Re-Membering Psycho: Aesthetic Regimes and Affective Resonances in the Bourne Identity (Report‪)‬

I am watching Doug Liman's 2002 film The Bourne Identity. (1) I am approximately a quarter of the way through and the amnesiac protagonist Jason Bourne arrives at his unfamiliar Paris apartment with Marie, his newly acquired female sidekick. She asks to use his bathroom. It should be a fairly innocuous moment: taking a shower is perhaps the most quotidian of human undertakings. However, the legacy of that shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho (2) imposes itself on my memory; it seems embedded in the texture of Liman's film. As in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, 'cinema asserts itself as aberration of movement and dispossession of point of view'. (3) The camera is restlessly searching out its subject in each shot. The intensifying pace of the editing, the fragmented framing, the cinematic cuts that fragment the body of Bourne--which offer me a multiplicity of perspectives from which to look at him while he talks on the phone--aesthetically mimic the demise of Psycho's protagonist, Marion. Similar to Psycho's shower scene, the cinematography in The Bourne Identity violently disorients me, refuses to hold me at a distance but also refuses to stabilise my point of view. My skin prickles with anticipation knowing that danger is imminent--the pressing memory of Psycho is, to quote Bill Schaffer, 'the fate of my affect, the shape of a feeling that will live in me, become part of my life'. (4) I experience the affective resonance of Psycho as textual--that is, embedded on the surface of The Bourne Identity. However, the textual echo of Psycho resonates with my body; The Bourne Identity calls forth from my sensorium a response that is familiar, a response that is remembered. As has been demonstrated by the cinematic scholarship of Vivian Sobchak (5) and Linda Williams, (6) taking time to reflect upon our own subjective experiences of the cinema highlights the inadequacies of traditional theories of spectatorship. What I hope to foreground with my own subjective experience is the embodied and affective nature of postmodern cinema. Affect is a concept perhaps most comprehensively developed by philosopher Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. (7) Massumi extrapolates how 'the body doesn't just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts, it infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing if not situated.' (8) The implication is that cognition, emotion and feeling are recursive processes; they are 'higher functions' used to process and evaluate an affective moment, whereby one pathway of expression or action is selected from many possible pathways. Furthermore, all potential actions and expressions, though not actualised, remain with us virtually, as potential, giving the 'body's movements a kind of depth that stays with it across all its transitions--accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in tendency.' (9)