Norman-clature
What’s in a name? Apologies to any readers who are named Norman, but let’s be honest: the name is a geeky and cruel christening. More significantly, the name Norman is a word that is one letter away from being completely normal, and if another letter of the name is made translucent, the name can suggest a somehow retrograde adult male, a No_man, a stunted, stranded identity that has passed beyond boyhood into some kind of warped pubescence that blocks him from ever growing into a man.

In two movies, disparate films made twenty years apart, hoary-voiced matriarchs use their weaker male companions’ names them by calling for them in condescending, raspy repetition. 

“Nor-man!” barks Mrs. Bates, the spectral resident of the Psycho house, dragging her son’s two-syllable name into a gravelly quasi-sentence as she issues him bloody directives and derogatory put-downs. As his mother, we can assume she named her son Norman, and so it must be malicious relish she takes when she uses it as a pejorative.

Mrs. Bates - who only ever yells out her son's name like it's a curse word and then at other times deliberately manipulates her son’s name when she pronounces it, dropping the “r” from the first syllable of the name, then substituting the last three letters of Norman’s name, which spell “man”, with an infantilisation of that word (“boy”) when she barks: “No_boy, I tell you no!” Indeed, she regularly addresses her adult son with “boy” when addressing her Psycho-sexually developmentally stunted son and drives her point home at one point with the put down that as a “boy”, he doesn’t have “the guts” to do something, as, we presume, she believes a man would.

Indeed, given that at the end of the movie we don’t get any of Norman’s story from Norman (we get it “from his mother” – as self-styled psychiatric expert Dr Richmond tells us in the film’s penultimate scene), and given that the mother (female) side of Norman has long been the dominant part of his psyche and has taken complete control over his mind and body regularly for decades, and since by movie’s end whatever skeins of Norman’s identity that he had left to himself have been completely “taken over” by his mother side to the point that when a policeman hands him a blanket he says thank you most politely in his mother’s conspicuously female voice there’s a sense that behind the cloak of his male physicality, Norman Bates is actually a female – a no man, specifically, his mother. In a sense, then, Sheriff Chambers' disgusted croak that “(Norman’s) a transvestite”, though it may not have seemed a very worldly observation and isn't fully correct actually wasn’t too far off the mark.

Incidentally, Norman Bates was not a transvestite, as know-it-all Dr. Richmond duly corrects Sheriff Chambers, but had Dr. Richmond seen the huge grin of excitement on Norman’s face when Norman appears in full flight dressed as Mrs. Bates to satiate his blood lust and stab Lila to death in the fruit cellar, he may not have so quickly dismissed the Sheriff’s observation with the rebuttal that a man who dresses in women’s clothes to obtain some sort of pleasure of gratification was a transvestite. When glum, workaday Norman burst in to kill Lila he never looked so ready-to-be-gratified!

Anyway, Mrs. Bates’ voice was never voiced by Anthony Perkins, but 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. So, Anthony Perkins did not “speak” for Mrs. Bates, indeed, even when Norman Bates calls out "Oh Mother, blood" and so on when he discovers Marion's body after the shower scene, the bass line of Anthony Perkins' vocal track was removed, at Hitchcock’s request, to make Norman sound more “adolescent”. Oddly, though the afore-mentioned half-a-dozen different actors provided Mrs. Bates’ ever-changing voice (it never really sounds exactly the same each time she speaks, and the thank-you-for-the-blanket voice of the film-closing monologue is especially eerily different from every other Mrs. Bates voice we’ve heard in the film to that point), every time she says “No”, “No, boy” or “Norman”, Mrs. Bates’ voice sounds exactly the same.

Mrs. Bates’ use of the name Norman reverberates its way through the celluloid decades to come out the mouth of 1981's On Golden Pond’s Ethyl Thayer (played by Katharine Hepburn) who - with Hepburn’s imperious vibrato - repeatedly barks 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 increasingly tenuous manhood. Her husband is becoming old and frail, and while she has transferred with linear ease into healthy and vibrant grand family matriarch, he is struggling - sometimes with much embarrassment - to hold onto his lost virility and diluted masculinity. And, on top of time moving ever-forward and him having one foot sinking increasingly deep in the grave, Norman is being dragged backwards in time by the needs of his daughter (Jane Fonda) who is chasing his forever-withheld love and finally wins his respect by diving into a pond as he wanted her to do decades ago when she was a child. Elemental Ethyl is at one with Time, while Norman is Time’s passive plaything, his genitalia dangling embarrassingly as Time pulls one of his legs in one direction, and one in the other.

Unlike Norman Bates, we assume that Norman Thayer was called Norman long before he met his wife, but Ethyl has evidently figured out long ago she can use her husband’s name as a hierarchical control tool. Ethyl delights in using her husband’s name over and again when he has crashed a boat or collapsed with angina to ensure that the humiliating event and he and his name are not to be separated and when she tires of using ”Norman” she substitutes withering terms-of-endearment such as “loon” and “coot".

But like Golden Pond’s loons, who return every season, and like Psycho’s corpse-filled swamp, there’s more to this story. A dredge through the watery depths of our proleptic couplet of crotchety Norman-croaking unveils not only another Norman couplet - this one fourty years apart and magically breaching the membrane between celluloid and the physical world - but one which plugs into a seemingly bottomless matrix that unites ostensibly unconnected people, events and ideas and ultimately, suggests some kind of alchemy.

The Norman Heuristic
The Norman Heuristic is an elaborate intertextual cat’s-cradle, a tangled metro map that begins with imagination and coincidence but flowers into something oddly tangible. 

Mrs. Bates and Mrs.Thayer’s Norman-calling create a double-decker set of what pioneering scholar 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 ostensibly faint connections to form what Roland Barthes 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 but when they land they form a meaningful, if inscrutable, heap and, to paraphrase Wayne Koestenbaum, contradictory realms of experience, time and space converge.

The two Normans of The Norman Heuristic are like Cosmic twins. They never met – they never could have – but they are like brothers, soul mates. Both of unhinged and murderous mind, they waited spiderlike for their prey, which they’d attached themselves to in Pschotic ways. Unlike so many never-found murderers, the Normans are undone by their fatal flaws and don't get away with their crimes, even though they never really feel ultimately responsible for their actions.  Nevertheless, they both ended up incarcerated. Also, they both have ambiguous sexualities, and both are held firm in the orbits of legendary movie directors. Both drift in and out of a celluloid skin, but corporeality too: the fictional Norman was based on a real-life mass murderer, while the actual Norman spent his days dressing as Rambo and living much of his adulthood deluded that he was a dinosaur baby from the film Jurassic Park.

Meet the Normans

The Normans of The Norman Heursitic are Norman Bates, the Psycho killer we’ve already met, and Jonathan Norman, a dude from West Hollywood currently serving twenty-five years-to-life in a Californian prison for stalking and planning to torture and rape Steven Spielberg in 1997.

Look how “Norman” forms parentheses, or bookends, around their names when you place their names next to each other: 

Norman Bates Jonathan Norman. 

It also forms a joint middle name when you place their names next to each other and conflate the duplicated “Norman”: 

Jonathan Norman Bates. 

We could go on with the anagrammatic possibilities of Mr. Perkins’ first name and Mr. Norman’s first (Jonathan and Anthony are just a few letters short of being anagrams of each other and they are more similar t-h-a-n any other pair of random male names, and apart from the y and the j – letters often interchangeable in languages that share linguistic roots, for example, yes (English) and ja (German) and y and j have a similar shape when written in lower case – both first names are comprised of exactly the same set of letters), and so on but beyond this scrimmaging lies a rich weave of immanent and interpretive intra-messages that creates and uncanny continuity between the identities of the two Normans, and practically every single person or object that either ever had or have had anything to do with.

Norman Bates 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 lived quietly out of town but once he had lured victims to his home, decapitated them, decorated his house with their corpses, and made suits out of their skins. Bloch’s novel was adapted by screenwriter Joseph Stefano for Alfred Hitchock’s 1960 film, Psycho. 

Norman Bates is the Ur Gein-character: his cinematic 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 (because he killed them), 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. Oh, and, he keeps the embalmed corpse of his mother in the fruit cellar, dressing up occasionally in a wig and a dress and speaking in her voice, and doing as she “commands” by violently killing any nubile female who pulls into the motel car park and arouses his shameful desires. The chthonic wormholes 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. The number one was Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs’ skin-stripping killer, another Gein hand-me-down. 

(Perhops it’s also just a coincidence that Anthony Perkins and Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs, all but share the same name.)

Jonathan Norman was sentenced in 1998 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. Found in Norman’s car were collages featuring cutout pictures of Spielberg’s head stuck 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. Allegedly, 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 immobilized then sexually assaulted by him, in a watered-down version of Jeffrey Dahmer’s automata attacks. 

Though Norman didn’t harm Spielberg, his two prior arrests won him a heavy sentence – the charge was 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.

Welcome to the Norman Hall of Mirrors
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 the promising start of Psycho, to only 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 Stephano

He was was credited as screenwriter on the 1998 remake of Psycho, appropriately since little changes were made to his original 1960 script. In other words, his name is not an especially famous one, certainly not comparable with the extremely famous names involved in the production of the film based on his script for Psycho. 

Though, his name rings a bell with another Joseph Stefano from Philadelphia who burnt brightly but faded quickly: 1990s gay porn megastar Joey Stefano.

Working the Philadelphia streets as a hustler while still his teens, and from a father-absent broken home (something essential for all players in the Norman Heuristic), 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.

Joey Stefano

For a couple of years in the early 1990s, Joey Stefano was not only one of gay porn’s biggest names but an iconic and historically important figure in his field whose persona and performance style came along just at the right time and altered the trajectory of his industry. A trailblazing “bottom”, Joey Stefano was the first gay porn star who specialised in enthusiastically receptive anal sex, and whose movies followed him in this quest. oey’s model-material beauty was softened by a hairless body not overworked by lifting weights and he had a subtle femininity to his sexual persona, separate from the fact that he like being fucked in the ass. He was the flipside to the gruff machismo of his predecessors, a long line of hugely-built, “straight-acting tops” who – cast as factory mechanics or truck drivers - gruffly and mercilessly gave their docile partners “just what they deserve, y-eeah”. Pre-Joey, the sexual pleasure belonged to the hyper-iconic macho men and the camera’s focus was on their (invariably massive) dicks and the valiant passivity of their brutalized partners. At around the time when “gay” became “queer”, taking it in the ass became a political badge of honour, and Village People role-play fell quickly out of date and the top-heavy gay porn classics from the seventies and eighties took on a retro look. Joey became the gay porn world’s first-ever bottom superstar (and more about that later).

Joey’s porn identity was indistinguishable from his private personality and his massive drug addictions, destructive relationships and fast-lane friendships with entrepreneurial drag queens are well documented. Joey also evolved into a top-shelf male escort: his porn movies served as handy advertising as he charged around $500 per hour per client and he famously said he charged double “if they wanted me to move”. Joey appeared in Madonna’s “Sex” book and was allegedly considering a serious acting or modeling career when he died in Los Angeles on November 26, 1994 (two months and three days after Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel Psycho, died in Los Angles), 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.

Special Guest Star!
So, Joseph Stefano, Hollywood screenwriter of yore, is connected to Norman Bates through Psycho, and Jonathan Norman’s exploits were along the lines of Norman Bates. Joey Stefano was a peer of Jonathan Norman – they may have even met or met eyes across a Santa Monica Blvd bar! -  and of course in name he matches Joseph Stefano, who of course shares close intertextual synthesis with both Psycho's Norman Bates and now, with our special guest star! 

Please welcome our special guest and Norman Bates' first victim, Marion Crane.

Clothes hearses
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, sometimes through the peepholes of porn theatres, sometimes through metaphoric peepholes while partner or parents are out of the house. 

As a porn star Joey Stefano's body was subject to such frenzied ocular attention via his work. The star of around three dozen porn features in which he played characters who discarded all their garments as early in each scene as possible, Joey gleefully allowed his naked body to be filmed in all forms of close up and intimate detail to be spied on by seen and countless seen and unseen observers. But Joey's exhibitionism saw him naked off-the-job a lot of the time as well. In his biography of Joey, Charles Isherwood reported that Joey didn't bother to put on a robe or even a pair of shorts or underpants to conduct on-set interviews, sitting fully nude, sometimes with one leg up on the arm of the chair, and often with an erection, explaining to the journalist that nudity was part of his workplace and as for the erection, “I’m always horny. There’s hot guys around. I’m naked”. Joey even died in the nude, and the cover of Isherwood's book is filled with a wraparound photo of Joey wearing nothing but a pair of tube socks. Like Princess Diana (who was, unlike Joey, conspicuously, perpetually dressed), porn stars are like silent film stars - they aren't remembered for anything they may have said (beyond maybe one or two classic lines) but instead, are remembered by their appearance and so, Joey is remembered as a nude person - few people who think of Joey, surely, would picture him wearing clothes.

Not quite so willingly exhibitionist but equally clothing-avoidant was Marion Crane, whose first appearance sees her wearing nothing but a set of white lingerie (considered at the time of the film's release to be as explicit and vulgar as a full frontal nude scene in a film today) and then in her penultimate scene she strips down to black underwear which she then removes before stepping into the fateful shower completely naked. Not only was she under the ominous eye of Norman Bates at the time, but has since been seen nude from various camera angles and - twisting and wriggling to escape Mrs. Bates' knife -  in various body positions, 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 an almost fifty year period. Her part in the movie ends with her lying naked, dead in a bathtub - just like Joey - with the camera famously closing in on her  eyeball. The best she gets for a funeral outfit is a couple of white sheets hastily wrapped around her naked corpse and even they probably came loose somewhere between the bumpy drive to the swamp and the subsequent clunky immersion in the water. In between the white bra and the black one Marion wears the same drab gray suit all the way from her escape from work to her parlour conversation with Norman Bates. Marion then, like Joey, is remembered for her lack of clothes.

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 unique lunar phase for porn stars that 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 shadow Joey’s final moments in the style of 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 (would they have covered their mouth in shock like Norman Bates when they encountered the scene?) 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 complained that the shower nozzle in Crystal’s shower was 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, and so 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 its famously shower nozzle 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, Joey Stefano “hop[ped] on a bus, unsure what he would find, but sure he had to go” and “arriv[ed] 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, 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. In their doomed flights to better futures, Marion became Marie Samuels, Nick Iacona became Joey Stefano and the rest - and them themselves as well - are history.

Joey Stefano 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, there is a deliberate 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. 

Turn offs
Joey’s particular appeal to contemporary gay porn audiences was his synch with a changing gay to queer mood, while Psycho’s notorious innovation was the first-act murder of a popular star who audiences had been led to believe was playing the lead role.

Yet, since Joey's death, and in any subsequent viewing of Psycho, viewers of either Joey or Marion remain as involved as ever in their on-screen exploits and engage, empathise and become excited by what Joey and Marion do, all the while completely aware that both meet grisly, premature deaths. Marion Crane is a likeable character, and despite knowing that she departs at the end of the first act in a pool of blood, during repeated viewings of Psycho, who doesn’t empathise when Marion furrowes her brow from a headache, or quietly giggle at her polite avoidance of getting too involved with the totally annoying office secretary (played by Pat Hitchcock, the director’s daughter)? Repeated viewers are still interested in her clandestine love affair, also, and still worry she may be busted for stealing the $40,000, or busted by the bug-eyed traffic cop, even though they know that given what's in store for her, jail time for embezzlement was probably the best thing that could have happened to her. In Joey’s case, fans 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 a little too much what viewers are watching him do. 

Kaja Silverman observed in “The Subject of Semiotics” that “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”. Viewers become engrossed in Marion’s quest to free herself from office servitude and illicit love, and are anxious to see how her efforts turn out. They like her: she’s the character they “side with” for the first third of the film. For the most part, she doesn't generate any antipathy and up to the shower scene, she’s easy for audiences to identify with. But as Marion’s death is preceded by her conspicuous displays of semi-nudity, after her murder audiences are yanked from feeling comfortably intimate with Marion to sensing a kind of guilt, like they've invaded the poor woman’s privacy. Into the swamp and out of the movie for good, she's no longer the audience's alter-ego and so all that comfortable staring at her while she undid her bra strap, stepped into the shower naked, did things that she - and we - hope we're doing privately, suddenly seems like snooping, much like creepy Norman Bates, peering at Marion through his peephole. But, when Mrs. Bates' knife takes an ownership over Marion’s body, which despite Marion's best efforts, is cornered and cannot escape the invasive thrusting, the audiences eyes, hitherto skimming casually up and down Marion's exposed body, find they've been tricked - you haven't been seeing someone just like you doing normal things, you've been watching a kind of snuff film.

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, marked by the appearance then sudden death of Joey, 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. Also, Pre-Stefano, it was the penis not the anus that was the site of a somewhat self-denying ocular worship, but with and post-Stefano, gay porn characters were allowed to seek and enjoy being fucked in the ass, rather than serve another man's cock-needs. Christopher 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 1994, 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 form of reality check – a fly in the ointment of the Gay Pride Parade. Joey’s adventures in drugs and anal eroticism were glamorous and powerful; but his resultant HIV infection and problems with addiction and empty celebrity were the worm-tunneled compost on the underside of the log.

Joey Stefano, like Marion Crane, only became fully “understood” to audiences after their sudden, premature deaths, as 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 enjoying equally - and perhaps even more - the new, semi-snuff narrative. In death - like a mini Monroe or Dean - Joey's persona shifted slightly from brooding hero to die-young martyr, but unlike other died-young tragiques, you could watch Joey take it in the ass and groan then cum whenever you wanted to sip one of his movies into your DVD player. Joey Stefano’s death increased his popularity with newer gay 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 resurrection 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.

As with Marion, posthumous Joey’s image is still geared to arouse a viewer, who enjoys watching Joey writhe and groan with mordant ecstasy while in the process of – almost literally - “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.

If Norman Bates enters the tale at this point, the two-way intra-textual chorograph of Joey-Marion turns into a threesome. 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, and viewers must develop some sort of instant amnesia regarding Marion's plotline. Norman too, has to forget Marion and carry on business as usual. Consumers of the late Joey Stefano’s porn films swallow Joey’s persona, which becomes temporary masturbation aid. But like Norman, they must construct an amnesia around their understandings of Joey’s death in order to enjoy tumescent pleasures and maintain emotional equilibrium during detumescent recovery.

A return to Normanity
Of course, in the plot of Psycho, Norman Bates does enter the tale around the time of Marion’s death. When blond, female Marion is yanked out of view, dark-haired, male Norman’s absorption of her prominence in the narrative works like a smooth, photo-negative baton-pass (note how their first names are also slightly jumbled mirror-images of each other – Norman can justifiably claim to not be who he appears to be and if she anagrammatically chooses too, Marion can concur with  “Nor am I”). The moment Marion’s car looks like it won’t sink into the swamp Norman Bates takes the movie over completely and becomes the anti-hero of Psycho audiences. 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. We don’t care too much about what happens to Sam and Lila, beyond hoping that they return to Norman and his motel so we can see more of Norman.

Jonathan Norman – remember him – suddenly “takes over” from the now dead Joey Stefano too, coming into prominence, like Norman Bates, very soon after his predecessor fell from this narrative several paragraphs earlier. As Norman replaces Marion's petty crimes with mass violent murder, 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 simply a mildly-immoral precursor to the real demons 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, interrupted an expectant mood  and propelled expectations backwards to a place of confusion and dread. 

Jonathan Norman is a descendant of Joey Stefano who inherited all his precursors worst genes in amplified form. He could probably have easily matched Joey’s notes of alienation and aimless despair but had 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 and a set of sex-cuffs.

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. Who knows the contents of Jonathan Norman’s porn collection, if he had one, but if he did, it’s reasonable to surmise that a Joey Stefano title 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 in Los Angeles (others include Greenwich Village or Chelsea in New York, or Darlinghurst in 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.

With apologies to the penultimate scene in Psycho, where the psychologist rattles of Norman’s pathology: 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. For Jonathan, all this alterity collapsed into an identity that recognized his star worship and therefore the specialness of the famous while at the same time that it made him feel a tangible sense of affiliation and similarity to the star. Jonathan Norman may have enjoyed Joey Stefano’s celebrity but at the time sensed that he couldactually 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.

Jonathan modelling, left, and just looking handsome, right

Jonathan Norman and Norman Bates share little physical similarity but they are both ostensibly, well, cute and likeable in a pitiable kind of way. 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 evil 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, spider analogies are not yet apparent 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. 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. 

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 starred 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. In the role, Vaughn creates a fittingly complete post-Normans hybrid: Norman Bates inside Jonathan Norman’s body.) The Lost World 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 – colleagues, perhaps, of Joey Stefano), a fight the pair had over dirty laundry, and Jonathan losing his wallet. Norman Bates and Jonathan Norman 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 even his parents thought him strange.

Taken in isolation Spielberg’s grand jury testimony and this recent biographical information is not especially unusual but in the context of The Norman Heuristic 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 tale: 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 had been a concrete wall that separated Spielberg from the Norman predators. And how strangely Norman of Spielberg to invent a fictional past that downplays the participation of a father.

There are more intra-textual links that suck Spielberg into The Norman Heuristic. For example, 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) and there's always the popular anecdote of a young Spielberg escaping from a Universal Studios backlot tour, and 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, rather like the scene in Psycho where Norman Bates, imperious and windswept outside the mansion’s front door, looked down with disdain as private detective Arbogast yells out in vain for Norman, who he can't find. 

Like a lot of what comes out of Norman Bates' mouth, 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 - presumably - 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 we 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?

The Normans have unusual parents

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. 

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 the core myth that informs 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.”  

There's 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, spying eyes and movie cameras are the tools and objects of the messages of The Norman Heuristic. We 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 possible 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 as a bottom he didn’t produce a replicated dildo range (you 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, and 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 the constellation of Normans are forever prying around for some kind of parental information and being blinded by the awesome flash of what they didn’t expect to see. Postmodern Pinnochios, the Normans create their own Blue Fairies, then set out to tear them limb from limb.

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 cosmic 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. 

Anthony Perkins + Joey Stefano = Andrew Cunanan?

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 sex 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”. Why do all the 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 man named 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”. 

Andrew Cunanan dead

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 even 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. Oh look at that - that’s the exact amount stolen by Marion Crane. And 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 is 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.

For the birds
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 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”.     

In 2004 Katharine Hepburn was played by Cate Blanchett in The Aviator – the word “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, a moment we revisitied earlier. 

In 1959, Mrs. Venable – 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. 

“Getting stuffed” or “taking it like a turkey/chook” is also 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.

In disguise
Jonathan Norman’s psychosis is apparent given his plans for Spielberg, and his blasé incorporation of the bizarre. 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. 

Both Normans draw easy metaphors between their parent figures and birds (remember, dinosaurs descened frm 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, they say, 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 at least one of the helix belts 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.

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 forever 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, Jonathan Norman fitting up as Rambo, or Joey Stefano wearing nothing but a hard on.

In the 1997 film Contact (starring Jodie Foster who co-starred in The Silence of the Lambs and who had her own stalker in John(athan) Hinckley who tried to impress Foster by assassinating then-President Ronald Reagan, whose last feature film was titled The Killers) a message from outside Earth arrives in the form of drab and ostensibly unusable monotones that hum out prime number sequences over and again. But, when technicians and sound experts interrogate the message and break its droning sound waves up into particles they find it originated as a powerful radio transmission from Nazi Germany that has been amplified by an advanced alien civilisation and returned to Earth encoded with an intricate matrix comprised of tens of thousands of pages dotted with alien hieroglyphics which can only connect meaningfully when, as a character in the film played by John Hurt points out, you think across "multiple levels and multiple dimensions".

When Ethyl Thayer returned Mrs. Bates' decades-old call, did she invoke a similar matrix?