Alfred Hitchcock | Psycho / 1960

the jealous mother

by Douglas Messerli

Joseph Stefano (screenplay, based on the novel by Robert Bloch), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Psycho / 1960

 

It was not until I began writing the essay on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo that I suddenly realized that his well-known 1960 horror film Psycho bears much in common with his brilliant 1958 film in the sense that it too is a kind of romance—a very strange one to say the least, but still a romance between a young man, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), and a passing stranger, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), an unexpected guest at his desolate motel. The two hardly meet, sharing only a short conversation over shared supper, before it becomes clear that the lonely Norman, living miles from the more-traveled highway, is fond of his new guest, and through his shy looks and comments we observe his interest in her. 

A supposed argument with his mother confirms his emotions:

 

Norma Bates: [voice-over] No! I tell you no! I won't have you bringing

                       some young girl in for supper! By candlelight, I suppose,

                       in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap,

                       erotic minds!

Norman Bates: [voice-over] Mother, please...!

Norma Bates: [voice-over] And then what? After supper? Music? Whispers?

Norman Bates: [voice-over] Mother, she's just a stranger. She's hungry,

                         and it's raining out!

Norma Bates: [voice-over] "Mother, she's just a stranger"! As if men don't

                       desire strangers! As if... ohh, I refuse to speak of disgusting

                       things, because they disgust me! You understand, boy? Go on,

                       go tell her she'll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with MY

                       food... or my son! Or do I have tell her because you don't have

                       the guts! Huh, boy? You have the guts, boy?

Norman Bates: [voice-over] Shut up! Shut up!

 

     Unlike Vertigo, however, where Scottie—as a kind of voyeur—and Madeline—as a knowingly observed performer—have long days together as their love blooms, Marion is almost unaware of his feelings and Norman has no time to develop a relationship. The two are completely severed from any possible consummation of feelings, she having stolen $40,000 and left her lover—for whom she has stolen the money in order to marry—back in Phoenix, he having a more powerful love-hate relationship with his mother living just up the hill in his mansion house. The romance of this frightening tale, from the beginning, is off kilter. Both the soon-to-be victim and the murderer are not who they pretend to be.

 

    Like Vertigo’s Madeline, Marion is a liar and, in this case, a thief. The realization of her errors comes soon after her conversation with Norman, as she determines to return to Phoenix; and, like the mythical bird, she clearly hopes to be "reborn," to rectify her behavior. The shower, as numerous observers have noted, is a kind of ritual baptism, a washing away of her sins with a hopeful return to innocence. Yet, the attentive viewer also knows that a resurrection will be impossible, for as we have witnessed in Norman's room behind the motel's front desk, Norman's hobby is taxidermy: he stuffs birds, assuring no possibility of their being reborn out of the ashes.

 

    Minutes later, dressed as his mother, he stabs Marion to death in the famed shower scene, a scene so powerful that women all over the world became terrified to take a shower. The three minutes of 50 cuts is a kind of small and masterful film in  itself, revealing in its attention to the details to Marion's body just how obsessed Norman/his mother is with this woman. It is hard to perceive such a brutal murder as a kind of love scene, but the way Hitchcock has filmed it, beginning with the sensual pleasure Marion finds in the shower, her scream upon the sudden intrusion, the outstretched hand and fingers, the gradual fall, the appearance of blood, and the final focus upon her dilated eye, seen abstractly it is almost a kind of dance of pleasure as well as a dance of death.

     Norman has to destroy her as his jealous mother to keep his psychosis alive; and it is that necessity—the acts of the jealous mother—that makes us realize just how attracted Norman has been to Marion. In a sense, Norman has been as obsessed with her as Scottie was with Madeline.

      But obviously, Norman is even more obsessed with his mother, a woman to whom he is not only in complete parental thrall, but with whom he is deeply in love. He has killed her because in her attraction for another man for whom he has believed she was preparing to abandon him.

 

     It is tempting, given this Hitchcockian muddle of Freudian-inspired psychological details to imagine Norman as being a latent homosexual. Certainly Freud might have argued that despite the boy's seeming love for and attraction to women he also fears and loathes them, explaining his need to destroy the women to whom he is attracted before they overtake his own identity or hurt him with their inability to fully share his love in the manner of his mother

        But with Norman the psychosis goes much further—partly out of guilt for his hidden hate and final murder of those of female sex, but also out of his own recognition that he cannot truly fulfill their love (in the case of his mother because of the obvious incestual restriction, and in Marion's case because he is still a virgin too terrified to ever proceed with a sexual advance)—he replaces them, becomes them himself in order to consummate a relationship between him and the women he admires from afar. Through his personal intercommunication with his inner mother / lover he creates a relationship of husband and wife, lover, and dependent mate. Norman is more a kind of faux transgender figure rather than a man who secretly desires others of his own sex.

     The rest of the story, how family and authorities discover the truth, hardly matters. The only thing that keeps the audience's interest—which is why the director was so determined not to reveal the story's secret and would not allow audiences to enter after the movie had begun—is the fact that we do not yet realize the truths I have just expressed above, that Norman is his mother, having killed her off long ago. What gradually becomes apparent is that his real lover / mother was a tyrant who would allow him no other lover, keeping him frozen in infancy forever. So, in the end, playing the role of both his mother and himself, he is, as his last name suggests ("Bates") a man forced to perpetually make love to himself in a kind a kind of psychical masturbation. As the doctor summarizes:

 

"Like I said... the mother... Now to understand it the way I understood it, hearing it from the mother... that is, from the mother half of Norman's mind... you have to go back ten years, to the time when Norman murdered his mother and her lover. Now he was already dangerously disturbed, had been ever since his father died. His mother was a clinging, demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man... and it seemed to Norman that she 'threw him over' for this man. Now that pushed him over the line and he killed 'em both. Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of all... most unbearable to the son who commits it. So he had to erase the crime, at least in his own mind. He stole her corpse. A weighted coffin was buried. He hid the body in the fruit cellar. Even treated it to keep it as well as it would keep. And that still wasn't enough. She was there! But she was a corpse. So he began to think and speak for her, give her half his time, so to speak. At times he could be both personalities, carry on conversations. At other times, the mother half took over completely. Now he was never all Norman, but he was often only mother. And because he was so pathologically jealous of her, he assumed that she was jealous of him. Therefore, if he felt a strong attraction to any other woman, the mother side of him would go wild." [Points finger at Lila Crane]

     "When he met your sister, he was touched by her... aroused by her. He wanted her. That set off the 'jealous mother' and 'mother killed the girl'! Now after the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep. And like a dutiful son, covered up all traces of the crime he was convinced his mother had committed!"

 

    In short, the doctor strangely confirms that Marion's murder was indeed a murder for love.

    At film's end, Norman sits covered in a blanket, as psychically dead as Scottie in Hitchcock's Vertigo. But while Scottie stood upon the edge of death into which Madeline has finally leapt, reminding us of his 20th century angst, the last images of Norman look more like a scene out of Fellini than anything else, hinting at something similar to the postmodern comic absurdity that cinema would portray in the years ahead. Even Norman's thoughts—his absurd belief that "I'm not going to even swat that fly" might convince someone of his inability to commit the atrocities he has—seems to be something out of Ionesco or Beckett rather than taken from a high modernist literary text which Vertigo calls up. Despite the fact that the two protagonists face similar destinies of meaningless and empty living, having both lost the women they most loved, Hitchcock's implication of what it means is far more comic in Psycho, despite the horrors of the film itself. For Norman, having finally consumed his male other, has now fully become his own lover. 

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2012 and September 30, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2012).