Psycho

by Jerry Roberts
June 13, 2004

Hard to imagine but in 1960, Psycho was actually reviled by most film critics. I think the reason might have been that they felt that, as a filmmaker, Hitchcock was taking a step backward. Hitch said that “I played the audience like an organ” and that is true in nearly every respect. If you follow the chronologically of Hitchcock’s films, Psycho will come as a bit of a shock because it comes after two expensive, more sophisticated thrillers Vertigo and North by Northwest. By contrast, Psycho looks like a cheap-grade exploitation picture, owing more to the films of William Castle (It was advertised with “Don’t Reveal the Surprises!” and “No One Will Be Admitted Once The Picture Has Started”. And yet, Psycho remains his most famous work, certainly his most popular.

I think those critics may have felt manipulated because with this movie he broke the rules. He went back to black and white (feeling the murders would be unbearable in color), he cast Janet Leigh in the lead and then bumped her off in the first act. He begins with a plot about Marion’s larceny then switches gears to a plot about Norman and those who keep entering his private island. He has whole sections of the film that pass without dialogue. The murders are staged with more ferocity, instead of biding time and waiting for the victim to enter the web, “Mrs. Bates” lunges forward stabbing Marion in the shower and meeting Arbogast on the stairway. In that respect the audience has no time to breathe, the murders happen and no sooner do they begin then they’re over.

For those reasons, if you ask anyone to name a Hitchcock film, then this is the one they are likely to remember. I think this movie works on a buried personal level. I think it taps certain levels of fear that we all have: the fear of how easy it is to become a criminal, the fear how easy it would be to become prey to a psychotic, the fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the fear of being dogged by a curious policeman. Watching the film we also find how easy it is to become a voyeur. We know that “mother” has committed an unspeakable crime and that Norman has covered it up but we find ourselves concerned for him as the outside world gets closer and closer to his misdeed. It’s not that we could murder someone but we indentify with how easy it is to get caught. He plays with us by showing a brutal murder and then immediately spending the next 15 minutes with Norman cleaning up the bloody mess. He does exactly what we would do and in the end our eyes search the room trying to see if he forgot anything. Then the payoff, he pushes Marion’s car into the lake. The car stops sinking halfway through and for a second we wonder what Norman will do. We want it to sink and there is relief when it does.

Hitchcock’s brilliance here is that he plays with our expectations. Marion is stuck in a dead-end job and steals $40,000 and leaves town to help out her debt-ridden boyfriend. Then, getting off the road in a storm, she meets Norman Bates, an odd little fellow with a twitchy manner and a kid’s smile. Talking to him she realizes that they aren’t that different. He tells her that he is stuck in a trap taking care of his invalid mother who berates him fiercely. He tells Marion all this in his parlor decorated with his stuffed birds that loom over the proceedings as if ready to swoop down (and it is odd that the whims of fate have found a fugitive named Marion Crane in the same room with a man whose hobby is stuffing birds). Our expectation is that Norman and Marion will help each other escape their private traps (perhaps a rehash of Strangers on a Train). When Marion is killed in the shower, the rest of the film becomes anybody’s guess. There are more surprises to come and they keep coming as the outside world swoops around Norman’s private island like a bird threatening to pull the lid off his secret.

Hitchcock plays with our expectations in another way too. All of the characters are guilty of one sin or another (a few of them pay for them). Here is no hero: Not Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, she is a thief who is sleeping with a married man. Not Arbogast the nosy police chief. It’s not even Lila and Sam who go looking for Marion under the guise of a married couple. Certainly not Norman. The characters in Psycho are guilty of one thing or another, do things they shouldn’t do and go places they shouldn’t go.

One of the biggest changes here is that Hitch didn’t work with is regular film crew and instead chose to work with the crew from his TV series. George Tomisini’s brilliant editing suggests more than it shows. Look at his work in the shower scene in which we never see the knife pierce flesh and he cuts so much and so often that we barely notice that “mother” has run out the door. There is John Russell’s use of black and white photography which suggests the terror lurking just under the surface. Look at the birds in Norman’s parlor with the shadows behind them they look poised to strike. And of course, Bernard Hermann’s legendary score gives us the chilling knife-edged screech rather than just a bombastic orchestral overkill.

The script by Joseph Stephano contains wonderful little touches, suggestions and forecasts that we miss the first time around. I love the scene that immediately follows the clean-up of Marion’s murder in which a woman stands in a store asking if insect poison is painless. I like the touches in Norman’s dialogue as he talks about taxidermy “I hate the look of beasts when they’ve been stuffed” then we see what it has done to his mother. I can scarcely think of a line of dialogue that doesn’t work except in the closing in which the flow of the film is marred by some anti-climactic psychoanalytical hoo-ha from a psychiatrist who spends 8 minutes reiterating the secrets of the story that we’ve already figured out. A perfect line to end the scene would have been when he says “Norman Bates no longer exists, he only half existed to begin with.” With this, an otherwise effective film stoops to one of the biggest screenwriting mistakes - reiterating for the slow-witted what we already know.

Still, despite that little flaw, Psycho remains a superior work that would fix for the rest of the century the way horror movies were made. Before Psycho most horror movies were simply a meeting of one literary creature with another (Frankenstein Meets Dracula or Godzilla and Kong flattening their respective terrains). Psycho changed all that, bringing the genre a little closer to ground-level, working with inner terrors (it was made at the height of cold war paranoia).

For better and for worse it established the genre of slasher movies and ushered in the subversive terrors found in The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and The Silence of the Lambs. But none have the impact or touched the central core that Hitchcock’s movie has, none have found a way to tap our fears of murder, crime, private traps or upsetting mother.