Macro Study
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Illustrated by an American Film Institute poll in 2001, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was voted the greatest thriller of all time, its scenes and characters among the most memorable in cinema. Hitchcock was prompted to make Psycho after seeing Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1954), which took the thriller genre to new levels of shock value. Not to be outdone, Hitchcock adapted Robert Bloch's pulp novel with a view to pulling off an unprecedented feat of audience manipulation.  The result was a masterpiece of visual and aural film style, rightly deserving the plaudits that hail it as one of the greatest films ever made. 

Although largely classified as a horror film, director Alfred Hitchcock worked extensively within the genre of suspense. Therefore Psycho is essentially a film made by Hitchcock working within and occasionally challenging the horror genre. Despite this, it actually defies genre classification itself. Whilst much of the film's iconography refers to the horror genre, elements of other genres are also prevalent: the detective mystery, relating to the involvement of the private detective, melodrama/romance, thriller/suspense and finally film noir. This is not so much a genre but the tone of a film. Promoting moods of disillusionment and moral corruption, this relates to Marion's theft of $40,000.
From the opening scene the audience are restricted from seeing narrative events from the protagonist's point of view; that is, until her death which occurs one third of the way through the film. The fact that the "star" was written out in such a violent fashion at this early point is disturbing for the audience, as they no longer know where to place their sympathies. The vicious murder, carried out in the innocuous setting of the bathroom went against Hollywood conventions of the horror genre; characters were usually attacked in dark, forbidding places, this contrast making the incident even more shocking for the audience. In structuring the narrative elements in this way, Hitchcock twisted accepted conventions of the horror genre.

In many of the mainstream Hollywood films of the 1940's and 1950's, the camera only moved to follow the actions of the characters on screen. In his innovative use of camera movements, Hitchcock became renowned for making the audience aware of their position as spectators in a film. By thwarting audience expectation1, he was breaking away from styles prevalent under the studio system. Such techniques also served to reinforce genre and heighten suspense; with Psycho, more than anything Hitchcock wanted his audience to be scared.

Made in 1959, Psycho was on the cusp of the transition between Classical Hollywood Narrative and modern cinema. The equilibrium at the beginning of Psycho refers to the relationship between Marion and Sam (John Gavin). Regardless of Sam's tolerance, Marion (Janet Leigh) sees the emptiness in their relationship and so the narrative disruption is set in motion. Marion returns to her office where she ruminates over her misfortune. A rich client called Tom Cassidy comes in to buy a house with cash for his daughter's wedding present. Seeing an immediate solution to her problems, a narrative chain of cause and effect is set in place as she impulsively steals the $40,000. In a Classical Hollywood Narrative one would expect the story to relate to the return of the money and Marion's eventual marriage to Sam. However, it is Psycho's deviation from this which makes it particularly complex. The central protagonist is killed off in the first 47 minutes of the film, something never previously done in cinema, and so the audience are forced to side with the bizarre yet sympathetic antagonist. What becomes the incidental enigma unfolds from the very beginning and then develops as a fractured narrative. 

The clip chosen is the "shower scene" and the subsequent cleanup of the murder, lasting approximately 13 minutes 35 seconds. Inside the cabin we see Marion leaving her desk and entering the bathroom. The pace is measured, with the scene developing following the rules of continuity. The spectator is then allowed the privileged position of observing Marion showering, accentuating the theme of voyeurism endemic in the film. Artful use of close-ups heightens suspense and audience complicity as Marion metaphorically cleanses away her sins. Through the shower curtain we then see a shadowy figure approaching. We cannot make out the features of this figure, a technique used by Hitchcock to create suspense, although it seems as if it is female. At this point the curtain is pulled back to the accompaniment of screeching violins and we see the figure in darkness raising a knife to the air. What follows is a series of shots depicting Marion being repeatedly stabbed by "mother", the sudden dramatic change in pace effectively communicating the frenzy of the attack. Shots are almost subliminal as Hitchcock moves away from the continuity technique to associative montage; a series of images are shown in such a way that we infer something that has not been shown. 
The protagonist is now dead. Off screen, Norman (Anthony Perkins) can be heard shouting to his mother and is seen running from the house to the motel. For the rest of the scene we follow Norman as he obsessively removes all traces of the murder, at this stage assuming him to be the dutiful son. However, audience sympathy is transferred entirely to Norman when Marion's car stops suddenly as it sinking into the swamp. Norman looks around nervously and we breathe a collective sigh of relief as the car finally disappears beneath the inky depths.

It can be argued that Psycho is not about the theft of $40,000 but is really about the mechanics of watching, something that lies at the heart of the cinematic experience. Its release in June 1960 followed that of Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960), similarly dealing with a young man driven to insanity and violence. These two films overtly expose the audience's own voyeuristic behaviour. As feminist critic Laura Mulvey 2 argues, Hollywood has always reflected the dominant ideological concept of cinema. These films did not conform to this, resulting in mass social and critical outcry.

The Gothic monstrosity of the Bates mansion is a significant aspect of Psycho, a rich visual metaphor for the dominance of the past over the present. The shower scene can also be read as Marion's rape by a potent phallic symbol. Another key theme is the split between good and evil, with mirrors being used extensively to symbolise these duplicitous divisions. Obviously Norman's personality is split in the extreme, but even Marion reveals a propensity for both vice and virtue in her theft of $40,000 and the decision to return it. It is even suggested by Bellour 3 that Norman parallels Marion's life after her murder, albeit in the extreme.

Audiences have often looked to Hollywood to provide a moralistic guide to society. Those watching Psycho may find it difficult to do this, given the complex nature of Marion when placed in the context of 1960's American attitudes towards social decency. Psycho reinforces the prevalent ideology of the day because Marion is a sexually active woman outside of marriage and so has transgressed the moral codes of the family. Marion is killed before she achieves the respectability she craves, a symbolic act of punishment for her sexual transgressions. In this sense, a 1960's American audience may justify Marion's untimely death. While the shower scene is the embodiment of Norman's inability to escape his maternal dependency, it is also symbolic of Hitchcock's swipe at standard Hollywood narrative procedure. Although the film's denouement reveals the killer to be male, upon our first encounter with her, we assume her to be female, another shock to the 1960s's American audience.  Psycho's narrative structure also illustrates this bipolarity; the characters with whom Marion associates in the first half cultivate dark secrets while Sam, Lila (Vera Miles) and Sheriff Chambers (John McIntire) are presented as morally upstanding citizens. It is with these characters that the audience are also made to identify with after Marion's death, proving that even in such a film as Psycho, good has to triumph over evil. 

Given that Psycho is a product of its time, it retains a shock factor still powerful today. Like many of Hitchcock's films, so layered and complex is it that multiple viewings are often necessary to capture all its subtlety. This taut masterpiece was followed by 3 sequels, none of which directed by Hitchcock, with Anthony Perkins reprising his role in all of them. His and Hitchcock's shadow is cast over such films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974), The Silence Of The Lambs (Demme, 1991) and Scream (Craven, 1996), with Van Sant's remake (1998) only generating interest for the original film. Psycho can genuinely claim to be a landmark in film history. Providing audiences with a new kind of cinematic experience, it pushed back boundaries of what was acceptable in cinema and showed that even the most popular kind of mass entertainment could be considered an art worth taking seriously. 

(1,490 words)

Bibliography

Bellour, R. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion in Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory, no 3-4, summer 1979

Condon, P & Sangster, J. The Complete Hitchcock, London 2001

Cook, P. & Bernick, M. The Cinema Book, 2nd ed. BFI, London 2001

Duncan, P. Alfred Hitchcock, Hertfordshire 2002

Durgnat, R. Psycho, BFI, London 2001

Durgnat, R. A Long Hard Look At Psycho, BFI, London 2001

Leigh, J. & Nickens, C. Psycho: Behind The Scenes of the Classic Thriller, London 1995

Macnab, G. Key Moments in Cinema: The History of Film and Filmmakers, London 2001

Mulvey, L. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Visual and Other Pleasures, first published 1975, London 1989 pg 15

Nelmes, J. An Introduction to Film Studies, London 1999

Rebello, S. Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho London 1998

Roberts, G. & Wallis, H. Key Film Texts, London 2002



Online sources

http://www.imdb.com

http://www.culturevulture.net

www.filmsite.org

http://www.finearts.uvic.ca/film/courses/295.html

http://media-arts.rmit.edu.au/Phil_Brophy/MMAlec/Psycho.html

http://members.aol.com/vistavision/psycho.html

http://www.phesnt.demon.co.uk/mudge/iss14.psycho.htm

http://www.film.queensu.ca/Critical/Sage.html

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/feminism/gaze.htm#Mulvey 

http://www.bothell.washington.edu/faculty/mgoldberg/subjectobject.htm 

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html 

http://web.tiscali.it/no-redirect-tiscali/andrebalza/essay.html 


CD-ROM

Microsoft Cinemania '94 Edition

Microsoft Encarta '98


























1 Truffaut, F. Hitchcock London 1985, pg 269
2 Mulvey, L. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Visual and Other Pleasures first published in 1975, London 1989 pg 15
3 Bellour, R. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion in Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory no 3-4, Summer 1979



1
Rebecca Andrews
AS Film Studies