“Most films of the ’50s are secret ads for the American way of life. Psycho is a warning about its lies and limits” (The Moment of Psycho – David Thomson)
The first scene in Hitchcock’s film, Marnie, sees an auburn haired woman walking in and out of the red line positioned towards the edge of the train platform. That scene is a summary of the plot of Marnie, a woman not walking the straight and narrow of life instead she transgresses outside the line into crime. But what also made me wonder is why Marnie is allowed to live and not Marion Crane (Psycho)? Both have transgressed, both have stolen from their respective bosses. For Marion the money she stole is a one-off while with Marnie the stealing is a compulsion. So why does Marion Crane end up being murdered by Norman Bates and Marnie doesn’t? The key is that while Marion is sexually active code for transgressive Marnie is not. Marnie dislikes men, hates the touch of a man and refrains from any contact with a man. Marnie is redeemable while Marion isn’t even if she declares to Norman Bates while sitting in the parlour of the Bates motel that she is intending to drive back to Phoenix to fix the mess she created.
But Marion Crane dies in the shower, 40 minutes or so into the film, a scene frenetic, violent and sadistic and one that lasts minutes, the piercing screeching of violins as Marion is stabbed, the lingering voyeuristic shot of her unblinking eye the camera panning back allowing the spectator to glimpse her unmoving body, the slowing down of Bernard Herrmann’s psychologically disturbing composition ending with the noise of running water from the shower head.
The scene that would go down in the annals of the movie horror history as one of the greatest film scenes, a scene modernist and minimally shot in monochrome which would be copied and replicated many times over with Janet Leigh who will be forever labelled as ‘scream queen’.
Psycho by its nature is voyeuristic, a restrained voyeurism, where we the spectator are invited to lurk as the camera slips unheard through the window of the first scene where Marion is lounging on the bed dressed in white underwear while Sam, her lover, is getting dressed one assumes this is post-coital where dreams of a life together are dashed by discussions of lack of money therefore lack of hope in their relationship. Marion returns to her job and witnesses a $40,000 dollars housing transaction between her boss and a client.
Marion, trusted employee, is asked to bank the money, she agrees and asks for the rest of the day off as she has a headache. The next scene sees Marion frantically packing a suitcase, again she is clad in black underwear this time, staring at the money that hasn’t been banked, wondering silently whether she is doing the right thing. Marion sets off to escape Phoenix for Fairvale to her lover Sam. Money may not buy love but it can sure solve financial woes, even stolen cash though Marion confused and desperate hasn’t thought the implications through, she wants to escape the loneliness and isolation.
And that escape from loneliness makes her end up off the beaten track and into the trap of the Bates motel invading the lives of Norman Bates/Mother. In the parlour scene we witness Marion and Norman chatting over sandwiches and milk about life and ‘private traps’. Both same to relate to each other, on the surface though part of me wonders if Marion is making polite conversation originally but eventually warms to him, but Norman understands Marion’s need to escape to a ‘private island’ and compared to Sam, Norman displays more of an insight to Marion’s predicament.
“And none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other. And for all of it we never budge an inch”. (Norman Bates)
Marion resolves to make amends in Phoenix, “I’d like to go back and try to pull myself out of it”. But Marion can’t she is murdered in the shower. On a general point, it must have been a shock for the audience to witness a violent ending for a leading female actor at the pinnacle of her career. Forty minutes devoted to Marion, the rest of the film devoted to Norman Bates.
I am not that interested in the rest of the story, except for the ending where the killer of Marion, the private investigator and two other nameless young women is unmasked. Norman Bates’s psyche has been invaded by his Mother sublimating her jealous rages meaning that Marion had to die because she aroused Norman, the close-up visual of him with the light from the spy hole exposing his voyeuristic eye watching Marion undressing for her shower, he putting the picture back with an embarrassed and ashamed expression.
David Thomson describes the explanation of Norman Bates/Mother as ‘cockamamie’ especially the scene at the end with the shrink tying up the loose strands of psychopathology. Even Hitchcock apparently thanked the actor who played the shrink for ‘saving the film’.
And that’s the thing, Mother did it, Norman may have committed the physical act but he was driven by Mother. We never see the true Mrs Bates of who she really was, we get descriptions obviously from Norman (‘my mother is not herself’) but also from the sheriff (‘clingy woman’) and that’s all. We the spectator get a male interpretation of Mrs Bates. The ending of Psycho ultimately lays the blame of Norman behaviour to his domineering Mother. Norman a likeable young man who is undermined and devalued by her.
I am a Hitchcock fan, he was an auteur of suspense, psychological/Freudian narratives and overall technically inventive of his craft. But also he comes across as a misogynist creep, reflection of his period and time? I wonder as well whether Hitchcock related to many of his psychological damaged creations (He develops and spends more time crafting, for example, Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train and Norman Bates in Psycho than Sam Loomis or Guy Haines), whether the stories reflected his own troubled childhood, domineering patriarch and mother. Though his stories depict a mixture of domineering, forceful, cold, manipulative Mother figures (Psycho, Marnie, The Birds) while father figures are sometimes non-existent. Again, it seems to enter the realms of ‘mother blaming’. I am not suggesting that mothers can’t screw up their children but it is always the easy option to revert to.
The Hitchcock woman is usually blonde, cool temperament, transgressive and that means punishment by a male authority figure. Mark Rutland (Marnie) rescues ‘frigid kleptomaniac’ Marnie from the clutches of the law. Instead it is he who traps her, which amounts to sadistic form of punishment, intent on curing her psychological traumas harking back to childhood hence the looming figure of the cold and uncaring Mother who holds the key to the unlocking Marnie’s repressed memories. Though in saying that Hitchcock is capable of depicting pure suspense such as the scene that is sliced in two showing Marnie creeping away from the safe with the loot in her bag while a cleaner is washing the floor, it is directed in silence only shattered by Marnie dropping her shoe, the audience like Marnie are desperate to know whether the cleaner has heard.
The rape scene in Marnie is unnecessary and for what purpose does this specific scene mean, and fit in? The original screenwriter left in disgust as he believed Hitchcock was obsessed with that scene (was it Hitchcock’s vile way of getting back at Tippi Hedren for rebuffing him?). Hitchcock’s voyeurism and violence becomes less restrained and results into pure violent misogyny (Frenzy is a case in point).
Laura Mulvey developed the theory of ‘scopophilia’ (pleasure of being looked at and pleasure in looking) and applied it to Hitchcock. The dominant patriarchal ideology that permanent society is reflected in film, the powerful active male gaze versus passive female gaze. Women are ultimately sexual objects to be gazed at.
“An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly controlled narrative structure’. (Visual and Other Pleasures – Laura Mulvey)
This can also explore the voyeurism and fetishistic fascination of Hitchcock, the beautiful female Hitchcockian object controlled by a male. The persecution, obsession and humiliation of this female object from film narratives such as Vertigo, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, Psycho, Marnie….
And who does the spectator, the audience identify with? Do we identify with the woman and at some a fantasy level take a voyeuristic and sadistic pleasure in her pain and fear, a common theme which runs through Hitchcock films . And when you consider the function of the “male gaze” where E. Ann Kaplan argues that men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; the spectator, in turn, is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the woman on screen; and the camera’s original ‘gaze’ comes into play in the very act of filming.
When it comes to exploring fantasy and reality I think it is much more complicated regarding identification. We live in a world saturated by sexist imagery existing in a dominant patriarchal and capitalist society based on commodification. And partly on a cynical level, what brings in the punters and how it relates to their lives but not that challenging rather it is in the acceptable boundaries. Regarding Hitchcock, I believe the narratives reflect his own beliefs in the ‘perfect woman’, a sexual object placed on a pedestal to be humiliated and to endure sadistic violence. In Hitchcock’s world, ‘the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong’.
Books:
Visual and Other Pleasures – Laura Mulvey
Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film – Carol Clover
The Moment of Psycho – David Thomson
Posted by harpymarx 
