Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell

Author:Namwali Serpell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Books
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

SILHOUETTE

The things that Lila goes on to find in the house above the motel are all tinged with the human figure as well: a near-nude faux classical statue, a sculpture of hands in a Möbius clasp, Mother’s loose hanging clothes, a bed imprinted with an S-curved form. Norman’s room is chockablock with objects that bear the mark of childhood—like an old stuffed bunny that has been fondled frowzy—yet are juxtaposed with perverse pleasures: Lila opens a porn magazine and her eyes widen. Enacting fetishism’s “baseless consecration of mundane material objects,” Lila drifts from one quotidian thing to another, each in turn animated by her curiosity, which models our own.100 And when she startles herself by catching her reflection in a mirror, her face comes to seem like just one among the many textured things she is encountering.

The film’s ultimate fetish comes at the end of Lila’s search: Mother. In deciding how to embody Norman’s dead mother, Hitchcock replaced the script’s “doll” with a wig-wearing skeletal corpse. When Lila spins Mother’s chair, she sets the skeleton into motion, reminding us of the mop: the wooden look, the jerky movements, the thin layer of hair, the animation under a roving light. The corpse and the mop share a material shiftiness: heavy with water (or blood) yet light and stiff (as bone). Because we expect a murderer, a living person to whom we can pose questions, the skull seems oddly expressive and hollow at once: its open eyes and mouth imitate Lila’s shocked expression—and ours—while still screaming DEATH.

This carried, handled, person-thing is how Norman compensates for the loss of Mother, but this fetish also covers over the dearth of a solution to the film’s mystery. When Norman promptly barges in, dressed in a wig and a dress, swinging a knife at Lila, the terror—or camp—of the moment diverts us from a major plot inconsistency: how can Mother exist as both a corpse and as Norman in drag? Does he have two wigs? After two sister heroines, two male leads, two detectives, the two mothers in this scene constitute the illogical endpoint to the film’s doubling.

And just as the buried mop seems to pop up again and again, Mother’s skeleton re-emerges spectrally in the shot of Norman’s face in custody:101

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