By Mark Adnum

Norman-clature
In two completely unrelated movies, made twenty years apart, hoary voiced matriarchs demonstrate their dominance their weaker male companionsover by calling their names of in condescending, raspy repetition.

“Nor-man!” barks Mrs Bates, the shadowed killer in the Psycho house, dragging her son’s two-syllable name into a gravelly quasi-sentence as she issues her meek son Norman with bloody directives and derogatory put-downs. As his mother, we can assume that she was responsible for naming Norman, and so it is with wicked relish that she uses it pejoratively, taking full advantage of the name’s ontological connotations of impaired normality and incomplete manhood. In its lettering, Norman is a word that is not quite normal, and Norman also suggests a somehow retrograde adult male, a no-man, a trapped and stunted identity that is neither boy nor man. For emphasis, she sometimes splits the name and uses a truncation of the first syllable and an infantilisation of the second to create the Norman echo heard at the start of “No, boy, I tell you no!” Indeed, she regularly substitutes the loose Norman synonym “boy” (male that isn’t a man: a no-man) when addressing her developmentally stunted son. Interestingly, though half-a-dozen different actors provided Mrs Bates’ ever-changing voice, when she says “No”, “No, boy” or “Norman”, Mrs Bates somehow always sounds the same.

(Mrs Bates’ voice was provided by Jeanette Nolan, Virginia Gregg, Ann Dore, Margo Epper, Anthony Perkins’ friend Paul Jasmin and the enigmatically-named Mitzi. Psycho sound engineers overlaid the vocal tracks or spliced them together, so that at most times when Mrs Bates talks, a combination of the recorded voices are heard together. Anthony Perkins did not “speak” for Mrs Bates, indeed, when he addresses her after the shower scene, the bass line of his vocal track was removed, at Hitchcock’s request, to make him sound more “adolescent”.)

Similarly, On Golden Pond’s Ethyl Thayer, played by Katharine Hepburn, quotes Mrs Bates as, with Hepburn’s imperious vibrato, she repeatedly shouts her husband Norman’s name when instructing him to look at loons, return for dinner on time, or to cease dying. As with Mrs Bates, Ethyl employs her husband’s name as a signifier of his tenuous identity as a man. Her husband is becoming old and frail, and while she has transferred with ease into her matriarchal role, he is struggling embarrassingly to hold onto his lost virility and diluted masculinity, and is dragged backwards in time by an ongoing quarrel with his daughter who is chasing his withheld love. We assume that Norman was called Norman long before he met his wife, but Ethyl snatches up Mrs Bates’ example and uses her husband’s name as a hierarchical control tool. Ethyl delights in using her husband’s name when he has crashed a boat or collapsed with angina, and she substitutes withering terms-of-endearment such as “loon” and “coot” when she tires using ”Norman”.

This proleptic couplet of crotchety Norman-croaking is, on its own, a fun but mild coincidence, somewhat of a stretch and of little analytical value. It isn’t the subject of this analysis. Where it becomes uncanny and important is how it forms an eerie auditory backdrop, an uncanny choral invocation that, Siren-like, lures me to explore a separate Norman connection, one that revolves around two men named Norman, that also has a root in Psycho, but which yields a compelling and valuable heuristic, an elaborate helix of intertextual, speculative meaning. Mrs Bates and Mrs Thayer, and The Norman Heuristic that they cunningly call my attention to, create a double-decker set of what Noel Sanders may call an “uncanny rhyming gizmo” or “a melismatic metaphor”.

According to Sanders, such gizmos set the stage for crypto-analytical, abductive guesswork, a creatively speculative process that automatically amplifies faint connections to form what Roland Barthes, in “Rhetoric of the Image”, called “floating chain[s] of signifieds” out of ostensibly polysemous ephemera. In this process, boundaries between fact and fiction, intuition and logic, scholarship and fandom, collapse and, to paraphrase Wayne Koestenbaum, contradictory realms of experience, time and space dissolve into consonance.

The two Normans of The Norman Heuristic are like Cosmic twins. Both of unhinged and murderous mind and, they wait spiderlike for their prey, attach, and as a result, they both ended up incarcerated. Unllike so many never-found killers, our Norman's are losers - they don't get away with it. They have ambiguous sexualities, and, as they are illustrative of several decades of dialogue around “queerness”, have an extra-temporal aura. Both are locked in the orbits of famous movie directors which gives them a kind of celluloid skin and makes them signposts in a study of gay cinephilia.

They are Norman Bates, brought to fame by Alfred Hitchock’s 1960 film Psycho, and Jonathan Norman, currently serving twenty-five years-to-life in a Californian prison for stalking and planning to torture and rape Steven Spielberg in 1997.

“Norman” is the primary link between the two Normans. It forms parentheses, or bookends, around on their names - Norman Bates, Jonathan Norman - and forms a joint middle name in another - Jonathan Norman Bates.

But beyond this initial onomastic similarity lies a rich weave of immanent and interpretive intra-messages that creates uncanny continuity, much like how my other pair of apparent strangers Mrs Bates and Mrs Thayer sound just alike when they call out “Norman”. An archaeological dig around my Normans reveals a rich suite of eerie conjunctions that begins promisingly but evananescent, g, as per Barthes’ definition of the obtuse meaning (“at once persistent and fleeting, smooth and elusive”) only occasionally clarifies itself.

Though several decades separate the Normans, and though their exploits took place on different planes of existence (on-screen and off-screen) a tight bundle of yoked messages and matching symbols existbetween them and this suggests that some hyper-real, metaphysical or vascular conexts the elder’ Norman's celluloid fiction and his junior’s suburban reality. As per Barthes and his “Kitchen of Meaning”, for me “Norman” becomes a principle of classification, something I can use to collate my enormous mass of apparently anarchic facts, and then appraise them as one.

In this analysis, “Norman” is the textual matter that matters.

Norman Bates (left) is a fictional character devised by novelist Robert Bloch, who based his novel “Psycho” on the exploits of Ed Gein, the 1950s Wisconsin serial killer who decapitated his victims, decorated his house with their corpses, and made suits out of their skin. Bloch’s novel was adapted by screenwriter Joseph Stefano for Alfred Hitchock’s 1960 film, Psycho. Norman Bates is the Ur Gein-character: his descendants include Leatherface, from 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill, from 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, both of whom were also modelled on Gein. An only child whose parents have died, Norman is mild-mannered and hermit-like and he keeps his family’s nondescript, off-the-highway motel running despite a lack of staff or guests. He busies himself with taxidermy, concentrating almost exclusively on stuffing birds.

Also, he keeps the embalmed corpse of his mother in the fruit cellar, dressing up occasionally in a wig and dress and speaking in her voice, and doing as she “commands” by violently killing any female who pulls into the motel car park and arouses his shameful desires.

The chthonic rhythms of Norman’s super-ego have been externalised and the membranes between reality, behaviour, instinct and morality are, for him, completely dilated. Norman was played with élan by Anthony Perkins, a minor 1950s matinee idol who played the role again in Psycho’s two sequels, and the character appeared again in a 1998 remake of Psycho directed by Gus van Sant. Norman Bates is an enduring screen villain who was voted second all-time villain on the American Film Institute’s 2003 “Heroes and Villains” list (behind Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs’ other skin-stripping killer, and a ein hand-me-down anwyay).

Jonathan Norman (Right, above) is a real person who in 1998 was sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years in prison for planning to tie up, torture and rape movie mogul Steven Spielberg, who he believed was his “father”. An avid kickboxer with two prior arrests for violent assaults, Norman was apprehended outside Spielberg’s estate in July 1997 with what prosecutors called a “rape kit” containing duct tape, nipple clamps, razor blades, electric shockers, eye masks and dog collars. Also found in Norman’s car were collages featuring Spielberg’s head atop nude and muscular male bodies, and a videocassette copy of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial.

Norman initially fled the scene on foot, but was captured in a neighbouring yard, wielding a curtain rod like a javelin. Norman was a regular user of “crystal” methamphetamine, though it is unclear whether he was high at the time of his planned attack. In court, an ex-lover of Norman’s revealed that Norman had been traumatised by the departure of his “homophobic” father from the family when Norman was six years old, and that Norman was convinced that Spielberg wanted to be immobilised ad sexually assaulted by him. Though Norman didn’t harm Spielberg, his two prior arrests won him a heavy sentence for stalking under California’s “three strikes” law. His lawyer’s claims that he was acting only under the influence of drugs did not convince the jury, who adjudged Norman was mentally competent and aware of his actions, though I would reason that, as with Norman Bates, Jonathan Norman’s bizarre Oedipal externalisation was not quite normal.

More Mismatched twins in the Magic Mirror Maze

Psycho was co-written by Joseph Stefano, a screenwriter born in Philadelphia who had previously scripted Martin Ritt’s The Black Orchid, and who went on, after Psycho, to muted success as the screenwriter of Eye of the Cat and The Kindred and as episode writer for science-fiction television series “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “The Outer Limits”. Joseph Stefano was credited as screenwriter on the 1998 remake of Psycho, though little changes were made to his original, 1960 script. In other words, his name is not an especially famous one, certainly not competitive with the extremely famous names involved in the production of his most successful script.

What does resonate – and resonate quite loudly - in the name Joseph Stefano for me, is another Joseph Stefano from Philadelphia: burn-out gay porn megastar Joey Stefano.

Working the Philadelphia streets as a hustler while still his teens, and from a father-absent broken home, Joey Stefano (born Nick Iacona) moved to West Hollywood, seeking money and fame and in doing so acquired both Jonathan Norman’s zip code and the same hearty appetite for amphetamines. For a couple of years in the mid 1990s, Joey Stefano burned brightly as one of gay porn’s biggest names. A trailblazing “bottom”, Stefano was the first gay porn icon to specialise in enthusiastically receptive anal sex, rejecting the gruff machismo of his predecessors, a long line of “straight-acting tops”. Joey’s porn identity was indistinguishable from his private personality, and he became famous for his massive drug addictions, destructive relationships and fastlane friendships with entrepreneurial drag queens. Joey also evolved into a top-shelf male escort, his porn movies serving as priceless advertising; he charged around $500 and famously said he charged double that “if they wanted me to move”. Joey appeared in Madonna’s “Sex” book and was allegedly considering a serious acting career when he died in 1997, aged 26, from a drug overdose. He was reportedly HIV-positive and left a “shopping list” style suicide note, a bullet point rundown of what he considered were the biggest troubles in his life.

Joseph is connected to Norman Bates through Psycho. Joey is a peer of Jonathan Norman. Joseph and Joey are connected in name and birthplace. This is fairly straightforward. What is surprising is that Joseph and Joey don’t just share a novelty connection, and sit isolated from and unknown to each other outside the parentheses of The Norman Heuristic, but, rather, they sit on a series of concentric circles, ripples that surround and intersect the Normans like the clashing reverberations of an enclosed echo. Joseph Stefano matches Joey Stefano, who in turn shares close intertextual synthesis with both Psycho's Norman Bates and, a new star in our analysis, Bates' first victim, Marion Crane.

Joey Stefano’s body was spectacular, it was on constant and total display. The star of around three dozen porn features, Joey gleefully allowed his body to be spied on by seen and countless seen and unseen observers. Charles Isherwood, in his biography of Joey called “Wonder Bread and Ecstasy” reports that Joey conducted on-set interviews fully nude and with an erection, explaining the nudity was part of the workplace and as for the erection, “I’m always horny. There’s hot guys around. I’m naked”. As Richard Dyer and Linda Williams have noted, porn star bodies are subject to “frenzied” ocular attention, with cameras catching them tumescent and nude from every possible angle, and home porn viewers watching them in freeze frame, fast forward, and persistent repetition. As a “bottom”, Joey was unable to access a key gay porn star money maker spin-off – the signature rubber dildo, cast from the star’s own penis and sold to eager fans in sex shops the world over. Such dildos from well-endowed “tops” like Jeff Stryker are bestsellers, and the porn actor becomes a brand, lucratively outliving his brief window of porn movie acting. This was not Joey’s career trajectory: he was a purely visual attraction: he was looked at, ejaculated over, and identified via his images only. Key to Joey’s appeal was his zeitgeist-hooking rejection of dated gay porn structures that continued to code gay-identified characters as the hapless servants of horny mechanics, builders and athletes who wanted to get their rocks off, but treated their scene-lovers with scorn. “You like that big cock, don’tcha” is a typical pre-Joey line of gay-porn dialogue, a rhetorical question delivered in a guttural growl by a commanding fucker to his voiceless, gasping conquest.

What Joey Stefano introduced was the “hungry bottom” in full control of the sexual encounter, even exhausting his “tops” and never appearing satisfied by their efforts. Joey was, really, the first gay-identified major porn star in gay porn, the first “bottom” to carry his own movies. In 1990s More Of A Man he plays up to this dynamic, starring as a blue-collar Catholic who refuses to acknowledge how much he likes passive anal sex, which he cruises for non-stop in public toilets and seedy leather bars, until he falls in love with a co-star, and they have energetic “safe sex” on the back of a float in a Gay Pride parade. Stefano's stardom was pegged with contemporary gay thirsts to forge less leather -and -moustahced identities.

Not quite so willingly exhibitionist but equally spectacular was Marion Crane, whose appearance in white negligee in Psycho’s opening scene was considered very revealing at the time, but which paled to her later, unwitting display of black underwear for Norman Bates, who was peering at her through a hole in his parlor wall. Of course, Marion plays the shower scene naked , and, as a result, has been seen wriggling and screaming in the nude by innumerable filmgoers and film scholars who’ve watched that particular scene in freeze frame and persistent repetition and who’ve examined its reproduced images in text books and journals over a nearly fifty year period.

As a spectator of Joey and Marion I delight in staring at their bodies, and identify with parts of their personae and some of their actions. Psycho’s notorious innovation was the first-act murder of a popular star who was apparently playing the lead, while Joey’s particular appeal to contemporary gay porn audiences has been mentioned above. I’m drawn into empathy with Joey and Marion, only to be confronted with the perverse knowledge that I am apparently happy to watch them suffer, or, in Joey’s case, continue to watch his enduringly popular films in the knowledge that his alluring body and glossy hair are decomposed, six feet under, partly as a result from him enjoying what I’m watching him do, a little too much. As Kaja Silverman observed in “The Subject of Semiotics”, “Psycho obliges the viewing subject to make abrupt shifts in identification … Thus the viewing subject finds itself inscribed into the cinematic discourse at one juncture as victim and at the next juncture as victimizer” . I become engrossed in Marion’s quest to free herself from office servitude and illicit love, and I am anxious to see how her efforts turn out. I like her, I empathise with her, she’s the character that I “side with” for the first third of the film. For the most part, she doesn’t look or act strangely and up to the shower scene, I’ve no reason to think her destiny is in any way unusual or confronting; she’s easy for me to identify with.

But as Marion’s death is preceded by her conspicuous displays of semi-nudity, after her murder I am yanked from feeling comfortably intimate with Marion to sensing a guilt, that I may have invaded the doomed woman’s privacy. After the shower scene, I’m confronted with the feeling that I had been, unwittingly, acting like creepy Norman Bates, peering at Marion through his peephole. Now, my eyes, skimming up and down her exposed body, are shockingly echoed by Mrs Bates’ butcher’s knife, which forces entry at points across Marion’s entire personal topography. Like my eyes, the knife takes an ownership over Marion’s body, which despite her best efforts, is cornered and cannot escape the invasive thrusting. When she’s violently killed, then, I “take it in the eye” like a stab to myself.

This was a “twist” not just in the narrative of Psycho, but in the spectatorial mechanisms of film-going. The impact of the shower scene, and of Alfred Hitchock’s theatrical disciplining” of audiences to arrive on time, to wait in line, to not discuss the film’s secrets and so on, has been well-studied. In Linda Williams’ words,

When the forward-moving, purposeful, voyeuristic camera eye “washes” down the drain after the murder of Marion and emerges in reverse twisting out of her dead eye, audiences could, for the first time in mainstream motion-picture history, take pleasure in losing the kind of control, mastery, and forward momentum of “classical” narrative.

Similarly, Joey Stefano’s career was as a fulcrum in the evolution of gay porn spectatorship. As with Psycho, there’s a “before and after” effect that is readily observable. As Charles Isherwood noted, gay porn "bottoms" were traditionally interchangeable, ephemeral chorus-cast, as the macho fucker ruled, and the hulking porn stars who enacted the macho fucker were every gay porn film’s “top” attraction. Joey’s rise matched the early/mid 1990s gay cultural shift away from the idolization and fetishisation of the construction worker/lumberjack image and towards self-celebrating “queer” identities. Pre-Stefano, it was the penis not the anus that was the site of self-denying ocular worship. Isherwood notes that "the hegemony of the top was toppled; a new mood had arrived" and quotes the editor of the Gay Video Guide:

There was a new generation driving the market. These were kids coming out of the closet, joining ACT UP, who didn’t want to worship some straight man. The fact that Joey was out and that he was obviously enjoying what he was doing made him the first bottom to break into superstar status.

Joey was a sexy emblem of a new mood, but his premature death, like that of Marion, an independent 1960s woman in a pioneering film, stabbed the new mood in the eye. Whacking off over Stefano before 1996, gay porn audiences revelled in both his looks and his gay sexual confidence, but his death, a suicide or accidental drug overdose brought on by a conflation of pressures including a recent HIV-positive diagnosis suggested that underneath the “new mood” lay a threatening set of very old problems. If Joey Stefano’s career was a brilliant diversion - from the traumas of AIDS and the perils of the gay fast-lane - then his death was a reality crash. Joey’s adventures in drugs and anal eroticism were glamorous and powerful; his resultant HIV infection and problems with addiction and empty celebrity the worm-tunneled compost on the underside of the log.

Yet Joey’s popularity as a porn star continued after his death, indeed, his death served as a bewitching advertisement for his films, as his persona shifted slightly from brooding hero to die-young martyr, along the lines of Montgomery Clift or James Dean. Joey Stefano’s death increased his popularity with audiences, in the way it glossed his already-known enthusiasm for hyper-urban gay life and sex with the excitement of unquenchable desire for ever-increasing stimulation. Joey’s rise coincided with a sense that a new gay American generation was emerging, one free of the AIDS-beset shackles of what Camille Paglia has described as their “doom laden elders” and ready to be young, sexy and hot. But Joey Stefano became the new Icarus of the gay VCR as a shower-scene style audience shift from identification to consumption took place. Joey Stefano, like Marion Crane, only became fully “known” to audiences after sudden, premature death, as Silverman’s abrupt shifts in identification arouse confusion and shame among audience members who find themselves at first lamenting and missing the screen character with whom they empathised but then cheering the new story and even feeling “grateful” that the character was so apparently committed to their audience’s invigoration that they were prepared to “die for it”.

The deaths of Joey Stefano, as described by Isherwood, and Joseph Stefano’s anti-heroine Marion Crane are visually and narratively matched. In debt and with his porn career waning (a lunar phase that, for porn stars, is a once-only and permanent eclipse) Joey had upped his drug intake and was alternately high or crashing twenty-four hours a day. The last days of his life dovetail textually and visually with the last days of Marion Crane: as Joey’s death draws near, Hitchcock and Psycho haunt his shadow moments in the style of Charon, or Bengt Ekerot in The Seventh Seal. Four days before he died, Joey went into the bathroom, stepped into a warm shower, and shot up heroin into his left and right arms. Half an hour later he was found on the bathroom floor. Isherwood describes the scene: “Through floods of steam Stefano could be seen slumped in the stall, a needle in each arm”. A shocked friend cleaned him up and rushed him to the hospital. Two days before he died, Joey and his friend Crystal Crawford (note the methamphetamine and gay diva worship references in that name) rented two videos, one of which was The Birds, but during a line-quoting screening of Mommie Dearest Stefano had another shower overdose and cut his forehead just above the eye. Explaining his injuries the next day Stefano made reference to several visual cuts of the Psycho shower scene and the spectatorial debates that surround it by saying “I hit my eye in Crystal’s shower – the nozzle is too low”. Later that day, he was found clammy and blue on a bed in the Hollywood La Brea Motel. Like Mrs Bates, Matt the drug dealer who’d supplied Stefano with his deadly dose had fled the scene, it was up to shocked friends and paramedics to bundle up Stefano and drag him from the motel room on a stretcher. Nick Iacona’s family mourned his death, unaware that he’d gone west and turned into Joey Stefano. Lila Crane had a stronger inkling of Marion’s furtive flight to Fairvale, where she stopped en-route and briefly became Marie Samuels.

Marion, illicit and ambitious, tormented by money woes and eluding contact from all who know her, steps into the Bates Motel bathroom and is almost immediately invaded by repeated stabs from a knife. The shower water runs over her dying body, and she stretches out an arm, grabbing for the shower curtain in the moments before she crumples over and her head hits the tiles, hot water pouring over her lifeless form. She is found on the bathroom floor by a shocked Norman Bates, who picks up her body and rushes it to a nearby swamp.

Prior to her death, Marion drives out of town with voices running through her head and she looks variously stressed or smug. Packed with the hope of a new future but burdened with the fear and doubt of the risks incurred she loses her way in a disorienting rainstorm, unknowingly pulling off the highway and stopping a few minutes drive short of her destination. Marion doesn’t realise that her drive is a one-way journey. Having snapped up a chance to escape her urban mundanity, she’s unwittingly charted herself a direct course to her own destruction. In Isherwood’s biography, I read about Joey Stefano “hopping on a bus, unsure what he would find, but sure he had to go” and “arriving in LA, sucking in the air of promise”. Earlier, we’ve read about Joey’s lower-working class broken home, and the boring dead end of his druggy life as a Philadelphia street hustler. According to Isherwood, the second Joey packs up for Hollywood in search of fame as a blue-ribbon porn star and ultra-expensive prostitute, the genie is out of the bottle, and its only a matter of time until drugs and disappointment take their ultimate toll. Marion becomes Marie Samuels, and Nick Iacona becomes Joey Stefano.

Marion seemed brazenly sexual in her day, so did Joey. Joey was reported to have “eaten like a bird”, living off the occasional white bread sandwich, the same meal that Marion is eating when Norman notes that she too has avian eating habits. Joey lamented that no one ever saw the “real him”, though in both he and Marion’s efforts to conceal their identities, I see their similar quest for self-evasion. Visual quotes and narrative coincidences abound, and Marion and Joey become unexpected inter-generational and inter-media warenkaraketers for each other. This is redoubled by their proximity to each other and to the other elements on the chorographic helix of The Norman Heuristic.

If Norman Bates enters the room at this point, my two-way intra-textual chorograph becomes suddenly trifurcated, split into chaotic new directions like the shattering of a mirror. Norman, spying on Marion before the shower scene, “stands in” for the spectator of Psycho also, post shower scene, behaves like the post-1996, after-Joey viewer of Joey Stefano’s porn films. With Marion’s entrunked body at the bottom of the swamp, Norman becomes his movie’s leading man. Marion’s display of flesh aroused him and he removed her from the picture and took over the narrative. As consumers of the late Joey Stefano’s porn films, gay porn audiences swallow Joey’s persona, which becomes temporary masturbation aid. Like Norman, they must construct an amnesia around their understandings of Joey’s death in order to enjoy tumescent pleasures and maintain equilibrium during detumescent recovery.

As with Marion, Joey’s death is fused with his potential to arouse an unseen viewer, who enjoys watching Joey writhe and groan with mordant ecstasy while in the process of “fucking himself to death”. And, like the casaba melon used by the Psycho sound effects team to simulate the sound of Mrs Bates’ butcher’s knife meeting Marion’s skin and tissue, the clack of one of Joey’s porn tapes coming out of a consumer’s VCR echoes the click of Marion’s car trunk as Norman prepares to vanish her body.

It ain't gellin'

Of course, in the plot of Psycho, Norman Bates does “enter the picture” around the time of Marion’s death. When blond, female Marion is yanked out of view, dark-haired, male Norman whose absorption of her privileged place in the narrative works like a smooth, photo-negative baton-pass (note how their names are also almost inverted mirror-images of each other). Norman Bates takes his movie over completely and becomes the anti-hero of Psycho audiences the moment Marion’s car looks like it won’t sink into the swamp. He looks around nervously, chewing on candy, and at this precise moment audience identification and narrative agency – which has been orphaned for a few minutes since Marion’s murder - is transferred entirely to Norman. I don’t care too much about what happens to Sam and Lila, beyond hoping that they return to Norman and his motel, which have become the planet that the entire movie and every character in it now revolves around. Jonathan Norman, with a flick of his speeded-up will, marshalled the attention of Hollywood’s biggest powerbrokers, and grabbed a small slice of fame.

As Robert Samuels has noted, Psycho marked the moment where horror was shifted from an external source to an internal one, the extra-terrestrial creatures from the black lagoon replaced with mild-mannered, clean cut Norman Bates, who runs a small motel. Andrew Tudor also identifies Psycho as the moment when cinema horror began to match the ‘public mood’ by moving “from collective fears about threatening forces somewhere ‘out there’ [to concerns of] sexuality, repression and psychosis”. Norman Bates is like a demarcating fault line between the 1950s and the 1960s, between modernity and postmodernity, between fear of the Other and suspicion of the Self. I don’t resist Norman, indeed, his scariness comes from his ordinariness – I could be him, he could be us, or, at least, he could be the “guy next door”. Without his charms and his ostensible normality, Norman Bates wouldn’t be scary at all, and the impact of his film would have been most different.

Jonathan Norman – with his privileged role within this analysis – “takes over” from Joey Stefano too, coming into prominence, like Norman Bates, very soon after his predecessor falls from the narrative. Like Norman to Marion, Jonathan takes the shadows and suggestions of darkness that were threaded through Joey’s screen persona and manifests them in frightening visions of horrible violence. Like Marion, Joey is but a suspicious precursor to the real demon that takes his place. Joey Stefano’s charisma was comprised in part of the sense of optimism and excitement his persona generated, that a lusty gay identity – an idea battered by the traumas of AIDS – was about to become cool again and was something to be celebrated. Joey’s death, like Marion’s, interrupts a mood of reverie and propelled expectations backwards to a place of confusion and dread. Jonathan Norman is a descendant of Joey Stefano who inherited all Joey’s worst genes. He amplifies Joey’s notes of alienation and aimless despair but has a most malformed approach to Joey’s love of fame. Along with the West Hollywood fastlane torch he picked up from his predecessor, he also packs a knife. True to the narrative innovation of Psycho, Jonathan Norman now cuts Joey Stefano from his lead role in this analysis and replaces him with himself.


Joey Stefano (left), Jonathan Norman (right)

I don’t know the contents of Jonathan Norman’s porn collection, if he had one, but if he did, it’s reasonable to surmise that Joey Stefano was in there somewhere. Jonathan Norman is of the Joey generation, a gay guy who was in his twenties during the 1990s, and who lived in a geo-cultural gay epicentre, West Hollywood being to Los Angeles as Greenwich Village is to New York, or Darlinghurst to Sydney. Jonathan was a body builder and an apparently heavy recreational drug user. He was a consumer in the West Hollywood gay economy, and was, then, peer, neighbour and probably fan of Joey Stefano. Just as Joey Stefano may have felt he was one degree removed from “real” Hollywood stardom, Jonathan Norman may have felt that he was one degree removed from Joey Stefano. Alterity is collapsed into an identity that recognises star worship and therefore the specialness of the famous at the same time that it feels a tangible sense of affiliation and similarity to the star. In this example, Jonathan Norman may have enjoyed Joey Stefano’s celebrity but at the time sensed that he could be Joey Stefano. The swarthy Norman was not unattractive, and like many West Hollywood gay men, enjoyed regular recreational drug use and had probably considered or undertaken an experience of prostitution or porn performance.

Joseph Stefano’s screenplay describes Norman Bates as “somewhere in his late twenties, thin and tall, soft-spoken and hesitant … [with] something sadly touching in his manner.” Norman’s endearment to audiences begins with his first appearance, where he, as a so far unknown character, assists Marion and offers her shelter from the rain. Though he commits occasional acts of strangeness, such as his suspicious wavering over the room key rack as he decides what room to rent Marion, his hospitality to Marion and his apparent generosity mark him as warm. Before he kills Marion, he’s quite nice to her, helping her dry off, making her a sandwich, and running back to the house in the downpour to fetch his “trusty umbrella”. When he invites Marion into his parlour, I don’t see spider analogies just yet, as we’re struck by his loneliness and his awkward but earnest skills of friendliness. His conversation about birds is endearingly eccentric, and shows a level of intelligence, and his protective attitude towards his domineering mother suggests, at this point in the story, that Norman has a traditional sense of loyalty and filial ethics.

There are substantial tools of endearment in Jonathan Norman’s almost-bloody tale, too. During grand jury testimony, Jonathan’s roommate and occasional lover Charles Markowich related the following “sadly touching” story. A couple of months before Jonathan’s arrest, Markowich and he went to the movies, where they saw Spielberg’s dinosaur sequel The Lost World. (Which, perhaps not incidentally, stars Vince Vaughn, who played Norman Bates in the 1998 remake of Psycho, but whose swarthy looks and strapping frame more resemble Jonathan Norman than lean and twitchy Anthony Perkins. Vaughn creates a fittingly complete post-Normans hybrid: Norman Bates inside Jonathan Norman’s body.) The film features a mating pair of adult Tyrannosaurus rex hunting their dewy, cute but needy offspring which broke its leg and has since been adopted and cared for by humans. The adult Tyrannosaurus’ follow the scent of their young’s blood, which has soaked, in an allusion to menstrual blood and afterbirth, into the clothing of a maternal palaeontologist, played by Julianne Moore, who also starred in the remake of Psycho (as Lila Crane).

During a scene, Jonathan told Markowich that he saw Spielberg as the father T. rex, Spielberg’s openly gay business partner, mogul David Geffen as the mother, and himself as their imperilled, lame baby. Weird, but also kind of sweet, no? Over the comic/crazy notes of his misplaced science-fiction family fantasy, the father-abandoned Jonathan’s touching yearning for a perfect family can be heard loud and clear. Further in his testimony, Markowich contributes the grand jury proceedings’ only humanising touches when he notes simple details of Jonathan’s fairly normal day-to-day, such as his reliance on a day planner (which nevertheless contained lurid collages of Spielberg’s head stuck to pictures of gay porn stars – descendants, perhaps, of Joey Stefano), a fight the pair had over dirty laundry, and Jonathan losing his wallet.

Norman Bates, a movie character, and Jonathan Norman, who, according to Markowich, had an “obsession with Hollywood” and who saw a comparison to his own imagined parents in the rubber dinosaurs of The Lost World, are Oedipal celluloid psychos. Neither is able to break away from the medium that they, in different ways, inhabit, and curiously, neither are their “parents”.

During grand jury testimony, Steven Spielberg talked of his fears regarding his elderly mother, who lives alone and runs a downtown kosher deli, The Milkyway:

“My mother owns a public restaurant. It’s on the street and she’s exposed more than anyone else [in my family]. My stepfather died, so my mother now lives alone. I just needed my mother to be aware and the security at the restaurant to be on the lookout in case an incident happened.”

Leah Spielberg was described by Joseph McBride, in his book “Spielberg: An Unauthorised Biography” as a “suburban bohemian”, who divorced Spielberg’s father, Arnold, while Spielberg was in his teens. The family frequently moved, and Spielberg remembers being the target of rural anti-Semitism. Spielberg has said that he “never felt comfortable with [him]self because [he] was never part of the majority”. Coded by himself and others as something quasi-human, Spielberg “felt like an alien” while merciless school peers gave him the derogatory nickname “Spielbug”. As a child, Spielberg felt “awkward, ugly and emotionally estranged” and his parents thought him strange.

Taken in isolation Spielberg’s grand jury testimony and this biographical information is not especially unusual but in the context of my analysis it is unnervingly resonant with a section of Norman Bates dialogue:

“She had to raise me all by herself, after my father died. I was only five and it must've been quite a strain for her. I mean, she didn't have to go to work or anything like that. He left her a little money. Anyway, a few years ago Mother met this man, and he talked her into building this motel. He could've talked her into anything. And when he died too, it was just too great a shock for her.”

Spielberg’s testimony, when mixed with this memory from Psycho, evokes a goofy melismatic metaphor not unlike the pair of “Norman” callers that introduced this analysis: Mrs Bates, cured by preserves, alone in the window, alone in the bedroom, alone in the fruit cellar and having to be protected by her awkward son from unwanted intruders, and Mrs Adler (nee, Spielberg), alone in The Milkyway, nervously tending her delicatessen’s cured meats and preserves while waiting for the extra security her once-awkward son’s sending ‘round.

This unexpected chorus between Spielberg, Norman Bates and Jonathan Norman destabilizes what was ostensibly a concrete dichotomy that separated Spielberg from the Norman predators. If I keep foraging in this area, I find a number of signpost intra-textual linkages that not only connect Spielberg with the Normans, but which steer my appraisal of his identity into their shapeshifting world of the quasi-real. For example, I find that Spielberg’s pre-1990s career had many parallels with Alfred Hitchcock’s (both were largely ignored at the Oscars despite huge popularity at the box office and evident command of their craft) or I revisit the popular anecdote of a young Spielberg escaping form a Universal Studios backlot tour, and hiding out among the sets until he was taken for an employee, and given an office. In my imagining of this anecdote, I can see young Steven hiding up behind the Bates mansion, refusing to respond to what must have been persistent “where are you” calls of a frantic backlot tour conductor who’s returned to base minus a teenage customer. Maybe Steven slipped from the tour as it passed the Bates Mansion set, and maybe he’s crouched there, hearing but ignoring the calls of the conductor just as Norman Bates, imperious and windswept outside the mansion’s front door, looked down with disdain as private detective Arbogast yells out in the hope of finding Norman somewhere and winning another quick interview. Like Norman Bates, though, Spielberg’s anecdote is fictional. As Joseph McBride points out, Spielberg didn’t slip off the tour bus at all, and nor did he sneak into Universal repeatedly until staff assumed he was an employee, and gave him his own office. Spielberg often told of how he “dressed up” to “look the part” and brags of his stealthy success: “it took Universal two years to realize I was on the lot!”. In fact, Spielberg’s entry to Universal was arranged by his father who knew someone, who knew an executive of the studio. Spielberg may have styled himself after his superiors, wearing ties and sweaters because that’s what the directors at Universal mostly wore, but beyond this fake-it-till-you-make-it impersonating, Spielberg’s early directing days were not quite the adventure tale that he and others have suggested. What do I make of Spielberg’s self-invention, his rewriting of his own history, by spinning this story in various forms from an interview in 1969 right through the 1980s?

How strangely Norman of Spielberg to invent a fictional past that downplays the participation of a father.

For his part, Jonathan Norman attempted to use as his defence a similarly implausible glamorous self-story, in which he was merely taking a script about a kidnapping to Spielberg, and that the items in his rape kit were props for the pitching session he and the director were about to have. Jonathan’s lawyer, John Lawson, qualified this strategy with the proposal that even though no such pitching session had been arranged, Jonathan innocently believed it had been, and therefore meant no harm to Spielberg. "Our legislators have not made it illegal to be weird, to have strange thoughts or to have strange fantasies," Lawson said in his opening statement.

Strange, misfit children turning to fantasy to find missing parents or more enriching parental-style relationships are a theme of much of Spielberg’s work, most obvious in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Empire of the Sun, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. In these Spielberg films, the quest for parental affection takes the lonely child outside his home, his species, his dimensions of time and space. Aliens, robots, inmates of Japanese prisoner of war camps, prehistoric dinosaurs, distant-future humanoids or the fantasy characters of JM Barrie.


Little boy lost, blinded by the light: Pinocchio Spielberg or Jonathan Norman?

Pinocchio, the artificial boy brought to life, boy-size and a dangerous adventure on the outside world by the magical beams of the Blue Fairy’s wand, is a base-mythology for much of Spielberg’s work. It was most explicitly the basis for A.I. Artificial Intelligence. When asked to choose a “master image” from his body of films, one that sums up all his work, Spielberg chose the shot (above) of the little boy from Close Encounters of the Third Kind looking through a doorway to see what Spielberg described as “beautiful but awful light coming through the doorway. And he’s very small, and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise and danger outside that door.” I see a lot of Pinocchio hovering over Spielberg himself, and not only because Roberto Benigni played Pinocchio soon after standing on the back of Spielberg’s chair when he won the Best Actor Oscar for Life Is Beautiful . Spielberg, the boy-man whose preternatural skills with child-actors is well-reported and who admitted, in 1982 aged 36 that he was “still a kid … why? I guess because I’m socially irresponsible and way down deep I don’t want to look the world in the eye. Actually, I don’t mind looking the world in the eye, as long as there’s a movie camera between us.”

Interesting word choice, as looking, eyes and movie cameras are the tools and objects of the messages of The Norman Heuristic. I watch, in Psycho, as Norman (as “Mother”) kills Marion soon after he has watched her undress, with apparent erotic interest, through a peephole in his parlour, which was revealed when he removed a painting (“Susannah and the Elders”) from the wall. The only stimulation I get from Joey Stefano’s porn career is via his visual cues of still and moving images as that’s all he left behind – his life was truncated and he didn’t produce a replicated dildo range (I can masturbate with “Jeff Stryker” without having to see his image). Much of the ample Psycho interpretive dialogue centres around scopophilia, the Gaze, and spectatorship, while Marion Crane was sensational at first for appearing before viewers in negligee, then for being stabbed in front of their eyes while naked in the shower. Steven “Spielbug” turned to looking down a camera to escape his adolescent isolation, and subsequently the light that shone through the celluloid of The Lost World in a Los Angeles cinema one night gave Jonathan Norman mystic dinosaur vision. Even Tom Cruise’s character in Spielberg’s Minority Report – a jaded detective who’s lost his family – has his eyeballs surgically replaced. An Oedipal analogy is unavoidable, as I see my constellation of Normans prying around for some kind of parental information and being blinded by the awesome flash of what they didn’t expect to see. I privilege the image in my analysis – I treasure it, take it seriously. If I can see it – be it a scene from a film, or the words on the page of a unauthorised celebrity biography, then it is, for me, a valid object of reference as I take Norman Bates’ advice and “make a mental picturisation” out of the anarchic kaleidoscope of The Norman Heuristic that swirls around in my head. Postmodern Pinnochios, the Normans create their own Blue Fairies, then set out to tear them limb from limb.

+=

Norman Bates + Joey Stefano = Andrew Cunanan?

During his Grand Jury testimony Steven Spielberg, identified in court transcripts as “John Doe”, said that he was frightened when he heard of Jonathan Norman and his plans:

He was on a mission and, had he not been-caught, he would have -- you know -thank god he was caught -- he would have completed his mission. I really felt my life was in-danger. ... I was frightened.

Spielberg was fortunate that his stalker was Jonathan, and not Andrew Cunanan, a peer of Jonathan’s whose obsession with Hollywood and skewered sense of filial identity resulted in the deaths of five people, including fashion mogul Gianni Versace, who Cunanan shot in 1997. Rumoured to have been a prostitute and an enthusiastic crystal meth user Cunanan was an appearance-changing serial killer who was on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list and who shot himself while holed up in a Miami houseboat in the days after Versace’s murder.

Cunanan was born in San Diego but, like Nick Iacona, changed his name (to Andrew de Silva, a strange and surely accidental echo of Albert de Salvo, the “Boston Strangler”) and became a flashy figure of the Californian gay scene (he partied in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco). Like Jonathan Norman, Cunanan invented numerous glamorous tales about his father, who was in fact an ex-sailor turned stockbroker who, in the spirit of Marion Crane, once embezzled $100,000. Also like Jonathan Norman, Cunanan preyed on a bearded, stocky celebrity multi-millionaire who had a reputation for youthful indulgences, a flashy output that was often criticized by conservative observers as superficial eye candy and who was a regular fixture on the Oscar red carpet.

Did Andrew Cunanan know Jonathan Norman? Did they buy their Joey Stefano pornos from the same store? What did Jonathan Norman think when he heard about the Versace murder on TV – did it embolden him, did he see Cunanan as a master-version of his nascent Tyrannosaurus baby-self? Friends of Cunanan claimed he had extreme S&M sexual tastes, and was fond of temporary asphyxiation and other quasi-tortuous scenes. They described him as a dominator: can you see the “Norman” in “dominator”?

Lana Turner was rejected for the role of Marion Crane in Psycho as she was considered too glamorous. In her memoir “Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller” Janet Leigh notes that Turner simply didn’t look like someone who would have lived and worked in Phoenix Arizona. Leigh’s costumes in the film were bought off the rack, “because that’s what Marion Crane could have afforded”. In her September 1997 “Vanity Fair” feature article on Cunanan Maureen Orth says that Cunanan’s victims “looked as if they had walked off a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box” and were from “upright, loving, midwestern families”. Characters on the helix of The Norman Heuristic add glitter to the ordinary; they blend and confuse Kellogg’s with Beluga, the Midwest with Hollywood, reality with fiction.

Approaching the eve of his killing of Versace, Cunanan’s tale grows ever-thicker with Norman-ness. Having grown tired of being the kept boy of wealthy Norman Blachford Cunanan moved to Miami, where he took up residence in a beach front hotel called the Normandy Plaza. On regular trips to San Francisco, Cunanan stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, a hotel name that, in the style of a cryptic-crossword clue, contains “Nor” and “Man”, schizophrenically divided and rearranged in reverse order. (An imagined example: 10 Across – Killer hotel manager with split personality, lurking at the edges.)

Like Norman Bates, Andrew Cunanan lived for a long time with his mother, and like Norman, who fed his mother cyanide, Cunanan treated his mother very badly. According to Orth, neighbours reported that Cunanan once slammed her “against a wall in such a way so hard that he dislocated her shoulder”. After Versace’s murder, Miami shopkeepers reported that Cunanan’s appearance constantly changed, that he may have occasionally dressed as a woman, and that he almost certainly wore wigs – maybe the same “cheap” wigs that Norman Bates bought so he could march around his family’s empty house dressed as his mother.

Just as Jonathan Norman described Spielberg as his “father”, Cunanan described his good friend and early victim Jeffrey Trail as his “brother”.

Cunanan too drew ever closer to Hollywood stars with whom he claimed imagined affiliation, but to who he bore malevolent intentions. According to Orth, Cunanan “fell all over television star Lisa Kudrow” at a paparazzi party, “insisting she get him a screen test”. When Kudrow ignored Cunanan and left without saying goodbye, Cunanan stormed around the party calling Kudrow a bitch. He met Hugh Grant in passing, then blamed the star when he wasn’t chosen for a walk-on role in one of Grant’s upcoming films. A one-night-stand of Andrew’s reported that Cunanan kept a bizarre shrine to Tom Cruise in his bedroom, and was jealously opposed to Cruise’s then wife, Nicole Kidman. Jonathan and Cunanan affected and made a mark on the celebrity world, with frightened Steven Spielberg changing his security arrangements and appearing in court, Elton John weeping uncontrollably at Versace’s funeral and Madonna publishing her Versace eulogy – which lists her fun times at the designer’s Lake Como villa attended by his staff of “Sri Lankan servants” who walked her dog Chiquita, her large stock of Versace jeans and the designer’s interest in yoga - in “Time” magazine.

Cunanan left behind a number of debts including a $40,000 bill at Neiman (Norman) Marcus, the exact amount stolen by Marion Crane. Like Marion, his body was dragged from an aquatic grave, his briney houseboat matching her swamp.

After Cunanan’s death, gay writers such as Gary Indiana and Michael Bronski indignantly attacked claims that Cunanan had been a prostitute, HIV-positive, and a regular user of porn and drugs, and lamented how writers such as Maureen Orth failed to resist a homosexual-pathologizing approach that deployed the well-trodden unstably-Oedipal underworld-dwelling junkie gay hustler template. Most probably, Andrew Cunanan’s real story is adrift somewhere between these two poles, but what is interesting to me that the “Vanity Fair” issue containing Orth’s Cunanan expose also features an article on film director Mimi Leder entitled “Spielberg’s Choice”. This article covers Spielberg’s championing of Leder, a female director, and his insistence that she direct two of his film company’s adventure thrillers, The Peacemaker and Deep Impact.

Published the month after Jonathan Norman was arrested and the month before Spielberg gave his Grand Jury testimony, this Norman-mixing issue of “Vanity Fair” delights me as it looks like The Norman Heuristic has crossed with majestic incognito into the print media, and made itself manifest.


The Normans had very unusual parents.

But the Norman parents ultimately eat their young. Though characters on the helix of The Norman Heuristic wield knives and duct tape, it’s their parent figures who ultimately have the last laugh, who prove to be the dominant personality. Jonathan Norman has no other claim-to-fame than as the “Spielberg stalker”, likewise, Cunanan is the “Versace murderer”, Nick Iacona became “Joey Stefano”, Anthony Perkins was forever typecast as “Norman Bates”, Norman Bates was “never all Norman, but often only Mother”. As Dr. Richmond (Simon Oakland, who also starred in Scandalous John and The Night Stalker) tells us at the end of Psycho with the proleptic prescience that is typical of The Norman Heuristic, “when the mind houses two personalities, there's always a conflict, a battle. In [the] Norman's case, the battle is over--and the dominant personality has won.”

“A son is a poor substitute for a lover,” says Norman Bates. To loosely quote Marion Crane, “he’d know, of course”. As noted previously, Norman Bates has a psychotically contradictory attitude to his “Mother”, similar to the one Jonathan Norman has with his “father”. Norman Bates lives in fear of his mother, he obeys her, but also, he poisons her and enacts her, controlling her image and copying her identity. Jonathan Norman reportedly idolised Steven Spielberg, and yearned for his paternal affections, while also believing that Spielberg wanted Jonathan to torture, rape and possibly murder him and his family. This unstable lethality is in turn contradicted by certain endearing qualities that both Normans have in abundance. They’re subservient to their parents, and this endearingly infantalizes them. They’re the kind of violent killers that I might want to take under my wing.

Hollywood chicks: Cate Blanchett (left) and Tippi Hendren (right)

Speaking of wings, the Norman-Sirens are calling again, with another odd Psycho/On Golden Pond verbal ripple, this time, an avian one. Psycho has a much-discussed “bird” sub-theme, with a character named Crane who comes from Phoenix, a man who stuffs birds for a hobby, Hitchcock’s next film was called The Birds, and so on. Norman Bates treats his mother – treats, literally, with embalming fluid – as he treats his collection of stuffed birds (Norman tells Marion that his mother is “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds”). On Golden Pond’s Mrs Thayer, whose life and marriage is metaphorically compared to the migratory patterns of water fowl, often calls her husband’s name as a prelude to a consideration of birds, as in, “Norman, the loons”, or “Norman, you old coot”. (A proleptic skein: in 2004 Katharine Hepburn was played by Cate Blanchett in The Aviator, “aviator” coming from the Latin avis, meaning bird; the movie has Blanchett-as-Hepburn flying a plane and features another plane called the Spruce Goose; during the film’s post-production Blanchett and her husband inspected various Sydney properties in search of a suitable home in which to raise their two young boys - a “nest”; Blanchett was considered for the role of Clarice Starling in Hannibal; she named her second son after the author of “The Maltese Falcon”; her first screen role was as the avian-named extra called Vivian in an Australian television series; she wore a much-photographed hummingbird dress by John Galliano for Christian Dior to the 1999 Academy Awards, the same year that Roberto Benigni jumped on the back of Steven Spielberg’s chair. Another one: in 1959, Mrs Venables – Katharine Hepburn’s character in Suddenly Last Summer – performs a lengthy monologue about flesh-eating black carrion birds, who hunt in flocks and tear strips of flesh from newly-hatched sea turtles waddling towards the water in the Encantadas, a creepy story that prefigures the seaside death-by-cannibals of her beloved gay-seeming son Sebastian and which also matches Mrs Bates’ rapacious silhouette appearing behind the shower curtain before diving with her “sharp beak” with lethal force onto Marion’s wet skin after Marion appeared to “threaten” Mrs Bates’ beloved sexually-suspicious son Norman.)

Praising Mimi Leder’s directing work on the television hospital drama “E.R.” (itself a one-letter removed referent from Spielberg’s masterpiece E.T.) Spielberg says that “her camera has wings”. During Jurassic Park, an archaeologist explains that dinosaurs, rather than becoming extinct, evolved into birds. He points out the similarities of the leg and hip structures and methods of perambulation of chickens with those of hind-leg standing breeds of dinosaurs. In March 2005, soft tissue recovered from a Tyrannosaurus bone was found to be identical in almost all respects to tissue removed from ostrich bones. A ticket-buying movie fan with a psychotic obsession who nearly breaks through Spielberg’s protective fence to prey on his flesh, Norman is like one of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors, stealthy bird-like killers initially created to appeal to the paying public who break through the electrified fence of their enclosure to become on the loose and on the hunt. “Getting stuffed” or “taking it like a turkey/chook” is slang for being sodomised. As a Dutch friend of writer Mark Simpson described his first experience of anal sex, “I felt like a turkey which is for Christmas being stuffed!” Jonathan hoped to immobilise Spielberg and “stuff him like a turkey”. He may have been looking to create a room full of immobilised Spielbergs, much like Norman Bates’ parlour, which is full of stuffed birds, or even one of the many publicity photos we’ve seen of Spielberg, posing with a rubber shark, alien or dinosaur. Jonathan insisted that Spielberg wanted to be raped, by Jonathan, and that such an advance was a regular act of filial love.

Jonathan’s psychosis is clear to me when I hear of his plans for Spielberg, and when I read Jonathan’s blasé incorporation of the bizarre I – and, I imagine, the jurors at his trial - react similarly to Marion Crane, who tries to keep a straight face during this exchange:

NORMAN:
My hobby is stuffing things--you know--taxidermy. And I guess I'd just rather stuff birds because I hate the look of beasts when they're stuffed--you know, foxes and chimps. Some people even stuff dogs and cats--but, oh, I can't do that. I think only birds look well stuffed because--well, because they're kind of passive to begin with.

MARION:
It's a strange hobby. Curious.

NORMAN:
Uncommon, too.

MARION:
Oh, I imagine so.

Like Norman Bates, Jonathan’s hobby/obsession is passive objects that require his enlightening touch. Both Normans wanted to stuff their idolised parent figure, immobilise it and then - as with Jonathan’s magazine collages and Norman’s “acting-out” of Mother, stick their imagined heads onto incongruous bodies. Both Normans draw easy metaphors between their parent figures and birds. And like Norman’s hobby, which “isn’t expensive, really, you know--needles and thread, sawdust. The chemicals are the only thing that cost anything”, Jonathan’s “rape kit” was an ad-hoc collection of hardware and sex shop oddments, most of which he already owned. Jonathan Norman, lurking to attack Spielberg with a blade, is like Norman Bates, rising from his celluloid grave to revenge attack Hitchcock’s successor Spielberg, who may have bit off more than he could chew when he invoked Norman-ity by employing strategies of parent-centric personal myth-making in the shadow of the Bates Motel set on the Universal Studios backlot. Birds of feather flock together, and so, for me, Spielberg’s ostensibly incongruous crossed-orbit with Jonathan Norman was actually fated; bound to happen. It’s as though Jonathan and Spielberg – linked on the asteroid belt of The Norman Heuristic – may have floated obliviously around each other indefinitely until the sudden bird (via dinosaur) conjunction in 1997 created a metaphysical fission that manifested as their almost-violent real life collision.

During Jonathan’s trial, one of his arresting officers, Manuel Hernandez, said that he chased Norman, who was carrying a curtain rod, over the lawns and fences of Spielberg’s neighbours. Jonathan hid under some bushes but was discovered by Hernandez, who ordered him to raise his hands. When Jonathan did this, he dropped his day planner and the cut-out photos of Spielberg scattered on the ground. Jonathan’s obsession was revealed accidentally, when he was overpowered and constricted in movement. His “disguise” collapses as tell-tale items he’d kept close to his chest fall in front of hostile observers. The tableau of Jonathan’s arrest is a magic visual quotation from Norman Bates’ apprehension, when Sam Loomis grabs him in the fruit cellar, and, wrestling the knife from his hand, dislodges Norman’s “Mother” wig and dress. In this scene, Lila (Vera Miles) acts on behalf of the audience, her facial expressions moving from sheer horror to confused fascination, as an all-to-strange dénouement takes shape before her eyes (in the script: Lila is not screaming. She is watching in disbelief as, in the ensuing struggle, the woman's wig falls off and the dress falls open, revealing the face and figure of Norman Bates). This image couplet also nicely double-decks the deaths of Marion Crane and Joey Stefano. It seems that everyone on the helix of The Norman Heuristic meets their end with akimbo-armed confusion, having been panicked into frantic flight before plunging lifelessly and getting dragged away from the scene – just like the final moments of many unlucky game birds.

Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, left) and Anthony Perkins (r)

Also at Jonathan Norman’s trial, Markowich said he remembered questioning Jonathan on his appearance on the day of the planned attack. He asked Jonathan, who “normally wore pressed, cotton dress shirts”, why he was going out in a black tracksuit, with gaffer tape and handcuffs strapped around his waist. “I’m going for the Rambo look,” Jonathan responded before setting out to Spielberg’s estate.

Also hiding behind the vestments of a film character is Anthony Perkins, the nervy star of Friendly Persuasion who was typecast as the crazy killer after playing Norman Bates in Psycho. Though he married and raised two children, Anthony was also attracted to men, and he reportedly had affairs with Rudolph Nureyev and Tab Hunter, a B-movie star who appeared in movies such Operation Bikini, Lust In The Dust, Gun Belt, Ride the Wild Surf – titles, incidentally, that sound like the kind of movie you’d find a performer like Joey Stefano. Like Jonathan preparing for his attack on Spielberg, during the filming of Psycho Anthony Perkins was part of a cloaked and costumed, covert and queer operation that would eventually surprise his colleagues and fans. Paul Jasmin, close friend of Perkins said that “even though Tony was a friend, what he was doing was a complete mystery, very hush-hush. Tony thought he was in the middle of making the career move of his life, and he was right.”

For me, the departure of the Normans onto their strange, secretive quests doubles back onto Spielberg’s “master image” of the Close Encounters boy at the light-filled doorway. In turn, I can’t help but think of Spielberg “dressing up” like a movie director before he made it big, or Marion packing her bag with outfits then changing from white underwear to black in the first act of Psycho, or Joey Stefano wearing nothing but a hard on.

Where does The Norman Heuristic begin and end, what is its master object, and what does it look like - a grid, a net, a helix, or one of M.C. Escher’s impossible structures? The image that matches it best, I think, is this:


HIV reverse transcriptase or a 3-D model of The Norman Heuristic?

This is a 3D-rendering of reverse transcriptase, the key viral enzyme of HIV. In it, I see Jonathan Norman and Norman Bates as the yellow and green inter-twisted central ribbons, Andrew Cunanan is the series of dark red dots in the top left, the clump of twisting sky blue ribbons can be Hollywood, containing Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Marion Crane and porn stars like Joey Stefano, the pendulous lilac twirls at the bottom right are the proleptic skeins, and so on. Note how they all touch each other through each other; distinct but codependent. This enzyme interacts with other intricately structured polymerases in human DNA and is itself part of a larger entity, which is in turn contained within a protein envelope, which floats in blood and semen, which have their own kaleidoscopic structures.

Reverse transcriptase is the enzyme in HIV which allows the virus to convert its viral RNA into DNA, which then enters the nucleus of the host immune-system cell and is integrated into that cells genetic material. Reverse transcriptase, as its name suggests, reverses the normal order of genetic coding. After the retrovirus HIV enters the body, it heads for the T-helper cells, which are located in the lymphoid tissues. Then, the following process takes place.

Not only do I see the 3D model of reverse transcriptase as an evocative rendering of The Norman Heuristic, I believe The Norman Heuristic works along the lines of the crucial HIV enzyme, performing reverse transcription on my ability to process visual messages. Once “infected” in this way, like an infected immune system cell, I’m unaware that I’ve been reprogrammed, and I continue to think and form ideas in the, well, image of The Norman Heuristic.

Barthes identifies the following three basic steps of the photographic message. Emission, which is the photo itself, the photographer and his camera, transmission, for example the newspaper or the magazine that carries a copy of the photo, and reception - readers of the publication who see the photo.

Barthes proposed that as though the meaning ascribed to an image is dependent on this process, and that therefore the image is an autonomous object, no image is an “isolated structure”, as each of step of the photographic message chain is in communication with at least one of the others. In other words, a photo of Jonathan Norman with his arms folded is merely a photo of a man, probably taken by a friend (emission), put on a website (transmission) and then seen by me (reception). My reaction to the photo is out of the photo’s control, in a way, but then, if it hadn’t been transmitted, I’d have not had the chance to react to it in the first place. Thus, my reception of a photo of Jonathan Norman is dependent on its transmission, though the photo itself remains an autonomous object. The meaning of the photo, then, comes from the image process, not the photo itself.

This process, however, is reversed and mutated in the retroviral workings of The Norman Heuristic. The Norman Heuristic contains its own reverse transcriptase enzyme that works not at cellular level but instead on memory and metaphysics.

The Norman Heuristic has a similar life-cycle to HIV, in the way that it penetrates and recodes Barthesian image processing, confusing and collapsing the roles and interactions of the source of emission, the channel of transmission and the point of reception until they no longer know who they are and disappear under the ever-increasing presence of The Norman Heuristic. Once infected with The Norman Heuristic, as I have become, it’s impossible for me to identify a chain or process that ascribes meaning to an image, indeed, it becomes impossible to identify when an image is still an image, and at what point it has become an idea. In The Norman Heuristic, each image is merely a mask of every other image; though each may appear before my eyes on its own, I receive them like the passing fibreglass horses of a rotating fairground carousel, one cascading into the next in an ever-turning, serpent’s-tail passage.