You guys ever seen this one called PSYCHO? It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s take on PEEPING TOM. Good shit. Check it out.
The weird thing about watching PSYCHO is that after you’ve already seen it (which in my opinion you have) the biggest trick is already given away. I’m not talking about the ending, the solution to the mystery. I’m talking about the fact that about half of the movie is all mis-direction… Marion Crane is unhappy, so she takes off with $40,000 of her boss’s money. Is the cop onto her? Will her boss know where she went? Will she decide to give it back? In a normal Hitchcock movie it might be about the money, but we know it’s not about the money. The money is not even the mcmuffin, it’s the red herring. We know not to really get invested in this because there is a little matter of something that happens in a motel shower that makes the money irrelevant. We know that and we still watch it again and again.
But with this hindsight we can also notice other things going on: the talk of Marion having to turn her mother’s picture around when her boyfriend is there, her co-worker (played by Hitchcock’s daughter) talking about her mother calling to check up on her… everyone has a mother lingering in their life from afar, overseeing things. But not quite like Norman does.
We’ve seen clips and photos and references and parodies of the shower scene almost as many times as we’ve seen Mickey Mouse, so it’s hard to get scared by it anymore. But when you see it in context it’s so much more. Most of its scare power has been squeezed out by familiarity, but it’s easy to forget that there’s more going on here before the stabbing. Forget about what’s about to happen and watch the look on Marion’s face as she cleans herself. She has decided to give the money back and she’s cleansing her soul. She feels good about it. And it’s actually her conversation with Norman that brought her to that decision. If he could just control these freaky urges he would’ve had a positive influence on her life, the dumb bastard.
On the latest fancy DVD of PSYCHO they included audio of Truffaut interviewing Hitchcock about PSYCHO. One thing Hitchcock says is that he’s very proud of the movie not for its content or acting but for it technical artistry, that for that it’s perfect. And he’s right, but what he’s missing is that without Anthony Perkins in that role it might not be the classic it is. He’s so perfect and so unlike other performances of the era. There’s nothing cliche about the way he plays crazy. He’s handsome, but skinny and a little weird. He’s awkward and sad, but also funny and likable. He’s even a little effiminate at times, which makes me wonder if that’s why Hitchcock wanted him for the role. If the stories are true then Perkins was hiding something himself. I suspect Hitchcock thought that would help. Or maybe he really didn’t give a shit about actors, like he claimed, and it was just a lucky coincidence.
At any rate, there’s something about that character that made him an American icon. I mean, as many great characters as Jimmy Stewart played for Hitchcock you never saw him coming back years later to show you the further adventures of that character, and I don’t think there was any demand for it. Although I guess I would’ve watched ROPE 2 and 3 where he solved other murder mysteries during what seems to be one continuous take.
My favorite acting in the movie is the way Norman nervously chews while being interrogated. He’s shot in profile and a little spot on his cheek keeps pulsating. It’s an obvious tell, but the funny thing is he doesn’t even know what he’s lying about. He thinks he’s covering up for something his mother did. He knows that’s bad but he has no idea how freaky the thing is that he’s actually hiding.
The book Psycho and the movie THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE were both loosely inspired by the real life killer Ed Gein, who dug up his mother’s body, killed some neighbors and ate parts of human bodies. CHAIN SAW rubs your nose in the gruesome horror show of it all, and takes advantage of how hard it is to understand what the fuck would make a human mind come up with that. I mean, nipple belts? I never. PSYCHO takes the other half of the coin, the side that kept it all hidden. Gein was not that much of a recluse, he knew people in town and they thought he was just a slow guy with a weird sense of humor. They had no idea.
Norman Bates is much more appealing. He seems like a nice guy, you feel sorry for him, even watching it knowing what he’s up to. He’s the killer but the movie lets us see him as a victim too, because he can’t control this other personality that he thinks is his mother. If he could control it he would. There wouldn’t be a problem here, and I’m sure he would do a good job of managing the motel. The Bates Motel would get pretty decent user reviews online, I think. “The manager even invited me up to his house for milk and sandwiches. Just a real friendly, family-run place, and quiet because it’s away from the freeway. I’d stay there again if ever visiting the greater Fairvale area.”
I’m telling you guys, watch PSYCHO. It has a real “mother” of an ending, but I won’t give it away. All I will say is that chick is no chick.
October 30th, 2009 at 1:41 am
“psycho” is one of my favorite all-time movies. i can’t say which i think is a better or more interesting picture, this or “vertigo,” but “psycho” is definitely the one i’m tempted to watch more often. i was kinda lucky because i first saw it as a kid, when i was about 11 and my mom rented it for us (which was pretty weird, actually, cause i wasn’t allowed to watch rated R movies until quite a bit later, and my mom was pretty strict about what i watched – in fact, when i mentioned to her recently that she had rented it for me at that age, she didn’t remember it and was shocked she had done such a thing – oops sorry for the somewhat lengthy aside about my mom, unnecessary but oddly appropriate).
anyway, the point is i had some vague awareness of the shower scene and stuff just from pop-cultural osmosis, but i didn’t really know what was going to happen, and plus i was 11, so it scared the living poop out of me, as did the scene on the staris with the detective, and the final reveal in the basement. i have seen the movie many times since and as an adult; in fact, i have a habit of forcing my girlfriends to watch it, as i did with my current squeeze around halloween last year. and it’s like you said, vern, obviously it’s not gonna be as scary or surprising now when you watch it, but you can really enjoy it and marvel at the technical artistry (the superb cinematography, amazing score) and the fantastic performance by perkins, which, as you say, feels somehow totally modern, kind of like brando in “streetcar named desire” or jack lemmon in “the partment” – doesn’t feel like the stylized, dated acting of the era.
and it would even be shocking now to set up a main protagonist in a movie that you have implicit sympathy for and set up a whole plot of conflict for her and then suddenly kill her off about halfway through the picture (though of course if a movie did that now, you would probly say they were just copying “psycho” – would still be a shock though, i think), but at the time it must have been absolutely mind-blowing.
so once marion is offed, all of a sudden norman becomes the protagonist of the movie. and when you watch it now, you know he is the killer, but like you said you STILL sympathize with him. it’s kind of amazing.
i love the scene where marion gets pulled over by the cop. when i watch the movie now as an adult, obviously i don’t get scared by the shower and other murder scenes anymore, so that scene where she gets pulled over has actually become the scariest scene for me in the movie. it’s so tense and creepy. i feel like that image of the cop in his sunglasses in the rearview mirror comes back to me in my nightmares.
i have been thinking about depalma and watching some of his movies a lot lately, and i can’t think of anyone besides him and hitchcock who play with tension as epertly. obviously, depalma has been homaging hitchcock – and specifically “pshycho – for his whole career (“carrie” quotes the screeching violins from “psycho”). i saw an interview with depalma about the making of “carrie” on the dvd, and he was talking about the humorous parts of the movie, and he said that the humor is absolutely necessary in a horror or suspense movie in order to relieve the audience’s tension, and i think if you look back at hitchcock’s movies,, you find that all them have some humor in them, whether it’s simply in the dialogue, or a more abstract humor in the satirical voice of the structure of the film, if that makes sense (depalma’s movies are all satirical to some degree).
oh, i also want to say that it may only be me, but i love the last scene in “psycho” with the weirdo psychologist explaining to everyone what the deal is with norman. i know it’s controversial and everyone hates it, but i feel like it gives the movie this unsettling and unsatisfying conclusion which suits it. the whole movie is about defying audience expectations. first you have your main girl that you like, then she gets suddenly murdered, then her sister and boyfriend whom you also like come looking for her, finally in the end they discovert that she’s been murdered, and you want them to have some kind of grief/closure, but you just get this weirdo, unlikable psychologist guy talking in dated 50’s psychobabble, supposedly explaining everything that ‘s happened, and there just like sitting there going “what the fuck?!” i dunno, i love it. then of course you get the great coda with norman and “his” interior monologue to close the flick.
perfect movie.