www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/bates-motel/first-you-dream-then-you-die-1
The Cord of Communion
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 03.18.2013
So the pilot's title [First You Dream, Then You Die] refers to /is the title of a bio of/ Cornell Woolrich, a writer whose life mirrored Norman Bates's in some oddly key ways and whose biographer has said, "He did in prose what Hitchcock did in film." He was gay, alcoholic, lived on and off with his mother, did well in the movie-option department ..
By adolescence he was living with his mother in a love-hate relationship that would dominate the rest of his life and provide the emotional wellspring for his claustrophobic tales of paranoia and fear. He sold more than 100 stories and novelettes to the pulps during the 1930s and developed the themes that would forever be associated with his name. Claustrophobia. Entrapment. Paranoia. Menace. Doom. With titles that aptly reflected those themes: Speak to Me of Death, Men Must Die, If I Should Die Before I Wake and You'll Never See Me Again. - See more at: http://sphozy.com/writings/nightmare-world-cornell-woolrich-first-you-dream-then-you-die#sthash.tDT3BvY6.dpuf
.. a man whose work influenced Hitchcock and yet who seemed to himself be a Hitchcock character. In fact Rear Window was based on a story of his which -- layer-violating -- was a remake //Woolrich's story was? ie a retelling?// of an H.G. Wells short story
I think it's more than a wink at the extensive and multivalent connections between Cornell, Norman, Alfred H (and Anthony P).
This is the world we are looking at, a world that pulls equally from ... all and sundry refilmed-remade-rebooted-retellings. The ultimate postmodern (in the actual sense of the term) spin-out and remix of a story that has proven widely and wildly remixable. Over the past week, I've learned that any review of this show that opens with bitching about iPhones is not going to be worth reading, because it has no idea what it's looking at. This is not even the first Norman Bates story with iPods, for chrissake. //I guess GVanSant's near shot for shot remake was set in current time?// A thing I can't remember anybody bringing up all week long. But while Gus van Sant was practicing creative restraint //shot for shot// and this is a show is about externalizing the duality of self /wait wh is the contrast there? this is a *story* about that externalizing, right? not just this show. the movie and the GVanS remake as well. ok I guess means while GVanS was restrained, he is still one of many instances of a remaking of this story ~ and I guess the 'and' is that this story is about externalizing the duality of self wh is compelling but still leaves one wondering why so compelling? bit sloppy loose here syntactically?//, one must wonder:
why is this the story, why are we continually returning to this particular thing to work out our zeitgeisty-artsy obsessions?
When in ten years they develop, I don't know, Smell-O-Vision or four-dimensional timespace dramas or liquid downloadable drinkable movies, there will be a Norman Bates story within the first six months.// :) // I guarantee it. Do I really need to tell you why?
It's the
//hmm isn't the oldest story more genesis?
not only the bible story ~ creation, naming, man, needs companion woman, innocence > body, shame fall from paradise /y this is old story, growing up 'for a long time I used to go to bed early' we were children we could not stay / so okay related mother-son but still first there are the two people the companions not the parent child but ok dyad but still takes two before have a (humanly born) child;
but also in (earlier older) myths Ka ~ mother earth /so okay?/ a snake a beginning /ok born of woman? and eee ouroborus eats itself? / ~ but, Athena from Zeus's head, or Aphrodite fr the ocean, these seem clean, bearable / but maybe what happened in the earlier generation, genesis, the gods who were (always already, for us?) dead when we began telling the myths: Cronos who ate whom?
WHAT IS THE OLDEST STORY? just now in mind oldest profession prostitution, ok so maybe woman as mother has to have had sex, how can male child deal with that? //
Does the mother overtake the son? Does the son overtake the mother? //hmm no is seeming to me like it is not about who dominates it is about how to stand it (tolerate, be okay with, not go crazy from) ~ ambivalence. //change ~ how to leave. attachment separation loss.// and I suppose sex in there, less understandable to me (I d n feel v fully into to a ~ three person stage?) - taboo on incest (thinking of parents as sexual) while also you were born of sex.
and yes this seems most apparent troublesome in mother-son {Oedipus} //why? bcs father-daughter is actually less bizarre ?? ~ it is a man violating ~ as men do ? I don't know. it's a story we are more used to ? it's ugly (frightening, hurtful) but not as icky? (mother is too much.) I don't know: Nicole in Tender is the Night. without mother-wife (died?), "it just happened, we became lovers" ~ that is a case of father not ~overtly terribly violent. seems actually ~sorry. is it less icky? yes. seems so. why. easier to get out. ? away from. ~ you didn't come from out of inside father's body. < I don't know if that matters. works as a metaphor? for how father does not surround you like mother does./
Male privilege will tell you that the world is about son overtaking father, becoming father, displacing father -- until he's old enough to become one.
But that's a story with a beginning and middle and end //easier to get out. ?//:
This [mother-son] is a story that surrounds you so much you can't even talk about it. //right. icky. too much. what is that, being too much?//
You can talk about "legitimate rape" /hm? politician anti-abortion I suppose got flack about this phrase, saying that leg rape rarely results in pregnancy, body shuts down. wh I can see offensive but how is this related? bcs wh I am saying? man violence on women is sth horrific that we *can* talk about??// and birth control rights and bake sexism right into the cake, but //?// you can't talk about it.
Unless you do it like this //as a story, with complicated not un-sympathetic, crazy, hurt, more or less well-meaning people ~ who care about each other?// : Horribly, horrifically, sadly and deliriously.
//delirious - acutely disturbed, restless, w illusions incoherence.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140330223421/http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/bates-motel/first-you-dream-then-you-die-1/15
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I wasn't being facetious when I mentioned Gilmore Girls and Grey Gardens and Mildred Pierce //dominating mothers//. You already know the difference between those stories and this one: Everybody's got a mother, but there's a difference between daughters and sons. Put a boy into one of those scenarios //oh. those are all daughters reacting against or trapped and dominated by their mothers//, one of those worlds where femininity reigns and you'll end up -- we're told, over and over -- with a Cornell Woolrich or several Tennessee Williams characters, or a monster like Norman Bates. (Go back far enough and you can see generations of American fathers terrified into violence that this'll turn his kid gay, for instance.) But it's really just the same old tale:
A mother who couldn't be alone //y// and a boy who wasn't ready to learn the difference between being a husband and being a son, when it was time //when is that? when she finds someone else to be not alone with?//. That's not how monsters get made, just wimps.
Mom-rapes * and brutal murders and these horrible people in the town, and apparently pervy manga, are how monsters get made. That and whatever is already going on with Norman that we don't know about yet..
*right. Norman goes to a party, against his mother's wishes: and she gets raped.
another night he goes over to a girl's and has sex; his mother gets arrested.
/this was noted in a comment I read, maybe prvslytv recent ep..
https://web.archive.org/web/20140330223408/http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/bates-motel/first-you-dream-then-you-die-1/11/
Norma: "Who's gonna book a room in the rape-slash-murder motel? We came here to start over, I'm fucking starting over."
And what about this? Where the hell was Norman?
You know, we came here to start over. We came here to start over. I am starting over!And then, seeing she's still pissed -- that the rape and the murder, he just witnessed are about to go on his permanent blame record -- he pulls the most manipulative move of the night /int I guess maybe this is manipulative? I don't know. not intentional, but y a rxn to being blamed, guilty, to instead be upset/: He flips out.
And where the hell were you, Norman? I- I was upstairs.
No, you were not! You were not upstairs. If you were upstairs, you would have come down, and you would have helped me. So where were you? I snuck out of my room and went to a party. Mom, I thought I was gonna study with them, but they took me to a party. I didn't know.
"I didn't know -- it hardly matters right now, there's a dead man on the floor, there's a lake of blood, what are we supposed to do, clean this up with paper towels and spray cleaner? I don't think so!"
Holy hell, mother, we're totally screwed! What are we doing? We don't know what we're doing! - Norman? Norman. - We just don't know - what we're doing! - Okay. Calm down. It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. It's okay. Look, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be okay.I'll tell you this -- and it goes for both of them -- the majority of shit that is wrong with you started out as a solution to something. /y v good and of course./ The human mind is expertly functional and extremely efficient when it *needs* to be:
Here's what we're gonna do, okay, we're gonna take all the bed linens from every motel room, and we're gonna use it to soak this all up. We're gonna wrap the body in one of the comforters, and we'll put it in a- in one of the tubs in one of the motel rooms just- just until I can figure out what to do with it tomorrow. Okay.Yeah? Norman, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that this dirtbag raped me, okay? /!/ But here you are, and here I am, and he's not gonna win this one. Go wash up a little. Put your bloody clothes in the trash bag.
Mother, are you sure we shouldn't call for help?
No one's ever gonna help us, Norman. No one's ever helped us.
Most non-chemical crazy is just solutions that stayed too long -- scaffold for a building that's since been built, that's now made weaker by it -- which is by the way why it's dumb to be ashamed of them /y. well, is that why? it is a reason. before it was sth wrong w you, it was sth you (your psyche) *accomplished*. sth you needed, and you made.//
In this case, that little histrionic breakdown /manipulated? y - a situation into a tolerable one, ok/ did exactly what it was programmed to do:
Force her to compensate, to assume the shape he needs her to assume, so she won't flip this energy and attack him.
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