Psycho as Comedy: The Joke’s on Everyone

We can further associate the filmmaker, the man with whom we’ve placed our narrative trust, with the “psycho” of both the title and our typical image of one, the latter being someone who would do something unexpected and outside the normal – like killing his protagonist not quite midway through the film! A “psycho” narrative would find such a development comical, watching the audience subsequently trying to find another character in the narrative to cling to. And if we cling to Norman, the joke becomes uproarious.

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1. Credits Where Credit Is Due

“To me, Psycho was a big comedy. Had to be.”

Hitchcock’s remark may be another part of the Hitchcock publicity engine that wanted to provide one extra shock to a film that did not really need another one.

There are humorous passages, many early ones provided by Hitchcock’s daughter in the realtor’s office. Marion (Janet Leigh) returns from her tryst with Sam Loomis (John Gavin) and asks whether she’s missed any phone calls. Caroline (Patricia Hitchcock) responds, “Teddy called me – my mother called to see if Teddy called.” Then Marion complains about a headache, and Caroline says, “I’ve got something – not aspirin. My mother’s doctor gave them to me the day of my wedding. Teddy was furious when he found out I had taken tranquilizers!”

Hitchcock establishes a light mood at the office at the expense of male-female relationships. In retrospect, the references to Caroline’s overbearing mother seem ominous. And a few minutes later we hear from an overbearing father, Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson), who is buying a house for his soon-to-be-married 18-year-old daughter.

Even before the action opens in Marion and Sam’s hotel room at exactly 2:43 (putting in the precise time is a joke itself), the credit sequence exhibits two associative variations. The title, Psycho, is split and moves from side to side, indicating a literal psychotic break. It occurs to me that, alone, this “break” would not deserve much comment, and could even be considered a cliché; however, later in the credits, Hitchcock’s name is animated with the same breaking motion. But after four years of the Hitchcock monologues during his television series, a 1960 audience would probably chalk up this second “break” to Hitch’s morbid sense of humor and not take it seriously.

The graver implication of the “Psycho” and “Hitchcock” credit break compels us to associate the director with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the voyeur-serial killer of women. Such unpleasant thoughts seem beyond comical or joking, even for Hitchcock, although his cameos may often establish a connection between himself and either the main character, as in Vertigo (1958), or enhance a theme or motif in the film, as in Marnie (1964).

We can further associate the filmmaker, the man with whom we’ve placed our narrative trust, with the “psycho” of both the title and our typical image of one, the latter being someone who would do something unexpected and outside the normal – like killing his protagonist not quite midway through the film! A “psycho” narrative would find such a development comical, watching the audience subsequently trying to find another character in the narrative to cling to. And if we cling to Norman, the joke becomes uproarious.

After Marion’s murder, the comedy almost abates, but not quite. Norman is amused over the sheriff’s (John McIntire) attempts to find the old lady seen in the window by Sam Loomis. Likewise, the audience is amused when Norman sits in the room at the courthouse and his mother’s voice thoroughly condemns him while exonerating herself:

It’s sad, when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son. But I couldn’t allow them to believe that I would commit murder.

Superficially, this scene might seem to mitigate the horrors perpetrated by Norman. More than anything, Hitchcock has thrown the idea and word, “psycho,” into a greater relief.

Our easy or complacent use of the word represents a shortcut that denies the object of this term any humanity.1 This theme arises often in his films, most poignantly at a dinner scene in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) when the father and his friend are discussing ways to murder people and young Charlie takes them to task for ignoring the victims of murder.

In the case of Norman Bates, should we walk away thinking that he’s a “psycho” who occasionally went mad, would that still be missing Hitchcock’s point? Norman’s state of mind is complex if not impenetrable – I, for one, am reluctant to think that his mother was to blame (in a strange way, comically, I might be agreeing with her final judgment of Norman).

Not that Hitchcock necessarily wants us to sympathize with him, if only because our sympathy assumes a set of variables that are as tenuous as those that say Mrs. Bates is a monster. Ultimately, Hitchcock’s playing with the titles means that he has taken away the easy answers, and prepares us to be skeptical when the psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) explains everything in the courthouse. When the psychiatrist says that “Norman Bates no longer exists,” what are we going to believe?

2. A Fly in the Ointment

“She wouldn’t even harm a fly.”

Comedy? Psycho? I’m not saying you’ll be laughing at any point, but you may bemused. More bemused than scared.

Maybe Hitchcock’s having a joke on the audience. An audience that easily accepts what it is given. You think that you’re going to a horror film. You react accordingly. You expect to be terrified. The film has terrifying moments. You’re never taking a shower again.

Hitchcock had made over 40 films before this. Suspense, melodrama, a screwball comedy like Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1942), and a suspenseful comedy, The Trouble with Harry (1955). Indeed, most of his films have humor except The Wrong Man (1956) and Topaz (1968). Why would he start making a type of film that he has never made before? Psycho’s take on human nature is more pessimistic than, say, Strangers on a Train’s (1951) or Vertigo’s (1958).

I have pointed out several examples of humor at the film’s beginning. Let’s jump to the end.

Norman has asked for a blanket. The guard takes it into the room where Norman is being held. We hear an old woman’s voice thank the guard. We then see Norman sitting against the wall. The mother speaks and condemns him (see above). It’s a complex moment. The voice comes from Norman’s mind. The mother’s voice. The mother who has been portrayed as demanding and possessive. The voice we heard earlier in the movie, a voice that convinces us that Mrs. Bates is alive and may be a “raving thing.”

The voice of Mrs. Bates worries about how she will be perceived.

They’ll put him away now, as I should have years ago. He was always bad, and in the end, he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man . . . as if I could do anything but just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds.

She couldn’t do anything. The real Mrs. Bates. She had been stuffed. She’s afraid that she’ll be blamed for the murders. I mentioned that I might agree with her assessment. She’s absolutely right in being blameless. What’s funny is her anxiety over getting the blame. Thus:

I’ll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do . . . suspect me. They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching . . . they’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…”

To her, the epitome of normal is when a person shows benevolence to the humblest of creatures.

Antipodal to her way of thinking comes earlier in the film when Lila (Vera Miles), Marion’s sister, first enters Sam’s hardware store. In the background, a woman is buying an insecticide. Sam’s helper sells her a brand and the woman reads the side of the can: the product promises to kill every insect in the world. Just what she needs. Again, Hitchcock has his joke and more. She says:

They tell you what its ingredients are, and how it’s guaranteed to exterminate every insect in the world, but they do not tell you whether or not it’s painless. And – and I say, insect or man . . . death should always be painless.

She leaves the store satisfied. The woman’s satisfaction appears incongruous beside the foregrounded scene where Lila confronts Sam about her missing sister. Alone, the woman is comic relief and, like a puff of smoke, floats from our consciousness forever. Almost. Instead, her thoughts act as a secret communication to Mrs. Bates. We have an inversion of the normal and psychotic. The manifestly normal person who purchases insecticide bears responsibility for annihilating billions of bugs and does not think twice about it, unless we care that those billions of deaths be painless.

In life’s hierarchy, way below beasts like crocodiles, sharks, and turtles, are spiders, gnats, and flies. Few tears are shed for the swatted fly – just 20 minutes ago I killed one in my den and felt, as I do when squashing a mosquito, that I’d done humanity a service. This feeling I think nothing about.

I and the audience of Psycho are like the woman in Sam’s shop. We epitomize normalcy and sanity. We want the bugs out of our rooms and gardens. We want to stop these creatures from annoying us. The justice of our actions goes undisputed. There’s a billion-dollar industry dependent on us.

It’s the “psycho” who doesn’t want to kill the fly.

Secluded in Norman’s mind, the woman we call his mother doesn’t understand normal. We might “suspect her” if she doesn’t swat the fly. Except that no one is watching her. Only the audience of the film. And we’re only hearing her. We chuckle at her delusion. This delusion is part of a psychosis, one that is impossible to unravel. Unless this “voice” is telling us it wouldn’t have harmed Marion. Although Marion’s death was hardly painless.

We have been led to believe by the psychologist (Simon Oakland) – as well as being influenced by Norman saying “thank you” in his mother’s voice when he gets the blanket – that Mrs. Bates has taken over Norman. What a horrible woman, clinging to Norman, suffocating his individuality and manhood.2 We are amused at “her” delusion about the way she thinks “they” will judge her when she allows the fly to live. But the joke’s on us, we who have annihilated the insect population of the world painlessly, because we think we know what is happening in Norman’s mind. We think we can identify and know a “psycho.”

The psycho has a laugh on those watching who are having a laugh. Remember Norman’s conversation with Marion when he describes the “crazy place” where his mother might be put:

Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing, and the tears, and those cruel eyes studying you? My mother there?

A reference to the local, normal asylum called the movie house. The audience watches and laughs and judges.

And think about the credit sequence, and the implied parallel between the title and the character. Hitchcock is having the last laugh (literally: Mrs. Bates’s monologue at the end). The theater empties (in the home theater, we go on to the next “thing”). All the normal people go home, scared to take a shower, when what they should have been scared about was that they were actually watching a comedy.

3. Narrative Traps, or Joking Too Far

A subtly unreliable narrative appears in Psycho. I mentioned that Hitchcock had many narrative tricks; none may have been more jarring than when he killed his protagonist, Marion Crane, less than halfway through the film.

A protagonist’s death may be palpable once she has resolved her conflicts. After speaking to Norman Bates, Marion has decided to take back the money she had stolen from her bank. While she is taking a shower, you can see she has unburdened herself and looks relieved if not happy. Then the shower curtain opens . . . as if Hitchcock means to deny us, more than Marion, her redemption. This maneuver virtually makes Psycho an experimental film.3 The audience is lost, desperately seeking to find a way out of the story. Because we believe that Norman is innocent and the mother is guilty, our sympathies slide toward him. We hold our breath as he cleans up the motel room, puts Marion’s body in the trunk of the car, and sinks the car in a swamp behind the motel (with the nice touch of having the car stop sinking for five to ten seconds). Is it accidental that Marion’s name is a near anagram for “Norman”? Besides, her sister and fiancé are not strong enough to take control of the story. They are like Arbogast (Martin Balsam): investigators looking for the woman who stole the money, and essentially operating in the dark.

This narrative situation is certainly worse than, say, the kind we experience in a David Mamet movie, like House of Games (1987) or The Spanish Prisoner (1997), where we consciously allow ourselves to be strung along, baffled, and perplexed. We’ve picked this poison and have not been tricked – which is not to say that we won’t become extremely frustrated figuring out whether his characters are being straight with us or not.

In Psycho, by the time we’ve seen Norman sink Arbogast’s body and car into the swamp, we start to suspect that we’ve chosen the wrong person to attach our desire to for some narrative fulfillment. But it’s too late. We’re in a narrative bed with “a psycho,” as unreliable a narrator as you can get. Worse, the mother side of Norman gets the last words in the film, a coup de grace for an audience that was once only following Marion and the stolen money.

In my film classes, I show movies in tandem, and my students analyze them as pairings. The choices are deliberate and center on specific themes and/or the same director. Psycho and The Birds (1963) fulfill both criteria. Hitchcock’s themes and motifs overlap in many of his films, never more sharply than with the bird imagery in Psycho – the threatening stuffed birds above Marion and Norman in the motel parlor – that come to full violent life in The Birds.

In class, I specifically mentioned the long dialogue between Marion and Norman. The second time watching Psycho, the meaning of what Norman was saying changes. Things like: “Mother wasn’t quite herself,” “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” and “A son is a poor substitute for a lover.” I quote other lines:

Norman: You know what I think? I think that we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out.
Marion: Sometimes, we deliberately step into those traps.
Norman: I was born in mine. I don’t mind it any more.

A few weeks before, we had watched The Truman Show (1998). It was on my mind and, seemingly from nowhere, I said that Truman Burbank was also born in a trap.4 He had been the subject of a television show since he was born. As long as the show’s ratings were high, he could not leave this trap. While Truman grew up, his creator, Christof (Ed Harris), created circumstances to keep him trapped psychologically on the island town of Seaview. The major difference between Truman and Norman is that Truman started to mind being in his trap.

What could we make of this? What meaning, if any, did this parallel situation of characters in widely different films have? At the time, I had no real answer, nor did the students respond to the connection. That’s the problem with these kinds of connections. There’s no ready-made answer. One can make something of it; that is, “find” meaning, or drop it as a curiosity or not worth the effort. This is a case, perhaps, of it taking one film to understand another film. If we liken Truman Burbank to Norman Bates, how far do we want to take it?

Truman cannot escape the narrative, initially, because he’s unaware of the forces controlling him. These come from the “outside,” unlike Norman’s interior compulsions. Neither man “knows” he’s the star. Even Truman’s discovery of his situation is still part of the show, but consciously he decides to exit it. He is free.

In the “Norman Show,” his world encloses absolutely. There is no more Norman, only Mother. Indeed, the film’s final words are narrated by Mrs. Bates. Except that Mother, Mrs. Bates, is only a manifestation of Norman’s mind. Like Scott Carey (Grant Williams) in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), he plummets through microspace, a mental microspace.

The perversity of Truman’s situation is less obvious than Norman’s. The suggestion of incest within the Bates family immediately implants horrific images in the viewer’s imagination. Whereas we can convince ourselves that Truman lives in the best of all possible worlds. Norman is a serial killer, creating an even stronger feeling of revulsion in us. Truman wears mismatched clothes and is afraid of water. He can be laughed at. Maybe he’s a tad neurotic.

Finally, Norman gets locked away. He couldn’t disentangle himself from his mother-self. In other words, he is imprisoned within the film’s narrative. The director, having identified himself as a psycho, has taken us so deeply into Norman that we might be thinking Hitchcock’s taking the joke too far.

4. The Other MacGuffin

It is accepted that Marion’s stealing of Tom Cassidy’s money is Psycho’s MacGuffin. Her action fits the definition: “an object or device in a movie that merely serves as a trigger for the plot.” We follow the money and share her anxiety as long as Marion is alive. In her motel room, she folded the stacks into a newspaper. Still toying with us over it, Hitchcock has Norman nearly forget to get rid of it with Marion. The money is also the reason for Arbogast pursuing Marion, coming to the Bates Motel, entering the house to talk to Mrs. Bates, and, ultimately, being murdered, laid to rest in the swamp with Marion. The money fades from our consciousness until Sam asks the psychologist (Simon Oakland): “What about the $40,000 dollars?”

Similar uses of this device in Hitchcock films include:

1. Plans for the airplane engine – The 39 Steps (1935)
2. Coded message memorized by Mrs. Froy – The Lady Vanishes (1938)
3. The peace treaty – Foreign Correspondent (1940)
4. The black uranium ore – Notorious (1946)
5. Crisscross murders – Strangers on a Train (1951)
6. The murder of Thorwald’s wife – Rear Window (1954)
7. Government secrets on microfilm – North by Northwest (1959)
8. The birds attacking people – The Birds (1963)

Vertigo contains multiple MacGuffins, including Scottie’s (James Stewart) vertigo and Madeleine’s (Kim Novak) possession by Carlotta Valdes. The fact that Scottie’s fear of heights is contained in the title informs my thoughts about Psycho, whose other – and more important – MacGuffin is the presence of a “psycho.” More important because it precedes Marion’s theft by being the title, signaling most clearly where the film will be going. The real drama starts here, in a classic Hitchcock use of anticipation. The audience takes the idea of “the psycho” into the theater. We’re like the boy in Sabotage (1936) carrying the bomb in the film canisters across London. Unlike him, we know we are carrying it and live for three-quarters of an hour with the knowledge that a psycho will explode in the plot. The tension this causes us minimizes concern for Marion being caught with the money! Yes, her stealing the money initiates many great elements in the film, especially her imaginary conversations involving the bank manager (Vaughn Taylor), Tom Cassidy, the policeman (Mort Mills), and California Charlie (John Anderson). However, our anxiety for her situation rests completely with her potentially meeting the “psycho.” Worse, given film conventions, the psycho MUST be a murderer.

Calling the presence of a psycho in the film, Psycho, a MacGuffin is not meant to minimize its importance. It is a more important plot device than Marion’s theft. Yet Hitchcock ultimately undermines the conventional, public notion of a psycho by fertilizing our anxieties. These anxieties are satisfied or relieved by the shower scene. This scene will be the mental scar that the public carries home and lives with forever. A psychic wound, so to speak. I say “public” because the wound and subsequent scar extend beyond audiences of the film. This “psychic” pain will deflect us from the director’s true intentions.5

5. The Moment

In The Moment of Psycho, David Thomson contends that Marion’s murder was more than a wound or the memory of it a psychic scar. It was much more, literally changing the nature of cinema.6 Specifically, affecting cinema censorship and its response to cinematic violence. There may have been horrific deaths before 1960, especially in horror films and film noir. A few years before, in Touch of Evil (1958), it’s difficult to watch Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) kill Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) in the hotel room.7 Then there’s Kiss of Death’s (1947) Tommy Udo pushing a woman in a wheelchair down the stairway, but even there it’s Tommy’s hysterical laugh that affects us. Often, we see the results of a gruesome death or hear the cries of a torture victim, and usually there was a significant absence of blood on the victims. Nothing like the sight of a knife slashing a naked body with the blood flowing into the tub and running into the drain, done in rapid montage that served Hitchcock’s faking out the Production Code. Thomson writes:

It’s clear from their notes that the Code functionaries were confused; they couldn’t be sure what they had seen – and they were being lectured about “reaction” by one of the greatest film and audience experts ever. They caved in. (Chapter 3 – Room Service).8

Yet, earlier in the chapter, he questions whether Norman is capable of the killing we saw.

There is nothing in this awkward young man that suggests the anger of Mother – the repeated thrusts with the blade. Rather, the energy and malice come from the film’s design than from Norman’s psychotic state.

Then later he states:

The question that remains is not just who has killed Marion Crane, but what tempest has felt bound to overtake the film. The answer is the same – the director, and the reason for both answers is “To keep this hysterical film alive.”

The idea is that Hitchcock, not Norman (Mrs. Bates), brandishes the knife in the shower scene. Another psycho, one as “real” as Mrs. Bates, is an artist who must take cinema into an unknown region and, essentially, fight to legitimize this journey. Bringing us back to the credits. The break in the title, followed by the same break in the director’s name. Hitchcock draws attention to the “real” psycho whom the audience should fear – and not so much the one lurking in the film.

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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.