you’ve picked a very vivid, very dramatic piece to work with. it has infinite scope for drama and story telling and i think all the time spent at the Cross Media Lab will def allow you to sort out the story a bit more (once you have a visual framework and setting in mind)

I’m thinking here of Melanie Klein:

“…feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother. The power of love - which is the manifestation of the forces which tend to preserve life - is there in the baby as well as the destructive impulses, and finds its first fundamental expression in the baby’s attachment to his mother’s breast, which develops into love for her as a person. My psycho-analytic work has convinced me that when in the baby’s mind the conflicts between love and hate arise, and the fears of losing the loved one become active, a very important step is made in development. These feelings of guilt and distress now enter as a new element into the emotion of love. They become an inherent part of love, and influence it profoundly both in quality and quantity.” (from Love, Hate, and Reparation)

I think Klein’s work is useful for your story because she was trying to grapple with identity which is not about lost innocence. For Klein we in fact carry loving and sadistic impulses at the same time, even from birth toward the mother, and so rather than Bates’ conflicted position being a problem, within a Kleinian framework this might be precisely why we identify with Bates at that moment.

It doesn’t surprise me that Costello, being a horror writer, would not admit such a position. Horror is one of the most distinctively white genres, and I think part of this might be due to how central the “lost innocence” trope is to the classical horror narrative since that time. Certainly, the gesture of killing off the leading lady 20 minutes in suggests some kind of “originary violence” that is perhaps radical compared to later works in the genre?

thanks man
-Pradeep

I swear I was going to ask you more about the project today… (it wasn’t meant to be all about me!). Anyway from the little snippets I did get, I’m really excited about how it’s all progressing, looks like your India mission was a fantastic source of inspiration and endeavour. Cool.

Oh and hi Stella, nice to see you here!