Well, that was great. I don't know what I expected, beyond consciously trying not to expect anything or think about it too much, but I could not have predicted that... Clusterfuck. And I mean that in the best way. Hilarious, oddly touching, scary (viscerally so: big old trigger warning, btw) and intriguing by turns, it's a modern-day interpretation of a story that, while wonderfully told in its own right, is still pretty crazy, even today.
Six months ago, gawky 17-year-old Norman Bates woke up from a short drugged nap to find that someone -- who is clearly him -- bludgeoned his father to death. Mother Norma's weird affect about the whole thing is our first clue (beyond the title, I guess) that things are not at all okay, or what they seem. After six month of apparently not therapy, the pair buy and move into a motel, found at auction, and within minutes they've been initiated into the town: Sheriff Nestor Carbonell and Hot Deputy Mike Vogel will be a continuing authoritarian presence, a coven of cute teen girls has sweetly adopted Norman as their own little playtoy, a strange-looking teacher is causing weird feelings in Norman's pants, and worst of all, the guy who got foreclosed is a real mean customer -- an overall-wearing, drunken Straw Dogs ne'er-do-well, of the sort you often see lurking around and under Tennessee Williams porches.
The girls secretly whisk Norman off to a transcendently weird, beautiful teen party full of pot and lighting concepts -- and a frenemy played by that Canadian kid that is in every television show -- just long enough Norma to have a scorned-lover fight with Norman's older brother Dylan (he should be along soon), and then for the grizzled prospector dude to bust into the house and beat and handcuff and brutally assault Norma.
As far as these things go, it's fairly earned just off the top, but once Norm helps her out of the jam and she stabs the guy like one million times, it starts feeling pretty okay. Mostly this is thanks to Norma's craziness and pragmatism plus Vera Farmiga's magnetic watchability -- "That sucked, getting raped and killing a dude, but you know what, I've got a motel to get up and running, so put on your big girl panties and help me treat my various wounds and let's do this." -- but honestly, it all happens so deep into the episode that you're way more entranced by then at the way these two manipulate and choreograph their way around each other, like a couple of cobras who think they're looking at a mongoose and not another cobra.
In the struggle to first cover up the stabbing, then rid themselves of the body, the pair make the acquaintance of the cops and Norman finds a notebook scrawled with manga torture porn, that seems to be actually happening in some other location (and possibly will influence his crush on the English teacher in some nonstandard ways). Next day at school Norman barfs, meets another girl -- this one a quirky CF kid, complete with flair-covered O2 tank -- and generally freaks out.
Back home, Norma and Norman have the most romantic outing yet: A moon-dappled rowboat trip to the middle of a lake, where they can toss the body of the rapist. After discussing matters of their relationship, finer points of parenting, and even some choice Jane Eyre quotes, it's clear that everything is going to be just fucking peachy from now on, so they row to shore. It's funny, original, smart, creepy, and above all, confident. You can get away with a lot, given some swag, and -- beyond the talent -- it's so far the show's best feature.
But none of this is really what you want to know, what you want to know is:
Q: Why did they make this show?
A: Still not sure why, but I do like to think we could be so tired of reboots and remakes that we are now rebooting the idea of a reboot. It feels genius, it looks great, and if you think about this aspect too long you'll get high. The town seems like a character -- like it's going to be one of those shows where everybody is keeping everybody else in sex dungeons and whatever -- so the setting really pulls you in with its oddly timeless modernity. Some places are like cyberpunk almost, too bleeding-edge, and then the interiors on their property are so retro-dead feeling you can smell the dust. It's lovely to look at. You feel everything. The movie you're thinking of recedes so far back in your head it's like a dream one of the characters had, because the reality of what's going on is so present and emotionally viable.
Q: Is that Billy Elliott?
A: No, and it's not the one from Love Actually, it's Pantalaimon and the only good thing about the horrible Spiderwick Chronicles which even Nancy Botwin sucked in, and he's adorbz. Also fantastic to watch, and every bit his mother's son -- and equal. He's tragic and scary and secretive and has about ten thoughts for every one he expresses, and you find yourself rooting for him not to become... what he already pretty clearly is. When one character randomly describes him as a "beautiful, deep still lake in the middle of a concrete world," you're like, Yeah, I'll allow it. Especially since nobody knows about the gators at the bottom, least of all Norman himself.
Q: Am I offended?
A: No. I mean, do what you want, but the show has its shit in order. A stronger warning about the brutal sexual assault would have been nice, but it's not there to titillate or contribute to a culture of violence or anything. Unless you mean the kind of violence where girlfriend immediately stabs her rapist in the abdomen until he is just a jelly in that region, which is like the most fun possible kind. I don't really do well with this kind of thing, this looking-to-be-offended thing, so I'm not the one to ask. Oh, but the title of the source material I guess you could go here too, which is why it's such a profound and humanizing shocker: Just how workaday, lalala, true-to-life (for the most part) their mental illness(es) is/are, from the first minute. We get hints, you can see them setting up a plausible progression of mental dominoes to take us to the end, but Norma is only slightly more wack than plenty of people you know and love. I mean, she's intense as hell, but not in a campy or overdone way: She's just this lady who is intense as hell. To whom a succession of very fucked up things happen, throwing off the balance even more.
Q: But is she amazing?
A: Well, hell yeah she's amazing. It's the perfect match of strikingly intelligent, humbly talented, scary/sexy actress and the ex nihilo whirlwind that is Norma on the page. While there are elements of the neurotic-making moms of the past (Running With Scissors is prevalent in the mix, as are both Beales and both Mildred Pierces), it's still something very specific and new and mesmerizing and of-this-moment that she's doing: A female character that could only exist now, in 2013, and never before. Farmiga takes a character whom we only really know as the imaginary voice of one person's deepest repeating unwanted thoughts, and manages to turn her into a living, breathing, frustrating, heartbreaking, crazy-as-hell, abusive, narcissistic, beautiful, repugnant, angry, nurturing, smothering, self-sacrificing, parasitic, repellent and charismatic mess of a woman.
Q: What is the deal with them?
A: I don't know what the deal is with them, but I think they make a great couple.
Q: Couple of what?
A: I know, right?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!
NOTES
So the pilot's title refers to Cornell Woolrich, a writer whose life mirrored Norman Bates's in some oddly key ways and whose biographer (whose book bore the same title) has said, "He did in prose what Hitchcock did in film." He was gay, alcoholic, lived on and off with his mother, did well in the movie-option department and seemed like an all-around total genius I would never have otherwise heard of or enjoyed so much as I have in the past few weeks since first googling this phrase.
I think it's more than a wink at the extensive and multivalent connections between Cornell, Norman and Alfred H (and Anthony P), though. As the show itself drifts in its various layers of reference, reversion, reverence and retelling, picking and choosing from things on every layer in order to tell the story it wants to tell, it makes total sense to quote a man whose work influenced Hitchcock and yet who seemed to himself be a Hitchcock character. In fact Rear Window was based on a story of his which -- layer-violating once again -- was a remake of an H.G. Wells short story and so on.
All of which is to say: This is the world we are looking at, a world that pulls equally from all time and cinematic history, from disparate levels of mimesis and simulacrum, biography to fantasy to all and sundry refilmed-remade-rebooted-retellings, equally. The ultimate postmodern (in the actual sense of the term) spin-out and remix of a story that has proven widely and wildly remixable. Over the past week, I've learned that any review of this show that opens with bitching about iPhones is not going to be worth reading, because it has no idea what it's looking at.
This is not even the first Norman Bates story with iPods, for chrissake. A thing I can't remember anybody bringing up all week long. But while Gus van Sant was practicing creative restraint and this is a show is about externalizing the duality of self, one must wonder - why is this the story, why are we continually returning to this particular thing to work out our zeitgeisty-artsy obsessions? When in ten years they develop, I don't know, Smell-O-Vision or four-dimensional timespace dramas or liquid downloadable drinkable movies, there will be a Norman Bates story within the first six months. I guarantee it. Do I really need to tell you why?
It's the soup of culture surrounding the oldest story in history and the oldest fear at the heart of humans. Does the mother overtake the son? Does the son overtake the mother? Male privilege will tell you that the world is about son overtaking father, becoming father, displacing father -- until he's old enough to become one. But that's a story with a beginning and middle and end: This is a story that surrounds you so much you can't even talk about it. You can talk about "legitimate rape" and birth control rights and bake sexism right into the cake, but you can't talk about it. Unless you do it like this: Horribly, horrifically, sadly and deliriously.
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