A bizarre trope that had a foothold in the mid-budgets of the VHS days was personal psychopath, the villain who only existed in the world to antagonize the protagonist. These are the weirdos played by John Malkovich and Tommy Lee Jones and, in the case of Pacific Heights, Michael Keaton. In John Schlesinger’s 1990 film, Keaton’s psycho becomes a tenant in a San Francisco Victorian home recently bought by a yuppie couple (played by Matthew Modine and a Melanie Griffith styled to look like Meg Ryan). Their rentier dreams of an easy way to pay a mortgage are quickly foiled by Keaton and his accomplice holing up in their unit, constantly drilling and banging at the walls, to the point where it runs out a couple living in the other subdivided apartment. It escalates from there to long-winded legal proceedings and violence as Keaton drives the couple from their new home, and when they start asking why he would do this they get no answers—he’s just a psycho.
Hitchcock looms over this thriller, from its Vertigo choice of location to a Tippi Hedren cameo, although the most obvious parallel between the “master of suspense” and Pacific Heights is Psycho, wherein Anthony Perkins portrays an Ed Gein-ian killer who’s ripe for the armchair Freudian analysis that was in vogue at the time. Norman Bates became its own archetype, as the culture shifted over the decades, the psychoanalytics of the post-war years slipped away, and the psycho killer became something almost from the ether, like when Michael Myers disappears right in front of Laurie Strode’s eyes in John Carpenter’s original Halloween. Given that culture moves in waves, that search for understanding would come back in fashion, with Rob Zombie taking up the mantle in the 2000s and turning Michael Myers into a character to be understood.
Zombie’s notable for flipping the script and reveling in the perspective of his murderous psychos, adding a dimension of exuberant class consciousness as his dispossessed white-trash killers not only get to be a genuinely loving (if in an unconventional sense) family unit—more Spider Baby than Texas Chainsaw Massacre—in House of a 1000 Corpses, before letting them go all-out in their violent merrymaking in The Devil’s Rejects. One could dismiss Zombie as irreverent and misanthropic, but what’s going on in these films is an expression of joy at saying “fuck you” to a world that rejects you. This is inverse to, say, the villains of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, which, especially in the case of Heath Ledger’s Joker, appear in the world to terrorize the vigilante defender of legalism. Given Nolan’s massive debts to Andrew Davis, there’s no doubt that the English-Chicago filmmaker is drawing from the well of these bargain bin psychos, helping them endure as staples at the top of the box office and ushering in a new era where villains are little more than just “crazy.”
These premises only work when founded on a refusal towards class analysis. A Kracauerian lens would reveal this as the popular culture reflecting a societal psychology which, in the case of Pacific Heights and the decorous neoliberalism of the H.W. era, suggests a fear manifesting in the middle class of something coming up from below and dragging them off their road towards comfortable success. Here, the premise of whether it’s just or moral to pay for one’s property off of the needs of others is never questioned, it’s seen as a given. Here, conflict isn’t found because of the natural costs of maintaining, but because someone, with no real pretext, wants to tear down everything this couple has built.
Here, tenants' legal rights from an incompetent and overly bureaucratic state are weaponized to prevent landlords from getting a psychopath off their property. It’s a nightmare that can only be had by a society which disallows an understanding for why anyone might be mad at the petit bourgeois who turn houses into profit, one which believes that criminals are criminals, that terrorists are terrorists, that people only do these terrible things because they’re who they are, that there’s no cause to the effect, that it’s a fool’s errand to waste time trying to understand others when you could instead be trying to stop them, to sweep them under the rug. Here, the dispossessed are a danger, ready to tear you down for no reason.