Psycho (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock
"A boy's best friend is his mother."
Psycho is such a fucking great movie.
There were a few points last night when I had to stop and exclaim to my wife how good it was (like she didn't know?), and how much fun I was having watching it, even though I've seen it before and knew all the twists and turns. How many true thrillers with a radical twist ending can claim that kind of longevity? If some 1960 version of me (a fat Maynard G. Krebs with an alcohol problem) saw this when it came out, I'm sure my brains would have liquified, and only in part from the early formulation LSD that my friend snuck out of a military research lab.
Psycho was released in 1960, after Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest which were all color films. The use of color film was expected by 1960, but not required by the moviegoing audience yet. I remember hearing when I was a kid that the reason Hitchcock used black and white, even after making such a vividly colorful film like Vertigo, was to get away with filming some never-before-seen things.
I don't know if that's a theory that serious film analysts hold, but I found his use of black and white this time to be a purely artistic choice. There's a duality to humans in general, and Norman Bates specifically, that resonates in the stark black-and-white quality of Psycho's palette. Even the gradients of gray help establish that nobody is purely good or purely evil, and our motivations are sometimes misplaced, and thrust upon us by passion, or greed, or family.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's dig into the plot. The first half of the film is beautifully constructed, maybe perfectly so, and the characters are understandable, nuanced, and well played. We first meet Janet Leigh's character (Marion Crane) who is an administrative assistant in love with a married man (Sam Loomis). Our first look at their afternoon encounter is set up like a passionate tryst, but we quickly learn that Marion and Sam are deeply in love, and are willing to stake out a life together even if it means Sam's financial ruination in the divorce. Even in the context of an extramarital affair, we meet two characters whose motivations are complicated and varied, not purely duplicitous or vindictive.
While at work, Marion meets one of her boss's clients, a drunk millionaire who flirts shamelessly and throws his wealth around as a status symbol. Despite the idiocy of doing so, he gives $40,000 in cash to Marion as payment for a real estate development instead of issuing a check. Marion's boss asks her to deposit the money right away, and she leaves to do so, telling her boss that she would like to take the rest of the day off.
Marion makes an impulsive decision to leave with the money, and has not planned out exactly what to do. She's motivated by the idea that this $40,000 gives her and Sam the ability to start a comfortable life together (plus it was stolen from a rich lout who would just waste it anyway). This is something that we've all probably half-considered while at work at some point in our lives, but Marion is acting on it. On her way out of town, her boss walks in front of her car at a stop walk. They see each other, and her boss seems to have a glimmer of recognition on his face before he continues on.
While on the road, Marion considers all of the conversations that will undoubtedly take place back at the office come Monday morning. Discovering that the money had not been deposited, waiting for her to come into the office, the harried phone calls to her family, searching her apartment, discovering the truth, and eventually realizing that it WAS her that her boss saw driving out of town on Friday afternoon. It's a clever way to develop some exposition and move the plot along without cutting away from Marion and her harried escape. We get to be Marion's silent companion on this journey of hers.
She has opportunities to turn back, but keeps pushing forward. She's approached by a police officer who is immediately suspicious of her (she's not the best criminal on earth). She decides to use some of the money to change cars at a local used car dealership to throw the law off her tail. I love the used car dealer in this scene. He exudes the quiet confidence and smooth-talking ways that she wholly lacks. Marion's insistence on speeding through the transaction only raises more suspicions, and the police officer from earlier watches her from across the street. Before he can approach and question her again, she gets in her new car, and speeds off down the road.
The shots of Marion driving down the highway at night are particularly evocative. She can barely see the road in front of her, and the rain pelting her windshield only blurs things further. She's heading down a dark and treacherous path, one which leads to only more darkness and uncertainty.
Looking for a place to hide from the rain (and the police), Marion stops at a quiet roadside motel in the hills and meets its proprietor, Norman Bates. Knowing what we know now, this scene is almost comic. This is the genesis of the trope of the single woman stopping at the lonely roadside motel and being hacked to death by a madman. Nobody since this film, real or fictional, would willingly do this without exclaiming their extreme hesitation or suspicion.
But Marion is our guinea pig. She's the monkey we strap into the capsule to test out the limits of space. The brave but unwitting trailblazer that will forever be known as THAT girl, and will make all showers in a strange place just a little bit uncomfortable. Psycho changed not just film, but all of popular culture.
When we first meet Norman, he is completely disarming. The way Anthony Perkins plays him as timid but affable completely fits in with his backstory, and perhaps hints that with a different upbringing he could have been a kind and well-adjusted man.
When he's showing Marion around her room, he can't even say the word "bathroom" out of shyness and repression. The idea of a woman doing toilet things is so uncomfortable to him that he just sort of gestures at it and hems and haws. Later, we get the first flushing toilet ever shown on film. I like to think of Norman's hesitation to be, at least in part, a deeply satirical criticism of the motion picture industry in general. It took until 1960 before someone was "brave" enough to show a god damn flushing toilet on screen, because the whole world was taught that being raised like Norman Bates was the good and wholesome and correct way.
Shortly thereafter, Norman and Marion share a meal in his parlor, and we get our first hints of trouble. Norman talks about his lonely and boring existence. He describes his mother with equal parts loving reverence and abject hatred, seemingly resigned to his fate as her constant companion and the only friend he has in the world. Norman claims that his mother is mentally ill following the grisly death of her lover 9 years ago and requires his constant care. It's an unsettling picture of a man who is locked in childhood by an overbearing mother.
Then there's the set dressing:
Besides the obvious connection between Hitchcock and birds, we find out that Norman has stuffed these delicate and beautiful animals himself. Taxidermy is creepy enough, but the framing of the owl, a silent and solitary predator, between Norman and Marion gives us an idea of Norman's thoughts during this conversation.
Feeling sorry for Norman's situation, Marion appears to come to the realization that she's made a terrible mistake, and resolves to return the money to Phoenix in the morning. She retires to her room, and this is when we get our first experience with the twisted nature of Norman Bates. He pulls away a framed painting in the parlor, revealing a secret peep hole into room 1, the specific room he chose to give to Marion when she checked into the motel.
Y'all know what happens next:
You can get a sense by watching this scene where our Italian friends got the inspiration for their giallo cinema. It's a brutal and visceral death. She's stabbed repeatedly, and the camera dances around her body to show us where the knife is penetrating. Blood mixes with the water and drains away, and Marion is left gasping for breath. But the scene doesn't end there. She struggles to pull herself out of the tub, but only ends up ripping the shower curtain down, and finally dies, bent over the edge of the tub. The camera work here is masterful, with the extreme closeup of her eye, stretching into a long view of her contorted body inelegantly splayed over the edge of tub, with her face under the toilet. Hardly the careful craftsmanship that went into posing the stuffed birds in Norman's parlor.
I also love what Emily pointed out last night: Marion seems so refreshed and invigorated by the shower, because she's resolved to cleanse herself of her guilt and crime by doing what is right. She's washing away her sins, and feels happy and comfortable, which only makes her brutal death that much more grisly.
Would this scene work as well in color? I guess it's hard to say. If we're going to compare it to the 1998 Anne Heche version, the answer is no, because that movie is an abomination. But could Argento or Bava have stepped in and made something as impactful, utilizing an oversaturated color palette and a more brutal eye for gory effects? Maybe. There's an undercurrent to giallo that makes it both viscerally real and hyper absurdist. I don't know what it looks like when somebody gets their face chopped in half with a farming tool, but it probably doesn't look exactly like this:
The shock on his face works both the first time you see it, and on each subsequent viewing. He's the first character to witness Norman Bates' mother, and it sends him reeling, both literally and figuratively.
After Arbogast's disappearance, Lila and Sam arrive at the motel, getting no help from the local sheriff who has trouble believing that the kindly and simple Norman Bates could be involved in something so nefarious. After Lila searches the room where Marion stayed and finds a shred of evidence, she sets out to search the Bates home while Sam keeps Norman busy.
I like the conversation that Sam and Norman have, because Sam's suspicion is still quite grounded: that Norman discovered Marion was on the run with $40,000 and wanted the money for himself. Who would suspect the far more chilling alternative? Norman becomes suspicious, asks where Lila has gone, and knocks Sam unconscious in a brief struggle.
Lila's search of the home ends in the fruit cellar with another classic scene:
As a social worker, I'm a big proponent of meeting people where they are, while understanding the circumstances from which they came. Was Norman born a psychopath who murdered his mother out of jealousy when she found a lover? The way he frames this situation to Marion during their dinner scene seemingly implies something untoward ("A son is a poor substitute for a lover"), but if Norman's understanding of his mother at the very end is any indication, she was a horrible person who treated Norman inappropriately to say the least. The cruelty and trauma of isolation is the hinted at, but ultimately unspoken, background to Norman Bates' character.
I think the idea that Norman was created by his mother, both in a biologic and emotional sense, makes him a far more compelling character. He's perhaps the first modern film villain to transcend the idea of needing a clear external motivation for his crimes, which is shocking to both the characters in the film and to the audience.
And 57 years later, when seemingly "normal" people can amass high powered rifles to commit senseless acts of murder without a clear manifesto or motivation, it's still just as shocking.
There were a few points last night when I had to stop and exclaim to my wife how good it was (like she didn't know?), and how much fun I was having watching it, even though I've seen it before and knew all the twists and turns. How many true thrillers with a radical twist ending can claim that kind of longevity? If some 1960 version of me (a fat Maynard G. Krebs with an alcohol problem) saw this when it came out, I'm sure my brains would have liquified, and only in part from the early formulation LSD that my friend snuck out of a military research lab.
Psycho was released in 1960, after Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest which were all color films. The use of color film was expected by 1960, but not required by the moviegoing audience yet. I remember hearing when I was a kid that the reason Hitchcock used black and white, even after making such a vividly colorful film like Vertigo, was to get away with filming some never-before-seen things.
I don't know if that's a theory that serious film analysts hold, but I found his use of black and white this time to be a purely artistic choice. There's a duality to humans in general, and Norman Bates specifically, that resonates in the stark black-and-white quality of Psycho's palette. Even the gradients of gray help establish that nobody is purely good or purely evil, and our motivations are sometimes misplaced, and thrust upon us by passion, or greed, or family.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's dig into the plot. The first half of the film is beautifully constructed, maybe perfectly so, and the characters are understandable, nuanced, and well played. We first meet Janet Leigh's character (Marion Crane) who is an administrative assistant in love with a married man (Sam Loomis). Our first look at their afternoon encounter is set up like a passionate tryst, but we quickly learn that Marion and Sam are deeply in love, and are willing to stake out a life together even if it means Sam's financial ruination in the divorce. Even in the context of an extramarital affair, we meet two characters whose motivations are complicated and varied, not purely duplicitous or vindictive.
While at work, Marion meets one of her boss's clients, a drunk millionaire who flirts shamelessly and throws his wealth around as a status symbol. Despite the idiocy of doing so, he gives $40,000 in cash to Marion as payment for a real estate development instead of issuing a check. Marion's boss asks her to deposit the money right away, and she leaves to do so, telling her boss that she would like to take the rest of the day off.
Marion makes an impulsive decision to leave with the money, and has not planned out exactly what to do. She's motivated by the idea that this $40,000 gives her and Sam the ability to start a comfortable life together (plus it was stolen from a rich lout who would just waste it anyway). This is something that we've all probably half-considered while at work at some point in our lives, but Marion is acting on it. On her way out of town, her boss walks in front of her car at a stop walk. They see each other, and her boss seems to have a glimmer of recognition on his face before he continues on.
While on the road, Marion considers all of the conversations that will undoubtedly take place back at the office come Monday morning. Discovering that the money had not been deposited, waiting for her to come into the office, the harried phone calls to her family, searching her apartment, discovering the truth, and eventually realizing that it WAS her that her boss saw driving out of town on Friday afternoon. It's a clever way to develop some exposition and move the plot along without cutting away from Marion and her harried escape. We get to be Marion's silent companion on this journey of hers.
She has opportunities to turn back, but keeps pushing forward. She's approached by a police officer who is immediately suspicious of her (she's not the best criminal on earth). She decides to use some of the money to change cars at a local used car dealership to throw the law off her tail. I love the used car dealer in this scene. He exudes the quiet confidence and smooth-talking ways that she wholly lacks. Marion's insistence on speeding through the transaction only raises more suspicions, and the police officer from earlier watches her from across the street. Before he can approach and question her again, she gets in her new car, and speeds off down the road.
The shots of Marion driving down the highway at night are particularly evocative. She can barely see the road in front of her, and the rain pelting her windshield only blurs things further. She's heading down a dark and treacherous path, one which leads to only more darkness and uncertainty.
Looking for a place to hide from the rain (and the police), Marion stops at a quiet roadside motel in the hills and meets its proprietor, Norman Bates. Knowing what we know now, this scene is almost comic. This is the genesis of the trope of the single woman stopping at the lonely roadside motel and being hacked to death by a madman. Nobody since this film, real or fictional, would willingly do this without exclaiming their extreme hesitation or suspicion.
But Marion is our guinea pig. She's the monkey we strap into the capsule to test out the limits of space. The brave but unwitting trailblazer that will forever be known as THAT girl, and will make all showers in a strange place just a little bit uncomfortable. Psycho changed not just film, but all of popular culture.
When we first meet Norman, he is completely disarming. The way Anthony Perkins plays him as timid but affable completely fits in with his backstory, and perhaps hints that with a different upbringing he could have been a kind and well-adjusted man.
When he's showing Marion around her room, he can't even say the word "bathroom" out of shyness and repression. The idea of a woman doing toilet things is so uncomfortable to him that he just sort of gestures at it and hems and haws. Later, we get the first flushing toilet ever shown on film. I like to think of Norman's hesitation to be, at least in part, a deeply satirical criticism of the motion picture industry in general. It took until 1960 before someone was "brave" enough to show a god damn flushing toilet on screen, because the whole world was taught that being raised like Norman Bates was the good and wholesome and correct way.
Shortly thereafter, Norman and Marion share a meal in his parlor, and we get our first hints of trouble. Norman talks about his lonely and boring existence. He describes his mother with equal parts loving reverence and abject hatred, seemingly resigned to his fate as her constant companion and the only friend he has in the world. Norman claims that his mother is mentally ill following the grisly death of her lover 9 years ago and requires his constant care. It's an unsettling picture of a man who is locked in childhood by an overbearing mother.
Then there's the set dressing:
Besides the obvious connection between Hitchcock and birds, we find out that Norman has stuffed these delicate and beautiful animals himself. Taxidermy is creepy enough, but the framing of the owl, a silent and solitary predator, between Norman and Marion gives us an idea of Norman's thoughts during this conversation.
Feeling sorry for Norman's situation, Marion appears to come to the realization that she's made a terrible mistake, and resolves to return the money to Phoenix in the morning. She retires to her room, and this is when we get our first experience with the twisted nature of Norman Bates. He pulls away a framed painting in the parlor, revealing a secret peep hole into room 1, the specific room he chose to give to Marion when she checked into the motel.
Y'all know what happens next:
You can get a sense by watching this scene where our Italian friends got the inspiration for their giallo cinema. It's a brutal and visceral death. She's stabbed repeatedly, and the camera dances around her body to show us where the knife is penetrating. Blood mixes with the water and drains away, and Marion is left gasping for breath. But the scene doesn't end there. She struggles to pull herself out of the tub, but only ends up ripping the shower curtain down, and finally dies, bent over the edge of the tub. The camera work here is masterful, with the extreme closeup of her eye, stretching into a long view of her contorted body inelegantly splayed over the edge of tub, with her face under the toilet. Hardly the careful craftsmanship that went into posing the stuffed birds in Norman's parlor.
I also love what Emily pointed out last night: Marion seems so refreshed and invigorated by the shower, because she's resolved to cleanse herself of her guilt and crime by doing what is right. She's washing away her sins, and feels happy and comfortable, which only makes her brutal death that much more grisly.
Would this scene work as well in color? I guess it's hard to say. If we're going to compare it to the 1998 Anne Heche version, the answer is no, because that movie is an abomination. But could Argento or Bava have stepped in and made something as impactful, utilizing an oversaturated color palette and a more brutal eye for gory effects? Maybe. There's an undercurrent to giallo that makes it both viscerally real and hyper absurdist. I don't know what it looks like when somebody gets their face chopped in half with a farming tool, but it probably doesn't look exactly like this:
I also don't know what it looks like when a woman is stabbed to death in a bathtub, but I know it would be a frenetic and shocking event. And I know that the inglorious aftermath that Hitchcock shows us is probably very realistic indeed. The way Hitchcock filmed this scene, our brains can fill in the details, and that's what makes it truly frightening.
The second half of the film, while still excellent, isn't as strong as the first. It involves Sam, Lila (Marion's sister), and Mr. Arbogast (a private investigator hired by Marion's boss) teaming up to find out what happened to Marion and/or the stolen $40,000. Arbogast follows a hunch and visits every roadside motel or boarding house in the area, and finally ends up at the Bates Motel. The private investigator senses that Norman isn't telling him the truth, and asks to question the invalid Mrs. Bates, which her son flatly forbids.
Determined as he is, Arbogast sneaks into the Bates home, and meets his end in my favorite scene in the film:
The shock on his face works both the first time you see it, and on each subsequent viewing. He's the first character to witness Norman Bates' mother, and it sends him reeling, both literally and figuratively.
After Arbogast's disappearance, Lila and Sam arrive at the motel, getting no help from the local sheriff who has trouble believing that the kindly and simple Norman Bates could be involved in something so nefarious. After Lila searches the room where Marion stayed and finds a shred of evidence, she sets out to search the Bates home while Sam keeps Norman busy.
I like the conversation that Sam and Norman have, because Sam's suspicion is still quite grounded: that Norman discovered Marion was on the run with $40,000 and wanted the money for himself. Who would suspect the far more chilling alternative? Norman becomes suspicious, asks where Lila has gone, and knocks Sam unconscious in a brief struggle.
Lila's search of the home ends in the fruit cellar with another classic scene:
Nothing Hitchcock does throughout the film to hide the fact that Norman and his mother are the same person could be called unfair, but on a rewatch you can tell that the clever camera angles serve a dual purpose. They lend a vision and style to the film, while also ably concealing the ultimate mystery. The shock of the reveal is great, and Norman running in wearing a dress and wig is an emotional crescendo that rivals the end of Vertigo. You feel like Arbogast tumbling backward down the stairs in disbelief watching it.
I guess there's not a way to end a film like this in 1960 without the penultimate scene, but boy does it feel dated now. The audience gets a full-blown lecture from an expert in psychiatric sciences (in an era where homosexuality would be considered a profound mental illness). It plays out a little hokey, but is a good study in how our understanding of mental illness has evolved over time and is still evolving today. Although I'm guessing M. Night Shyamalan missed that memo based on how godawful Split was.
The final scene is probably all we needed, as Norman has finally broken completely and allowed the persona of his mother to take control. It also gives us a glimpse into the kind of mother she was toward Norman, or at least how he perceived it. She comes off as vindictive and heartless, detached from the fate she's doomed Norman to, all while believing she will escape punishment. After all, she's just a sickly old woman who wouldn't even harm a fly.
As a social worker, I'm a big proponent of meeting people where they are, while understanding the circumstances from which they came. Was Norman born a psychopath who murdered his mother out of jealousy when she found a lover? The way he frames this situation to Marion during their dinner scene seemingly implies something untoward ("A son is a poor substitute for a lover"), but if Norman's understanding of his mother at the very end is any indication, she was a horrible person who treated Norman inappropriately to say the least. The cruelty and trauma of isolation is the hinted at, but ultimately unspoken, background to Norman Bates' character.
I think the idea that Norman was created by his mother, both in a biologic and emotional sense, makes him a far more compelling character. He's perhaps the first modern film villain to transcend the idea of needing a clear external motivation for his crimes, which is shocking to both the characters in the film and to the audience.
And 57 years later, when seemingly "normal" people can amass high powered rifles to commit senseless acts of murder without a clear manifesto or motivation, it's still just as shocking.
Summary:
An all-time classic of thriller cinema, there's just no excuse for having never seen it. Do yourself a favor and buy it today.
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