Bates Hotel in the 2020s means that an entirely different set of socio-economic factors currently plaguing rural American hotels must come into play—the COVID-driven collapse of the tourism industry, counter-urbanization, gentrification, the rise of Airbnb—but which must still result in the exact same dialogue and camera shots as the Hitchcock original.

This approach is not only a breath-takingly exhilarating tightrope performance: it also renders Ménard’s Pyscho an infinitely richer experience than Hitchcock’s (and de facto more revelatory than Van Sants’).  During the infamous shower scene, for example, Hitchcock derives its thrills from the crass shock-value of it all, the sheer novelty of killing off a main character within the first 40 minutes of a film.  The intervening decades, needless to say, have dampened the impact of that scene—and Van Sant’s addition of mere blood and gore to the scene merely served to underline the quiet desperation of the 1998 adaptation, and the complete impoverishment of its visual lexicon that could not innovate a single new idea.  But when Ménard presents the shower scene—again, shot for shot, frame by frame—he does so in the context of our post-Harvey Weinstein #metoo moment, wherein the inherent objectification of the female body by Hollywood, and the inevitable violence committed against it, has been foregrounded culturally in a manner such that it could never be made invisible again.  The shock of Marion Crane’s murder is heightened not because we’ve never seen anything like it before (we certainly have), but because we now understand our own complicity in encouraging these acts of violence through our own cinematic voyeurism.  With self-reflective horror, we realize her death is on our hands, because we through our ticket-purchases have demanded it.  We are the ones stabbing her; we have always been the ones stabbing her.

For that matter, the big reveal at the end of Hitchcock’s Pyscho—that the murderous Mrs. Bates has really been Norman Bates dressed as his Mom all along—is but a musty piece of Freudian schlock when it debuted in 1960.  But in the 2020s, full generations after Freud has been repeatedly discredited by every respectable academic field and consigned to a mere museum curio, what is shocking is to behold the return of the repressed long after it had been consigned to the dustbin of history.  The Oedipal complex has risen from the dead!  Freud himself is now part of the repressed that has returned to exact his vengeance!

Nor are these the only interpretations that can harvested from Ménard’s 2020 Pyscho; in fact, that’s the whole beauty of it, the manifold ways Pyscho can be re-read in the 2020s are far more fascinating than whatever Hitchcock could’ve dreamt in 1960—or Van Sant in 1998!  Nor is Ménard’s revolutionary approach limited to Pyscho.  With deft insinuation, Ménard invites us to apply his method to all other forms of cinema, art, and literature: to watch Blade Runner as though it came out after Inception; to watch Star Wars Episode IV as though it really was filmed after Episode III;  to read Homer’s Odyssey as though it were written in response to Joyce’s Ulysses, or even O Brother, Where Art Thou; to appreciate the Mona Lisa as though it were painted after Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q.; to read Don Quixote as though it came after Jorge Luis Borges.  We complain so much about the creative—nay, spiritual—bankruptcy of modern Hollywood, but might such an approach renovate even our most starved impulses of the soul?