Word: psycho
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...have this right: Sean Connery is a cute medieval dragon who breaks into Alcatraz. Psycho groupie Robert De Niro tracks Flipper all the way to Alaska. Schwarzenegger takes the Brady Bunch into Witness Protection. Danny DeVito and Shaquille O'Neal--twins! Bill Murray goes bowling with his pet elephant. A tornado spits a giant spaceship onto the White House lawn and out steps the most destructive alien force the world has ever known: Jim Carrey...
...later work this lyricism would too often get buried under the polemics, but in the '60s it was to the fore, and it accounts for the pathos of a piece like The Wait, 1964-65. At first it's a shock, like coming across Mama's corpse from Psycho in a museum. The old woman is waiting for death; her head is a sheep's skull in a jar on whose front is pasted a photo of herself when young; she wears a necklace of memories: jars containing gilded mementos of prayer, marriage, long-gone sexual love. The repeated forms...
...failure on our part, then we deserve some of this heat." St. Martin's is not the first U.S. publisher to yank a controversial book off its list. In the most celebrated recent instance, Simon & Schuster decided in 1990 not to release Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho after advance reviewers complained about its voyeuristic scenes of women being tortured. (Knopf later bought the discarded manuscript and published it in paperback.) But the St. Martin's case is more complex because it involves a work of nonfiction rather than a question of artistic license. Should publishers vouch for the accuracy...
...process, the editor may also make art. Any cinephile's collection of favorite movie moments will include the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin, the Citizen Kane dinner-table scene, the shower murder in Psycho, the final killings in Bonnie and Clyde--all of which were created not so much on the set as on the editing table. Try to imagine these scenes in single long takes, and you start to appreciate editing's vital contribution: it gives films the collision of images that creates a collision of emotions. It has been the primary technical touchstone for great directors...
...trite grotesqueness, though, Alice cannot be tossed off as another American Psycho, the famously godawful Bret Easton Ellis novel to which it has been likened. Ellis' treatment of sadism has a dopey campiness that Homes is incapable of. She takes her crazed protagonist very seriously, describing his every abhorrent desire in mind-boggling detail that amounts to a twisted, writerly artfulness all its own. And as in her last book, In a Country of Mothers, the story of a psychoanalyst's debilitating obsession with a young patient, Homes shows a knack for intertwining two characters' pathologies. In Alice...