Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(40)
Twenty-two
They started the day with the shower scene. Poor Janet, a good girl really, regular and law-abiding, though not above the occasional sex and tumble with a married man in her lunch hour, succumbing to a momentary temptation and stealing forty thousand dollars. Pursued, suspected, she clings to her last vestiges of calm and is almost clean away. Then in the storm she takes a wrong turn and checks into the Bates Motel.
The day school audience responded the way audiences were programmed to do: the insistent, keening music, stabbing at the ears, the slash and cut of blade, the absurd figure of the attacker, all-powerful, unreal; shot after shot of the woman’s body, naked, falling, cut after cut; blood on the shower curtain, blood on the tiles; her face, unmoving, the open, staring eye; blood merging with the flow of water, running away.
Poor Janet.
The lights came up on sixty, seventy people sitting there, the smaller auditorium; some with notebooks opened on their laps, some with cups of coffee cooling in their hands. Mostly women, young to early middle-age, a scattering of men: teachers, media students, specialists from the caring professions, academics, a phalanx of hard-core lesbian feminists, the obligatory few crazies, lost already in their own impenetrable agendas, a shaven-headed young woman exhibiting a fetishistic interest in body piercing and tattoos, a nun.
“What we’ve just been watching,” the first speaker pronounced, “is the classic scene of ritual punishment, ritual cleansing. The female protagonist has transgressed the laws of her male-dominated world. The camera, while delighting in her sexuality—remember the first shots in the film, almost like a contemporary advertisement for Wonderbra, the way they emphasize her wantonness, the size and shape of her breasts, lying there on the bed while her lover gets dressed—the camera still punishes her for it. And us, as audience. Having pried on her, involved us in her secret activity, aroused us with her sexuality, it becomes her attacker, the movements of the camera becoming those of the knife, taking us, whether we want to or not, deep down into the cut.
“But Hitchcock being Hitchcock, extreme chauvinist that he was, these extremes of punishment that we witness, and in which we are forced to participate, are not carried out by a man. As the end of the film makes clear, it is only when Norman Bates is taken over by the other half of his divided personality, the mother half, that these murderous impulses come to the surface. Norman didn’t kill the Janet Leigh figure, Norman’s mother did. It is the female, the feminine side of our nature that is the site of evil here, the blood is on our hands.”
It was some seven minutes short of eleven o’clock. Before the first break at noon, they would see brief extracts from Hellraiser, Dressed to Kill, and Hallowe’en. In the afternoon there were separate seminars, running simultaneously, one on women’s fiction—In the Cut, The End of Alice, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Zombie—the other devoted to sado-masochism and the fetishization of the female body in high fashion. Everyone would come back together at the end of the day for a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, followed by a final question and answer session and discussion.
Sister Teresa had brought sandwiches and a thermos of tea and sat on one of the low walls outside the media center, talking to a lecturer from Trent University and an earnest young man with a disturbing look of Anthony Perkins about him, who was in his first year of studying video and film. The person she really wanted to talk to was the bald woman with the wonderful tattoos.
“Aren’t you the one who does that radio program?” the lecturer asked suddenly, her eyes brightening. “Sister something-or-other, is that you?”
Teresa smiled apologetically and did her best to deflect the question.
Why was it, she thought, people were always so fascinated with nuns? Especially today, when there was all that sex and repression up there on the screen? At least they weren’t showing Black Narcissus, that was something to be grateful for. Although in a rash moment a year or so back, Sister Bonaventura had confessed that it was Kathleen Byron’s portrayal of a nun in that film which had persuaded her into holy orders, the messianic look of jubilation in her face before throwing herself to her death.
Sister Teresa’s other colleague from their order, Sister Marguerite, would be attending that afternoon, specifically to go to the seminar on fetishism and fashion; after prayers that morning, she had threatened to break with protocol and go along wearing her traditional habit. See what they have to say about that!
Hannah and Jane were sitting just inside the Café Bar, sharing a crowded table with Mollie Hansen and several other members of the Broadway staff.
“So what do you think?” Mollie asked, spooning chocolatey froth from her cappuccino toward her mouth. “The turnout. You pleased?”
“Why, yes,” Jane said, excited. “Aren’t you? I mean, I never thought … I suppose fifty, you know, that would have been terrific. Saturday, people away. But this, well, there must be getting on for eighty, don’t you think?”
“Sixty-nine.” Mollie matter-of-fact, chocolate or no chocolate.
“Are you sure? I would have thought … But, well, it’s still good; it is, isn’t it? Okay? I mean, you are pleased?
“Oh, yes. Yes, it’s fine.”
“I thought it got us off to a good start,” Hannah said. “The first session. She had some really interesting things to say. Don’t you think that’s right?”