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More Hitchcock
Last Laugh: Vertigo
Was Hitchcock's masterpiece a private joke?
Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone
A photo study of the Master's fetishes — uh, motifs
Touch of Psycho? Welles' Influence on Hitchcock
Touch of Evil and Psycho: John W. Hall asks, "Can you tell the difference?"
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The camera at first lags behind Arbogast as he begins his climb, then jumps ahead and above him, and then to the terrifying shot of the thin band of light that runs from the crack in the door of Mother’s room, a band that quickly widens as Mother prepares to launch her assault. Once more, Mother’s presence is heralded by a contrast between light and shadow.37
As the door widens, we return to the shot showing Arbogast ascending the stairs. Instead of returning to show Mother coming through the door, we switch to an overhead shot. Just as Arbogast reaches the top of the stairs, the Psycho strings enter and so does Mother, brandishing her carving knife once more. There is a strange, herky-jerky character to her assault, almost as if we were watching an old, speeded-up silent film, that at once distances us from the action and yet makes it more horrible. A sudden close-up of Arbogast’s stunned, bloody face throws us back into the action, and the camera follows him as he staggers backwards down the stairs. He collapses at the foot of the stairs, where Mother finishes him off.38
Although it looks (to me, at least) that Arbogast is stumbling backwards at he makes his descent, Hitchcock apparently envisioned him as being almost in free fall. "The back must have been broken on impact," he says, in the trailer. The shot was filmed with the camera gliding down the empty staircase. Balsam then sat in a chair and waved his arms wildly while the staircase shot was projected behind him. Hitchcock obviously had a great fear of falling, and it comes out in this scene.39
Meanwhile, Sam and Lila are waiting to hear from Arbogast, in a hardware store that is hardly better lit than the Bates Motel. Twice we see Lila back-lit so that her face is completely obscured, reminding us of our first encounter with Mother, and suggesting that the two of them will eventually have a showdown. Prodded by Lila, Sam goes out to the motel, but is unable to find anyone. His shouts of "Arbogast!" carry out to the swamp, where Norman is supervising the disappearance of the private investigator’s car. Norman, dressed in black so that he almost disappears against the swamp, here appears as Lucifer, ruler of the Underworld, contemptuous of the mortals who would enter his realm, and a far cry from the little boy who’s afraid to say "bathroom."
Sam returns to Lila, and together they go to the deputy sheriff’s house. The deputy, John McIntire, and his wife, Lurene Tuttle, are almost caricatures, and are given a number of bad lines, which they deliver with all their badness intact. It is at this point that we learn the Bates’ unfortunate family history, that ten years ago Mrs. Bates, a widow, murdered her lover and then committed suicide. (Norman had told Marion that the lover was dead, but of course didn’t specify the means.) The deputy calls Norman, who admits to having seen both Marion and Arbogast, which is sufficient evidence for Sam and Lila, but not for the deputy, particularly because Sam and Lila won’t file a missing person report for Marion, apparently because this would involve charging Marion with the theft of the $40,000.
The deputy’s call is enough to push Norman into action, however. We follow him as he heads for the house once more. His fanny-swinging trot up the stairs, which always gets a laugh from the audience, is a bit of a cheap shot, because Norman isn’t gay. He’s hetero, but with a twist.
Norman runs up the stairs and enters Mother’s room, but the camera holds the shot of the staircase. We hear Norman and Mother arguing. It becomes clear from their conversation that if the camera remains in place we will soon be face to face with Mrs. Bates. At this point the camera apparently decides that discretion is the better part of valor, and it gently glides upwards toward the ceiling. The screen goes dark as the camera seems to press itself into a corner and then turn around, so that it is now looking directly down on the second-floor landing, the same position from which it viewed Mother’s assault on Arbogast. (This also usually draws a laugh from the audience.) Then we see Norman emerge from the bedroom carrying Mother, who, seen from above, looks quite doll-like and helpless. (Although we can’t quite see it, the descent to the root cellar is the familiar spiral of the flushing toilet and the gurgling drain.) At this point, we are fully aware that information is being withheld from us, and that Psycho will not be over until we have looked Mother fully in the face.
In fact, Hitchcock went to great lengths (one might say he cheated) to conceal the fact that Mother and Norman are one and the same. For example, Perkins never "did" Mother’s voice. Hitchcock used several voices, male and female, to try to prevent the audience from getting a fix on Mother.40 He also used several different people to play Mother. Margo Epper, a 24-year-old actress who had worked largely as a double in Hollywood, played Mother in the shower sequence. Epper, who is described in Rebello’s book as "long and lean and [having] almost a male set of hips," probably also played Mother when Marion sees her in the second-story window.
However, for the Arbogast murder scene Hitchcock used "Mitzi," whom Rebello artfully describes as a "little person41," so short that Mother seems to be stabbing up when she attacks Arbogast. It’s also Mitzi rather than the "mommy mummy" that Perkins carries downstairs. But I wonder if it was not Epper rather than Mitzi who put the finishing touches on Arbogast at the foot of the stairs.
The image of a tall, almost skeletal woman appears in several of Hitchcock’s films from the thirties. In the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Cicely Oates plays "Nurse Agnes," who is apparently Peter Lorre’s lover (he embraces her woefully when she is killed in the shootout that concludes the film). Oates, who is referred to by almost every critic as a "strange-looking woman," is tall, slender, and broad-shouldered, with a fierce, rigid look on her face. The gang of spies led by Lorre use a sort of cultish church of sun worshippers as a cover for their activities, and Oates serves as the pastor or priestess for the congregation. Presumably in connection with this activity, Lorre once addresses her as "sister." Hitchcock goes to curious lengths to show Nurse Agnes in a sympathetic light. During the shootout, she crawls on her hands and knees, dragging a heavy box of ammunition alongside her while the police blaze away.
Four years later, in The Lady Vanishes, the greatest "train" thriller ever made, Hitchcock used a similar character, played by actress Catherine Lacey,42 supposedly both a "nurse" and a "sister" — that is, she is supposed to be a nun, though in fact she is a member of a gang of German/Italian spies who intend to do away with the sweet Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who is also a spy, but a "good spy," an English spy. In the film, the heroine, Margaret Lockwood, suspects that Lacey is not really a nun because she is wearing high heels. When we hear her speaking with a Cockney accent, we know she is a fraud, because there are very few English nuns.43 (Hitchcock of course was Catholic, and his mother undoubtedly spoke with a sort of Cockney accent.)
Once Lacey realizes that the gang are out to kill an Englishwoman, she turns on them and joins forces with the English on the train. It is she who leaps from the train, races ahead of the engine, and turns the switch that lets them escape the Germans.44 She then clambers back on the locomotive, getting shot in the back for her troubles. (She says it doesn’t hurt, but the last time we see her she doesn’t look too chipper).
In both films we have a tall, strange, masculine-looking woman who seems to have mysterious inner resources, dressed in an outfit that covers all of her body except her face and hands. Mrs. Bates makes a third, though she is by far the least sympathetic of the three.
With Mother stowed in the root cellar, Norman is as ready for assault from the outside world as he ever can be. Sam and Lila appear, and for a third time Norman defends himself against outsiders in the tiny office of the Bates Motel. Lila’s persistent gaze, looking right by Norman into his parlor, suggests that he will be hard pressed to keep his secrets this time around.45
Once Sam and Lila register as man and wife, they make their way rather easily into Cabin One. Sam is surprised to notice that there is no shower curtain, and Lila finds a scrap of paper with Marion’s handwriting on it, Hitchcock’s way of telling us that we can’t just flush our sins down the toilet.
Sam and Lila are vaguely coming to terms with the idea that Norman may have killed Marion for the $40,000, and killed Arbogast to conceal the first crime, though they don’t say so specifically. Sam engages Norman in a conversation that quickly turns ugly, while Lila sets off to confront Mrs. Bates.
Sam’s conversation with Norman largely re-creates Norman’s earlier encounter with Arbogast. Sam’s theory, that Norman stole the $40,000 so that he could leave the Bates Motel and find a new start, is wildly off base, but it serves to get Norman’s goat, as though Sam were accusing him of wanting to abandon his mother. "This house is my only world," he tells Sam with an almost pathetic intensity. Indeed, Norman is hardly separable from his environment. He both presides over the house and is imprisoned by it, locked in a house of hidden corruption, where repressed desire flourishes unchecked in the basement and childish things are not put away.
While the two argue, Lila makes her way up to the house. Hitchcock cuts back and forth between Lila and the house, as though it were advancing on her. Lila looks increasingly frightened, as though she were suffering from a form of vertigo, but she seizes the doorknob decisively and enters.
We see the dreaded staircase for the fourth time. The camera follows Lila as she opens the door to Mother’s bedroom. At last we are going to see everything. Hitchcock makes time stand still as Lila explores the suffocating Victorian décor, the armoire with the carefully spaced dresses, the famous, horrible crossed hands46 on Mrs. Bates’ vanity table, and the mattress indented with Mrs. Bates’ seated form. Along the way we get perhaps the best scare in Hitchcock, when Lila sees her image from a mirror behind her reflected into the mirror before her.47
Lila doesn’t confine her investigations to Mother’s room. Going up another half-flight of stairs, she comes to Norman’s room. As we look at the worn toys, the filthy, unmade bed, we realize that we are inside Norman’s mind. On Norman’s record player we see Beethoven’s "Eroica" symphony. (Hitchcock surely assumed the audience would think "erotic" rather than "heroic."48) Then Lila pulls a book from the bookcase and opens it. However, we aren’t allowed to see what it is. Some secrets remain secrets.49
We have learned more from Lila’s explorations than she has. She descends the stairs only to see Norman coming up the path. She cleverly hides beneath the cellar stairs as Norman ascends, but then, to the screams of the audience, decides to inspect the cellar rather than escape. Unwittingly, we have been headed toward this moment for the entire film, and it does not disappoint. The swinging overhead light, stolen from The Picture of Dorian Gray, works perfectly, although Lila has to work a little too hard to set it in motion.50
The appearance of Norman as Mother is a bit of a disappointment. Unless you’re seeing Psycho for the first time, you’re likely to be struck by how little Norman looks like Mother. Perkins was as thin as a rail when he made Psycho, but he still looks like nothing but a guy in a dress. When Sam arrives to put the arm on Norman, it can be said that neither actor inhabits his role. Gavin looks like he’s afraid he’s going to hurt Perkins (or perhaps even afraid to touch him), while Tony practically throws his neck out of joint trying to get that damn wig off his head.
But get it off he does, and the shot of that terrible, harmless tangle of hair lying on the floor is one of the most important in Hitchcock. For Hitchcock, women’s hair had a totemic power. By daring to cross the line that divides men and women, Norman had stepped into the realm beyond good and evil. Now he has been stripped of that power.
Hitchcock came of age during World War I,51 one of the great turning points of Western Civilization. For decades before the War, women had long hair, very often waist length, always wearing it "up" in public. No doubt Hitchcock’s mother wore her hair in this manner. When women started getting their hair cut short, it came as an enormous shock, far surpassing the fuss over long hair in the Sixties.
An obsession with women’s hair comes up over and over again in Hitchcock’s films. In The Lodger, there are several scenes where the Lodger tremblingly removes the heroine’s hat and runs his fingers through her short hair. In The Lady Vanishes, before the "nun" jumps off the train to turn the switch, she tears off her wimple, or headdress, so that we can see her dark hair, which appears to be plaited in a curious manner. In Suspicion, caddish Cary Grant goes so far as to suggest to Joan Fontaine that she change her hairstyle. In The Paradine Case, when the well-bred Mrs. Paradine enters prison, a stern-looking matron unpins the unfortunate lady’s hair and runs her fingers through it (looking for contraband, apparently). In Vertigo, of course, the final transformation of Judy into Madeleine occurs when she changes her hairstyle. In The Birds, both the heroine (Tippi Hedren) and the hero’s mother (Jessica Tandy) have the same hairdo. In Marnie (1964), Hedren always wears her hair up, but when she goes riding (the only time she feels free), her hair is loose and flowing in the wind. At the close of the film, when she begs forgiveness from her mother (and doesn’t get it), she puts her head on her mother’s knee and her tousled blonde locks fill the screen.
There is also at least one reference to "crossing" in Hitchcock. In Saboteur (1942), hero Robert Cummings is involved in a conversation with an effeminate saboteur who is nonetheless a family man, who tells him "My wife and I have just had our second son. I’m thinking about letting his hair grow quite long. When I was a boy, I had the most beautiful golden curls. People used to stop me on the street just to admire them."
After Norman is subdued, we get the official wrap-up from "Dr. Richmond" (Simon Oakland), in a scene that many fans don’t care for, because it’s so un-cinematic. In fact, it’s hard to believe that Oakland really got this story from "Mrs. Bates" ("Yes, Norman poisoned my lover and me and put us in bed together"), but the audience wants, and needs, some sort of explanation in order to come down from what they’ve just seen. Oakland’s finger-pointing summation does as well as any.52
When Oakland is finished, a police officer enters, carrying a blanket for Norman, who is suffering from a "slight chill."53 We then get our final glimpse of Norman, staring helplessly, while Mother gives us her side of the story through the voiceover. She finishes by saying that she’s just going to sit here like the harmless old lady she is. Suddenly, the focus returns to Norman’s eyes. He looks right at us and grins menacingly. Logically, it may not make much sense, but dramatically it’s perfect. The film has unmasked Norman, and now he unmasks himself, to reveal the leering monster that lurked beneath all his personae. To drive the point home, Hitchcock superimposes Mother’s death’s head grin over Norman’s own.54
The last scene in Psycho shows Marion’s car being pulled from the swamp by a chain-winch. It recalls Marion’s dying gesture, as she reached toward us in the shower for help. Now, at last, we have extended a hand. The chain stretches directly toward the audience, disappearing on the right-hand side of the screen. It is as if we were reaching into the screen to pull the car from the swamp. But we are, of course, far too late. Unlike the phoenix, there is no resurrection for Marion Crane. She is being pulled from an unmarked grave only to be buried in a marked one. Now that her death is known, it can be mourned, and accepted, and life can go on. But that is all.
In Psycho, the two halves of human nature, passion and reason, fall apart, and passion devours reason as the greater devours the less. Psycho lacks the completeness of works like La Grande Illusion and Les Enfants du Paradis because Hitchcock did not believe in completeness. Psycho is very close to the bleakest of the Greek tragedies, such as Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis, and Euripides’ Medea and The Bacchae, plays in which the gods, if they appear at all, come as the destroyers of hope rather than its source.55 And Marion Crane’s fate seems even crueler than that of her Greek predecessors; she tempted the gods not through vanity, or even virtue, but through vulnerability. Somehow, the death of the common bourgeois with the big boobs never loses its sting.
AFTERWORDS
Both Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho and Donald Spoto’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius make excellent reading. William Rothman’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze includes extensive reviews of eight Hitchcock films, including Psycho. Rothman, like many academics, manages to be both wooden and windy at the same time, but he’s studied these films carefully and has some interesting things to say. In his Web article "Touch of Psycho?," John W. Hall looks at the impact of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil on Hitchcock.56
The web sites devoted to Hitchcock and his films are almost without number. The MacGuffin Web Page is a good place to start. The Psycho home page is slow-loading but has numerous downloadable images and audio and video files, as well as links to other sites. Janet Leigh: A Tribute is an exercise in fifties deluxe, despite its Pink Floyd soundtrack.
NOTES
37. Hitchcock uses light from under a door in several earlier films to suggest the presence of a threatening consciousness or will. See Suspicion and Spellbound.
38. The fury of her assault here causes the audience to laugh throughout the rest of the film whenever anyone refers to Mrs. Bates as "a sick old lady." Psycho is a film that benefits greatly from being seen with an audience.
39. Vertigo is practically built around falling. Jimmy Stewart also takes a dive in Rear Window, though it’s not fatal. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint almost fall to their deaths at the conclusion of North by Northwest, and Cary almost falls off a roof a number of times in To Catch a Thief. For a rare Hitchcock hero who isn’t afraid of heights, see Saboteur, where Robert Cummings jumps off a high bridge, and lives!
40. The final voice-over, when Norman is in prison, was done by a young actor, Paul Jasmin.
41. Rebello quotes Anthony Perkins as referring to "Mitzi" as "she," but avoids a gender-specific reference himself.
42. Lacey is simply referred to as "Nun" in the credits, even though she is not a nun. She wears a very elaborate habit that does not look at all as though it were designed for nursing.
43. Prior to World War II, most Englishmen and women were openly anti-Catholic. Nuns were generally regarded as sinister freaks.
44. And if you think it’s easy to run on a railroad track in heels and an ankle skirt, try it some time.
45. One might also note that Marion, Arbogast, and Sam all saw Mother in the window. Lila, however, sees Norman.
46. Hands, the symbol of human vulnerability in Hitchcock, here are turned to stone, or at least bronze. The camera zooms in to show them in extreme close-up.
47. At this point we see three Lilas, the "real" Lila, from the back, in close-up, a small Lila, also from the back, reflected in the mirror behind her, and a third Lila, from the front, reflected in the mirror before her, still looking at the crossed hands.
48. The Paradine Case has a similar, but much less interesting "bedroom investigation" episode: lawyer Gregory Peck visits the flamboyant chambers of the imprisoned Mrs. Paradine — the style could be described as late Scarlett O’Hara — and sees the score for the "Appassionata" on her piano.
49. In Joseph Stefano’s script, the book was supposed to be pornographic (Stefano made the Norman/Mother relationship explicitly incestuous). However, for all we can learn from Lila’s reaction, the book may as well have been Ivanhoe (one of Hitchcock’s childhood favorites — Edna Mae Wonacott, the middle daughter in Shadow of a Doubt, is reading Ivanhoe).
50. Hitchcock had earlier used the device of a shifting light source himself in Foreign Correspondent when Joel McCrea hides in between the gears of a windmill.
51. He avoided service because of his weight. With death and casualty figures running in the millions, draft avoidance during World War I was not the same as during the Vietnam War. Young men of draft age in civilian clothes were quite likely to be publicly insulted as cowards. Some young women carried white feathers for this purpose, which were handed to the victim. In 1939, Hitchcock left England for America, almost immediately before the outbreak of World War II. Obviously, he felt fighting was someone else’s business.
52. Hitchcock apparently thought it was terrific, thanking Oakland on the set for "saving my picture."
53. Imagine a prisoner making such a request on NYPD Blue.
54. This was left off many of the prints of Psycho as too shocking. Amusingly, Blockbuster Video, which rents a cut-down, "TV version" of Psycho (although it’s not marked as such), with some of the stabbing taken out of the two murder scenes, includes the death’s head superimposition, at least in the copy that I rented. Blockbuster’s versions of The Birds and Marnie are similarly edited, and similarly unmarked.
55. All three plays involve murderous deceptions. In The Women of Tracis, Deianira, the wife of Hercules, seeks to regain his love through a magical potion that proves fatal to the big guy when applied. In The Bacchae, Agave kills her son Pentheus in the midst of Bacchic revelry, and bears his head home on a stick, thinking she has killed a lion, only to be disillusioned. In Medea, when Jason announces to his wife Medea that he is divorcing her and taking a new wife, she pretends to acquiesce, presenting the bride to be with a beautiful cloak of hammered gold links. When the girl puts it on, her flesh bursts into flame, and her father, seeking to rescue her, is likewise consumed. To further ruin Jason’s day, Medea murders their two sons.
56. Among other things, both films featured Janet Leigh having a bad day in a cheap motel. In Psycho, Leigh was only stabbed to death in a shower; in Touch of Evil, she was raped and shot full of heroin by a pack of Mexican leather boys. Something about Janet brought out the worst in fat film directors.
April 2000 | Issue 28
Copyright © 2000 by Alan Vanneman
EDITOR'S NOTE: There’s a crisp new DVD version of Psycho available for a mere $34.98 list price (30% less at online discount stores like lasersedge.com). It’s in widescreen with hi-fi sound and loaded with extras: trailers, documentary on the making of the film, censored scenes, production notes, etc. Also easy to get on VHS flat or widescreen (list price $14.98), or for those who follow the old communist canard that "property is theft," it’s often screened on television.
