psycho killer

Right now I'm reading (and enjoying) Don DeLillo's Point Omega, which came out back in February. It's a short book--only 117 pages. The main story is bookended by two encounters with Douglas Gordon's 1993 piece, 24 Hour Psycho, which DeLillo became obsessed with when he saw it at MoMA back in 2006.

“I went back four times," he said in a Feb. piece in the NYT, "and by the third time I knew this was something I had to write about...most of the time I was the only one there except for a guard, and the few people who came in left quite hastily.”

Below is an excerpt from the prologue-y first part:

He thought he might want to time the shower scene. Then he thought this was the last thing he wanted to do. He knew it was a brief scene in the original movie, less than a minute, famously less, and he'd watched the prolonged scene here some days earlier, all broken motion, without suspense or dread or urgent pulsing screech-owl sound. Curtain rings, that's what he recalled most clearly, the rings on the shower curtain spinning on the rod when the curtain is torn loose, a moment lost at normal speed, four rings spinning slowly over the fallen figure of Janet Leigh, a stray poem above the hellish death, and then the bloody water curling and cresting at the shower drain, minute by minute, and then eventually swirling down.