Hitchcock’s Psycho – Psychological Terror Hits Closest at Home

This movie stood in the pantheon of great films that I had never seen.  OK.  I recently saw the last 15 minutes and thought the psychological explanation was pretty weak.  But I was very up for watching it with the reluctant stepdaughter when we were talking about horror films (not a genre I have any interest in – part of the reason that I haven’t seen this is that I have avoided it) and we both like Hitchcock – so it was agreed.  We would watch this classic together for family movie night.

My assumption in what follows is that you have seen the film.  If you haven’t, either watch it before reading or decide that it is OK to not experience the really wonderful thrill of this film.  The stuff that I grew up fearing – the shower scene in particular – is incredibly hokey by today’s standards – and may have been even then.  Hitchcock’s emphasis on the gore and sexuality coming together is over the top – and I think may have been a way of both displaying and masking what I think were probably deeper perversions that the censors would not have tolerated – I’m actually pretty surprised that they let as much nudity through as they did – but I think the emphasis on the slasher aspect (this is considered the first slasher film) is also to throw us off the scent.  This is not about being afraid of violent death, but about being afraid of what lies within the human psyche.  And the perversions that are described are actually quite delicious – and unnerving.  This film still chills – not because of the gore, but because of the psychological intensity and because of the misdirection that leads us to be unaware of where we are heading so that we tumble, unprepared, into the messiness of human perversion.  I think it is also a caution.  What is dangerous lies, not outside ourselves, but within.

The central subterfuge of the film is that the out of towners are led to believe that Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) lives with his mother.  Well, of course, he does, but in a much more intimate way than we initially imagine.  We meet him, though, when our heroine, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), is running towards her lover who lives in Bates' town with stolen money.  And Marion, not Norman, is the focus of our interest.  She is a fallen woman who wants to be legit.  She has trysts with her lover who can’t afford, because of his alimony payments, to make her an honest woman, but he can somehow afford to fly to Arizona from California to see her.  Meanwhile Marion is the honest and beautiful receptionist who works for a real estate company and has to fend off the advances of a fat wealthy man whose money is entrusted to her.  To free her and her lover from the shackles that binds them, she decides to drive to California with the money that she was to have deposited in the bank.

This is, then, a morality play.  Who are the moral characters?  Who are the immoral ones?  What will be the punishment for whom?  How fairly are those punishments meted out? 

Once upon a time, I worked for a bank in Santa Fe.  My first job out of college – with my bachelor’s degree in hand - was as the mail boy for the bank.  I drove from branch to branch, delivering the mail and taking the cancelled checks back to the main office.  Occasionally, I would transport cash between the branches.  When there was a lot of it, the security guard at the main bank, the ex-chief of police who was about 90 years old, would accompany me.  He was a great guy and I loved being with him.  We would always know how much there was, and we often talked of driving to Mexico with what we had and living out our days together on the beaches.  It was a fun day dream to share, though the realities were that, even at our minimum wage jobs, we were better off where we were.

Marion ends up at the Bates motel because making a trek like the one she is making is harrowing.  She is running from everything that she is connected to in order to, what? Start a life as a desperado?  After packing up, on the way out of town, she spies her boss, who also sees her.  She feels guilty for having betrayed him.  She drives until she can’t drive anymore, pulls over and falls asleep, but sleeps too long and a highway patrol officer wakes her and notices how guiltily she acts.  So, when, at the end of another long day of driving, she gets lost and is tired by the rain and glare on the road, her arrival as the only guest of the isolated Bates motel makes her the perfect prey for Norman, the nervous Nellie who is, we believe, hen pecked by his overbearing mother who divines his unholy lust for a woman he has just met and whom he wants to feed.  We speculate (at least the analysts in the audience do) that this mother is so dependent on her son’s love that she can’t bear to think of his being attracted to anyone else, and we feel sorry for this poor cosseted soul.

Marion is a little wiser than we.  She looks around his room and sees that it is filled with stuffed birds and gets him to admit that he is a taxidermist.  She finds this creepy.  She also slips and, after having signed in with a pseudonym, tells him her real name, crane, which makes her a bird – a creature that it is OK to kill and stuff – Norman thinks that other animals have more use and thus shouldn’t be killed.  But who kills Marion?  It is, of course, Norman in his alter ego mode of being his long dead mother – the woman he killed – the woman who penned him in after his father died and then married a cruel stepfather – Norman killed them both, exhumed the body of his mother and stuffed her, keeping her in the Gothic house out back of the cheap motel that the stepfather built, and he now kills, as the mother, to keep him from defiling a woman and potentially deserting his mother (who, of course, lives only in his head) and, in the process of killing, in this case, Marion, enacts a terribly sexual and aggressive scenario.  Why doesn’t he stuff the bodies and keep the trophies?  Well, mother would not abide with that, would she?

And now we have gotten to the psychiatrist’s summary of his mental state (skipping over the killing of the detective who was sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong and the discovery of all that I have just laid out by Marion’s boyfriend and Marion’s sister who has gone looking for her).  When I saw it without having seen the film, I was embarrassed by it.  It seemed very flat footed and I was prepared to try not to judge him, just I would not like to be judged by those who follow in my shoes 50 or 100 years from now.  But watching the film, the description is actually quite satisfying.  It is a nice psychological explanation of what we have just witnessed. 

Now, could what we just witnessed have happened in that way?  I think Hitchcock is encouraging us to imagine this.  To imagine just how perverse our minds are.  To imagine how strong our early attachment to our mothers is and to wonder how that could get played out in the real world.  I think the film works not because it describes something that actually could happen, but because it describes something that we find hard to believe doesn’t happen.  Why is it that we don’t more frequently go over the edge?  And I think we need to remember that there are two edges that have people have gone over.  Marion has gone over an edge that we all stand back from - she has given up on being the nice girl.  Norman went over a much steeper edge a long time ago.  Are these edges being equated?  Perhaps.  Is it also the case that every edge is the moral equivalent of every other edge and once we go over one edge we will end up in the company of those who have gone over them all?  That would also seem to be a message.

Hitchcock, himself, went over all kinds of edges, indulging in all kinds of things.  And the issue of guilt is a very deep one for him.  When he was about five, his father caught him doing something wrong and gave him a note he was to take to the police station asking the constable to lock him up for about five minutes to pay for the crime.  This fear of police pervades this film – and is a fear that I think we all share – it is not just the fear of police – but of being caught for doing wrong and, as Freud points out, our superego has access not only to what we do wrong, but to what we think about doing wrong. 

The characters in this movie are all trapped.  Marion is trapped by her miserable job and unavailable lover.  At the Bates Motel, she decides to return to Arizona and take back the money in the morning, but her fate is already decided.  She is given the death penalty for thinking of stealing.  Her decision to leave the straight and narrow has lead her inexorably towards Norman - she, not just as the dating woman who has forbidden trysts in the daytime, but as the one who betrays her boss, is now a siren who calls perversion to her.  As mentioned before, the detective also gets his fate handed to him for sticking his nose in where it does not belong.  Norman is going to go to an institution – and his description of the institution he is heading towards when he tells Marion that he would never put his mother in such a place, is chilling.  He will be punished.  But his punishment is actually worse than that.  It is clear in the final scene that he will be punished as his mother, whom he has entirely become.  She will be put there.  And, of course, Norman is innocent.  It is the events of his life that have created him – he is a good, if nervous, boy.  He, like Marion, is the kid next door.  He has the kooky mother. She has the down and out boyfriend, but she is, in spite of herself, attached to him.  And these attachments – Norman to his mother and Marion to her boyfriend – are their downfall.

From Freud’s perspective, the superego is the internalized parental figure, one who is judgmental.  In fact, it is a lot more complex than this, but if we use this stripped down simplified version, Norman has gone a bit overboard on being the dutiful son, internalizing his mother to the nth degree.  Marion, too, is trying to be a good girl, but to do that she ultimately has to deny too much.  She overthrows her role, but she pays for it.  Hitchcock, on the other hand, gets to get away with it.  He can portray his perversions for all the world to see and what does he get?  He gets an Oscar nomination for a slasher film.  He gets fame and glory.  He gets away with it – as Norman Bates does for a while.  He metes out the punishments he deserves on the characters that he directs – and the more he flagellates them the more credit he receives.  In the same way, it is not Norman who is jailed, but his mother - the person who ought to be punished for many sins, not the least of which is the murder of her son, don't you agree?  What a funny world we live in.

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