Video Essays

How bout a triple feature? Phantom Thread/Eraserhead/Rashomon

Bring the popcorn.

It's worth it for my video.

These are all good points. Rashomon has some accepted facts too, even though they're a lot vaguer. We know all three characters meet in the woods, we know the Bandit and the Wife had sex (though the circumstances of which vary greatly), and we know the samurai died. There's not a lot of indisputables, but there's enough for a viewer to hold on to.

That was pretty good.

PG Cooper Dracula

What is this one about?

Well, there was no need to call him that.

Time to clear your search history.

A Mishapdick is just another way of saying A Hitchcock



So if the runtime is any indication, I may have gone a bit too far with this one. Well, it's a big topic. The primary purpose of this video essay is to dive into Hitchcock's final four films and try to make sense of Hitchcock's struggles to remain relevant in the 1960s and 70s. This video also offers a broad overview of Hitchcock's entire career, attempting to categorize his work into distinct phases, as well as suss out core themes and elements. I'm sure for some of you parts of this will be review, but hopefully there's some new details. And if not, it's still more Hitchcock, and you gotta love that.

If you're intimidated by the runtime, consider watching the film in separate sittings while on the can.

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This video needed more De Palma/Scorsese/Schrader.

The modern Hitchcock movie wasn’t Frenzy but Sisters, Obsession, Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Blow Out, Body Double and to a lesser extent Dressed to Kill.

Frenzy is just an old Hitchcock movie without the censorship. It doesn’t explore any new ideas. Point is, he was just an old fart. He could have been skinny and his movies would have been shit.

I think Psycho and Marnie should have been the focus of the video because those movies represent the last time Hitchcock was progressive. Norman Bates is a cross dressing serial killer. For 1960, in the United States of America, making a movie about that was fucking insane. INSANE!!!

Now you look at a character like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. It’s about a mentally disturbed war veteran that tries to impress a girl by murdering someone, fails, and then goes on to rescue another girl by going on a murder spree. That’s a motherfucking Hitchcock character. And to further emphasis the point, Scorsese hired Bernard Herrmann to do the score. He could have hired John Williams. That’s who Hitchcock hired for Family Plot. Even De Palma hired John Williams for Fury. Scorsese wanted that “Hitchcock sound.” Taxi Driver is a Hitchcock movie. Hitchcock could have made a movie like it. He DID release a movie in 1976. But he didn't because he was totally unaffected by the Vietnam war. This is a man who lived through World War I and World War II. A movie about a deranged war veteran. It would have never crossed his mind. I’m sure he watched Taxi Driver and thought, “what the fuck???”

Hardcore is another example. It’s about a dad who sees his daughter in a porno and says, “not while I’m alive.” It’s a comical premise that you could picture an old & conservative filmmaker directing, but what was porn in Hitchcock’s day? The porn “industry” is not something that Hitchcock would even think about.

Hitchcock simply got old and society moved on. Young filmmakers took the techniques and tropes created by Hitchcock and applied them to modern stories.

Blow-Out is another example. You have a character that’s solving a murder through the use of technology. What does technology mean to a Hitchcock in his 70’s?

If Hitchcock had been healthy and making consistent movies throughout the 1970’s, he would have just made movies like Duel, the Steven Spielberg movie about a guy being chased by a mysterious truck driver. He didn’t have the insight to make movies as progressive as Psycho and Marnie.