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"Psycho" and the Tragedy of Anne Heche

posted 2 years ago by ecarle (14979)
2 replies | jump to latest

I post this in August of 2022, and within the last two weeks, actress Anne Heche has died at the age of 53(very young to a fellow as old as me) in a tragic car crash that came with a big dose of controversy. (The rage over it is expressed elsewhere, by others.) She was speeding, she survived one crash and sped off into a second fiery crash that destroyed a house and killed her -- though it took some days for her to die.

Indeed, "the long goodbye' of Anne Heche was part of the tragedy of the story. She was brain dead, on life support, and so "RIP" announcements rather wavered , back and forth, as the press waited for days to see when she could finally be declared "dead dead." As a complication, the week before , "Leave It To Beaver" star Tony Dow(older brother Wally) was mistakenly announced as dead about a day before he actually died. So they treated Ms. Heche's demise with kid gloves. Some RIPs went out when she was "brain dead," some waited until her organs were transferred to others and she was laid to rest(or will be?)

Such terrible detail. And then there was the helicopter shot at the crash scene of Ms. Heche being transported by gurney to an ambulance, and then suddenly sitting up from under a sheet and thrashing.

Just not a very good death at all. And so Anne Heche will enter the show business history books with a very untidy end.

Which brings us to Psycho. Well...Gus Van Sant's "shot by shot remake" of Psycho, filmed and released in 1998 and starting Anne Heche in the shower victim role immortalized by a much different actress, Janet Leigh, for Alfred Hitchcock in 1960.

I can't say that the Van Sant Psycho gets much airplay these days, or sells many DVDs. It had a short shelf life, the original keeps coming back for Cineplex releases every few years and has books written about it and Janet Leigh has pretty much returned her primacy as Marion Crane.

But Anne Heche's appearance in the Psycho remake will now, I suspect, add an unintended "new element" of tragedy and violence to that famous story -- the actress recreating the most famous horrible death in major movie history -- died a horrible death herself. That will always "color" Van Sant's Psycho for anyone(few as they will be) who will watch Van Sant's Psycho now. Janet Leigh died of natural causes in her late 70's. Not so, Anne Heche.

Some, but not all of Anne Heche's obituaries mentioned the Van Sant Psycho. After all it was one of her very few movie leading roles -- she made her mark in supporting work(The Juror, Wag the Dog and Donnie Brasco) before bagging a "really big major movie" opposite Harrison Ford("7 Days, 6 Nights") in 1998 -- the same year as the somewhat lesser Psycho remake. (The Ford movie came out first -- and you can see the poster IN Van Sant's Psycho, Marion Crane drives by it in Phoenix.)

Almost simultaneously with landing the romantic comedy with Ford, Heche "came out" as the lover of openly gay comedienne Ellen DeGenres(like nobody knows this.) It was all a bit of an explosive bout of fame for Anne Heche, and even progressive as Hollywood is, it seemed like the romance DID rather kill her movie star career as a lead(or maybe they were just bad movies, yes?) Not to mention, Heche went back to men. Lots of them. (Though evidently not exclusively, I have since read. To each their own.)

Y'know, Ellen helped Heche out a little with Psycho promotion, saying it was hard for her to watch the shower scene -- "I mean, couldn't they have changed it to wet towels getting thrown at her?" and(on Jay Leno, I think) helping Heche cut a "Psycho birthday cake" (it WAS somebody's birthday) with the big Psycho knife. So...more Psycho trivia.

Heche also made the news in 2001 with a bad incident(wandering on drugs into a stranger's house in Fresno California -- off the freeway between LA and SF, Marion Crane's route -- in her underwear) and giving a TV interview about her private demons which was famously obliterated in the news by 9/11 a few days later._

But that was long ago. Looks like Heche kept up a working actresse's career ever since, and raised children. A theory I have: once you have made your name as an actor in ANYTHING(a movie, a TV series) j ust ONCE...you are castable forever in today's Hollywood. 100s of cable and streaming TV shows and indie movies. Often cast with "unknowns plus one name actor." For instance, i keep seeing that guy who played Dwight on The Office as "the ONLY name" in various movies and TV shows. Once you got a name...you are cast forever.

So it was for Anne Heche. She was famous in the late 90's-early 2000s(including "Psycho"), but she continued on past her fame. Too bad that evidently the demons may have got her.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

A couple of negatives -- career wise only -- for Ms. Heche:

ONE: Steve Martin dated Anne Heche, but she broke up with him and soon thereafter got with Ellen. Martin rather vengefully created an "Anne Heche character" in his self-written Hollywood satire "Bowfinger" (1999, the year after Psycho.) Under another name, Heather Graham played an ambitious young actress who "gets off the bus from Ohio"(Heche was from Ohio) and proceeded to "sleep her way up" through crew, cast and director in her quest for fame. At film's end, she has left the fictional Steve Martin for a fictional Ellen. Its the old story of a lover scorned: Maybe Heche WAS that sexually cold-blooded, but Martin demeaned himself by attacking her for it. He had HIS fun. (Hey, haven't all men been there? What's that old Bill Withers song? "Use Me." )

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

TWO: Anne Heche wasn't really a big enough star for the Marion Crane role in Psycho, but she came into the film with some good reviews for Wag the Dog and Donnie Brasco. Therefore, it was rather surprising to see how overall bad Heche WAS as Marion Crane. I have two examples:

a. In the real estate office, as Cassidy walks away from Marion after having hit on her, Janet Leigh just gives the lech a neutral, cold look. Anne Heche makes an angry, comical "scrunchy face." Too much.

b. Later, when Norman tells Marion, "Well, a boy's best friend is his mother" -- Leigh reacts with some distress but controls herself; Heche practically convulses in repulsion.

Hitchcock once told Kim Novak that she "made too many faces when she acted." He demonstrated by drawing two lines on a piece of paper -- "that's as much expression as you SHOULD have" and then scribbled all over the paper --"that's the expression you DO have. Too much." Anne Heche's Psycho performance is too many scribbles. Also she chose a very short haircut that gave her a boyish look and removed much of Janet Leigh's curvy sensuality. (Ms. Leigh is MUCH sexier, in both the opening hotel tryst scene and in the early showering before the knife...)

Oh well. It was totally impossible for hulking comic giant Vince Vaughn to match Tony Perkins as Norman, and of similar difficulty for Anne Heche to capture the calm essence of Janet Leigh as Marion.

So Ms. Heche went on to over 20 years of other roles, other praise, a career and a life.

It is sad how it ended, but that was quite a life.

RIP. Finally.