Psycho

You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.

Hitchcock was such a puppeteer. I am such a puppet with Hitchcock’s film just pulling the strings. How many times have I watched this and still found myself compelled when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is awakened by the police officer, followed by him until she gets to the car lot to trade hers for another (with California license plates compared to her Phoenix, Arizona ones), and watching her as she attempts to get the exchange done quickly, looking absolutely suspicious. She impulsively takes $40,000 from her employer's client (money for a fancy wedding), drives off with it in some half-cocked scheme to help pay off her lover’s debt (he operates a hardware store) in a California town called Fairvale. We’ve all acted impulsively at one point or another in our lives so I think that may be why many of us don’t completely judge her when Marion runs off with the money without truly contemplating her actions. 

It's not like my mother is a maniac or a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes.

 

 What I have always found fascinating is how someone like Norman Bates, totally devoted to (..and undermined by) his mother (really, he is) can talk sense into Marion—through his own life-long struggle to free himself from his impossible mother, Marion realizes she must right her wrongs and liberate herself from her crime. Traps. She walked into her, Norman was born into his. Too bad, she’ll never get the chance to cleanse her soul.

                   Oh, no, mother! The blood! The blood!

Look, those who stop by here have certainly read their fair share of theses and opinions, critiques and reviews on Psycho ad nauseum. Whether it be how Marion’s brassiere and undies white while she’s in her cheap hotel room with lover, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), black when about to run with the money (black symbolic of her probable sin), or the exhaustive explanation at the end in regards to Norman’s “mommy issues”, lots of admirers and writers, bloggers and critics, have penned their own musings and thoughts about the themes and characters involved in this movie. How could I possibly offer anything innovative or fresh for this movie?

It pisses me off when people try to say this movie isn’t horror. It has a knife stabbing to a naked woman bathing in a shower for chrissakes!  Even if it is done expertly without showing any gore or knife wounds, it’s all in the delivery and how the camera and music establishes just how horrifying and vicious it is while others now feel the need to explicitly convey the butchery in graphic detail. Dismiss the word horror and how its use as a genre is a dirty word, a taboo many in the “establishment” consider defamation to a movie. Jaws or Psycho. Brutal violence to human beings is horror. You pricks with a problem with that just get over yourselves.

Had to get that off my chest.

                          A boy's best friend is his mother.

The clean up. It’s chilling really. How clinical and janitorial it all is. It is all so matter-of-fact and meticulous. Norman realizes the horror of what his mother done, but he loves her enough to bury that away so he can focus on the task at hand. When he dumps the car in the swamp, we all know the manipulative power of Hitchcock in relation to the vehicle’s not going under immediately…did you hope it would sink? If you did, it is a testament to Hitchcock’s and Anthony Perkins’ ability to seduce you into the dark side. Norman just loves his mother and his actions are so she won’t be implicated in a heinous crime. Don’t we love our mothers just as much? Okay, maybe I got a little carried away…

I was thinking as I was watching this movie that I couldn’t imagine Psycho being in anything other than B&W. The way Norman’s eyes look—they practically glow in the dark—in Marion’s room and peering at her unchanging in Motel Room #1 while inside his parlor room. Those night shots of the Bates home on the hill as Norman either walks to or from there to conduct business for the Bates Motel or retreat after his peeping (or that marvelous scene where Mother is pacing in her room) are so beautifully ominous. I love this movie so much not just for the warped themes going on or the master using  his camera to illustrate the money and what results from its allure, but also for how visually stimulating the simple locations are (the parlor room with the stuffed birds and portraits of birds you might find at a flea market and how they seem to be overlooking everything/everyone, the old two story house with a history that holds some sinister secrets, the Bates Motel and how its advertising neon light seems to say “Don’t stop here, whatever you do!”,  and the basement where Mother is kept “for her own good”).

If you are a fan of Hitchcock or have read or studied about his work or style, his work ethic or planning process, you know of the McGuffin. I won’t spend a lot of time on it but it does take something to motivate the plot involving the characters you follow. The money stolen is just a tool that gets the movie started and forwarding ahead. Without Marian stealing the money, we never get to Norman Bates and his neurosis, the Bates Motel or the Bates House. We need the McGuffin and I am amused at how it is just disposed of along with the body once carrying it. The money’s existence doesn’t end, now, once it is tossed in the trunk of Marion’s car, because a private investigator, along with Marion’s sister and lover, will be in pursuit of their lost loved one and the cash.

Martin Balsam. He has, what, fifteen minutes of running time in the entire film? What an impact such a marvelous actor can make. I think his interrogation of Norman is a sterling example of great acting. He doesn’t have a harsh tone. Very civil and respectable, yet totally convincing in his skills as a private investigator who rattles Norman when his questions provoke nervousness and anxiety. It is also great to see Perkins excel at the character, in its infancy before he would further explore the character in the other sequels in the 80s, going from comfortable to stuttering, losing his composure, showing that if ever challenged aggressively he would crack under the pressure. In order for Balsam’s Arbogast to be stopped now Mother would have to put an end to him. Hitchcock introduces him with a strong facial shot and follows him into Sam’s store, very on-the-case, determined to immediately cancel out (or consider) whether or not Loomis and Lila (Vera Miles; as Janet Leigh’s sister) are possibly holding Marion somewhere. He’s a shark after the seal, Arbogast finds his seal in Norman, but isn’t prepared for Mother. That is some kind of death scene; I almost dig it as much as the shower sequence and that’s saying something. It’s startling and out-of-nowhere, isn’t it? Just a rush of violence, over within a matter of seconds, but leaves quite an impression.

The swamp. It is quite a burial spot that certainly chills the bones when further mentioned later that other bodies could have been dumped there, two missing girls who may’ve met bad ends because they left Norman aroused. It is a back story that awakens us to just the kind of monster that lurks within Norman’s disturbed mind. Pretty unsettling how Norman wraps up Marion in the room’s shower curtain and places her in the trunk with an efficiency and then takes her and it to this swamp, his hands clasped in prayer, waiting, waiting, waiting, for it to sink. Just to think that this isn’t the first time..

Lila and Sam’s portraying husband and wife, getting a room momentarily under such a disguise as to find out more about what happened to Marion and Arbogast (and the money, using it as a method of provoking a response from Norman about what he had done to secure it for a better living arrangement away from such an uneconomical deserted locale always with plenty of vacancies) sets up the final fantastic reveal of Mother herself in all her skeletal glory, the hanging light bulb introducing her to us as Norman, dressed in full regalia, wig and robe, speaking in her voice, a long butcher knife ready to strike. I flat adored the take of Lila ascending the steps leading to the Bates House showing her face and figure steadily approaching, Hitch cutting back and forth to the building as it closes into her and us, it looks like evil bearing down from above. Then Lila’s search takes us into the home of Norman, his mother’s room exactly preserved (as Mother herself) as it was when she was alive, the childhood room, and eventually the basement. Slight hints of what it looks like inside are given when Norman enters after taking a look at Marion, but when Lila is there, during the day, we get a full view not a glimpse.

Then there’s the final scene, after the whole psychiatric examination explaining Norman’s plight, where we see Mother in full control, Anthony Perkins just hitting on all cylinders, his face morphing from a listless state into a wicked smile, a skull overlaying him as to say that she is in charge. Good stuff right here.

What a movie. It just never ceases to enthrall me. Visually. Thematically. Performance. The setting. The interesting characters. The ways Hitchcock pulls us in using his camera as a guide. I think this film uses fate remarkably well. Marion is fated to find Bates Motel: the rainfall sends her off the main highway onto the old road to Bates Motel. The theft of the money, an irrational response to an unhappy situation where desperation motivated such an act, led Marion on the path of destruction. But without Marion’s tragic demise, Norman would never have been stopped and Mother would certainly have kept on ridding her son of those nasty little sluts that send an erotic charge through him.

In closing, what a piece of acting from Janet Leigh on her way out of Phoenix to California, where Hitch uses what might be said from various characters about her theft of the money and suspicious behavior, talking away inside her mind, the reactions of each conversation (her smirk when the rich man whose money she stole starts barking away is perfect) a definite highlight for me. She’s sensational in this movie, because you can read her like a book even when Leigh doesn’t say anything. Just a bravura performance. Leigh. Perkins. Balsam. Hitchcock. Psycho. When all the right pieces come together, good things happen.

It's sad, when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son. But I couldn't allow them to believe that I would commit murder. They'll put him away now, as I should have years ago. He was always bad, and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man... as if I could do anything but just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds. They know I can't move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me. They're probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I'm not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching... they'll see. They'll see and they'll know, and they'll say, "Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly..."