«Do you (really) believe in evil?». Psycho, televisione seriality and its viewer
Abstract
Even if the influence exercised by Hitchcock on the cinema is widely known, it has been largely disregarded by scholars, especially in comparison to the uncountable studies devoted to dissect his own movies. Hitchcock’s influence on television has been even more disregarded. This essay draws on the case study involving Psycho (1960) to enlighten a few radical changes to which intertextuality in the television seriality underwent in the past thirty years. In fact, the classical seriality and the most recent one (usually referred to as the new seriality of quality television) have handled the intertextual relationship in very different ways. The selection of the contents offered by the model is different: indeed, difficult topics and issues, such as serial killing, mental illness and queer sexuality, as well as the performative side of gender, were hardly suitable for the classical seriality. More importantly, it is the conception of the viewer and of his/her habits that changed considerably, so much so to influence the conception and form of series themselves.
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