It’s a temptation that few directors can resist. Are you making a film about loneliness and isolation? About what remains of the American dream if you scratch a little beyond the surface? Hop, borrowing from painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967). He can show all those things like no other, in a single image. How many movie characters have sat through him sadly at night at a diner bar, filmed from the outside through the window, like his most famous painting Nighthawks?
People who are lonely in their apartments, leave gas stations: Hopper’s paintings could all be stills from one full-length film about America, wrote German director Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas), who looked closely at Hopper’s work to shape his America. His colleague Antonioni was inspired by the artist, as was David Lynch and everyone else who ever made a film or television series about worrisome house or office wives in the 1950s. Hopper determined the image of films that were iconic for America.
The director most closely related to Hopper is Alfred Hitchcock. Both love to peek at characters who appear to be just sitting behind the window, while in the meantime something threatens or shimmers. What, that depends on the perverse fantasy of the viewer. Perhaps.
Think of Norman Bates as a character from a Hopper painting, gave Psychoscreenwriter Joseph Stefano collaborated with actor Anthony Perkins. As a motel owner, voyeur and mother’s boy, he also hangs around and is just as lonely, isolated and trapped. Hitchcock based the Victorian house in which he lives on House by the Railroad (1925). Hopper’s house stands out lonely against a blue sky; it is the white, bathed in yellowish sunlight, with a cast shadow that falls exactly over the entrance. A house with a personality. Has it been abandoned? Faded glory due to the arrival of those rails that cut the image horizontally?
into the house Psycho is also isolated by progress: a new highway means no more people pass by. It’s dark, but the resemblance is striking: Hitchcock films it from the same angle, it has the same shape, the same portico and it looks just as lonely. And like Hopper’s house, it’s a character unto itself – a dark shadow in the lashing rain or against haunting cloudy skies, towering over the horizontal motel in front of it, just as Norman’s mother is a great ominous presence in the film. If you Psycho Once you’ve seen it, you can’t trust that Hopper house at all. In sunlight it feels falsely safe.
According to lore, Hopper was “flattered” that Hitchcock used his house. He was a huge movie fan anyway and in turn liked to be inspired by cinema.
An intriguing idea, that Hopper watched Hitchcock movies. That Hitchcock studied Hopper’s paintings at MoMa. That they saw each other’s incidence of light, lines and framing. That there is an elusive interplay between those two people who have had such an enormous influence on the way America is portrayed.