Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin

Bridging landmark territory in film studies, Psycho-Sexual is the first book to apply Alfred Hitchcock s legacy to three key directors of 1970s Hollywood Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin whose work suggests the pornographic male gaze that emerged in Hitchcock s depiction of the voyeuristic, homoerotically inclined American man. Combining queer theory with a psychoanalytic perspective, David Greven begins with a reconsideration of Psycho and the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much to introduce the filmmaker s evolutionary development of American masculinity.

Psycho-Sexual probes De Palma s early Vietnam War draft-dodger comedies as well as his film Dressed to Kill, along with Scorsese s Taxi Driver and Friedkin s Cruising as reactions to and inventive elaborations upon Hitchcock s gendered themes and aesthetic approaches. Greven demonstrates how the significant political achievement of these films arises from a deeply disturbing, violent, even sorrowful psychological and social context. Engaging with contemporary theories of pornography while establishing pornography s emergence during the classical Hollywood era, Greven argues that New Hollywood filmmakers seized upon Hitchcock s radical decentering of heterosexual male dominance. The resulting images of heterosexual male ambivalence allowed for an investment in same-sex desire; an aura of homophobia became informed by a fascination with the homoerotic. Psycho-Sexual also explores the broader gender crisis and disorganization that permeated the Cold War and New Hollywood eras, reimagining the defining premises of Hitchcock criticism.