Spoilers 

“The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw…to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.”

An art installation at the MoMA, 24 hour Psycho, where Hitchcock’s  film was slowed down and played in 24 hour loops. The filmmaker, Jim Finley, watching the film thinks “It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you….He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing.” 

“There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create….This is something we do with every eyeblink. Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed- upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn’t.”

Richard Elster was a scholar hired by military analysts “to conceptualize…to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment, counterinsurgency” and to redefine words such as “rendition”. In an earlier paper investigating the origins of the word “rendition”, Elster wrote  “about select current meanings of the word rendition-interpretation, translation, performance. Within those walls, somewhere, in seclusion, a drama is being enacted, old as human memory…actors naked, chained, blindfolded, other actors with props of intimidation, the renderers, nameless and masked, dressed in black, and what ensues…is a revenge play that reflects the mass will and interprets the shadowy need of an entire nation, ours.”

“But what had he [Elster] thought of the charge that he'd tried to find mystery and romance in a word that was being used as an instrument of state security, a word redesigned to be synthetic, concealing the shameful subject it embraced.”

Finley wants to make a documentary about Elster’s time working for the defense department and he meets with Elster to get his approval. Jessica, Elster’s daughter, visits her father and the three spend their days looking out at the desert surrounding Elster’s remote home. Then one day, Jessica goes missing. Elster and Finley considers the possibility that a man Jessica met previously might be involved in her disappearance. Elster, overwhelmed by grief, falls into a deep depression and increasingly requires Finley to tend to his basic needs. Finally unable to wait for Jessica’s return, Finley takes Elster and returns back to the city.

During Finley’s visit with Elster, Elster tells him that Jessica, when a young child, would “move her lips slightly, repeating inwardly what I was saying or what her mother was saying. She'd look very closely. I'd speak, she'd look, trying to anticipate my remarks word for word, nearly syllable for syllable. Her lips would move in nearest synchronization with mine." Finley, while at the 24 hour Psycho exhibit, had a conversion with a woman  where she mentioned "I used to read what people were saying on their lips. I watched their lips and knew what they were saying before they said it. I didn't listen, I just looked. That was the thing. I could block out the sound of their voices as they said what they were saying." Was the woman at the museum Jessica and was Finley involved later in her disappearance? Much like the cold, clinical fashion Finley watched the film, similar to the way Norman Bates spied on his victim, Finley closely observed Jessica while at Elster’s desert home. “I was the man who'd stood in the dark watching while she lay in bed.” And so like a military operation, a calculated strike was executed and a young woman was renditioned.