We All Go A Little Mad Sometimes

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho isn't just my favorite horror movie of all time, but may possibly be my favorite movie, period, of all time. (Which is odd, considering that at no point do any characters in it receive awesome powers and fight for justice.) I know I'm hardly alone in singing its praises, but this is my blog, so you have to put up with it.

Oh, and SPOILERS! Seriously, massive SPOILERS! If you haven't seen Psycho, then stop reading this and go rent it right now. Or at least stop reading this. Especially if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say I don't want to spoil the twist ending. It's possibly the third-most spoiled twist ending in film history (After Empire Strikes Back and The Sixth Sense), so if you're lucky enough not to know the twist, then you doubly owe it to yourself to stop reading this and go rent the darn movie.

And no, the twist ending isn't "some lady gets killed in a shower." But that part's still good, and we'll cover it in due time.


I assume you've seen the movie if you're still reading this far, and I'm going to speak accordingly. The first question I have to ask is, have you seen it more than once? Possibly my favorite thing about the film is how thoroughly it spells out its own conclusion to you right up front, but you can't recognize it without knowing that conclusion. I don't just mean the literal, in-story sense of seeing the clues in retrospect; I mean that practically even off-hand line, every staging of the camera shot, even every prop, is a blatant clue.

My favorite example of this is the scene with Marion Crane and Norman Bates in the parlor. First off, just the fact that Norman's hobby is stuffing birds, ("Only birds look 'right' when they're stuffed") and the star's last name is Crane is a signifier right off the bat. But beyond that, follow the pace of the conversation, and see how the camera focuses on Norman. Whenever the stuffed owl is in the background, Norman is either upset, or treading too closely to the Mother personality. When he talks about asylums, though, the camera closes up on his face; you can't tell which personality is pulling the strings, although the dialogue makes it more obvious than not that poor Norman's spent some time with the mental health profession himself.

Heck, everything about Norman's character really drives home what he is: a repressed child in a grown man's body. He uncomfortableness around Marian, (He can't even say 'bathroom' in front of her), his little hideaways and peepholes, and his habit of eating candy when stressed. Of course, his room drives the whole point home, so much so that it was one of the only set pieces that Hitchcock didn't examine when he "toured" the motel grounds for the theatrical preview.

(The room is made even creepier by the erotic record on the player; the sexually perverse overtones in this movie are only blatant once, but they're always there.)

Structurally, the film is wonderfully uneven, with no protagonist following the story through to its conclusion. There's a very real sense that anyone could be next, even poor Norman. (Who, in a manner of speaking, does "die" at the end of the film.) But what I find really appealing about the revolving door protagonists is the double-layered dramatic irony. Everyone thinks Marion's murder or disappearance is about the stolen money, but the audience knows differently. But while the audience knows the money wasn't the cause, we're just as wrong about the truth as Arborgast (great name, by the way), Steve and Lila. Oh, yes, the audience thinks it's sooooo smart. Ha!

Actually, I think Hitchcock did intend the audience to be smart, at least in the sense that he expected them to piece together the evidence on their own and appreciate the subtleties of the plot. That's the only way I can imagine why the psychiatrist at the end of the film is such a douche bag. The guy drips smarm from every orifice, and is the only character in the film who's completely unlikable. Even the tycoon at the beginning loved his little girl; the psychiatrist barely remembers that one of the victims' family are in the room with him. (His brief appearance in Psycho Part IV only further drives home the point that he's a creep.) I really do believe that Hitchcock resented having to slow down the pacing of his film to explain everything to the audience, and he compensated by making us resent it as well.

Then there's the shower scene, one of the most famous scenes in film history. God, this is an uncomfortable scene. The audience figures out right at the beginning of the scene that poor Marion is a goner; you really only had to show Mother lifting the knife. But it keeps going on, with the famous screeching violins and quick camera cuts. The part that really creeps me out is her screams; you can tell she's trying to form a coherent objection, but she just can't manage it. Chilling. And it just keeps going on, and on, until she's dead, lying in a pool of her own chocolate syrup. And even after that, we see her corpse for an uncomfortably long period of time. And even after that, we see Norman "discover" the body, almost throw up in shock, and go through the whole process of destroying the evidence.

It's a stark contrast to modern horror movies, where all too often a murder is quick, gory, and inconsequential. There's no gore here (the knife doesn't even penetrate), we just lost our protagonist (Norman is actually the figure with the audience's sympathies for a long stretch, here), and this scene just won't end. We know she's dead, we don't want to see anymore, but here we are. Hitchcock is showing us too little and far too much at the same time. Why are you torturing the audience like this, Alfred? Why?!

(Answer: Because he was awesome.)

I suppose, before closing this mash note out, I should say something about this film's later sequels. I was on the fence for a long time on whether or not I even wanted to watch parts II-IV, simply because I didn't think they could justify their own existence. And, while they weren't as bad as I'd feared, they still don't bring much to the table. Except, ironically, part IV.

Part II tries its hardest to overcome the fact that with Norman's secret out (and him supposedly cured), there's really no ready antagonist. It also tries and fails to recreate the mind-games from the first movie; it succeeds in being more confusing than anything else. It would have worked a lot better if the film hadn't been so dead-set on getting Norman back into exactly the first situation he was in at the start of the original movie. Norman Bates isn't Jason Vorhees, and his motel isn't Camp Crystal Lake; you don't need to leave the film open for a sequel like that.

(Although, to its credit, the climax of this film is unintentionally hilarious. It's like a bloodthirsty episode of Three's Company.)

Part III seems like it had some high-minded ideas it was going for (and was actually directed by Anthony Perkins, so it's interesting for that alone), but the Catholic overtones go nowhere, Norman's romance with a twit who looks like Marion Crane is only slightly more creepy than the romance in the Twilight books, and the crusading reporter is so obnoxious that you want her to be killed, too. This film, though, seems to recognize that it's a disservice to poor Norman to leave him as he is, and has him institutionalized again at the end of the film. Of course, this film also treats him a bit like a traditional slasher killer, and has him kill a few random women just because. Sigh.

Part IV, The Beginning, is actually the best of the three. Part of this may be because it's completely divorced from the overly-convoluted story lines developed in the first two sequels, but most of it is because the film finally puts a face on Norma Bates. And this woman is really, really creepy, while not being a total monster. She's obviously bi-polar, and it's unfortunately combined with a spoiled upbringing and a twisted view of sexuality. In a way, she's as much of a victim as Norman, because despite her tidy bit of wealth, she doesn't have a social support network to step in and tell her that she needs help.

But although this is the only sequel that actually manages to be as disturbing as the original (mostly by bringing the sexually perverse undertones to the foreground), it's still a structural mess. The talk-show format the grounds most of the movie simply disappears by the third act, and you're instead left to wonder why Norman keeps falling for these women with absolutely no common sense whatsoever. Don't go to the damn house, lady! You work in medicine! You should know something's up!

(Also: when a man with a history of profound mental illness stemming from monstrous family issues tells you that he doesn't want to have a child, it's not "a surprise" to go off the pill. It's evidence that you may not be qualified to raise a child in the first place.)

Granted, part IV gives Norman a happy ending for once, but all these sequels really do is undermine one of the most insidiously subtle parts of the original film: Mother's closing monologue.

Think about it: the "Mother" personality was supposed to be the killer, right? But here "Mother" is telling us in an inner monologue that she didn't kill them, Norman did. Norman, of course, is the definition of an unreliable narrator, but it does add an extra bit of doubt into the state of Norman's psyche. Just enough to keep the audience on edge...

Enjoy your shower.