F 2 F

When Lila Crane finally turns the body in the fruit cellar, the whole world turns (and retrospectively, all previous meaning in the plot) when its grey bun reveals as its obverse the mummified face of Norman's mother. Hand flung back in terror, Lila knocks at a hanging lightbulb, setting it swinging as if this fixed point of visibility, like a minor sun, were the fixed point of Norman's reality suddenly sent out of orbit, no longer illuminating a convincingly real account of things. But as Norman literally "wigs out," and the film turns towards the mechanisms of truth--the plodding account of the police psychologist corroborated by Norman's "mother"--this truth is still part of the false intimacy of plot, subordinated by the time-image. In the end, it is not the intricacy of story and counter-story, but the swamp that holds the truth (a literally "plotless" space, since no real estate can go up on it).