MAGGIE JAFFE

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PSYCHO

          I would like to make a movie concerned with food,

           beginning with its arrival in the city and ending with

           the sewers and garbage being dumped into the ocean.

           Thematically, the cycle would show what people do to

           good things.

           -Hitchcock, in an interview with Francois Truffaut

Friday, December 11, 1960, 2:43 pm,

interior shot of a shabby hotel

room in Phoenix, Arizona.

Marion Crane (AKA Janet Leigh) stretched

out in bed, her lunch hardly touched.

The girl eats like a bird.

Above her, John Gavin, and what a hunk,

even if Hitchcock called him "The Stiff."

Leigh stands up. Her D-cup bra looks like twin

atomic silos, more terrifying than the Cuban Missile

Crisis and world-wide Communist domination.

By the time she changes into a black slip

and bra, we knew she was history.

They used chocolate syrup for her

O God, Mother, blood, blood!

Like most of us, she'd like to buck

the system. Thinking back to her shitty job,

the dough don't stink but it's filthy.

She just sat there while I dumped it out!

Plowing through the rain, even headlights

assault her. The Bates Motel looms up:

the camera pans Norman's boyish

butt: his swish becomes legend, black pools

his eyes, his AIDS-related suicide

in "real time."

Did Hitch hate women?

Only the thin-lipped bourgeoisie,

cops and transvestites, who'd say

straight-faced, a boy's best friend

is his Mother. Here's a fact-

turd for you, America: Psycho

is the first movie to use a toilet

as definitive proof of a crime.

After Psycho, nothing was the same.

Not the comfort of showers,

nor mom's down-home

apple pie. Prophetic:

within three years America

will eat her young: the skull

beneath her smirking grin

metastasizing into a diminutive

Cambodia.