ABSTRACT
When readers reach this moment in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), they experience a sense of déjà vu. The mother in a rocking chair, the strange movement of that rocking chair, the horrifying moment of revelation that the woman is dead-all these elements appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho (1960). More than these similarities, however, Psycho offers one further parallel with Beauty Queen: half of Hitchcock’s film seems to be a suspense movie-definitely not a horror film-as Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, steals her boss’s money and attempts to avoid capture. The audience’s interest and expectations are settled on Marion as the central character; however, audience expectations meet a grisly end during the infamous shower scene, when Psycho reveals itself to be something entirely different from the kind of film the audience was led to expect. As Harvey Greenberg states in Movies on Your Mind, “With Leigh gone, the comfortable conventions of the Hollywood suspense vehicle have been totally violated” (quoted in Clover 203). When Marion Crane’s blood begins swirling down the drain, we know we are in another genre. And when, in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Mag Folan tips forward, dead, in her slowly rocking chair, this allusion to Psycho alerts McDonagh’s audience that he has played a similar trick-the genre has changed. Indeed, Ondlej Pilnm describes this manipulation of genre as a key aspect of McDonagh’s work; while he “instigates in his audiences particular genre expectations,” he then “proceeds to thoroughly subvert [them]” (228). The intertextual use of Psycho in Beauty Queen provides audiences with a transition that signals we are no longer in the realm of comedy and have moved into the blood-soaked realm of horror and the gothic.
