the electric internet

“Screenwriter Joseph Stefano, adapting Robert Bloch’s novel, employs an odd device here that I can’t recall encountering in any other film: Marion imagines conversations that haven’t happened yet, predicting how her boss, her sister, and the oilman whose cash she swiped will react when she doesn’t show up for work on Monday. (You see this kind of hypothetical flash-forward from time to time, but this is the only instance I know of that confines it to voiceover.) It’s an elegant solution to one of cinema’s more intractable problems: how to convey what a character is thinking when he or she’s entirely alone. What’s more, it’s exactly the sort of useless speculation in which we all indulge at times of great stress—in effect, we become screenwriters (or perhaps playwrights) ourselves, inventing plausible dialogue for the people in our lives, anticipating their behavior. The sense of accumulating guilt and anxiety is palpable.

Hitchcock, of course, makes it even more palpable by gradually darkening the sky, brightening the headlights (both oncoming and from the rear), and turning on the waterworks. But most of the sequence consists of Janet Leigh looking straight into the camera in medium close-up, in an extraordinary sort of quasi-non-performance.”