I always thought Gus Van Sant's Psycho was one grossly misunderstood movie. I always thought it quite audacious to attempt a shot by shot remake of one of the most studied films in the history of the art, a film that had been analyzed shot by shot obsessively, compulsively, fetishistically. The frothing reaction by movie-buffs to the news of its production and its eventual release was something approaching pitchforks and torches. It was as if Van Sant had shat on the Master's grave. The common complaint among critics was "Why?" Another one was "Pointless." Of course, the point these critics missed was not that Van Sant intended his version to be a replacement or a a version upgrade (in software parlance) to the venerable original (despite Van Sant's claims to the press about updating it in color to cater to younger filmgoers' tastes, which in retrospect seems nothing more than playing to the reporters, which of course Hitchcock used to do). Instead, I feel, it was Van Sant's intent to create a companion piece to the original, a variation to a theme, formally something a little more complex than mere homage. Things like this are common in other artforms like music, painting, sculpture, even poetry. Despite claims of cinema's closest analogues being music, dance, or even the plastic arts, what a lot of people expect and want out of movies hasn't changed since the days of Griffith, that is, essentially, the aesthetic trappings of the Victorian novel: a well paced plot arc, three dimensional characters, a climax and denouement. People feel cheated if they don't get them.
Mark Carpenter suggests in an interesting piece in Off Screen that Van Sant is engaging in "appropriation art", art that utilizes and exploits elements of the original, and comments on it the same time. Carpenter comments Van Sant "...provides us is a near-mirror image which leaves us with the peculiar sensation of watching ourselves watching images retained from our viewing past".
Indeed. Van Sant's Psycho is best appreciated by those who love and know the original like the back of their hand, like I do, and so many other people. These are the people who, in their pale and awkward adolescence, recorded the soundtrack off the late-late show on C-90 cassette and who played it back, flipping through Richard Anobile's shot by shot book (which may have inspired young Gus, too). People who had it on Beta, then VHS. Surely, these fans would understand Van Sant's motive, his meta-commentary on Psycho, and also the movie industry itself (it's a wonder it got financed at all; it's like Hollywood's first art school film). Maybe they would dig on the familiarity, and then the not so familiar. Then these could be acolytes who would rage and rail against the heresy of the thing.