Psycho 1960
Psycho (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock's powerful, complex psychological thriller, Psycho (1960) is the "mother" of all modern horror suspense films - it single-handedly ushered in an era of inferior screen 'slashers' with blood-letting and graphic, shocking killings (e.g., Homicidal (1961), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Motel Hell (1980), and DePalma's Dressed to Kill (1980) - with another transvestite killer and shower scene). While this was Hitchcock's first real horror film, he was mistakenly labeled as a horror film director ever since. It was advertised as:
"A new - and altogether different - screen excitement!!!"
The nightmarish, disturbing film's themes of corruptibility, confused identities, voyeurism, human vulnerabilities and victimization, the deadly effects of money, Oedipal murder, and dark past histories are realistically revealed. Its themes were revealed through repeated uses of motifs, such as birds, eyes, hands, and mirrors.
The low-budget ($800,000), brilliantly-edited, stark black and white film came after Hitchcock's earlier glossy Technicolor hits Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and would have been more suited for as an extended episode for his own b/w TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In fact, the film crew was from the TV show, including cinematographer John L. Russell.
The master of suspense skillfully manipulates and guides the audience into identifying with the main character, luckless victim Marion (a Phoenix real-estate secretary), and then with that character's murderer - a crazy and timid taxidermist named Norman (a brilliant typecasting performance by Anthony Perkins). Hitchcock's techniques voyeuristically implicate the audience with the universal, dark evil forces and secrets present in the film.
Psycho also broke all film conventions by displaying its leading female protagonist having a lunchtime affair in her sexy white undergarments in the first scene; also by photographing a toilet bowl - and flush - in a bathroom (a first in an American film), and killing off its major 'star' Janet Leigh a third of the way into the film (in a shocking, brilliantly-edited shower murder scene accompanied by screeching violins). The 90-odd shot shower scene was meticulously storyboarded by Saul Bass, but directed by Hitchcock himself.
[Note: A satirical parody of scenes from various Hitchcock films, including some from Psycho, were included in Mel Brooks' comedy High Anxiety (1977). The shower scene itself has been referenced, spoofed and parodied in numerous films, including Brian De Palma's The Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Dressed to Kill (1980), Squirm (1976), Victor Zimmerman's low-budget Fade to Black (1980), Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse (1981), John De Bello's Killer Tomatoes Strike Back! (1990), Martin Walz' The Killer Condom (1997, Ger.), Wes Craven's Scream 2 (1997), Scott Spiegel's From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999), and the animated Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), in which Bugs acts out with the film's black-and-white footage and a can of Hershey's chocolate syrup poured down the drain.]
In this film, Hitchcock's gimmicky device, termed a MacGuffin (the thing or device that motivates the characters, or propels the plot and action), is the stolen $40,000 from the realtor's office. Marion Crane becomes a secondary MacGuffin after her murder.
The film's screenplay by Joseph Stefano was adapted from a novel of the same name by author Robert Bloch. Remarkably, Bloch's 1959 novel was based on legendary real-life, Plainfield, Wisconsin psychotic serial killer Edward Gein, whose murderous character also inspired the mother-obsessed farmer in Deranged (1974), the Leatherface character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and serial killer Jame Gumb ("Buffalo Bill") in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
[Note: Bloch became a major horror screenwriter during the 60s decade and beyond, responsible for such suspenseful horror films and chillers as The Cabinet of Caligari (1962) - an update of the 1919 classic, Strait Jacket (1964), The Night Walker (1964), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), The Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Asylum (1972), the short feature Mannikin (1977), and The Amazing Captain Nemo (1977).]
Like many of Hitchcock's films, Psycho is so very layered and complex that multiple viewings are necessary to capture all of its subtlety. Symbolic imagery involving stuffed birds and reflecting mirrors are ever-present. Although it's one of the most frightening films ever made, it has all the elements of very dark, black comedy. This film wasn't clearly understood by its critics when released. Hitchcock admitted that Henri-Georges Clouzot's influential thriller Les Diaboliques (1955, Fr.) inspired his film.
This taut masterpiece was followed by three feature film sequels (none directed by Hitchcock) and other imitations or TV films:
TitleDirectorComment
Psycho (1960)
Not rated until 1968, when an early version of the MPAA ratings system rated it M, for mature audiences only; a 1984 reissue re-rated the film RAlfred HitchcockAnthony Perkins as Norman Bates
Psycho II (1983)
Note: This was a record interval - 23 years between a 'I' and 'II' picture.Richard FranklinAnthony Perkins as Norman, released from a mental hospital after 22 years; Marion's sister Lila Loomis (again Vera Miles) protests his release
Psycho III (1986)Anthony Perkins, in his directorial debutAnthony Perkins as Norman, 25 years later
Bates Motel (1987)Richard RothsteinTV pilot film, with Bud Cort as Bates Motel manager
Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990)Mick GarrisMade for cable-TV film, with Anthony Perkins as Norman, Henry Thomas as a young Norman, and Olivia Hussey as Norma Bates
Psycho (1998)Gus Van SantAn almost 'scene-by-scene' (actually 'shot-by-shot') remake (or replication) of the original classic, that only generated interest for the original film
The film's four Academy Award nominations failed to win Oscars: Best Supporting Actress (Janet Leigh with her sole career nomination), Best Director (Alfred Hitchcock with the last of his five losing nominations), Best B/W Cinematography, and Best B/W Art Direction/Set Decoration. Bernard Herrmann's famous and memorable score with shrieking, harpie-like piercing violins was un-nominated.
When the film was originally aired in theaters in mid-1960, Hitchcock insisted in a publicity gimmick (a la P.T. Barnum) that no one would be seated after the film had started - the decree was enforced by uniformed Pinkerton guards. Audiences assumed that something horrible would happen in the first few minutes. Violence is present for about two minutes total in only two shocking, grisly murder scenes, the first about a third of the way through, and the second when a Phoenix detective named Arbogast is stabbed at the top of a flight of stairs and topples backwards down the staircase. The remainder of the horror and suspense is created in the mind of the audience, although the tale does include such taboo topics as transvestism, implied incest, and hints of necrophilia.
The Story
The bleak, monochrome film is made more effective by Bernard Herrmann's sparse, but driving, recognizable score, first played under the frantic credits (by industry pioneer Saul Bass) - shown with abstract, gray horizontal and vertical lines that streak back and forth, violently splitting apart the screens and causing them to disappear. The frenetic lines appear as prison bars or vertical city buildings. [These criss-crossing patterns, like mirror-images, are correlated to the split, schizophrenic personality of a major protagonist.]
The film opens with the aerial-view camera sweeping left to right along the urban skyline of "PHOENIX, ARIZONA" where some new construction is in progress. [The numerous references to birds in the film begins here, with the city of 'Phoenix'.] The specific date and time are emphasized in titles in the middle of the screen:
FRIDAY, DECEMBER THE ELEVENTH
TWO FORTY-THREE P.M
The shot pans across many skyscraper buildings, and after a series of numerous dissolves, randomly chooses to descend and penetrate deeper into one of many windows in a cheaper, high-rise hotel building - the window's venetian blinds narrowly conceal the dingy interior. There, the camera pauses at the half-open window - and then voyeuristically intrudes into the foreground darkness of the drab room. The camera takes a moment to adjust to the black interior - and then pans to the right where a post-coital, semi-nude couple have just completed a seedy, lunch-time tryst. Attractive, single 30-ish secretary, Marion (spelled not with an A but an O - signifying emptiness) Crane (Janet Leigh), wearing only a prominent white bra and slip and reclining back on a double bed, is with her shirtless lover/fiancee Sam Loomis (John Gavin) who stands over her. In the background is a bathroom (the first of three bedrooms with bathrooms in the background).
Sam speaks the first line of dialogue, referring to the uneaten lunch food on the stand - on many levels, she has lost her appetite for their ungratifying relationship and mutual poverty. As he kisses her and they embrace on the bed, they discuss their "cheap" relationship and impoverishment, and their many unresolved issues:
Sam: You never did eat your lunch, did you?
Marion: I'd better get back to the office. These extended lunch hours give my boss excess acid.
Sam: Why don't you call your boss and tell him you're taking the rest of the afternoon off? (It's) Friday anyway - and hot.
Marion: What do I do with my free afternoon? Walk you to the airport?
Sam: Well, you could laze around here a while longer.
Marion (foreshadowing a future hotel visit): Hmm. Checking out time is 3 pm. Hotels of this sort aren't interested in you when you come in, but when your time is up. Oh Sam, I hate having to be with you in a place like this.
Sam: I've heard of married couples who deliberately spend an occasional night in a cheap hotel.
Marion: When you're married, you can do a lot of things deliberately.
Sam: You sure talk like a girl who's been married.
Marion: Sam, this is the last time.
Sam: For what?
Marion: For this, meeting you in secret so we can be secretive. You come down here on business trips. We steal lunch hours. I wish you wouldn't even come.
Sam: All right, what do we do instead? Write each other lurid love letters?
It's a hot, Friday afternoon [although December, it undoubtedly looks like a summer day] and they are obviously in the midst of a "secretive" affair in Room No. 514. She loves Sam but they can only furtively see each other during his business trips. Sam has flown in from a small town in California to see Marion - and "steal lunch hours." As she rises to dress and cover up her ample breasts, they discuss further difficulties in their fitful relationship (characterized as more sexual than intimate). Sam secretly enjoys the illicitness of their sleazy, "lurid" affair and suggests seeing her the next week - and even assents to having "lunch - in public."
In a semi-ultimatum to Sam, Marion tells him that "this is the last time" - she will deny him further sexual couplings in "secretive" meetings. She expresses her frustration about their private love trysts and her real desire for marriage - she wants chastity, respectability, and public meetings in the place she shares with her sister (where a framed picture of her dead "Mother" morally disapproves, presides, and judges them). [Of course, there's another morally-disapproving, judgmental 'dead Mother' in the film, but that comes later. One unanswered question in the film: Did Marion spend years nursing her invalid mother - selfless dedication that contributed to her fate as an old maid?] He agrees to see her under the new terms of 'respectability,' although he reminds her how "a lot of sweating out," "patience," and "hard work" would be prerequisites in a respectable relationship [Marion's sister later tellingly asserts: "Patience doesn't run in my family"]:
Marion: Oh, we can see each other. We can even have dinner, but respectably. In my house, with my mother's picture on the mantel, and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.
Sam: And after the steak, do we send sister to the movies, turn Momma's picture to the wall?
Marion: Sam!
Sam: (begrudgingly) All right. Marion, whenever it's possible I want to see you and under any circumstances, even respectability.
Marion: You make respectability sound disrespectful.
Sam: Oh no, I'm all for it. But it requires patience, temperance, with a lot of sweating out. Otherwise though, it's just hard work. But if I could see you and touch you, you know, simply as this, I won't mind. (He nibbles at her neck.)
Sam, a small-town (Fairvale, California) hardware store proprietor, is also frustrated and self-pitying because of his money worries - he is a financial martyr, burdened by his father's debts and the alimony he must pay to his ex-wife. She proposes marriage directly (she is still a spinster and stuck in the same job after ten years) - and poignantly describes her willingness to share a life of cash-strapped hardship with him. But annoyingly, he balks at the thought, refusing because he doesn't want her to live in poverty and because he believes he must first pay off his debts over the next couple years. She threatens to leave him and thinks she may find "somebody available" to take his place and end her fears of being a fallen woman:
Sam: I'm tired of sweating for people who aren't there. I sweat to pay off my father's debts and he's in his grave. (Sam has walked in front of a fan with spinning blades.) I sweat to pay my ex-wife's alimony and she's living on the other side of the world somewhere.
Marion: I pay too. They also pay who meet in hotel rooms. [This line evokes the famous last line of Milton's sonnet, On His Blindness: "They also serve who only stand and wait."]
Sam: A couple years and my debts will be paid off. If she remarries, the alimony stops.
Marion: I haven't even been married once yet.
Sam: Yeah, but when you do, you'll swing.
Marion: Oh Sam, let's get married! (They kiss and embrace.)
Sam: Yeah. And live with me in a storeroom behind a hardware store in Fairvale? We'll have lots of laughs. I'll tell you what. When I send my ex-wife her alimony, you can lick the stamps.
Marion: I'll lick the stamps.
Sam: Marion, you want to cut this off, go out and find yourself somebody available?
Marion: I'm thinking of it.
Sam: How could you even think a thing like that?
Unhappy and unfulfilled in her unsanctified relationship, Marion rejects his idea to take the afternoon off and rushes back to her storefront real estate office - she is anxious about being late.
[Director Hitchcock, wearing a ten-gallon hat, makes his cameo appearance on the Phoenix sidewalk facing away from the window of the realty office.] She is relieved that her boss Mr. George Lowery (Vaughn Taylor) is not back from lunch, but she suffers from a headache (brought on by her perennial problems with Sam). [Behind her in the office is a framed picture of a barren, desert scene]:
Headaches are like resolutions. You forget them as soon as they stop hurting.
She listens to her recently-married co-worker Caroline (Patricia Hitchcock, Hitchcock's real-life daughter) chatter about her interfering, nagging mother, who had suggested that her doctor prescribe tranquilizers for her wedding day to protect her (from the anguish of losing her virginity and having sex?) - her mother's nosiness angered her proprietary groom/husband Teddy. [Scenes of frigid winter are displayed behind her.] Caroline offers Marion a tranquilizer rather than an aspirin for her headache.
My mother's doctor gave them to me the day of my wedding. Teddy was furious when he found out I'd taken tranquilizers.
Mirrors are ever-present throughout the film - Marion checks out her appearance and applies lipstick using a small compact mirror from her purse. Mr. Lowery arrives shortly afterwards with an important, wealthy (and inebriated) millionaire - a cowboy-hatted customer named Mr. Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson). He is an oil-lease man who is sweating from the heat and complaining about the weather: "Wow! It's as hot as fresh milk." The salty oilman suggests that Lowery should "air-condition...up" his employees, because he "can afford it today." Mr. Cassidy has just proudly bought a house on Harris Street for his "sweet little girl" - his 18 year old, soon-to-be-married daughter ("baby"):
Tomorrow's the day my sweet little girl - (He leers over at Marion) - Oh, oh, not you - my daughter, a baby. And tomorrow she stands her sweet self up there and gets married away from me. I want you to take a look at my baby. Eighteen years old, and she never had an unhappy day in any one of those years.
Flirting with Marion, he sits on her desk, and sensing that Marion is unhappy and feeling deprived with his talk of marriage, gloats about his wealth and his easing of life's pains through buy-offs:
You know what I do about unhappiness? I buy it off. Are, uh, are you unhappy?
Marion answers that she isn't "inordinately" unhappy - although she is uncomfortably reminded of her unmarried status and other deprivations. Then, the vulgar client takes out the $40,000 in cold, hard cash for the house purchase for his "respectable" married daughter as a wedding present, and boastfully waves and flops it around in front of his audience. He domineeringly explains how virile the money makes him:
Now, that's, that's not buying happiness. That's just buying off unhappiness. I never carry more than I can afford to lose.
He tosses the money on Marion's desk, but the money is not for her - but for Cassidy's daughter's wedding dowry (although she is challenged and tempted by the money earmarked for a bride's house - she feels more entitled to it than the pampered daughter). It is an awkward, discomfiting sight for Marion who has just left her impecunious lover/partner whom she is unable to marry for lack of money. Caroline is astonished by Cassidy's brash proposition: "I declare!" Cassidy even brags about how he doesn't rightfully 'declare' his illicitly-obtained money to the government - an obvious illegality: "I don't. That's how I get to keep it."
Lowery is worried about so much cash out in the open: "A cash transaction of this size is most irregular," but Cassidy assures him: "Aw, so what. It's my private money. Now it's yours." [His transference of the 'dirty' private funds to Lowery suggests that Marion's boss may keep the cash transaction undeclared.] The loud-mouthed Cassidy embarrasses the real estate boss by exposing the presence of something else hidden away and unrevealed - a bottle in the desk in his office. He persuades Lowery to take him into the inner air-conditioned office for a drink. Lowery instructs Marion to put the large amount of cash in a bank's safe deposit box over the weekend: "I don't even want it in the office over the weekend. Put it in the safe deposit box in the bank."
Caroline is jealous that Cassidy flirted with her colleague [Her 'respectable' marriage must be somewhat desperate and unfulfilling.]:
He was flirting with you. I guess he must have noticed my wedding ring.
Both women touch and handle the naughty, filthy money, and then Marion puts it into an envelope, wraps it up and sticks it in her purse. She is granted permission to go straight home after the bank deposit because of her headache. Although she expects to be "in bed" all weekend, Cassidy thinks she needs an escape and propositions her with an invitation:
What you need is a weekend in Las Vegas, the playground of the world!
As she leaves, Marion refuses tranquilizers a second time from her co-worker: "You can't buy off unhappiness with pills." [But obviously, can't her unhappiness be bought off with money?] As she leaves the office, her shadow follows after her.
In the next scene, Marion's shadow precedes her. In a moment of weakness and impulse, she has been tempted to bring the money home to her small bedroom instead of to the bank. (Her sister is away for the weekend in Tucson to "do some buying.") Again in partial undress wearing only a black bra and slip [after the theft, her underclothes turn black - signifying her darkness], Marion repeatedly and apprehensively eyes the money in a fat envelope lying on the bed (where she told Lowery and Cassidy she would spend the weekend). The camera zooms in and cuts back and forth to the envelope more than once. Next to it is her packed suitcase, ready for a trip. [Behind her in this second bedroom in the film is another bathroom - this one with the shower head particularly noticeable. Also, more mirrors and windows and pictures looking down from the wall - two of her as a baby, another of her deceased parents. She has redirected the money intended by Cassidy for his "baby" to her own maternal instincts - her wish to be married to Sam, have respectable sex and raise a family.] She stares long and hard at herself in the dresser mirror. Although she appears casually indifferent and secure in the presence of the money, she nervously finishes packing and closes her full suitcase.
She sits down on the bed, stares with desire at the money, and tries to stop herself from doing something she knows is shameful and wrong - something that is not "respectable." But she can't control her sinful, obsessive-compulsive behavior. Because her suitcase is already full and shut, she stuffs the envelope in her purse (with other important papers) and then leaves.
While driving out of Phoenix toward Fairvale, California in her black car, Marion stares straight ahead and trance-like while imagining that she is on her way to elope with Sam with the large sum of cash with which to finance her elopement and marriage. She hears a conversation with a startled Sam who is surprised to see her in Fairvale - with pilfered money for their salvation. His startled, echoing voice speaks in her head. With an uneasy reaction to her appearance, he would undoubtedly reject her solution to their problem:
Marion, what in the world, what are you doing up here? Of course I'm glad to see you. I always am. What is it, Marion?
Their conversation is cut short and interrupted. Significantly, she cannot finish talking with him.
While waiting at a stoplight, her boss (and Cassidy) pass by in the cross-walk in front of her. He at first smiles and nods when recognizing her, and leaves the frame of the windshield. Likewise, she smiles - nervously. But then he stops, turns and furrows his brow at her. Mr. Lowery is puzzled and concerned to see her in her car when she was supposed to be home sick. Likewise, her face turns frozen after realizing that she has been caught. Bernard Herrmann's jarring music begins to play, slashing at her. She pulls away, gulps hard, and looks back - her conscience already gnawing away.
Unnerved but still drifting along irrationally, Marion drives her dark-toned car toward Fairvale from Phoenix and it turns to dusk and nighttime. She repeatedly looks into her rear-view mirror - symbolically checking out her own inner thoughts. She blinks her tired eyes and tries to avoid the glare of headlights of oncoming cars - spotlighting her crime.
The next morning, Marion wakes up from her lying position in the front seat of her car, where she has pulled it over to the shoulder of the road beneath some bare hills to get some sleep. She is startled by rapping knuckles on her driver's side window and horrified to see a California Highway Patrolman (Mort Mills) with frightening dark glasses staring at her through the car window. His glasses reflect back her inner soul - ridden with guilt. Marion impulsively turns on the ignition to leave, but he orders her ("acting as if something's wrong") to "hold it there."
After rolling down her window, she tries to act calmly as he suggests that she would be safer in a motel [ha!]. While scrutinizing her, he can sense that she is skittish and nervous:
Patrolman: In quite a hurry.
Marion: Yes, I didn't intend to sleep so long. I almost had an accident last night from sleepiness so I decided to pull over.
Patrolman: You slept here all night?
Marion: Yes. As I said, I couldn't keep my eyes open.
Patrolman: There are plenty of motels in this area. You should've...I mean just to be safe.
Marion: I didn't intend to sleep all night. I just pulled over. Have I broken any laws?
Patrolman: No, ma'am.
Marion: Then I'm free to go.
Patrolman: Is anything wrong?
Marion: Of course not. Am I acting as if there's something wrong?
Patrolman: Frankly, yes.
Marion: Please, I'd like to go.
Patrolman: Well, is there?
Marion: Is there what? I've told you there's nothing wrong, except that I'm in a hurry and you're taking up my time.
Because she is short with him, he asks to check her driver's license. From a low camera angle facing back from the passenger's seat, she turns her back to him and digs into her purse as the patrolman is leaning on the window behind her and watching her (omnisciently). Marion removes the envelope from her purse and desperately hides it between her body and the automobile seat, and then finds her documents. He checks the license and registration (her 1959 Arizona license plate number is ANL 709 - signifying anal-obsessive behavior or something more sordid?) and lets her drive away, but follows her from behind for awhile, still suspicious, while the jarring music plays. [Through subjective camera movements, audience identification with her predicament results in resentment and impatience with everything that makes it difficult for her flight to succeed.] She drives through desolate desert terrain somewhere between Los Angeles and Bakersfield - and is greatly relieved (and so is the audience) when he turns off after a sign reading: "RIGHT LANE FOR GORMAN." [Gore-man, a play on words?]
In Bakersfield, California, she turns into a flashy "CASH FOR CARS" used car lot. [This is the film's sole location shoot.] While waiting for the salesman from the Used Car Department, she purchases a Los Angeles Tribune newspaper from a coin-operated vending machine and quickly scans the paper - for a possible report of her theft? (She doesn't notice the same patrolman drive up, park across the street, and stand next to his vehicle - looking very tall while leaning on his car - to watch her.) The affable, fast-talking used car salesman, California Charlie (John Anderson) greets her ominously:
California Charlie: I'm in no mood for trouble.
Marion (blurting back): What?
California Charlie: There's an old saying. The first customer of the day is always the most trouble.
Hurriedly, realizing she must exchange her Arizona-plated car for one that will not be identifiable, she asks: "Can I trade my car in and take another?" He accommodates her request: "You can do anything you have a mind to. Being a woman, you will." He intuitively grasps her feelings about her car: "Sick of the sight of it." She confirms his perspective - and reveals her life's mood: "I'm in a hurry and I just want to make a change." While a mechanic pulls her car in to inspect it before selling her a different car, she is shocked when she catches sight of the suspicious patrolman. Even though she is aware that the new car she'll be purchasing will be able to be identified, Marion quickly and irrationally decides on going ahead with her car purchase - a light-colored '57 Ford. She causes the astonished, high-pressure salesman to wonder why she is 'pressuring' him to make a swift purchase:
One thing people never ought to be when they're buying used cars - and that's in a hurry...You mean you don't want the usual day and a half to think it over? Ha! You are in a hurry aren't ya? Is somebody chasin' ya?...Why, this is the first time the customer ever high-pressured the salesman!
Without any negotiation, Marion agrees to his first offer, her out-of-state car's trade-in value (and proof of ownership) plus $700, adding warily: "I take it you can prove that car is yours." Before paying, she enters the enclosed ladies room to unwrap and handle the stolen money and to take the car title out of her purse. (Her image is schizophrenically reflected in the lavatory's mirror.) She counts out seven $100 dollar bills over the grimy rest room's sink and returns to California Charlie, who is terribly suspicious of her uneasy, atypical behavior and her refusal to take a trial spin. She defends her own impatience: "Can't we just settle this?...Is there anything so terribly wrong about making a decision and wanting to hurry? Do you think I've stolen my car?" After they have made the deal and she rushes to her new car, the patrolman slowly pulls his vehicle into the car lot. When she hurriedly begins driving off, the greasy mechanic calls out: "Hey!" giving her quite a fright - but it is only because she has forgotten her luggage. It is loaded into the back seat of her car before she drives off, leaving the dumbfounded trio (the cop, the salesman, and the mechanic) staring at her restless departure.
[Saturday evening]
Now a fugitive (or "wrong one"), she drives all day Saturday on monotonous roads as the dark night approaches. Marion is tormented even more by menacing, inner monologues from off-screen voices. Her disintegrating mental state and self-destructive conscience (and physical weariness) cause her to look inward and punish herself - as she imagines and forecasts events leading up to her capture. Headlights from oncoming cars illuminate her face like interrogation spotlights:
[Saturday - imagined]
- California Charlie: Heck officer, that was the first time I ever saw the customer high-pressure the salesman. Somebody chasin' her?
- Patrolman: I'd better have a look at those papers, Charlie.
- California Charlie: Did she look like a wrong one to you?
- Patrolman: Acted like one.
- California Charlie: The only funny thing. She paid me $700 in cash.
[Monday - imagined]
- Caroline: Yes, Mr. Lowery.
- Mr. Lowery: Caroline, Marion still isn't in?
- Caroline: No, Mr. Lowery, but then she's always a bit late on Monday mornings.
- Mr. Lowery: Buzz me the minute she comes in.
- Mr. Lowery: And call her sister. No one's answering at the house.
- Caroline: I called her sister, Mr. Lowery, where she works - the Music Maker's Music Store, you know. And she doesn't know where Marion is any more than we do.
- Mr. Lowery: You'd better run out to the house. She may be, well, unable to answer the phone.
- Caroline: Her sister's going to do that. She's as worried as we are.
[Mr. Lowery on the phone with Marion's sister - imagined]
- Mr. Lowery: No, I haven't the faintest idea. As I said, I last saw your sister when she left this office on Friday. She said she didn't feel well and wanted to leave early. I said she could. That was the last I saw - oh, wait a minute. I did see her sometime later driving. Uh, I think you'd better come over here to my office, quick! Caroline, get Mr. Cassidy for me.
[Mr. Lowery on the phone with Mr. Cassidy - imagined]
- Mr. Lowery: After all Cassidy, I told you, all that cash! I'm not taking any responsibility. Oh, for heaven's sake. A girl works for you for 10 years, you trust her. All right yes, you better come over.
[Mr. Lowery speaking with Cassidy in the office - imagined]
- Cassidy: Well, I ain't about to kiss off forty thousand dollars. I'll get it back and if any of it's missing, I'll replace it with her fine soft flesh. [Marion's own fantasy judgment upon herself is a foreshadowing of what is to come - a wish-fulfillment.]
- Cassidy: I'll track her. Never you doubt it. [Marion grins at Cassidy's raging, vengeful threat and condemning indignation at the loss of his money - and virile manhood. She fantasizes about his sadistic desire to violently murder her and erotically punish "her fine soft flesh." The grin foreshadows another similar one by Norman Bates later in the film.]
- Mr. Lowery: Now hold on Cassidy. I-I still can't believe. It must be some kind of a mystery. I-I can't...
- Cassidy: You check with the bank? NO! They never laid eyes on her? NO! You still trustin'. Hot creeper. She sat there while I dumped it out. Hardly even looked at it. Planned it. And even flirtin' with me.
Rain drops begin to splash on the windshield, as oncoming headlights blind Marion's tired eyes (she has been traveling for almost 30 hours with nothing to eat and an uncomfortable Friday night's sleep in her car). The rainstorm becomes more violent, and the windshield wipers slash back and forth through the water across her window, accentuated by the soundtrack. [A perfect visual metaphor for the celebrated shower scene to come!] Although the rain has a cleansing, climactic effect and her inner monologues cease (and the music dies down), her vision is blurred and obscured - literally - and she becomes lost and driven off the main road. Glaring car headlights (from behind or ahead) disappear. The side road she has been derailed onto is dark - suddenly up ahead, a neon "BATES MOTEL VACANCY" sign appears (seen from her point of view) - almost conjured up like all her other interior imaginations. Her flight is aborted. She pulls in to the out-of-the-way, deserted, and downbeat roadside motel - a modest but seedy looking place.
As the rain is beating down, she parks in front of the motel office and gets out of her car. The office is lighted but unattended. Then, from the motel porch, she peers around the corner of the motel, looking up at the gloomy, gothic-style Victorian house behind the motel on a hill. The stereotypical horror movie's 'old dark house' looks like a giant skull with lighted windows/eyes. In a lighted second story window, she sees the silhouetted figure of an old woman pass in front of the window. She honks her horn a few times to signal her presence.
The nervous, gangly thin, shy, peculiar but likeable caretaker, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) breathlessly bounds down the steps on the hill in the rain (carrying an unopened umbrella) - smiling and greeting her with the words:
Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please.
As she enters the empty office, the camera captures her reflected image in a mirror, and then a split-second image of both of their faces in the mirror. They speak to each other in profile across the desk, prefaced by his meaningful, ironic comment: "Dirty night." According to the twitchy proprietor, the motel is completely vacant:
"We have twelve vacancies. Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies. They moved away the highway."
-- Play clip (excerpt):
He is delighted to see a visitor because nobody ever stops at the motel unless they accidentally get off the "main road" [another ironic comment about her waywardness]: "Nobody ever stops here anymore unless they've done that." Her handbag is placed next to her on the desk, with the word "OKAY" visible at the top of her folded Los Angeles Tribune newspaper. With frayed nerves from her experience, Marion awkwardly registers in the guest book under a false identity as Marie Sam-uels [a reference to her unfulfilled wish to marry Sam] from Los Angeles after a glance at her paper. The motel keeper banters on with a significant statement:
There's no sense dwelling on our losses. We just keep on lighting the lights and following the formalities.
At the same moment that she lies about her address, the attendant hesitates when he reaches for the room key to Cabin 3. Turning slightly sideways, he selects instead the key to Cabin 1 - the room that adjoins the office: "it's closer in case you want anything." She learns she is only about 15 miles from Fairvale, Sam's town. He takes her bags from the back seat and leads her to her room. As he shows her the interior of the room, he comments on its smell - another richly-textured line: "Boy, it's stuffy in here," and opens the window. In a charming, friendly, eager-to-please way, the uptight proprietor meticulously shows Marion where everything is, pausing on the word "mattress" [a word remarkably similar to the word matricide], possibly because he is nervous about being in the bedroom alone with a pretty woman:
Well the, uh, mattress is soft, and there's hangers in the closet and stationery with 'Bates Motel' printed on it, in case you want to make your friends back home feel envious. -- -- Play clip (excerpt):
Framed bird pictures adorn the drab walls. But he stammers as he turns on the bright bathroom lights and points her to the "and the, uh, over there" (she must provide the word bathroom for him as if it was a forbidden, dirty word), the white-tiled bathroom. He offers his services: "Well, if you want anything, just tap on the wall. I'll be in the office."
When she learns his name - it's not "Mr. Bates" he suggests, but a more personable "Norman Bates" - her image is reflected in the room's mirror, clutching her purse with the stolen bundle of money. He shyly and humbly invites her to dinner in his house: "Would you have dinner with me? I was just about to myself. You know, nothing special, just sandwiches and milk...I don't set a fancy table, but the kitchen's awful homey." [His own self-deprecating opinion of himself is that he is "nothing special."] She agrees and he tells her to wait in her room and he'll be back "as soon as it's ready" with his "trusty umbrella."
While he is gone, Marion places both her handbag and suitcase on the bed. She takes the money from her handbag and looks for a better place to conceal the money - she opens up three drawers. She finally decides to wrap it up in her Los Angeles newspaper and place it in plain view on the bed nightstand (the word 'OKAY' is ironically still visible in the headline). [As she sets the paper down, it's as if a voice she hears saying "NO!" from the house judges her guilty action.]
Through the window (that Norman conveniently opened) facing the old house, Marion hears voices - an argument that Norman is having with his shrill-voiced, domineering mother (voice of "Mother" by Virginia Gregg) over his "cheap erotic" dinner invitation to the young woman [the film's voyeur theme is reinforced by the idea of Norman's mother 'peeking' into her son's life with her ears]:
Mother: No! I tell you, No! I won't have you bringing strange young girls in for supper. By candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds.
Norman: Mother, please!
Mother: And then what - after-supper music, whispers?
Norman: Mother, she's just a stranger. She's hungry and it's raining out. (Marion turns away from the window)
Mother: (mocking him) 'Mother, she's just a stranger.' As if men don't desire strangers. (Marion turns back and eavesdrops some more) Oh, I refuse to speak of disgusting things because they disgust me. Do 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 to tell her, because you don't have the guts? Huh, boy? Do you have the guts, boy?
Norman: Shut up! Shut up! -- Play clip (excerpt):
Uncomfortable, she turns away from the window until she hears the door shut. She watches Norman, who has defied his mother, carrying a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of milk down the hill. Marion waits outside her motel door, and moments later sees Norman turn the corner onto the porch: "I caused you some trouble," she apologetically states. As they stand together on the porch, the camera photographs them as if they were the two sides of the same coin, and Norman's image is reflected in the glass window behind him - and symbolic of his split personality. Crestfallen, Norman tells Marion that his mother is extremely disagreeable. She resigns herself to 'eat'-ing his "fixed" supper:
Norman: No. Mother, my mother, uh, what is the phrase? - she isn't qu-quite herself today. -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: You shouldn't have bothered. I really don't have that much of an appetite.
Norman: Oh, I'm sorry. I wish you could apologize for other people.
Marion: Don't worry about it. But as long as you've fixed the supper, we may as well eat it.
As she leans back with her hands folded across her front and invites him into her motel room to eat, Norman steps forward and backward one step, stiffens uncomfortably and lowers his gaze, and then proposes that it would be "nicer and warmer" in the motel office. She is amused by his bashfulness and pathetic self-consciousness - and sympathetic to his nervous awkwardness around her. And because it is "too officious" in the office, he suggests the darkened parlor (with only one Tiffany lamp) behind the office: "I-I-I-I have the parlor back here."
[The ominous invitation into the parlor recalls the words of Mary Howitt's 19th century poetic fable, The Spider and the Fly - an excerpt follows below:
"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly;
"'Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you may spy.
The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,
And I have many curious things to show when you are there."
"Oh no, no," said the little fly; "to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."...
And then, in the conclusion:
...He dragged her up his winding stair, into the dismal den -
Within his little parlor - but she ne'er came out again!
And now, dear little children, who may this story read,
To idle, silly, flattering words I pray you ne’er give heed;
Unto an evil counsellor close heart and ear and eye,
And take a lesson from this tale of the spider and the fly.
The parallel to the fable is even more prophetic when one recalls the final ironic words of Norman (or his alter ego): "I'm not even gonna 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.'"]
The parlor is decorated with his stuffed [stuffy, but in another sense] trophy birds mounted on the walls or on stands - an enormous predatory, nocturnal owl with outstretched wings, a raven [a bird with a knife-like beak that preys on carrion (Marion?)], a pheasant, and a hawk - and classic paintings of nude women being raped. As he sits straight up and leans forward as in a toilet-like position while she nibbles on a sandwich (but doesn't drink any of the milk from the large pitcher), he looks on, fondles a stuffed bird, and talks about his "uncommon" and "cheap" hobby "to pass the time" - his interest in avian taxidermy:
Norman: It's all for you. I'm not hungry. Go ahead. (He intently watches her first bite.) You, you eat like a bird.
Marion (looking around): You'd know of course.
Norman (stuttering): No, not really. Anyway, I hear the expression, 'eats like a bird' it, it's really a fals-fals-false-falsity because birds really eat a tremendous lot. But I don't really know anything about birds. ['Birds' also connotes 'women'.] My hobby is stuffing things. You know, taxidermy. And I guess I'd just rather stuff birds because I hate the look of beasts when they're stuffed. You know, foxes and chimps. Some people even stuff dogs and cats but, boy, I can't do that. I think only birds look well stuffed because, well because they're kinda passive to begin with. (She tears the piece of bread in her hands, ending up with typical 'bird' food - bread crumbs!)
Marion: Strange hobby. Curious.
Norman: Uncommon, too.
Marion: Oh, I imagine so.
Norman: And itsa, it's not as expensive as you'd think. It's cheap really, you know, needles, and thread, sawdust. The chemicals are the only thing that, that cost anything.
Marion: A man should have a hobby.
Norman: Well, it's, it's more than a hobby. (He fondles a stuffed bird on the bureau next to him.) A hobby's supposed to pass the time, not fill it.
Marion: Is your time so empty?
Norman: No, uh.
He dutifully confides that he doesn't have other friends - his "best friend is his mother." Their conversation leads to speaking about how human beings become imprisoned "in our private traps" - in a narrow and minimal existence - in the course of their private lives. Marion sees parallels in her own life - she is caught in a degraded and draining relationship with a weak-willed Sam, similar to how Norman is debilitated by his enforced caring for his mother:
Norman: Well, I run the office and uh, tend the cabins and grounds and, and do a little, uh, errands for my mother. The ones she allows I might be capable of doing. (He smiles to himself.)
Marion: Do you go out with friends? (He brings his hands back to his lap.)
Norman: Well, a boy's best friend is his mother. You've never had an empty moment in your entire life, have you? -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: Only my share.
Norman: Where are you going? (She appears stony-eyed.) I didn't mean to pry.
Marion: I'm looking for a private island. (He leans forward.)
Norman: What are you running away from?
Marion (frowning): Wh-why do you ask that?
Norman: People never run away from anything. (changing the subject) The rain didn't last long, did it? 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. We scratch and, and claw, but only at the air, only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch. -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: Sometimes, we deliberately step into those traps.
Norman: I was born in mine. I don't mind it any more.
Marion: Oh, but you should. You should mind it.
Norman: Oh, I do. (Laughs and shrugs) But I say I don't.
Assertively, Marion insists that he can free himself from the traps that he feels have possessed him since birth - in actuality, she is in the process of healing herself and ready to renounce her own madness. She can't believe that he is traumatized so harshly by his mother - and suggests he should break away from her. According to Norman, he was raised by his widowed mother after the age of five. He was the central focus of his mother's attention until she fell in love with a man who talked her into building the Bates Motel. When his mother's lover died under unusual circumstances and she was bankrupted, "it was just too great a shock for her" and she went insane:
Marion: You know, if anyone ever talked to me the way I heard the way she spoke to you...
Norman: (positioned in front of his stuffed owl) Sometimes, when she talks to me like that, I feel I'd like to go up there and curse her and, and leave her forever. Or at least defy her. (He sits back passively like a little boy.) But I know I can't. She's ill.
Marion: She sounded strong.
Norman: No, I mean ill. She had to raise me all by herself after my father died. I was only five and it must have been quite a strain for her. She didn't have to go to work or anything like that. He left her a little money. Anyway, a few years ago, Mother met this man, and he talked her into building this motel. He could have talked her into anything. And when he died too, it was just too great a shock for her. And, and the way he died. (he smiles broadly at the thought) I guess it's nothing to talk about while you're eating. Anyway, it was just too great a loss for her. She had nothing left.
Marion: Except you.
Norman: A son is a poor substitute for a lover. [The film's suggestion of incest!]
Marion: Why don't you go away?
Norman: To a private island, like you?
Marion: No, not like me. (Marion's pose is similar to the one of the nude woman in the painting in the far left background behind Norman.)
Norman was forced into the role of nurse-maiding his deranged and invalid [mentally - "ill" ?] mother after his step-father's death. He erupts with furious intensity when she suggests that his mother be committed "someplace..." Marion is slowly made aware of how Norman's imprisoning predicament and treatment by his mother is far worse than her own situation. After Norman has sympathetically told her the story of his mother and their hard lives, Marion is compassionate but incredulous regarding his passive acceptance of his duty, his unhealthy, troubled devotion to his mother, and his sexual repression:
Norman: I couldn't do that. Who'd look after her? She'd be alone up there. The fire would go out. It'd be cold and damp like a grave. If you love someone, you don't do that to them - even if you hate them. You understand that I don't hate her. I hate what she's become. I hate the illness.
Marion: Wouldn't it be better if you put her - (she pauses and avoids speaking the obvious word) someplace ...
Norman (leaning forward with a mad look on his face, both angry and defensive): You mean an institution? A madhouse? People always call a madhouse 'someplace,' don't they? Put her in 'some place.' -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to sound uncaring.
Norman: (He grins) What do you know about caring? Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing and the tears! And the cruel eyes studying you. My mother there? [A foreshadowing of the film's climax.] But she's harmless! She's as harmless as one of those stuffed birds! [literally!]
Marion: I am sorry. I only felt - it seems she's hurting you. I meant well.
Norman: (bitterly) People always mean well. They cluck their thick tongues and shake their heads and suggest oh-so-very-delicately. (He leans back and turns back into his affable self.) Of course, I've suggested it myself, but I hate to even think about it. She needs me. (He leans forward again.) It's not as if she were a maniac, a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. (He leans back, smiles, and relaxes.) Haven't you? -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: (firmly) Yes. Sometimes just one time can be enough. Thank you.
Norman: Thank you, Norman.
Marion: Norman. (She stands to leave his company.)
At the conclusion of their discussion, he attempts to solidify their first-name-basis intimacy, but she is only thankful that she has learned a lesson from their talk. [Marion's admission that she has sunk to neurotic depths ("we all go a little mad sometimes") parallels Norman's own psychotic, pitiable trap in which he is hopelessly caught.] Marion realizes how horrible life can be when one is trapped in a situation without escape. In the mad act of stealing her boss's money, she has placed herself in such a trap.
Benefiting from Norman's example and trapped, self-sacrificing condition, he has provided or suggested a way of liberating salvation for Marion - and she gratefully thanks him. Regaining her sanity and rationality, she is resolved to extricate herself from her own self-imposed "private trap back there" due to lack of money and a frustrating romance. She will return to Phoenix to turn herself in "before it's too late":
Marion: I have a long drive tomorrow, all the way back to Phoenix.
Norman: (incredulously) Really?
Marion: I stepped into a private trap back there and I'd like to go back and try to pull myself out of it before it's too late for me to.
Marion forgets, however, that she has signed the register with a fake name and fake home address, and now tells Norman that her name is Crane. Norman watches her return to her cabin, and then takes another look at the register, smirking at the false name and location. [Norman Bates' hobby, "baiting ," snaring and trapping birds for stuffing - such as the "crane' woman from Phoenix - another legendary bird - has again found a suitable match - and he is amused by it.]
Walking back into the shadowy dark parlor and shutting the door behind him, motel manager Norman listens at the wall for sounds in the adjoining Cabin Room 1. Then, he removes one of the nude paintings from a hook [a replica of Susanna and the Elders - in which a nude is assaulted by two male satyrs], revealing a jagged hole chipped out of the wall with a bright peephole in its center [a symbol of feminine sexuality].
When he leans down to peer at Marion through the hole, his eye, in profile view, is illuminated by the light from her bedroom. The camera angle shifts and from Norman's point of view, he sees her undress down to her black brassiere and slip in front of her open bathroom door [a subjective camera placement implicates the audience in his peeping voyeurism].
A gigantic closeup of his large unblinking, profiled eye fills the screen - at precisely the same instant that he is lustfully watching Marion remove her undergarments and become naked. The camera cuts back to Marion as she covers her nude self with a robe and walks out of his/our view. An aroused Norman nervously replaces the picture, glances up to the house (in profile) with his jaw slightly twitching, and then resolvedly walks out. At the door to the office, he again glares up toward the house (in profile) and then begins bounding up the steps to his hillside home. Inside the house, he pauses at the carved staircase, places his hand on the banister post - and then with his hands in his pockets, retreats to the kitchen and sits hunched over the table at an odd angle. He twirls the cover on the sugar bowl. [The schizophrenic camera - or his Mother - voyeuristically watches him - and he appears to sense and realize it.]
In her motel room, Marion begins to reconsider her larcenous crime - she considers repenting and redeeming herself by returning the money. She sits at the room's desk with her First Security Bank of Phoenix bank book (with a balance of $824.12) and a scratch book of paper. She figures out how much she will have left after repaying the $700 she spent on her used getaway car (a paltry $124.12). Then she tears out the piece of paper from the scratch book and rips it up into small pieces. [At this point, it is left unclear whether she has decided to repent (and become clean and innocent again), or whether she changes her mind.]
To hide all evidence, she decides not to use the wastebasket and flushes the shreds down the toilet in the gleaming white bathroom - the noisy flush is emphasized as she watches the pieces circle around the bowl. [This was a convention-breaking taboo - to show a toilet and flush in a mainstream American film. This drain and 'flushing' imagery foreshadows the one of her own blood circling down the shower drain following her death.] She closes the lid on the toilet bowl, shuts the bathroom door, removes the robe from her naked back, drapes the robe over the toilet, steps naked into the bathtub (the camera displays her bare legs), pulls across the translucent shower curtain and prepares to take a shower before retiring - a final soul-cleansing act.
[In the next scene, the classic, brutal shower murder scene, an unexplainable, unpremeditated, and irrational murder, the major star of the film - Marion - is shockingly stabbed to death after the first 47 minutes of the film's start. It is the most famous murder scene ever filmed and one of the most jarring. It took a full week to complete, using fast-cut editing of 78 pieces of film, 70 camera setups, and a naked stand-in model (Marli Renfro) in a 45-second impressionistic montage sequence, and inter-cutting slow-motion and regular speed footage. The audience's imagination fills in the illusion of complete nudity and fourteen violent stabbings. Actually, she never really appears nude (although the audience is teased) and there is only implied violence - at no time does the knife ever penetrate deeply into her body. In only one split instant, the knife tip touches her waist just below her belly button. Chocolate syrup was used as 'movie blood', and a casaba melon was chosen for the sound of the flesh-slashing knife. -- Play clip (excerpt): ]
The infamous scene begins peacefully enough, although the sound effects are exaggerated. She opens up a bar of motel soap, and turns on the overhead shower water - from a prominent shower head nozzle (diagonally placed in the upper left) that sends arched needles of spray over her like rain water. There in the vulnerable privacy of her bathroom, she begins to bathe, visibly enjoying the luxurious and therapeutic feel of the cleansing warm water on her skin. Marion is relieved as the water washes away her guilt and brings energizing, reborn life back into her. Large closeups of the shower head, that resembles a large eye, are shot from her point-of-view - they reveal that the water bursts from its head and pours down on her - and the audience. She soaps her neck and arms while smiling in her own private world (or "private island") - oblivious for the moment to the problems surrounding her life.
With her back to the shower curtain, the bathroom door opens and a shadowy, grey tall figure enters the bathroom. Just as the shower curtain completely fills the screen - with the camera positioned just inside the tub, the silhouetted, opaque-outlined figure whips aside (or tears open) the curtain barrier. The outline of the figure's dark face, the whites of its eyes, and tight hair bun are all that is visible - 'she' wields a menacing, phallic-like butcher knife high in the air - at first, it appears to be stab, stab, stabbing us - the victimized viewer! The piercing, shrieking, and screaming of the violin strings of Bernard Herrmann's shrill music play a large part in creating sheer terror during the horrific scene - they start 'screaming' before Marion's own shrieks. [The sound track resembles the discordant sounds of a carnivorous bird-like creature 'scratching and clawing' at its prey.] Marion turns, screams (her wide-open, contorted mouth in gigantic close-up), and vainly resists as she shields her breasts, while the large knife repeatedly rises and falls in a machine-like fashion.
The murderer appears to stab and penetrate into her naked stomach, shattering her sense of security and salvation. The savage killing is kinetically viewed from many angles and views. She is standing in water mixed with ejaculatory spurts of blood dripping down her legs from various gashes - symbolic of a deadly and violent rape. She turns and falls against the bathtub tiles, her hand 'clawing and grasping' the back shower wall for the last shred of her own life as the murderer (resembling a grey-haired woman wearing an old-fashioned dress) quickly turns and leaves. With an unbloodied face and neck/shoulder area, she leans into the wall and slides, slides, and slides down the wet wall while looking outward with a fixed stare - the camera follows her slow descent.
In a closeup, Marion outstretches her hand (toward the viewer), clutches onto the shower curtain and yanks it down from its hooks (one by one) upon herself as she collapses over the edge of the bathtub - her face pitches forward and is awkwardly pressed to the white bathroom floor in front of the toilet. She lies bleeding on the cold, naked floor, with the shower nozzle still spraying her body with water [the soundtrack resembles soft rainfall].
The camera slowly tracks the blood and water that flows and swirls together counter-clockwise down into the deep blackness of the bathtub drain - Marion's life, or diluted blood, has literally gone down the drain. The drain dissolves into a memorable closeup - a perfect match-cut camera technique - of Marion's dead-still, iris-contracted [a dead person's iris is not contracted but dilated], fish-like right eye with one tear drop (or drop of water). The camera pulls back up from the lifeless, staring eye (freeze-framed and frozen at the start of the pull back), spiraling in an opposite clockwise direction - signifying release from the drain. [The association of the eye within the bottomless darkness of the drain is deliberate, as is the contrast between Norman's 'peeping tom' eye and Marion's dead eye. Her eye is slightly angled upward toward where Norman was positioned.]
On the soundtrack gushing shower water is still heard. The camera pans from Marion's face past the toilet and into the bedroom for a zoom close-up of Marion's folded-up newspaper on the nightstand. The bedstand also supports an empty ashtray and erect lampstand with a circular base. The camera continues to pan over along the flowery wall-papered wall to the open window where the house is visible. From there, Norman's voice is heard crying:
Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Blood! Blood! -- Play clip (excerpt):
[From a common-sense point-of-view, how could Norman have known?]
Norman scrambles down the hill to the scene of the crime in Cabin one, accompanied by the shrill music once again. At the bathroom door after viewing the curtain-less shower and the dead body, he turns away and cups his hand to his mouth, revulsed and nauseated by the horrific scene and possibly stifling a scream - and 'knocking off a bird' picture from the wall [Norman has literally knocked off a 'bird'].
He regains his composure, closes the open window, sits shaking in a chair, and then closes the cabin's door - camera angles often include the newspaper. He turns out the light, leaves the room, pauses outside, enters his motel office, and then shuts off the lights after closing the door behind him. [Hitchcock lingers on a view of the closed and darkened motel office door from the outside - note that the shadow of the roof overhang on the door's window forms the deathly silhouette of a guillotine blade-wedge!]
Dutifully, he re-appears from the office, carrying a mop and pail to methodically clean-up following the murder. [The audience is left with sympathetically identifying with the devoted, dutiful, automaton son who is once again cleaning up the mess and covering up for his misguided, insane mother's behavior. Clearly, the murder is not motivated by a lust for money.] He enters the bathroom, turns off the shower water, and then spreads out the shower curtain on the floor of the bedroom. He drags Marion's limp/nude corpse to the curtain and afterwards shows off his 'dirty' hands to the camera on this "dirty night." [Subjectively, his hands are really the audience's hands.] He washes his hands in the sink - blood and water again swirl down the drain. He rinses the sink clean of blood and then obsessively swabs and wipes up every trace of the bloody murder in the bathroom with the mop, after which he dries everything with a towel. He drops his towel and mop into the empty bucket at the conclusion of the laborious, ritualistic process.
Norman tiptoe-edges around her body as he goes outside to back Marion's car (and trunk) closer to the room's door. Then, he wraps her up in the plastic curtain [rolling and bundling her up like the money in the newspaper in the make-shift shroud], carries her over the door's threshold (!) and onto the porch, and places the corpse in the trunk of her car. He straightens up the bird picture that had fallen to the floor, packs up her few belongings, and also tosses them in the car. The final lingering trace of Marion and another crime - her folded newspaper concealing the money - is the last thing found in the room. Without looking inside, he non-chalantly tosses it into the car trunk and slams it shut. He drives off - a camera closeup of the car's rear end reveals its license plate - NFB 418 signifying 'Norman F Bates' - the F represents Francis, a reference to St. Francis, patron saint of birds] and drives to a nearby, bordering swamp-hole filled with quicksand. Or, NFB could mean Norman Frickin Bates!
Norman gets out and pushes the light-toned car into the dark thick morass of waters to submerge the evidence, watching nervously and nibbling as it slowly gurgles lower and lower into the muck. He cups his hands in front of his chin, fearful that it won't sink entirely. The car sinks only part way in - and then halts. Norman, looking remarkably like a scared bird, darts his head around anxiously. Then he grins approvingly when it is finally swallowed up - again down a drain of sorts - by the blackness. He is relieved that the evidence is covered up. [Audience identification shares Norman's relief.] The scene fades to black.
[A week later, on Saturday, December 19]
On his own hardware store letterhead, Sam handwrites a letter to Marion:
SAM LOOMIS HARDWARE
FAIRVALE, CALIFORNIA
Saturday
Dearest right-as-always Marion:
I'm sitting in this tiny back room which isn't big enough for both of us, and suddenly it looks big enough for both of us. So what if we're poor and cramped and miserable, at least we'll be happy.
If you haven't come to your senses, and still...
The camera pans from Sam seated in the cramped back room at the desk out into the wide-open space of the hardware store, where scythes, rakes and other tools hang overhead. A clerk is assisting an elderly customer who complains about poor-quality insecticides that do not specify if death is painless for the crawling victims ("Death should always be painless") - she decides on buying an effective brand called SPOT. [The famous last line of the film is recalled: "Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly!"]:
So far of those I've used, I haven't had much luck with any of them. Well, let's see what they say about this one. They tell you what it's 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 I say, insect or man, death should always be painless.
A blonde woman enters the store's front door, asking for Sam and introducing herself as "Marion's sister" Lila (Vera Miles) - she is strikingly similar in appearance. She is concerned that Marion has disappeared and hasn't been heard of for a week: "She left home on Friday. I was in Tucson over the weekend. And I haven't heard from her since, not even a phone call." She suspects that Sam has something to do with Marion's strange disappearance:
Look, if you two are in this thing together, I don't care, it's none of my business, but I want to talk to Marion and I want her to tell me it's none of my business and then I'll go...
While she blames him for Marion's troubling disappearance, a private detective and investigator enters the store. Milton Arb- O - gast (Martin Balsam), hired by Marion's employer, has been following Lila and watching them from outside the store's door. He suggests that they "all talk about Marion." His interest in the case is that he has been commissioned to search for and recover the missing funds: "$40,000...your girlfriend stole $40,000." Lila explains to Sam what Arbogast is referring to: "She was supposed to bank it on Friday for her boss and she didn't, and no one has seen her since." Arbogast is sure that the money makes Marion very conspicuous: "Someone has seen her. Someone always sees a girl with $40,000." Lila reassures Sam that: "they don't want to prosecute. They just want the money back." Sam disavows any knowledge of Marion's whereabouts, and Lila explains that she is there on a hunch: "All I want to do is see Marion before she gets in this too deeply." Arbogast maintains that Marion was seen leaving Phoenix in her own car by her employer, and suspects she is somewhere closeby. He infers that "boyfriend" Sam may have conspired with Marion to rob her employer:
You know, we're always quickest to doubt people who have a reputation for being honest. I think she's here, Miss Crane. Where there's a boyfriend...Well, she's not back there with the nuts and bolts but she's here in this town somewhere. I'll find her.
[A Few Hours? of Investigation that same Saturday]
In a montage of short scenes, Arbogast questions and canvasses a series of hotel, motel and boarding house managers over an indeterminate period of time, and eventually pulls up to the Bates Motel - a place Arbogast believes is "hiding from the world" because its neon sign is off, according to Norman: "It just doesn't seem like any use any more, you know?" Norman is on the porch, nibbling on candy from a bag. He announces the familiar: "twelve cabins, twelve vacancies." Although the motel hasn't had visitors, Norman explains how it's "linen day...I hate the smell of dampness, don't you? It's such a, I don't know, creepy smell."
After being invited into the motel office, the detective explains he is looking for a "missing person": "I've been trying to trace a girl that's been missing for oh, about a week now, from Phoenix. It's a private matter. The family wants to forgive her. She's not in any trouble." The fast-talking, slick, probing and smug Arbogast (with the back of his figure reflected in the office's mirror) shows Norman her picture, and asks the ironic question [suggesting Norman's ultimate fate]: "Would you mind looking at the picture before committing yourself?" Norman replies: "Commit myself? You sure talk like a policeman."
I don't even much bother with, uh, guests registering anymore. You know, one by one, you drop the formalities. I shouldn't even bother changing the sheets but old habits die hard.
Because Norman appears to be uncomfortably evasive, inconsistent, self-incriminating and halting in his replies and insists no one stayed in the motel for a couple of weeks - but then contradicts himself - Arbogast asks to see the register to discover if Marion Crane used an alias. (Norman chews nervously on candy, almost bird-like. From a low camera angle, his adam's apple moves up and down his giraffe-like throat while awkwardly stretching to look at the register.) Arbogast proves that Marion stayed at the motel by matching her signature to the "Marie Samuels" signature in the book - after Norman denied that he had any recent guests.
Norman: Is that her?
Arbogast: Yeah, I think so. Marie (Marion) Samuels (her boyfriend's name is Sam)
In their famous interrogation scene, the dialogue is overlapped to make Arbogast's skillful questioning even more intimidating. Norman becomes defensive when he realizes he is trapped and intruded upon - he starts to nervously stutter and stammer more profusely. Norman finally changes his story for the detective - he remembers Marion as an overnight guest at the motel (with a late arrival and early departure), and her dinner of a sandwich in the parlor:
Arbogast: Was she is disguise, by any chance? Do you want to check the picture again?
Norman: Look, I-I wasn't lying to you, mister.
Arbogast: Oh, I know that, I know you wouldn't lie.
Norman: You know, it's tough keeping track of the time around here...Oh yeah. Well, it, it was raining, and um, her hair was all wet. I'll tell ya, it's not really a very good picture of her either...Well, um, she arrived rather late one night and she went straight to sleep and uh, left early the next morning...Oh, very early...the, um, the, the, the, next morning. Sunday...
Arbogast: I see. Did anyone meet her here?...Did she arrive with anyone?...Did she make any phone calls or...locally?...Did you spend the night with her?...Well then, how would you know that she didn't make any phone calls?...
Norman: Uh, well she was very tired, and uh, see, now I'm starting to, uhm, remember it. I'm making a mental picture of it in my mind...she was, she was sitting back there, no, no, she was standing back there with a sandwich in her hand and she said, uh, she had to go to sleep early, because she had a long dr-drive, uh, ahead of her...back where she came from...yes, back in my, uh, in my parlor there, uh, she was very hungry, and I made her a sandwich. And then she said, uh, that she was tired and she, uh, uhm, had to go right to bed.
Norman tries to excuse himself by claiming he has work to be done, but Arbogast believes Norman is hiding something:
...if it doesn't gel, it isn't aspic, and this ain't geling. It's not coming together, something's missing.
Norman suggests that Arbogast follow him and join him while he changes the beds - Arbogast observes Norman stop, pause, and then bypass the first cabin room. Looking up at the Victorian house on the hill behind the motel, Arbogast becomes even more curious when he spots a figure in the window - he suspects that Marion might be using Norman to "gallantly" hide her - in exchange for sex, and that Marion may have 'met' Norman's mother:
Arbogast: Is anyone at home?
Norman: No.
Arbogast: Who is? There's somebody sitting up in the window.
Norman: No, no, no there isn't.
Arbogast: Oh sure, go ahead, take a look.
Norman (stumbling terribly on the words): Oh, oh, that, that must be my mother. She's, she's uh, an inv-invalid. Uh, it's, ah, practically like living alone.
Arbogast: Oh, I see. Well, now if this, uh girl, Marion Crane were here, you wouldn't be hiding her, would ya?
Norman: No.
Arbogast: Not even if she paid you well?
Norman: No, ha, ha.
Arbogast: (in a provoking tone) Let's just say for the uh, just for the sake of argument that she wanted you to, uh, gallantly protect her. You'd know that you were being used. You wouldn't be made a fool of, would ya?
Norman (angrily): But, I'm, I'm not a fool. And I'm not capable of being fooled. Not even by a woman.
Arbogast: Well, this is not a slur on your manhood. I'm sorry...
Norman: Let's put it this way. She might have fooled me, but she didn't fool my mother.
Arbogast: Oh, then your mother met her. Could I, could I talk to your mother?
Norman: No, as I told you, she's, she's confined.
Arbogast: Yes, well, just for a few minutes, that's all. There might be some hint that you missed out on. You know, sick old women are usually pretty sharp...
To refuse the detective's request for an interview with his mother and to dismiss him, Norman insists abruptly that Arbogast leave. As Norman watches Arbogast drive off, Norman's face is cut in half by light and darkness. Arbogast drives to a nearby telephone booth by the road and closes himself within the bird-caged-like booth. He telephones Sam Loomis and asks to speak to Lila. He confirms that Sam was innocent of Marion's whereabouts by summarizing what he found at the old Bates Motel - Marion was a guest there the previous Saturday night and probably stayed in cabin number one - and the boyish manager knows more than he is telling:
I'll just have to pick up the pieces from here. Well, I'll tell ya, I don't feel entirely satisfied.
He then explains how he plans to return to the motel immediately to try to talk to the manager's mother. Arbogast expects to report back to them in about an hour.
Back at the motel, Norman leaves the office and walks down the long L-shaped porch walkway in front of the rooms - the motel is dominated by the house on the hill. He disappears into the shadows as Arbogast's car drives up one more time. The detective calls out "Bates?" [baits?] and then snoops in the empty motel office and the parlor, noticing the birds adorning the walls and an empty safe. He leaves the office and ascends the hill to the old, dark house.
He quietly enters the front door, deferentially removes his hat, and then stands for a moment in the foyer before beginning to climb up the long steep staircase to the second floor. With Hitchcock's trademark tracking shots, the camera follows his footsteps from behind and then shifts to a backwards tracking, high-angled shot of him as he ascends the stairs. At the top landing, a crack of light appears on the floor through the slowly opening door of a bedroom. As he reaches the top step, the camera shifts to an overhead shot and the shrill, screeching music commences to preface the fearfully-exciting sequence.
In one of the most horrific murder scenes in film history, Arbogast is frighteningly attacked at the top of the stairs, in a bird's eye-view overhead shot, by a knife-wielding "old lady" emerging from the bedroom off to the right. He is slashed to death across the forehead and left cheek. Blood spurts as he stumbles, then loses his balance with his arms flailing outwards, and falls backwards down the entire flight of stairs to the oriental rug-covered floor. The woman pursues after him and flings herself on top of him - the gigantic butcher knife goes up into the air for another series of slashing blows before the scene fades to black.
Lila and Sam wait apprehensively in the hardware store for the detective's return later that Saturday, realizing that it has been three hours since Arbogast last called [just before his unexpected, horrific murder]. Lila admits being impatient to the procrastinating Sam: "Are we just going to sit here and wait?...Patience doesn't run in my family, Sam." When she demands to go to the motel, Sam volunteers to go by himself. A dark silhouetted Lila, with a cold wind blowing through her hair, dissolves into the figure of Norman, standing by the swamp [after sinking Arbogast and his car?]. He hears Sam's off-screen call for Arbogast, but doesn't respond. Norman's sinister look into the camera dissolves back into an image of Lila waiting in the back office of the hardware store. When Sam returns, she rushes forward to the camera [her dark, silhouetted image recalls Marion's first image of the murderer in the shower scene]. He reports his findings: "No Arbogast, no Bates," but he saw a "sick old lady unable to answer the door, or unwilling" in the second floor window.
[Saturday night]
The two decide to talk to Fairvale's Deputy Sheriff Al Chambers (John McIntire) and his wife (Lurene Tuttle) at their home - they find them in their night-robes. They explain that Lila's sister ran away from Phoenix (because "she stole some money...forty thousand dollars") and was traced to the Bates Motel by private detective Arbogast. Mrs. Chambers is dumbfounded when they mention a "Mrs. Bates" - "Norman took a wife?" An over-anxious Lila believes "there's something wrong out there" because Arbogast has inexplicably disappeared after reporting he was "dissatisfied and he was going back there." The common-sense country sheriff is also suspicious, but questions the integrity of the detective. He speculates that Arbogast might have obtained a "hot lead" from Norman, stalled them with a phone call, and then took off alone after Marion:
Well, I think there's something wrong too Miss, but not the same thing. I think what's wrong is your private detective. I think he got himself a hot lead as to where your sister was going, probably from Norman Bates, and called you to keep you still while he took off after her and the money.
The sheriff believes that Norman didn't answer Sam's cries deliberately: "This fellow lives like a hermit. You must remember that bad business out there about 10 years ago." Lila persuades Chambers to call Norman on the phone to confirm the sheriff's theory. Norman answers and supportively explains that Arbogast was there but left. There is a particularly stunning set of remarks made by Sheriff Chambers and his wife when they dispel the claims of both Sam and Arbogast about Norman's living 'mother.' In a double murder-suicide ten years earlier, Mrs. Bates poisoned her unfaithful lover and then took her own life:
Sheriff: This detective was there. Norman told him about the girl. The detective thanked him and he went away.
Lila: (disbelieving) And he didn't come back? He didn't see the Mother?
Sheriff: Your detective told you he couldn't come right back because he was gonna question Norman Bates' mother, right?
Lila: Yes.
Sheriff: Norman Bates' mother has been dead and buried in Greenlawn Cemetery for the past ten years.
Mrs. Chambers: I helped Norman pick out the dress she was buried in - periwinkle blue.
Sheriff: It ain't only local history, Sam. It's the only case of murder and suicide on Fairvale ledgers. Mrs. Bates poisoned this guy she was involved with when she found out he was married. Then took a helping of the same stuff herself. Strychnine. Ugly way to die.
Mrs. Chambers: Norman found them dead together - (whispering) in bed.
Sam: You mean that old woman I saw sittin' in the window out there wasn't Bates' mother?
Sheriff: Now wait a minute, Sam. Are you sure you saw an old woman?
Sam: Yes! In the house behind the motel. I called and pounded but she just ignored me.
Sheriff: You want to tell me you saw Norman Bates' mother?
Lila: But it had to be, because Arbogast said so, too. And the young man wouldn't let him see her because she was too ill.
Sheriff: Well, if the woman up there is Mrs. Bates, who's that woman buried out in Greenlawn Cemetery? -- Play clip (excerpt):
With a determined look on his face, Norman leaves the motel office and goes up to the house and stairs (walking effeminately with shifting hips) to the second floor bedroom - his 'mother's' bedroom. He tells her that it is time to move her to a new location - the fruit cellar. The cackling old lady protests vehemently with a macabre joke as he explains the necessity of the move:
Norman: Now mother, uhm, I-I'm gonna bring something up...
Mother: Ha, ha, I am sorry boy, but you do manage to look ludicrous when you give me orders.
Norman: Please, mother...
Mother: No! I will not hide in the fruit cellar! Ah ha! You think I'm fruity, huh? I'm staying right here.This is my room and no one will drag me out of it, least of all my big bold son.
Norman: They'll come now, mother. He came after the girl and now someone will come after him. Mother, please, it's just for a few days. Just for a few days so they won't find you.
Mother: Just for a few days? In that dark, dank fruit cellar? No! You hid me there once, boy, and you won't do it again. Not ever again! Now get out! I told you to get out, boy.
Norman: I'll carry you, Mother.
Mother: Norman, what do you think you're doing? Don't you touch me! Don't! Norman! Put me down! Put me down! I can walk on my own.
-- Play clip (excerpt):
During their argumentative dialogue, the camera pans up the stairway to above the bedroom door and then to a disorienting, spiraling overhead shot as Norman emerges with his mother in his arms and carries the frail figure down the staircase to the basement fruit cellar. [The audience is equally imbalanced and disoriented - who is the woman that he argues with and carries downstairs, immediately after the Sheriff revealed that Mrs. Bates is buried in a grave?]
[Sunday, December 20]
Churchbells sound to indicate the end of the Sunday services at the small-town Fairvale Church. On the steps in front of the spire-topped church, the Sheriff tells Lila and Sam that he found "nothing" but Norman at the Bates Motel when he visited earlier in the morning:
I saw the whole place, as a matter of fact. That boy's alone there...You must have seen an illusion, Sam. I know you're not the seein'-illusions type, but no woman was there and I don't believe in ghosts, so there it is.
The Sheriff suggests that they file a "missing person" report later that afternoon in his office: "The sooner you drop this in the lap of the law, that's the sooner you stand a chance of your sister being picked up." To "make it nicer," his wife suggests they do their reporting at their house around dinner time.
Disbelieving and unsatisfied, Lila and Sam decide to return to the motel on their own to see if Arbogast ran out on them. To "fool" Norman, they plan to register as guests - as "man and wife" - and then "search every inch of the place, inside and out." After they arrive at the motel, Norman spies on them from the upstairs window and Lila notices someone there. When Norman speaks to them about registering for a room, they explain that they are journeying to San Francisco, but don't like the looks of the weather: "It looks like a bad day coming, doesn't it?"
Sam and Norman face each other tensely across the front desk. Appearing assertive and insistent, Sam signs the register and demands a "notarized" receipt because his trip is: "90 percent business." Without luggage, Sam reminds Norman that it's odd that they don't have to pay for their room in advance. After paying ten dollars for the room and showing themselves to cabin number ten near the end of the porch, Lila wishes to search cabin number one where Arbogast told her Marion stayed: "No matter what we're afraid of finding or how much it may hurt."
Lila is suspicious that Norman, the motel manager of this "useless business," had a motive "to get out, to get a new business somewhere else - 40 thousand dollars." They are both anxious to search for clues that Arbogast had uncovered and evidence of the missing $40,000:
There must be some proof that exists now, something that proves he (Bates) got that money away from Marion somehow...He (Arbogast) wouldn't have gone anywhere or done anything without telling us unless he was stopped - and he was stopped. So he must have found out something.
They begin at Cabin One where they find two major clues. Sam notices that the shower curtain is missing and Lila finds a scrap of paper stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl, showing a notation - some figure has been added to or subtracted from $40,000. That might prove that Norman found out about the money. Lila is convinced that the "old woman, whoever she is, she told Arbogast something. I want her to tell us the same thing." They plan to split up and have Sam divert Norman's attention and keep him occupied within the office while Lila sneaks up to explore the house - she confidently assures Sam: "I can handle a sick old woman."
The camera subjectively tracks her climbing progress up the hill, both with eerie point-of-view shots and backward-tracking shots as the gothic house looms larger and she confronts its horror. She anxiously enters the solemn, archaic hallway of "Mother's House." In this final scary sequence, with parallel editing cutting back and forth between the motel office and Lila's assault on Norman's private world in the house, Sam abrasively corners Norman in the motel office's entrance. He aggressively and mercilessly banters away with the much-quieter, timid motel manager - challenging ('baiting') him to confess that he would "get away" given the right chance:
Sam: You are alone here, aren't you?
Norman: Hmm, hmm.
Sam: It would drive me crazy.
Norman: I think that would be a rather extreme reaction, don't you?
Sam: Just an expression. What I meant was, uh, I'd do just about anything to get away, wouldn't you?
[Lila explores the house in three areas - the bedroom, the attic, and the cellar - all parts of Norman's segmented personality.]
Lila first sees a black cupid statue in the hallway, and then a painting of a maiden at the top of the stairs. She enters Mrs. Bates' Victorian, baroque, stuffy, upstairs bedroom. She notes the ornate fixtures and strangely preserved, Victorian artifacts including an antique dry washbasin, a nude goddess statuette, a cold fireplace and empty chair, an armoire-wardrobe with old-fashioned, high-necked women's clothes neatly hung, a vanity table with large mirror, hairbrush and comb. There's also a jewelry box (a bronzed sculpture of two crossed, lace-cuffed hands clasped in prayer) on the dressing table. She gasps, seeing herself in multiple reflections in an opposing full-length mirror, but is relieved that the nightmarish apparition is only herself. She touches the deep-curved, indented imprint of a single reclining figure in the large double bed - Norman's "only world."
In the office, Sam doubts Norman's contentedness and acceptance of his poverty - assuming that he would "unload this place...to get out from under" if he had the money:
Sam: I'm not saying you shouldn't be contented here. I'm just doubting that you are. I think if you saw a chance to get out from under, you'd unload this place.
Norman: This place? This place happens to be my only world. I grew up in that house up there. I had a very happy childhood. My mother and I were more than happy.
On the third floor, Lila enters Norman's little-boy's room containing a mysterious, aberrant combination of children's (boy's and girl's items) and adult's things [signifying Norman's stultified personality development]. The isolated room contains a rocking chair; another stuffed bird; a doll, a model car, a toy schoolhouse and a stuffed teddy bear in a pile on a wall shelf; a stuffed rabbit on Norman's slept-in single bed; a phonograph record of Beethoven's Er-o-ica [one letter short of erotica] Third Symphony on a box-like turntable; and a world globe and small piggy bank safe next to a stack of books (one of the books has no title or author on its cover). She turns open the book cover to inspect its contents [is it pornographic, a book of black magic, Norman's diary perhaps, or is it an album that contains pictures of the Bates family?].
The shot cuts back to the motel office, where Sam continues his pleasantries to question a now-frightened Norman who stands confrontationally across from him [they are remarkably similar - almost mirror reflections of each other as they stand across the counter from each other]:
Sam: You look frightened. Have I been saying something frightening?
Norman: I-I-I don't know what you've been saying.
Sam: I've been talking about your mother. About your motel. How you're gonna do it?
Norman: Do what?
Sam: Buy a new one in a new town where you won't have to hide your mother.
Norman: Why don't you just get in your car and drive away from here, OK?
Sam: Where will you get the money to do that, Bates? Or do you already have it, socked away?
Norman: Shut up!
Sam: A lot of it, forty thousand dollars. (He pursues Norman into the parlor.) I bet your mother knows where the money is and what you did to get it. I think she'll tell us.
Realizing that the girl Sam came with has disappeared (he deduces that she may be in the house) and that he has been set up in a diversionary trap, Norman struggles with Sam, knocks him out, and races up the hill. As Lila is coming down the stairs, she looks out the curtained front door window and sees Norman rushing toward her. She runs around and hides behind the stairs in the stairwell leading to the basement steps - she is framed behind the 'bars' of the stairs. As Norman goes upstairs, Lila decides to tiptoe down into the darkness of the cellar [symbolically going deeper into the hidden secrets of the psyche or Psycho-path] - sensing that Norman's mother might be located there.
She enters a basement door, and then proceeds through a second creaking door into the fruit cellar, where she sees a lifeless, silent figure (with her hair drawn back in a bun) facing away from her in a chair - seated under a glaring bare-bulb light fixture. She walks up to the body, calling out "Mrs. Bates?" and taps the woman's shoulder. The body slowly swivels in its chair and jiggles back and forth as it completes its turn. She has discovered Norman's perverted and terrible secret and penetrated into his deadly world where she has found "Mother" - Mrs. Bates - a stuffed, dried-up, shrunken and withered mummy's skeleton with empty eye sockets and a wide, toothy grin. Horrified, Lila's wide-open mouth screams at the preserved corpse. As she draws back her hand, it hits the suspended light fixture, setting it swinging. It adds an unsettling set of dancing shadows of light and dark to the scene. As she screams, violin screeches match her own shrieks as she turns toward the sound of heavy footsteps.
A grey-haired woman with a knife wielded in the air suddenly jumps into the open fruit cellar door frame. 'Mother' pauses there for a moment and then steps forward to strike. Sam appears behind the matronly old woman, and grabs, overpowers, and subdues the knife-brandishing attacker. In the film's dramatic climax, Norman is metamorphosized and revealed as his "Mother" [Norma?] when his drag disguises (the wig and dress) are stripped away and ripped off. His body convulses and spasms (orgasmically?), his eyes squint, and his face grimaces in pain when his decaying illusion is exposed. His fingers claw upward and cling to the knife as he collapses to the floor. The 'Norman' self completely dies, while his macabre 'Mother' self is brought to life - illustrated by the cadaver's hysterically-laughing face, with its mummy's eyes 'moving' - animated and resurrected by the light. The 'living dead' eyes of the corpse that see Lila mock her - they appear lifelike but they are indeed lifeless. -- Play clip (excerpt):
The mummy's face dissolves into the next scene set in front of the County Court House - the face appears imprisoned behind the four white pillars holding up the establishment's law and order building.
[This final sequence or epilogue has been criticized as being too talky, and an over-explanation of the film's plot. However, Hitchcock was known for providing expositional content in other films, such as in his US remake The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), North by Northwest (1959) and Rear Window (1954).]
Sheriff Chambers remarks: "If anyone gets any answers, it'll be the psychiatrist. Even I couldn't get to Norman and he knows me." As a footnote to the entire series of events, the smug and officious police psychiatrist, Dr. Richmond (Simon Oakland) in the Office of the Chief of Police reconstructs or 'explains' the mystery of Norman's schizophrenic psychosis after questioning 'his mother' [Was he 'made a fool of...by a woman'?] - since Norman Bates no longer exists.
[A wall calendar behind the psychiatrist reads '17', a discontinuity error and a Hitchcockian self-reference to his earlier film Number 17 (1932). The date of the final scenes of Psycho should be December 20. In her first scene, Lila told Sam that Marion left Phoenix "a week ago yesterday"; the plot climaxed the day after that, which would be Sunday the 20th.]:
I got the whole story, but not from Norman. I got it from his 'mother'. Norman Bates no longer exists. He only half-existed to begin with. And now, the other half has taken over, probably for all time.
Lila asks if it is true that Norman actually killed her sister. The psychiatrist first answers "Yes...and no," but then confirms that Norman was the murderer of Marion, Arbogast, and possibly other individuals (in unsolved missing persons cases) who registered at the hotel and were deposited in the swamp in the vicinity of the motel. Then, he goes on to explain how a "disturbed" Norman had an incestuously possessive and jealous love for his mother, so he poisoned both her and her lover after he discovered them in bed together. [It has been speculated that there's another likely possibility - Mrs. Bates may have killed her own husband and then killed herself. Norman's delusional mind, with his accusatory 'Mother' enshrined inside, may have caused him to become mad to rid him/herself of guilt. The 'Mother' part of him directed him to commit the murders.]:
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 them both.
To wipe clean and obliterate the unbearable, intolerable crime of matricide from his conscience and consciousness, a remorseful Norman developed a split personality. In this way, he could keep the illusion that she was still alive. To make that illusion a physical reality, he dug up and stole her body, and used his taxidermist skills to preserve and stuff her corpse, keep her 'alive,' and then he would ease his loneliness by lying with her in bed:
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. -- Play clip (excerpt):
In his diseased imagination, he would play-act and fantasize that he was his mother - and that she was as jealous of him as he was of her. When attracted to a young woman, Norman would completely become his mother and be jealously and pathologically mad. His "mother" side, escalated to full reality, would stab to death the females he was attracted to - and commit the horribly violent crimes. After the murders, Norman would awaken and appear horrified by his 'mother's' crimes. However, from Norman's pathologically-crazed point of view, the murders were symbolic sexual acts of rape/revenge - his knife a potent phallic symbol against his 'Mother'.
So he began to think and speak for her, give her half his life, so to speak. At times, he could be both personalities, carry on conversations. At other times, the 'mother' half took over completely. 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 as jealous of him. Therefore, if he felt a strong attraction to any other woman, the 'mother' side of him would go wild. (To Lila) 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!...
He was a transvestite - "but not exactly." He would act out the "mother" side of the split personality, donning her clothing to keep his illusion of her being alive. Following the disclosure of Norman's crime, his weakened self-identity had been so completely and totally absorbed and possessed by the "mother" side of his split personality that his male Norman side no longer existed. When his two personalities fused, he became his dominant mother's final victim:
In Norman's case, he was simply doing every thing possible to keep alive the illusion of his mother being alive. And when reality came too close, when danger or desire threatened that illusion, he'd dress up, even to a cheap wig he bought. He'd walk about the house, sit in her chair, speak in her voice. He tried to be his mother. And, uh, now he is. Now that's what I meant when I said I got the story from the 'mother'. You see, when the mind houses two personalities, there's always a conflict, a battle. In Norman's case, the battle is over, and the dominant personality has won...These were crimes of passion, not profit.
A policeman brings a chilled Norman a blanket ("He feels a little chill") - off-screen, a woman's voice responds gratefully: "Thank you." As Norman sits still - staring out into space in his box-like jail cell [a bare "place" with "cruel eyes studying you" - Norman's words to Marion], he is wrapped and insulated from the world and huddled in a blanket. His frail character and self-identity have been fully possessed by his mother. As the camera slowly tracks toward Norman, the voice of "Mother" speaks in Norman's head, and condemns her son for the crimes, while she claims that she is harmless:
(off-screen) 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. 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 except just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds. Oh, they know I can't even move a finger and I won't. 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. -- Play clip (excerpt):
[The police and, more directly, the film's audience are 'watching' him/her through the peephole of the door. This scene recalls the scene of the policeman with dark sunglasses gazing at Marion with his "cruel eyes." The prison guard is an uncredited role for Ted Knight, the Ted Baxter character of the popular TV show The Mary Tyler Moore Show.] With darting eyes, he/she watches a fly crawl across his/her hand, displaying his/her innocence by sparing the insect's life. [One can only recall that Marion's life wasn't spared.] As he looks toward the camera, a grinning smile slowly creeps over his face - subliminally superimposed by and dissolving into the grinning skull of his mother's mummified corpse:
I'm not even gonna 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.' -- Play clip (excerpt):
The film ends with a dissolve into the dredging of the swamp - Marion's car with her body and the almost-$40,000 in the trunk is hauled trunk-first from the muck by a heavy clanking chain on a winch - she is liberated, withdrawn and reborn from her grave. Horizontal black bars partially, and then completely, cover the final image.
Alfred Hitchcock's powerful, complex psychological thriller, Psycho (1960) is the "mother" of all modern horror suspense films - it single-handedly ushered in an era of inferior screen 'slashers' with blood-letting and graphic, shocking killings (e.g., Homicidal (1961), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Motel Hell (1980), and DePalma's Dressed to Kill (1980) - with another transvestite killer and shower scene). While this was Hitchcock's first real horror film, he was mistakenly labeled as a horror film director ever since. It was advertised as:
"A new - and altogether different - screen excitement!!!"
The nightmarish, disturbing film's themes of corruptibility, confused identities, voyeurism, human vulnerabilities and victimization, the deadly effects of money, Oedipal murder, and dark past histories are realistically revealed. Its themes were revealed through repeated uses of motifs, such as birds, eyes, hands, and mirrors.
The low-budget ($800,000), brilliantly-edited, stark black and white film came after Hitchcock's earlier glossy Technicolor hits Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and would have been more suited for as an extended episode for his own b/w TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In fact, the film crew was from the TV show, including cinematographer John L. Russell.
The master of suspense skillfully manipulates and guides the audience into identifying with the main character, luckless victim Marion (a Phoenix real-estate secretary), and then with that character's murderer - a crazy and timid taxidermist named Norman (a brilliant typecasting performance by Anthony Perkins). Hitchcock's techniques voyeuristically implicate the audience with the universal, dark evil forces and secrets present in the film.
Psycho also broke all film conventions by displaying its leading female protagonist having a lunchtime affair in her sexy white undergarments in the first scene; also by photographing a toilet bowl - and flush - in a bathroom (a first in an American film), and killing off its major 'star' Janet Leigh a third of the way into the film (in a shocking, brilliantly-edited shower murder scene accompanied by screeching violins). The 90-odd shot shower scene was meticulously storyboarded by Saul Bass, but directed by Hitchcock himself.
[Note: A satirical parody of scenes from various Hitchcock films, including some from Psycho, were included in Mel Brooks' comedy High Anxiety (1977). The shower scene itself has been referenced, spoofed and parodied in numerous films, including Brian De Palma's The Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Dressed to Kill (1980), Squirm (1976), Victor Zimmerman's low-budget Fade to Black (1980), Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse (1981), John De Bello's Killer Tomatoes Strike Back! (1990), Martin Walz' The Killer Condom (1997, Ger.), Wes Craven's Scream 2 (1997), Scott Spiegel's From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999), and the animated Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), in which Bugs acts out with the film's black-and-white footage and a can of Hershey's chocolate syrup poured down the drain.]
In this film, Hitchcock's gimmicky device, termed a MacGuffin (the thing or device that motivates the characters, or propels the plot and action), is the stolen $40,000 from the realtor's office. Marion Crane becomes a secondary MacGuffin after her murder.
The film's screenplay by Joseph Stefano was adapted from a novel of the same name by author Robert Bloch. Remarkably, Bloch's 1959 novel was based on legendary real-life, Plainfield, Wisconsin psychotic serial killer Edward Gein, whose murderous character also inspired the mother-obsessed farmer in Deranged (1974), the Leatherface character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and serial killer Jame Gumb ("Buffalo Bill") in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
[Note: Bloch became a major horror screenwriter during the 60s decade and beyond, responsible for such suspenseful horror films and chillers as The Cabinet of Caligari (1962) - an update of the 1919 classic, Strait Jacket (1964), The Night Walker (1964), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), The Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Asylum (1972), the short feature Mannikin (1977), and The Amazing Captain Nemo (1977).]
Like many of Hitchcock's films, Psycho is so very layered and complex that multiple viewings are necessary to capture all of its subtlety. Symbolic imagery involving stuffed birds and reflecting mirrors are ever-present. Although it's one of the most frightening films ever made, it has all the elements of very dark, black comedy. This film wasn't clearly understood by its critics when released. Hitchcock admitted that Henri-Georges Clouzot's influential thriller Les Diaboliques (1955, Fr.) inspired his film.
This taut masterpiece was followed by three feature film sequels (none directed by Hitchcock) and other imitations or TV films:
TitleDirectorComment
Psycho (1960)
Not rated until 1968, when an early version of the MPAA ratings system rated it M, for mature audiences only; a 1984 reissue re-rated the film RAlfred HitchcockAnthony Perkins as Norman Bates
Psycho II (1983)
Note: This was a record interval - 23 years between a 'I' and 'II' picture.Richard FranklinAnthony Perkins as Norman, released from a mental hospital after 22 years; Marion's sister Lila Loomis (again Vera Miles) protests his release
Psycho III (1986)Anthony Perkins, in his directorial debutAnthony Perkins as Norman, 25 years later
Bates Motel (1987)Richard RothsteinTV pilot film, with Bud Cort as Bates Motel manager
Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990)Mick GarrisMade for cable-TV film, with Anthony Perkins as Norman, Henry Thomas as a young Norman, and Olivia Hussey as Norma Bates
Psycho (1998)Gus Van SantAn almost 'scene-by-scene' (actually 'shot-by-shot') remake (or replication) of the original classic, that only generated interest for the original film
The film's four Academy Award nominations failed to win Oscars: Best Supporting Actress (Janet Leigh with her sole career nomination), Best Director (Alfred Hitchcock with the last of his five losing nominations), Best B/W Cinematography, and Best B/W Art Direction/Set Decoration. Bernard Herrmann's famous and memorable score with shrieking, harpie-like piercing violins was un-nominated.
When the film was originally aired in theaters in mid-1960, Hitchcock insisted in a publicity gimmick (a la P.T. Barnum) that no one would be seated after the film had started - the decree was enforced by uniformed Pinkerton guards. Audiences assumed that something horrible would happen in the first few minutes. Violence is present for about two minutes total in only two shocking, grisly murder scenes, the first about a third of the way through, and the second when a Phoenix detective named Arbogast is stabbed at the top of a flight of stairs and topples backwards down the staircase. The remainder of the horror and suspense is created in the mind of the audience, although the tale does include such taboo topics as transvestism, implied incest, and hints of necrophilia.
The Story
The bleak, monochrome film is made more effective by Bernard Herrmann's sparse, but driving, recognizable score, first played under the frantic credits (by industry pioneer Saul Bass) - shown with abstract, gray horizontal and vertical lines that streak back and forth, violently splitting apart the screens and causing them to disappear. The frenetic lines appear as prison bars or vertical city buildings. [These criss-crossing patterns, like mirror-images, are correlated to the split, schizophrenic personality of a major protagonist.]
The film opens with the aerial-view camera sweeping left to right along the urban skyline of "PHOENIX, ARIZONA" where some new construction is in progress. [The numerous references to birds in the film begins here, with the city of 'Phoenix'.] The specific date and time are emphasized in titles in the middle of the screen:
FRIDAY, DECEMBER THE ELEVENTH
TWO FORTY-THREE P.M
The shot pans across many skyscraper buildings, and after a series of numerous dissolves, randomly chooses to descend and penetrate deeper into one of many windows in a cheaper, high-rise hotel building - the window's venetian blinds narrowly conceal the dingy interior. There, the camera pauses at the half-open window - and then voyeuristically intrudes into the foreground darkness of the drab room. The camera takes a moment to adjust to the black interior - and then pans to the right where a post-coital, semi-nude couple have just completed a seedy, lunch-time tryst. Attractive, single 30-ish secretary, Marion (spelled not with an A but an O - signifying emptiness) Crane (Janet Leigh), wearing only a prominent white bra and slip and reclining back on a double bed, is with her shirtless lover/fiancee Sam Loomis (John Gavin) who stands over her. In the background is a bathroom (the first of three bedrooms with bathrooms in the background).
Sam speaks the first line of dialogue, referring to the uneaten lunch food on the stand - on many levels, she has lost her appetite for their ungratifying relationship and mutual poverty. As he kisses her and they embrace on the bed, they discuss their "cheap" relationship and impoverishment, and their many unresolved issues:
Sam: You never did eat your lunch, did you?
Marion: I'd better get back to the office. These extended lunch hours give my boss excess acid.
Sam: Why don't you call your boss and tell him you're taking the rest of the afternoon off? (It's) Friday anyway - and hot.
Marion: What do I do with my free afternoon? Walk you to the airport?
Sam: Well, you could laze around here a while longer.
Marion (foreshadowing a future hotel visit): Hmm. Checking out time is 3 pm. Hotels of this sort aren't interested in you when you come in, but when your time is up. Oh Sam, I hate having to be with you in a place like this.
Sam: I've heard of married couples who deliberately spend an occasional night in a cheap hotel.
Marion: When you're married, you can do a lot of things deliberately.
Sam: You sure talk like a girl who's been married.
Marion: Sam, this is the last time.
Sam: For what?
Marion: For this, meeting you in secret so we can be secretive. You come down here on business trips. We steal lunch hours. I wish you wouldn't even come.
Sam: All right, what do we do instead? Write each other lurid love letters?
It's a hot, Friday afternoon [although December, it undoubtedly looks like a summer day] and they are obviously in the midst of a "secretive" affair in Room No. 514. She loves Sam but they can only furtively see each other during his business trips. Sam has flown in from a small town in California to see Marion - and "steal lunch hours." As she rises to dress and cover up her ample breasts, they discuss further difficulties in their fitful relationship (characterized as more sexual than intimate). Sam secretly enjoys the illicitness of their sleazy, "lurid" affair and suggests seeing her the next week - and even assents to having "lunch - in public."
In a semi-ultimatum to Sam, Marion tells him that "this is the last time" - she will deny him further sexual couplings in "secretive" meetings. She expresses her frustration about their private love trysts and her real desire for marriage - she wants chastity, respectability, and public meetings in the place she shares with her sister (where a framed picture of her dead "Mother" morally disapproves, presides, and judges them). [Of course, there's another morally-disapproving, judgmental 'dead Mother' in the film, but that comes later. One unanswered question in the film: Did Marion spend years nursing her invalid mother - selfless dedication that contributed to her fate as an old maid?] He agrees to see her under the new terms of 'respectability,' although he reminds her how "a lot of sweating out," "patience," and "hard work" would be prerequisites in a respectable relationship [Marion's sister later tellingly asserts: "Patience doesn't run in my family"]:
Marion: Oh, we can see each other. We can even have dinner, but respectably. In my house, with my mother's picture on the mantel, and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.
Sam: And after the steak, do we send sister to the movies, turn Momma's picture to the wall?
Marion: Sam!
Sam: (begrudgingly) All right. Marion, whenever it's possible I want to see you and under any circumstances, even respectability.
Marion: You make respectability sound disrespectful.
Sam: Oh no, I'm all for it. But it requires patience, temperance, with a lot of sweating out. Otherwise though, it's just hard work. But if I could see you and touch you, you know, simply as this, I won't mind. (He nibbles at her neck.)
Sam, a small-town (Fairvale, California) hardware store proprietor, is also frustrated and self-pitying because of his money worries - he is a financial martyr, burdened by his father's debts and the alimony he must pay to his ex-wife. She proposes marriage directly (she is still a spinster and stuck in the same job after ten years) - and poignantly describes her willingness to share a life of cash-strapped hardship with him. But annoyingly, he balks at the thought, refusing because he doesn't want her to live in poverty and because he believes he must first pay off his debts over the next couple years. She threatens to leave him and thinks she may find "somebody available" to take his place and end her fears of being a fallen woman:
Sam: I'm tired of sweating for people who aren't there. I sweat to pay off my father's debts and he's in his grave. (Sam has walked in front of a fan with spinning blades.) I sweat to pay my ex-wife's alimony and she's living on the other side of the world somewhere.
Marion: I pay too. They also pay who meet in hotel rooms. [This line evokes the famous last line of Milton's sonnet, On His Blindness: "They also serve who only stand and wait."]
Sam: A couple years and my debts will be paid off. If she remarries, the alimony stops.
Marion: I haven't even been married once yet.
Sam: Yeah, but when you do, you'll swing.
Marion: Oh Sam, let's get married! (They kiss and embrace.)
Sam: Yeah. And live with me in a storeroom behind a hardware store in Fairvale? We'll have lots of laughs. I'll tell you what. When I send my ex-wife her alimony, you can lick the stamps.
Marion: I'll lick the stamps.
Sam: Marion, you want to cut this off, go out and find yourself somebody available?
Marion: I'm thinking of it.
Sam: How could you even think a thing like that?
Unhappy and unfulfilled in her unsanctified relationship, Marion rejects his idea to take the afternoon off and rushes back to her storefront real estate office - she is anxious about being late.
[Director Hitchcock, wearing a ten-gallon hat, makes his cameo appearance on the Phoenix sidewalk facing away from the window of the realty office.] She is relieved that her boss Mr. George Lowery (Vaughn Taylor) is not back from lunch, but she suffers from a headache (brought on by her perennial problems with Sam). [Behind her in the office is a framed picture of a barren, desert scene]:
Headaches are like resolutions. You forget them as soon as they stop hurting.
She listens to her recently-married co-worker Caroline (Patricia Hitchcock, Hitchcock's real-life daughter) chatter about her interfering, nagging mother, who had suggested that her doctor prescribe tranquilizers for her wedding day to protect her (from the anguish of losing her virginity and having sex?) - her mother's nosiness angered her proprietary groom/husband Teddy. [Scenes of frigid winter are displayed behind her.] Caroline offers Marion a tranquilizer rather than an aspirin for her headache.
My mother's doctor gave them to me the day of my wedding. Teddy was furious when he found out I'd taken tranquilizers.
Mirrors are ever-present throughout the film - Marion checks out her appearance and applies lipstick using a small compact mirror from her purse. Mr. Lowery arrives shortly afterwards with an important, wealthy (and inebriated) millionaire - a cowboy-hatted customer named Mr. Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson). He is an oil-lease man who is sweating from the heat and complaining about the weather: "Wow! It's as hot as fresh milk." The salty oilman suggests that Lowery should "air-condition...up" his employees, because he "can afford it today." Mr. Cassidy has just proudly bought a house on Harris Street for his "sweet little girl" - his 18 year old, soon-to-be-married daughter ("baby"):
Tomorrow's the day my sweet little girl - (He leers over at Marion) - Oh, oh, not you - my daughter, a baby. And tomorrow she stands her sweet self up there and gets married away from me. I want you to take a look at my baby. Eighteen years old, and she never had an unhappy day in any one of those years.
Flirting with Marion, he sits on her desk, and sensing that Marion is unhappy and feeling deprived with his talk of marriage, gloats about his wealth and his easing of life's pains through buy-offs:
You know what I do about unhappiness? I buy it off. Are, uh, are you unhappy?
Marion answers that she isn't "inordinately" unhappy - although she is uncomfortably reminded of her unmarried status and other deprivations. Then, the vulgar client takes out the $40,000 in cold, hard cash for the house purchase for his "respectable" married daughter as a wedding present, and boastfully waves and flops it around in front of his audience. He domineeringly explains how virile the money makes him:
Now, that's, that's not buying happiness. That's just buying off unhappiness. I never carry more than I can afford to lose.
He tosses the money on Marion's desk, but the money is not for her - but for Cassidy's daughter's wedding dowry (although she is challenged and tempted by the money earmarked for a bride's house - she feels more entitled to it than the pampered daughter). It is an awkward, discomfiting sight for Marion who has just left her impecunious lover/partner whom she is unable to marry for lack of money. Caroline is astonished by Cassidy's brash proposition: "I declare!" Cassidy even brags about how he doesn't rightfully 'declare' his illicitly-obtained money to the government - an obvious illegality: "I don't. That's how I get to keep it."
Lowery is worried about so much cash out in the open: "A cash transaction of this size is most irregular," but Cassidy assures him: "Aw, so what. It's my private money. Now it's yours." [His transference of the 'dirty' private funds to Lowery suggests that Marion's boss may keep the cash transaction undeclared.] The loud-mouthed Cassidy embarrasses the real estate boss by exposing the presence of something else hidden away and unrevealed - a bottle in the desk in his office. He persuades Lowery to take him into the inner air-conditioned office for a drink. Lowery instructs Marion to put the large amount of cash in a bank's safe deposit box over the weekend: "I don't even want it in the office over the weekend. Put it in the safe deposit box in the bank."
Caroline is jealous that Cassidy flirted with her colleague [Her 'respectable' marriage must be somewhat desperate and unfulfilling.]:
He was flirting with you. I guess he must have noticed my wedding ring.
Both women touch and handle the naughty, filthy money, and then Marion puts it into an envelope, wraps it up and sticks it in her purse. She is granted permission to go straight home after the bank deposit because of her headache. Although she expects to be "in bed" all weekend, Cassidy thinks she needs an escape and propositions her with an invitation:
What you need is a weekend in Las Vegas, the playground of the world!
As she leaves, Marion refuses tranquilizers a second time from her co-worker: "You can't buy off unhappiness with pills." [But obviously, can't her unhappiness be bought off with money?] As she leaves the office, her shadow follows after her.
In the next scene, Marion's shadow precedes her. In a moment of weakness and impulse, she has been tempted to bring the money home to her small bedroom instead of to the bank. (Her sister is away for the weekend in Tucson to "do some buying.") Again in partial undress wearing only a black bra and slip [after the theft, her underclothes turn black - signifying her darkness], Marion repeatedly and apprehensively eyes the money in a fat envelope lying on the bed (where she told Lowery and Cassidy she would spend the weekend). The camera zooms in and cuts back and forth to the envelope more than once. Next to it is her packed suitcase, ready for a trip. [Behind her in this second bedroom in the film is another bathroom - this one with the shower head particularly noticeable. Also, more mirrors and windows and pictures looking down from the wall - two of her as a baby, another of her deceased parents. She has redirected the money intended by Cassidy for his "baby" to her own maternal instincts - her wish to be married to Sam, have respectable sex and raise a family.] She stares long and hard at herself in the dresser mirror. Although she appears casually indifferent and secure in the presence of the money, she nervously finishes packing and closes her full suitcase.
She sits down on the bed, stares with desire at the money, and tries to stop herself from doing something she knows is shameful and wrong - something that is not "respectable." But she can't control her sinful, obsessive-compulsive behavior. Because her suitcase is already full and shut, she stuffs the envelope in her purse (with other important papers) and then leaves.
While driving out of Phoenix toward Fairvale, California in her black car, Marion stares straight ahead and trance-like while imagining that she is on her way to elope with Sam with the large sum of cash with which to finance her elopement and marriage. She hears a conversation with a startled Sam who is surprised to see her in Fairvale - with pilfered money for their salvation. His startled, echoing voice speaks in her head. With an uneasy reaction to her appearance, he would undoubtedly reject her solution to their problem:
Marion, what in the world, what are you doing up here? Of course I'm glad to see you. I always am. What is it, Marion?
Their conversation is cut short and interrupted. Significantly, she cannot finish talking with him.
While waiting at a stoplight, her boss (and Cassidy) pass by in the cross-walk in front of her. He at first smiles and nods when recognizing her, and leaves the frame of the windshield. Likewise, she smiles - nervously. But then he stops, turns and furrows his brow at her. Mr. Lowery is puzzled and concerned to see her in her car when she was supposed to be home sick. Likewise, her face turns frozen after realizing that she has been caught. Bernard Herrmann's jarring music begins to play, slashing at her. She pulls away, gulps hard, and looks back - her conscience already gnawing away.
Unnerved but still drifting along irrationally, Marion drives her dark-toned car toward Fairvale from Phoenix and it turns to dusk and nighttime. She repeatedly looks into her rear-view mirror - symbolically checking out her own inner thoughts. She blinks her tired eyes and tries to avoid the glare of headlights of oncoming cars - spotlighting her crime.
The next morning, Marion wakes up from her lying position in the front seat of her car, where she has pulled it over to the shoulder of the road beneath some bare hills to get some sleep. She is startled by rapping knuckles on her driver's side window and horrified to see a California Highway Patrolman (Mort Mills) with frightening dark glasses staring at her through the car window. His glasses reflect back her inner soul - ridden with guilt. Marion impulsively turns on the ignition to leave, but he orders her ("acting as if something's wrong") to "hold it there."
After rolling down her window, she tries to act calmly as he suggests that she would be safer in a motel [ha!]. While scrutinizing her, he can sense that she is skittish and nervous:
Patrolman: In quite a hurry.
Marion: Yes, I didn't intend to sleep so long. I almost had an accident last night from sleepiness so I decided to pull over.
Patrolman: You slept here all night?
Marion: Yes. As I said, I couldn't keep my eyes open.
Patrolman: There are plenty of motels in this area. You should've...I mean just to be safe.
Marion: I didn't intend to sleep all night. I just pulled over. Have I broken any laws?
Patrolman: No, ma'am.
Marion: Then I'm free to go.
Patrolman: Is anything wrong?
Marion: Of course not. Am I acting as if there's something wrong?
Patrolman: Frankly, yes.
Marion: Please, I'd like to go.
Patrolman: Well, is there?
Marion: Is there what? I've told you there's nothing wrong, except that I'm in a hurry and you're taking up my time.
Because she is short with him, he asks to check her driver's license. From a low camera angle facing back from the passenger's seat, she turns her back to him and digs into her purse as the patrolman is leaning on the window behind her and watching her (omnisciently). Marion removes the envelope from her purse and desperately hides it between her body and the automobile seat, and then finds her documents. He checks the license and registration (her 1959 Arizona license plate number is ANL 709 - signifying anal-obsessive behavior or something more sordid?) and lets her drive away, but follows her from behind for awhile, still suspicious, while the jarring music plays. [Through subjective camera movements, audience identification with her predicament results in resentment and impatience with everything that makes it difficult for her flight to succeed.] She drives through desolate desert terrain somewhere between Los Angeles and Bakersfield - and is greatly relieved (and so is the audience) when he turns off after a sign reading: "RIGHT LANE FOR GORMAN." [Gore-man, a play on words?]
In Bakersfield, California, she turns into a flashy "CASH FOR CARS" used car lot. [This is the film's sole location shoot.] While waiting for the salesman from the Used Car Department, she purchases a Los Angeles Tribune newspaper from a coin-operated vending machine and quickly scans the paper - for a possible report of her theft? (She doesn't notice the same patrolman drive up, park across the street, and stand next to his vehicle - looking very tall while leaning on his car - to watch her.) The affable, fast-talking used car salesman, California Charlie (John Anderson) greets her ominously:
California Charlie: I'm in no mood for trouble.
Marion (blurting back): What?
California Charlie: There's an old saying. The first customer of the day is always the most trouble.
Hurriedly, realizing she must exchange her Arizona-plated car for one that will not be identifiable, she asks: "Can I trade my car in and take another?" He accommodates her request: "You can do anything you have a mind to. Being a woman, you will." He intuitively grasps her feelings about her car: "Sick of the sight of it." She confirms his perspective - and reveals her life's mood: "I'm in a hurry and I just want to make a change." While a mechanic pulls her car in to inspect it before selling her a different car, she is shocked when she catches sight of the suspicious patrolman. Even though she is aware that the new car she'll be purchasing will be able to be identified, Marion quickly and irrationally decides on going ahead with her car purchase - a light-colored '57 Ford. She causes the astonished, high-pressure salesman to wonder why she is 'pressuring' him to make a swift purchase:
One thing people never ought to be when they're buying used cars - and that's in a hurry...You mean you don't want the usual day and a half to think it over? Ha! You are in a hurry aren't ya? Is somebody chasin' ya?...Why, this is the first time the customer ever high-pressured the salesman!
Without any negotiation, Marion agrees to his first offer, her out-of-state car's trade-in value (and proof of ownership) plus $700, adding warily: "I take it you can prove that car is yours." Before paying, she enters the enclosed ladies room to unwrap and handle the stolen money and to take the car title out of her purse. (Her image is schizophrenically reflected in the lavatory's mirror.) She counts out seven $100 dollar bills over the grimy rest room's sink and returns to California Charlie, who is terribly suspicious of her uneasy, atypical behavior and her refusal to take a trial spin. She defends her own impatience: "Can't we just settle this?...Is there anything so terribly wrong about making a decision and wanting to hurry? Do you think I've stolen my car?" After they have made the deal and she rushes to her new car, the patrolman slowly pulls his vehicle into the car lot. When she hurriedly begins driving off, the greasy mechanic calls out: "Hey!" giving her quite a fright - but it is only because she has forgotten her luggage. It is loaded into the back seat of her car before she drives off, leaving the dumbfounded trio (the cop, the salesman, and the mechanic) staring at her restless departure.
[Saturday evening]
Now a fugitive (or "wrong one"), she drives all day Saturday on monotonous roads as the dark night approaches. Marion is tormented even more by menacing, inner monologues from off-screen voices. Her disintegrating mental state and self-destructive conscience (and physical weariness) cause her to look inward and punish herself - as she imagines and forecasts events leading up to her capture. Headlights from oncoming cars illuminate her face like interrogation spotlights:
[Saturday - imagined]
- California Charlie: Heck officer, that was the first time I ever saw the customer high-pressure the salesman. Somebody chasin' her?
- Patrolman: I'd better have a look at those papers, Charlie.
- California Charlie: Did she look like a wrong one to you?
- Patrolman: Acted like one.
- California Charlie: The only funny thing. She paid me $700 in cash.
[Monday - imagined]
- Caroline: Yes, Mr. Lowery.
- Mr. Lowery: Caroline, Marion still isn't in?
- Caroline: No, Mr. Lowery, but then she's always a bit late on Monday mornings.
- Mr. Lowery: Buzz me the minute she comes in.
- Mr. Lowery: And call her sister. No one's answering at the house.
- Caroline: I called her sister, Mr. Lowery, where she works - the Music Maker's Music Store, you know. And she doesn't know where Marion is any more than we do.
- Mr. Lowery: You'd better run out to the house. She may be, well, unable to answer the phone.
- Caroline: Her sister's going to do that. She's as worried as we are.
[Mr. Lowery on the phone with Marion's sister - imagined]
- Mr. Lowery: No, I haven't the faintest idea. As I said, I last saw your sister when she left this office on Friday. She said she didn't feel well and wanted to leave early. I said she could. That was the last I saw - oh, wait a minute. I did see her sometime later driving. Uh, I think you'd better come over here to my office, quick! Caroline, get Mr. Cassidy for me.
[Mr. Lowery on the phone with Mr. Cassidy - imagined]
- Mr. Lowery: After all Cassidy, I told you, all that cash! I'm not taking any responsibility. Oh, for heaven's sake. A girl works for you for 10 years, you trust her. All right yes, you better come over.
[Mr. Lowery speaking with Cassidy in the office - imagined]
- Cassidy: Well, I ain't about to kiss off forty thousand dollars. I'll get it back and if any of it's missing, I'll replace it with her fine soft flesh. [Marion's own fantasy judgment upon herself is a foreshadowing of what is to come - a wish-fulfillment.]
- Cassidy: I'll track her. Never you doubt it. [Marion grins at Cassidy's raging, vengeful threat and condemning indignation at the loss of his money - and virile manhood. She fantasizes about his sadistic desire to violently murder her and erotically punish "her fine soft flesh." The grin foreshadows another similar one by Norman Bates later in the film.]
- Mr. Lowery: Now hold on Cassidy. I-I still can't believe. It must be some kind of a mystery. I-I can't...
- Cassidy: You check with the bank? NO! They never laid eyes on her? NO! You still trustin'. Hot creeper. She sat there while I dumped it out. Hardly even looked at it. Planned it. And even flirtin' with me.
Rain drops begin to splash on the windshield, as oncoming headlights blind Marion's tired eyes (she has been traveling for almost 30 hours with nothing to eat and an uncomfortable Friday night's sleep in her car). The rainstorm becomes more violent, and the windshield wipers slash back and forth through the water across her window, accentuated by the soundtrack. [A perfect visual metaphor for the celebrated shower scene to come!] Although the rain has a cleansing, climactic effect and her inner monologues cease (and the music dies down), her vision is blurred and obscured - literally - and she becomes lost and driven off the main road. Glaring car headlights (from behind or ahead) disappear. The side road she has been derailed onto is dark - suddenly up ahead, a neon "BATES MOTEL VACANCY" sign appears (seen from her point of view) - almost conjured up like all her other interior imaginations. Her flight is aborted. She pulls in to the out-of-the-way, deserted, and downbeat roadside motel - a modest but seedy looking place.
As the rain is beating down, she parks in front of the motel office and gets out of her car. The office is lighted but unattended. Then, from the motel porch, she peers around the corner of the motel, looking up at the gloomy, gothic-style Victorian house behind the motel on a hill. The stereotypical horror movie's 'old dark house' looks like a giant skull with lighted windows/eyes. In a lighted second story window, she sees the silhouetted figure of an old woman pass in front of the window. She honks her horn a few times to signal her presence.
The nervous, gangly thin, shy, peculiar but likeable caretaker, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) breathlessly bounds down the steps on the hill in the rain (carrying an unopened umbrella) - smiling and greeting her with the words:
Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please.
As she enters the empty office, the camera captures her reflected image in a mirror, and then a split-second image of both of their faces in the mirror. They speak to each other in profile across the desk, prefaced by his meaningful, ironic comment: "Dirty night." According to the twitchy proprietor, the motel is completely vacant:
"We have twelve vacancies. Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies. They moved away the highway."
-- Play clip (excerpt):
He is delighted to see a visitor because nobody ever stops at the motel unless they accidentally get off the "main road" [another ironic comment about her waywardness]: "Nobody ever stops here anymore unless they've done that." Her handbag is placed next to her on the desk, with the word "OKAY" visible at the top of her folded Los Angeles Tribune newspaper. With frayed nerves from her experience, Marion awkwardly registers in the guest book under a false identity as Marie Sam-uels [a reference to her unfulfilled wish to marry Sam] from Los Angeles after a glance at her paper. The motel keeper banters on with a significant statement:
There's no sense dwelling on our losses. We just keep on lighting the lights and following the formalities.
At the same moment that she lies about her address, the attendant hesitates when he reaches for the room key to Cabin 3. Turning slightly sideways, he selects instead the key to Cabin 1 - the room that adjoins the office: "it's closer in case you want anything." She learns she is only about 15 miles from Fairvale, Sam's town. He takes her bags from the back seat and leads her to her room. As he shows her the interior of the room, he comments on its smell - another richly-textured line: "Boy, it's stuffy in here," and opens the window. In a charming, friendly, eager-to-please way, the uptight proprietor meticulously shows Marion where everything is, pausing on the word "mattress" [a word remarkably similar to the word matricide], possibly because he is nervous about being in the bedroom alone with a pretty woman:
Well the, uh, mattress is soft, and there's hangers in the closet and stationery with 'Bates Motel' printed on it, in case you want to make your friends back home feel envious. -- -- Play clip (excerpt):
Framed bird pictures adorn the drab walls. But he stammers as he turns on the bright bathroom lights and points her to the "and the, uh, over there" (she must provide the word bathroom for him as if it was a forbidden, dirty word), the white-tiled bathroom. He offers his services: "Well, if you want anything, just tap on the wall. I'll be in the office."
When she learns his name - it's not "Mr. Bates" he suggests, but a more personable "Norman Bates" - her image is reflected in the room's mirror, clutching her purse with the stolen bundle of money. He shyly and humbly invites her to dinner in his house: "Would you have dinner with me? I was just about to myself. You know, nothing special, just sandwiches and milk...I don't set a fancy table, but the kitchen's awful homey." [His own self-deprecating opinion of himself is that he is "nothing special."] She agrees and he tells her to wait in her room and he'll be back "as soon as it's ready" with his "trusty umbrella."
While he is gone, Marion places both her handbag and suitcase on the bed. She takes the money from her handbag and looks for a better place to conceal the money - she opens up three drawers. She finally decides to wrap it up in her Los Angeles newspaper and place it in plain view on the bed nightstand (the word 'OKAY' is ironically still visible in the headline). [As she sets the paper down, it's as if a voice she hears saying "NO!" from the house judges her guilty action.]
Through the window (that Norman conveniently opened) facing the old house, Marion hears voices - an argument that Norman is having with his shrill-voiced, domineering mother (voice of "Mother" by Virginia Gregg) over his "cheap erotic" dinner invitation to the young woman [the film's voyeur theme is reinforced by the idea of Norman's mother 'peeking' into her son's life with her ears]:
Mother: No! I tell you, No! I won't have you bringing strange young girls in for supper. By candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds.
Norman: Mother, please!
Mother: And then what - after-supper music, whispers?
Norman: Mother, she's just a stranger. She's hungry and it's raining out. (Marion turns away from the window)
Mother: (mocking him) 'Mother, she's just a stranger.' As if men don't desire strangers. (Marion turns back and eavesdrops some more) Oh, I refuse to speak of disgusting things because they disgust me. Do 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 to tell her, because you don't have the guts? Huh, boy? Do you have the guts, boy?
Norman: Shut up! Shut up! -- Play clip (excerpt):
Uncomfortable, she turns away from the window until she hears the door shut. She watches Norman, who has defied his mother, carrying a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of milk down the hill. Marion waits outside her motel door, and moments later sees Norman turn the corner onto the porch: "I caused you some trouble," she apologetically states. As they stand together on the porch, the camera photographs them as if they were the two sides of the same coin, and Norman's image is reflected in the glass window behind him - and symbolic of his split personality. Crestfallen, Norman tells Marion that his mother is extremely disagreeable. She resigns herself to 'eat'-ing his "fixed" supper:
Norman: No. Mother, my mother, uh, what is the phrase? - she isn't qu-quite herself today. -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: You shouldn't have bothered. I really don't have that much of an appetite.
Norman: Oh, I'm sorry. I wish you could apologize for other people.
Marion: Don't worry about it. But as long as you've fixed the supper, we may as well eat it.
As she leans back with her hands folded across her front and invites him into her motel room to eat, Norman steps forward and backward one step, stiffens uncomfortably and lowers his gaze, and then proposes that it would be "nicer and warmer" in the motel office. She is amused by his bashfulness and pathetic self-consciousness - and sympathetic to his nervous awkwardness around her. And because it is "too officious" in the office, he suggests the darkened parlor (with only one Tiffany lamp) behind the office: "I-I-I-I have the parlor back here."
[The ominous invitation into the parlor recalls the words of Mary Howitt's 19th century poetic fable, The Spider and the Fly - an excerpt follows below:
"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly;
"'Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you may spy.
The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,
And I have many curious things to show when you are there."
"Oh no, no," said the little fly; "to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."...
And then, in the conclusion:
...He dragged her up his winding stair, into the dismal den -
Within his little parlor - but she ne'er came out again!
And now, dear little children, who may this story read,
To idle, silly, flattering words I pray you ne’er give heed;
Unto an evil counsellor close heart and ear and eye,
And take a lesson from this tale of the spider and the fly.
The parallel to the fable is even more prophetic when one recalls the final ironic words of Norman (or his alter ego): "I'm not even gonna 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.'"]
The parlor is decorated with his stuffed [stuffy, but in another sense] trophy birds mounted on the walls or on stands - an enormous predatory, nocturnal owl with outstretched wings, a raven [a bird with a knife-like beak that preys on carrion (Marion?)], a pheasant, and a hawk - and classic paintings of nude women being raped. As he sits straight up and leans forward as in a toilet-like position while she nibbles on a sandwich (but doesn't drink any of the milk from the large pitcher), he looks on, fondles a stuffed bird, and talks about his "uncommon" and "cheap" hobby "to pass the time" - his interest in avian taxidermy:
Norman: It's all for you. I'm not hungry. Go ahead. (He intently watches her first bite.) You, you eat like a bird.
Marion (looking around): You'd know of course.
Norman (stuttering): No, not really. Anyway, I hear the expression, 'eats like a bird' it, it's really a fals-fals-false-falsity because birds really eat a tremendous lot. But I don't really know anything about birds. ['Birds' also connotes 'women'.] My hobby is stuffing things. You know, taxidermy. And I guess I'd just rather stuff birds because I hate the look of beasts when they're stuffed. You know, foxes and chimps. Some people even stuff dogs and cats but, boy, I can't do that. I think only birds look well stuffed because, well because they're kinda passive to begin with. (She tears the piece of bread in her hands, ending up with typical 'bird' food - bread crumbs!)
Marion: Strange hobby. Curious.
Norman: Uncommon, too.
Marion: Oh, I imagine so.
Norman: And itsa, it's not as expensive as you'd think. It's cheap really, you know, needles, and thread, sawdust. The chemicals are the only thing that, that cost anything.
Marion: A man should have a hobby.
Norman: Well, it's, it's more than a hobby. (He fondles a stuffed bird on the bureau next to him.) A hobby's supposed to pass the time, not fill it.
Marion: Is your time so empty?
Norman: No, uh.
He dutifully confides that he doesn't have other friends - his "best friend is his mother." Their conversation leads to speaking about how human beings become imprisoned "in our private traps" - in a narrow and minimal existence - in the course of their private lives. Marion sees parallels in her own life - she is caught in a degraded and draining relationship with a weak-willed Sam, similar to how Norman is debilitated by his enforced caring for his mother:
Norman: Well, I run the office and uh, tend the cabins and grounds and, and do a little, uh, errands for my mother. The ones she allows I might be capable of doing. (He smiles to himself.)
Marion: Do you go out with friends? (He brings his hands back to his lap.)
Norman: Well, a boy's best friend is his mother. You've never had an empty moment in your entire life, have you? -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: Only my share.
Norman: Where are you going? (She appears stony-eyed.) I didn't mean to pry.
Marion: I'm looking for a private island. (He leans forward.)
Norman: What are you running away from?
Marion (frowning): Wh-why do you ask that?
Norman: People never run away from anything. (changing the subject) The rain didn't last long, did it? 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. We scratch and, and claw, but only at the air, only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch. -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: Sometimes, we deliberately step into those traps.
Norman: I was born in mine. I don't mind it any more.
Marion: Oh, but you should. You should mind it.
Norman: Oh, I do. (Laughs and shrugs) But I say I don't.
Assertively, Marion insists that he can free himself from the traps that he feels have possessed him since birth - in actuality, she is in the process of healing herself and ready to renounce her own madness. She can't believe that he is traumatized so harshly by his mother - and suggests he should break away from her. According to Norman, he was raised by his widowed mother after the age of five. He was the central focus of his mother's attention until she fell in love with a man who talked her into building the Bates Motel. When his mother's lover died under unusual circumstances and she was bankrupted, "it was just too great a shock for her" and she went insane:
Marion: You know, if anyone ever talked to me the way I heard the way she spoke to you...
Norman: (positioned in front of his stuffed owl) Sometimes, when she talks to me like that, I feel I'd like to go up there and curse her and, and leave her forever. Or at least defy her. (He sits back passively like a little boy.) But I know I can't. She's ill.
Marion: She sounded strong.
Norman: No, I mean ill. She had to raise me all by herself after my father died. I was only five and it must have been quite a strain for her. She didn't have to go to work or anything like that. He left her a little money. Anyway, a few years ago, Mother met this man, and he talked her into building this motel. He could have talked her into anything. And when he died too, it was just too great a shock for her. And, and the way he died. (he smiles broadly at the thought) I guess it's nothing to talk about while you're eating. Anyway, it was just too great a loss for her. She had nothing left.
Marion: Except you.
Norman: A son is a poor substitute for a lover. [The film's suggestion of incest!]
Marion: Why don't you go away?
Norman: To a private island, like you?
Marion: No, not like me. (Marion's pose is similar to the one of the nude woman in the painting in the far left background behind Norman.)
Norman was forced into the role of nurse-maiding his deranged and invalid [mentally - "ill" ?] mother after his step-father's death. He erupts with furious intensity when she suggests that his mother be committed "someplace..." Marion is slowly made aware of how Norman's imprisoning predicament and treatment by his mother is far worse than her own situation. After Norman has sympathetically told her the story of his mother and their hard lives, Marion is compassionate but incredulous regarding his passive acceptance of his duty, his unhealthy, troubled devotion to his mother, and his sexual repression:
Norman: I couldn't do that. Who'd look after her? She'd be alone up there. The fire would go out. It'd be cold and damp like a grave. If you love someone, you don't do that to them - even if you hate them. You understand that I don't hate her. I hate what she's become. I hate the illness.
Marion: Wouldn't it be better if you put her - (she pauses and avoids speaking the obvious word) someplace ...
Norman (leaning forward with a mad look on his face, both angry and defensive): You mean an institution? A madhouse? People always call a madhouse 'someplace,' don't they? Put her in 'some place.' -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to sound uncaring.
Norman: (He grins) What do you know about caring? Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing and the tears! And the cruel eyes studying you. My mother there? [A foreshadowing of the film's climax.] But she's harmless! She's as harmless as one of those stuffed birds! [literally!]
Marion: I am sorry. I only felt - it seems she's hurting you. I meant well.
Norman: (bitterly) People always mean well. They cluck their thick tongues and shake their heads and suggest oh-so-very-delicately. (He leans back and turns back into his affable self.) Of course, I've suggested it myself, but I hate to even think about it. She needs me. (He leans forward again.) It's not as if she were a maniac, a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. (He leans back, smiles, and relaxes.) Haven't you? -- Play clip (excerpt):
Marion: (firmly) Yes. Sometimes just one time can be enough. Thank you.
Norman: Thank you, Norman.
Marion: Norman. (She stands to leave his company.)
At the conclusion of their discussion, he attempts to solidify their first-name-basis intimacy, but she is only thankful that she has learned a lesson from their talk. [Marion's admission that she has sunk to neurotic depths ("we all go a little mad sometimes") parallels Norman's own psychotic, pitiable trap in which he is hopelessly caught.] Marion realizes how horrible life can be when one is trapped in a situation without escape. In the mad act of stealing her boss's money, she has placed herself in such a trap.
Benefiting from Norman's example and trapped, self-sacrificing condition, he has provided or suggested a way of liberating salvation for Marion - and she gratefully thanks him. Regaining her sanity and rationality, she is resolved to extricate herself from her own self-imposed "private trap back there" due to lack of money and a frustrating romance. She will return to Phoenix to turn herself in "before it's too late":
Marion: I have a long drive tomorrow, all the way back to Phoenix.
Norman: (incredulously) Really?
Marion: I stepped into a private trap back there and I'd like to go back and try to pull myself out of it before it's too late for me to.
Marion forgets, however, that she has signed the register with a fake name and fake home address, and now tells Norman that her name is Crane. Norman watches her return to her cabin, and then takes another look at the register, smirking at the false name and location. [Norman Bates' hobby, "baiting ," snaring and trapping birds for stuffing - such as the "crane' woman from Phoenix - another legendary bird - has again found a suitable match - and he is amused by it.]
Walking back into the shadowy dark parlor and shutting the door behind him, motel manager Norman listens at the wall for sounds in the adjoining Cabin Room 1. Then, he removes one of the nude paintings from a hook [a replica of Susanna and the Elders - in which a nude is assaulted by two male satyrs], revealing a jagged hole chipped out of the wall with a bright peephole in its center [a symbol of feminine sexuality].
When he leans down to peer at Marion through the hole, his eye, in profile view, is illuminated by the light from her bedroom. The camera angle shifts and from Norman's point of view, he sees her undress down to her black brassiere and slip in front of her open bathroom door [a subjective camera placement implicates the audience in his peeping voyeurism].
A gigantic closeup of his large unblinking, profiled eye fills the screen - at precisely the same instant that he is lustfully watching Marion remove her undergarments and become naked. The camera cuts back to Marion as she covers her nude self with a robe and walks out of his/our view. An aroused Norman nervously replaces the picture, glances up to the house (in profile) with his jaw slightly twitching, and then resolvedly walks out. At the door to the office, he again glares up toward the house (in profile) and then begins bounding up the steps to his hillside home. Inside the house, he pauses at the carved staircase, places his hand on the banister post - and then with his hands in his pockets, retreats to the kitchen and sits hunched over the table at an odd angle. He twirls the cover on the sugar bowl. [The schizophrenic camera - or his Mother - voyeuristically watches him - and he appears to sense and realize it.]
In her motel room, Marion begins to reconsider her larcenous crime - she considers repenting and redeeming herself by returning the money. She sits at the room's desk with her First Security Bank of Phoenix bank book (with a balance of $824.12) and a scratch book of paper. She figures out how much she will have left after repaying the $700 she spent on her used getaway car (a paltry $124.12). Then she tears out the piece of paper from the scratch book and rips it up into small pieces. [At this point, it is left unclear whether she has decided to repent (and become clean and innocent again), or whether she changes her mind.]
To hide all evidence, she decides not to use the wastebasket and flushes the shreds down the toilet in the gleaming white bathroom - the noisy flush is emphasized as she watches the pieces circle around the bowl. [This was a convention-breaking taboo - to show a toilet and flush in a mainstream American film. This drain and 'flushing' imagery foreshadows the one of her own blood circling down the shower drain following her death.] She closes the lid on the toilet bowl, shuts the bathroom door, removes the robe from her naked back, drapes the robe over the toilet, steps naked into the bathtub (the camera displays her bare legs), pulls across the translucent shower curtain and prepares to take a shower before retiring - a final soul-cleansing act.
[In the next scene, the classic, brutal shower murder scene, an unexplainable, unpremeditated, and irrational murder, the major star of the film - Marion - is shockingly stabbed to death after the first 47 minutes of the film's start. It is the most famous murder scene ever filmed and one of the most jarring. It took a full week to complete, using fast-cut editing of 78 pieces of film, 70 camera setups, and a naked stand-in model (Marli Renfro) in a 45-second impressionistic montage sequence, and inter-cutting slow-motion and regular speed footage. The audience's imagination fills in the illusion of complete nudity and fourteen violent stabbings. Actually, she never really appears nude (although the audience is teased) and there is only implied violence - at no time does the knife ever penetrate deeply into her body. In only one split instant, the knife tip touches her waist just below her belly button. Chocolate syrup was used as 'movie blood', and a casaba melon was chosen for the sound of the flesh-slashing knife. -- Play clip (excerpt): ]
The infamous scene begins peacefully enough, although the sound effects are exaggerated. She opens up a bar of motel soap, and turns on the overhead shower water - from a prominent shower head nozzle (diagonally placed in the upper left) that sends arched needles of spray over her like rain water. There in the vulnerable privacy of her bathroom, she begins to bathe, visibly enjoying the luxurious and therapeutic feel of the cleansing warm water on her skin. Marion is relieved as the water washes away her guilt and brings energizing, reborn life back into her. Large closeups of the shower head, that resembles a large eye, are shot from her point-of-view - they reveal that the water bursts from its head and pours down on her - and the audience. She soaps her neck and arms while smiling in her own private world (or "private island") - oblivious for the moment to the problems surrounding her life.
With her back to the shower curtain, the bathroom door opens and a shadowy, grey tall figure enters the bathroom. Just as the shower curtain completely fills the screen - with the camera positioned just inside the tub, the silhouetted, opaque-outlined figure whips aside (or tears open) the curtain barrier. The outline of the figure's dark face, the whites of its eyes, and tight hair bun are all that is visible - 'she' wields a menacing, phallic-like butcher knife high in the air - at first, it appears to be stab, stab, stabbing us - the victimized viewer! The piercing, shrieking, and screaming of the violin strings of Bernard Herrmann's shrill music play a large part in creating sheer terror during the horrific scene - they start 'screaming' before Marion's own shrieks. [The sound track resembles the discordant sounds of a carnivorous bird-like creature 'scratching and clawing' at its prey.] Marion turns, screams (her wide-open, contorted mouth in gigantic close-up), and vainly resists as she shields her breasts, while the large knife repeatedly rises and falls in a machine-like fashion.
The murderer appears to stab and penetrate into her naked stomach, shattering her sense of security and salvation. The savage killing is kinetically viewed from many angles and views. She is standing in water mixed with ejaculatory spurts of blood dripping down her legs from various gashes - symbolic of a deadly and violent rape. She turns and falls against the bathtub tiles, her hand 'clawing and grasping' the back shower wall for the last shred of her own life as the murderer (resembling a grey-haired woman wearing an old-fashioned dress) quickly turns and leaves. With an unbloodied face and neck/shoulder area, she leans into the wall and slides, slides, and slides down the wet wall while looking outward with a fixed stare - the camera follows her slow descent.
In a closeup, Marion outstretches her hand (toward the viewer), clutches onto the shower curtain and yanks it down from its hooks (one by one) upon herself as she collapses over the edge of the bathtub - her face pitches forward and is awkwardly pressed to the white bathroom floor in front of the toilet. She lies bleeding on the cold, naked floor, with the shower nozzle still spraying her body with water [the soundtrack resembles soft rainfall].
The camera slowly tracks the blood and water that flows and swirls together counter-clockwise down into the deep blackness of the bathtub drain - Marion's life, or diluted blood, has literally gone down the drain. The drain dissolves into a memorable closeup - a perfect match-cut camera technique - of Marion's dead-still, iris-contracted [a dead person's iris is not contracted but dilated], fish-like right eye with one tear drop (or drop of water). The camera pulls back up from the lifeless, staring eye (freeze-framed and frozen at the start of the pull back), spiraling in an opposite clockwise direction - signifying release from the drain. [The association of the eye within the bottomless darkness of the drain is deliberate, as is the contrast between Norman's 'peeping tom' eye and Marion's dead eye. Her eye is slightly angled upward toward where Norman was positioned.]
On the soundtrack gushing shower water is still heard. The camera pans from Marion's face past the toilet and into the bedroom for a zoom close-up of Marion's folded-up newspaper on the nightstand. The bedstand also supports an empty ashtray and erect lampstand with a circular base. The camera continues to pan over along the flowery wall-papered wall to the open window where the house is visible. From there, Norman's voice is heard crying:
Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Blood! Blood! -- Play clip (excerpt):
[From a common-sense point-of-view, how could Norman have known?]
Norman scrambles down the hill to the scene of the crime in Cabin one, accompanied by the shrill music once again. At the bathroom door after viewing the curtain-less shower and the dead body, he turns away and cups his hand to his mouth, revulsed and nauseated by the horrific scene and possibly stifling a scream - and 'knocking off a bird' picture from the wall [Norman has literally knocked off a 'bird'].
He regains his composure, closes the open window, sits shaking in a chair, and then closes the cabin's door - camera angles often include the newspaper. He turns out the light, leaves the room, pauses outside, enters his motel office, and then shuts off the lights after closing the door behind him. [Hitchcock lingers on a view of the closed and darkened motel office door from the outside - note that the shadow of the roof overhang on the door's window forms the deathly silhouette of a guillotine blade-wedge!]
Dutifully, he re-appears from the office, carrying a mop and pail to methodically clean-up following the murder. [The audience is left with sympathetically identifying with the devoted, dutiful, automaton son who is once again cleaning up the mess and covering up for his misguided, insane mother's behavior. Clearly, the murder is not motivated by a lust for money.] He enters the bathroom, turns off the shower water, and then spreads out the shower curtain on the floor of the bedroom. He drags Marion's limp/nude corpse to the curtain and afterwards shows off his 'dirty' hands to the camera on this "dirty night." [Subjectively, his hands are really the audience's hands.] He washes his hands in the sink - blood and water again swirl down the drain. He rinses the sink clean of blood and then obsessively swabs and wipes up every trace of the bloody murder in the bathroom with the mop, after which he dries everything with a towel. He drops his towel and mop into the empty bucket at the conclusion of the laborious, ritualistic process.
Norman tiptoe-edges around her body as he goes outside to back Marion's car (and trunk) closer to the room's door. Then, he wraps her up in the plastic curtain [rolling and bundling her up like the money in the newspaper in the make-shift shroud], carries her over the door's threshold (!) and onto the porch, and places the corpse in the trunk of her car. He straightens up the bird picture that had fallen to the floor, packs up her few belongings, and also tosses them in the car. The final lingering trace of Marion and another crime - her folded newspaper concealing the money - is the last thing found in the room. Without looking inside, he non-chalantly tosses it into the car trunk and slams it shut. He drives off - a camera closeup of the car's rear end reveals its license plate - NFB 418 signifying 'Norman F Bates' - the F represents Francis, a reference to St. Francis, patron saint of birds] and drives to a nearby, bordering swamp-hole filled with quicksand. Or, NFB could mean Norman Frickin Bates!
Norman gets out and pushes the light-toned car into the dark thick morass of waters to submerge the evidence, watching nervously and nibbling as it slowly gurgles lower and lower into the muck. He cups his hands in front of his chin, fearful that it won't sink entirely. The car sinks only part way in - and then halts. Norman, looking remarkably like a scared bird, darts his head around anxiously. Then he grins approvingly when it is finally swallowed up - again down a drain of sorts - by the blackness. He is relieved that the evidence is covered up. [Audience identification shares Norman's relief.] The scene fades to black.
[A week later, on Saturday, December 19]
On his own hardware store letterhead, Sam handwrites a letter to Marion:
SAM LOOMIS HARDWARE
FAIRVALE, CALIFORNIA
Saturday
Dearest right-as-always Marion:
I'm sitting in this tiny back room which isn't big enough for both of us, and suddenly it looks big enough for both of us. So what if we're poor and cramped and miserable, at least we'll be happy.
If you haven't come to your senses, and still...
The camera pans from Sam seated in the cramped back room at the desk out into the wide-open space of the hardware store, where scythes, rakes and other tools hang overhead. A clerk is assisting an elderly customer who complains about poor-quality insecticides that do not specify if death is painless for the crawling victims ("Death should always be painless") - she decides on buying an effective brand called SPOT. [The famous last line of the film is recalled: "Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly!"]:
So far of those I've used, I haven't had much luck with any of them. Well, let's see what they say about this one. They tell you what it's 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 I say, insect or man, death should always be painless.
A blonde woman enters the store's front door, asking for Sam and introducing herself as "Marion's sister" Lila (Vera Miles) - she is strikingly similar in appearance. She is concerned that Marion has disappeared and hasn't been heard of for a week: "She left home on Friday. I was in Tucson over the weekend. And I haven't heard from her since, not even a phone call." She suspects that Sam has something to do with Marion's strange disappearance:
Look, if you two are in this thing together, I don't care, it's none of my business, but I want to talk to Marion and I want her to tell me it's none of my business and then I'll go...
While she blames him for Marion's troubling disappearance, a private detective and investigator enters the store. Milton Arb- O - gast (Martin Balsam), hired by Marion's employer, has been following Lila and watching them from outside the store's door. He suggests that they "all talk about Marion." His interest in the case is that he has been commissioned to search for and recover the missing funds: "$40,000...your girlfriend stole $40,000." Lila explains to Sam what Arbogast is referring to: "She was supposed to bank it on Friday for her boss and she didn't, and no one has seen her since." Arbogast is sure that the money makes Marion very conspicuous: "Someone has seen her. Someone always sees a girl with $40,000." Lila reassures Sam that: "they don't want to prosecute. They just want the money back." Sam disavows any knowledge of Marion's whereabouts, and Lila explains that she is there on a hunch: "All I want to do is see Marion before she gets in this too deeply." Arbogast maintains that Marion was seen leaving Phoenix in her own car by her employer, and suspects she is somewhere closeby. He infers that "boyfriend" Sam may have conspired with Marion to rob her employer:
You know, we're always quickest to doubt people who have a reputation for being honest. I think she's here, Miss Crane. Where there's a boyfriend...Well, she's not back there with the nuts and bolts but she's here in this town somewhere. I'll find her.
[A Few Hours? of Investigation that same Saturday]
In a montage of short scenes, Arbogast questions and canvasses a series of hotel, motel and boarding house managers over an indeterminate period of time, and eventually pulls up to the Bates Motel - a place Arbogast believes is "hiding from the world" because its neon sign is off, according to Norman: "It just doesn't seem like any use any more, you know?" Norman is on the porch, nibbling on candy from a bag. He announces the familiar: "twelve cabins, twelve vacancies." Although the motel hasn't had visitors, Norman explains how it's "linen day...I hate the smell of dampness, don't you? It's such a, I don't know, creepy smell."
After being invited into the motel office, the detective explains he is looking for a "missing person": "I've been trying to trace a girl that's been missing for oh, about a week now, from Phoenix. It's a private matter. The family wants to forgive her. She's not in any trouble." The fast-talking, slick, probing and smug Arbogast (with the back of his figure reflected in the office's mirror) shows Norman her picture, and asks the ironic question [suggesting Norman's ultimate fate]: "Would you mind looking at the picture before committing yourself?" Norman replies: "Commit myself? You sure talk like a policeman."
I don't even much bother with, uh, guests registering anymore. You know, one by one, you drop the formalities. I shouldn't even bother changing the sheets but old habits die hard.
Because Norman appears to be uncomfortably evasive, inconsistent, self-incriminating and halting in his replies and insists no one stayed in the motel for a couple of weeks - but then contradicts himself - Arbogast asks to see the register to discover if Marion Crane used an alias. (Norman chews nervously on candy, almost bird-like. From a low camera angle, his adam's apple moves up and down his giraffe-like throat while awkwardly stretching to look at the register.) Arbogast proves that Marion stayed at the motel by matching her signature to the "Marie Samuels" signature in the book - after Norman denied that he had any recent guests.
Norman: Is that her?
Arbogast: Yeah, I think so. Marie (Marion) Samuels (her boyfriend's name is Sam)
In their famous interrogation scene, the dialogue is overlapped to make Arbogast's skillful questioning even more intimidating. Norman becomes defensive when he realizes he is trapped and intruded upon - he starts to nervously stutter and stammer more profusely. Norman finally changes his story for the detective - he remembers Marion as an overnight guest at the motel (with a late arrival and early departure), and her dinner of a sandwich in the parlor:
Arbogast: Was she is disguise, by any chance? Do you want to check the picture again?
Norman: Look, I-I wasn't lying to you, mister.
Arbogast: Oh, I know that, I know you wouldn't lie.
Norman: You know, it's tough keeping track of the time around here...Oh yeah. Well, it, it was raining, and um, her hair was all wet. I'll tell ya, it's not really a very good picture of her either...Well, um, she arrived rather late one night and she went straight to sleep and uh, left early the next morning...Oh, very early...the, um, the, the, the, next morning. Sunday...
Arbogast: I see. Did anyone meet her here?...Did she arrive with anyone?...Did she make any phone calls or...locally?...Did you spend the night with her?...Well then, how would you know that she didn't make any phone calls?...
Norman: Uh, well she was very tired, and uh, see, now I'm starting to, uhm, remember it. I'm making a mental picture of it in my mind...she was, she was sitting back there, no, no, she was standing back there with a sandwich in her hand and she said, uh, she had to go to sleep early, because she had a long dr-drive, uh, ahead of her...back where she came from...yes, back in my, uh, in my parlor there, uh, she was very hungry, and I made her a sandwich. And then she said, uh, that she was tired and she, uh, uhm, had to go right to bed.
Norman tries to excuse himself by claiming he has work to be done, but Arbogast believes Norman is hiding something:
...if it doesn't gel, it isn't aspic, and this ain't geling. It's not coming together, something's missing.
Norman suggests that Arbogast follow him and join him while he changes the beds - Arbogast observes Norman stop, pause, and then bypass the first cabin room. Looking up at the Victorian house on the hill behind the motel, Arbogast becomes even more curious when he spots a figure in the window - he suspects that Marion might be using Norman to "gallantly" hide her - in exchange for sex, and that Marion may have 'met' Norman's mother:
Arbogast: Is anyone at home?
Norman: No.
Arbogast: Who is? There's somebody sitting up in the window.
Norman: No, no, no there isn't.
Arbogast: Oh sure, go ahead, take a look.
Norman (stumbling terribly on the words): Oh, oh, that, that must be my mother. She's, she's uh, an inv-invalid. Uh, it's, ah, practically like living alone.
Arbogast: Oh, I see. Well, now if this, uh girl, Marion Crane were here, you wouldn't be hiding her, would ya?
Norman: No.
Arbogast: Not even if she paid you well?
Norman: No, ha, ha.
Arbogast: (in a provoking tone) Let's just say for the uh, just for the sake of argument that she wanted you to, uh, gallantly protect her. You'd know that you were being used. You wouldn't be made a fool of, would ya?
Norman (angrily): But, I'm, I'm not a fool. And I'm not capable of being fooled. Not even by a woman.
Arbogast: Well, this is not a slur on your manhood. I'm sorry...
Norman: Let's put it this way. She might have fooled me, but she didn't fool my mother.
Arbogast: Oh, then your mother met her. Could I, could I talk to your mother?
Norman: No, as I told you, she's, she's confined.
Arbogast: Yes, well, just for a few minutes, that's all. There might be some hint that you missed out on. You know, sick old women are usually pretty sharp...
To refuse the detective's request for an interview with his mother and to dismiss him, Norman insists abruptly that Arbogast leave. As Norman watches Arbogast drive off, Norman's face is cut in half by light and darkness. Arbogast drives to a nearby telephone booth by the road and closes himself within the bird-caged-like booth. He telephones Sam Loomis and asks to speak to Lila. He confirms that Sam was innocent of Marion's whereabouts by summarizing what he found at the old Bates Motel - Marion was a guest there the previous Saturday night and probably stayed in cabin number one - and the boyish manager knows more than he is telling:
I'll just have to pick up the pieces from here. Well, I'll tell ya, I don't feel entirely satisfied.
He then explains how he plans to return to the motel immediately to try to talk to the manager's mother. Arbogast expects to report back to them in about an hour.
Back at the motel, Norman leaves the office and walks down the long L-shaped porch walkway in front of the rooms - the motel is dominated by the house on the hill. He disappears into the shadows as Arbogast's car drives up one more time. The detective calls out "Bates?" [baits?] and then snoops in the empty motel office and the parlor, noticing the birds adorning the walls and an empty safe. He leaves the office and ascends the hill to the old, dark house.
He quietly enters the front door, deferentially removes his hat, and then stands for a moment in the foyer before beginning to climb up the long steep staircase to the second floor. With Hitchcock's trademark tracking shots, the camera follows his footsteps from behind and then shifts to a backwards tracking, high-angled shot of him as he ascends the stairs. At the top landing, a crack of light appears on the floor through the slowly opening door of a bedroom. As he reaches the top step, the camera shifts to an overhead shot and the shrill, screeching music commences to preface the fearfully-exciting sequence.
In one of the most horrific murder scenes in film history, Arbogast is frighteningly attacked at the top of the stairs, in a bird's eye-view overhead shot, by a knife-wielding "old lady" emerging from the bedroom off to the right. He is slashed to death across the forehead and left cheek. Blood spurts as he stumbles, then loses his balance with his arms flailing outwards, and falls backwards down the entire flight of stairs to the oriental rug-covered floor. The woman pursues after him and flings herself on top of him - the gigantic butcher knife goes up into the air for another series of slashing blows before the scene fades to black.
Lila and Sam wait apprehensively in the hardware store for the detective's return later that Saturday, realizing that it has been three hours since Arbogast last called [just before his unexpected, horrific murder]. Lila admits being impatient to the procrastinating Sam: "Are we just going to sit here and wait?...Patience doesn't run in my family, Sam." When she demands to go to the motel, Sam volunteers to go by himself. A dark silhouetted Lila, with a cold wind blowing through her hair, dissolves into the figure of Norman, standing by the swamp [after sinking Arbogast and his car?]. He hears Sam's off-screen call for Arbogast, but doesn't respond. Norman's sinister look into the camera dissolves back into an image of Lila waiting in the back office of the hardware store. When Sam returns, she rushes forward to the camera [her dark, silhouetted image recalls Marion's first image of the murderer in the shower scene]. He reports his findings: "No Arbogast, no Bates," but he saw a "sick old lady unable to answer the door, or unwilling" in the second floor window.
[Saturday night]
The two decide to talk to Fairvale's Deputy Sheriff Al Chambers (John McIntire) and his wife (Lurene Tuttle) at their home - they find them in their night-robes. They explain that Lila's sister ran away from Phoenix (because "she stole some money...forty thousand dollars") and was traced to the Bates Motel by private detective Arbogast. Mrs. Chambers is dumbfounded when they mention a "Mrs. Bates" - "Norman took a wife?" An over-anxious Lila believes "there's something wrong out there" because Arbogast has inexplicably disappeared after reporting he was "dissatisfied and he was going back there." The common-sense country sheriff is also suspicious, but questions the integrity of the detective. He speculates that Arbogast might have obtained a "hot lead" from Norman, stalled them with a phone call, and then took off alone after Marion:
Well, I think there's something wrong too Miss, but not the same thing. I think what's wrong is your private detective. I think he got himself a hot lead as to where your sister was going, probably from Norman Bates, and called you to keep you still while he took off after her and the money.
The sheriff believes that Norman didn't answer Sam's cries deliberately: "This fellow lives like a hermit. You must remember that bad business out there about 10 years ago." Lila persuades Chambers to call Norman on the phone to confirm the sheriff's theory. Norman answers and supportively explains that Arbogast was there but left. There is a particularly stunning set of remarks made by Sheriff Chambers and his wife when they dispel the claims of both Sam and Arbogast about Norman's living 'mother.' In a double murder-suicide ten years earlier, Mrs. Bates poisoned her unfaithful lover and then took her own life:
Sheriff: This detective was there. Norman told him about the girl. The detective thanked him and he went away.
Lila: (disbelieving) And he didn't come back? He didn't see the Mother?
Sheriff: Your detective told you he couldn't come right back because he was gonna question Norman Bates' mother, right?
Lila: Yes.
Sheriff: Norman Bates' mother has been dead and buried in Greenlawn Cemetery for the past ten years.
Mrs. Chambers: I helped Norman pick out the dress she was buried in - periwinkle blue.
Sheriff: It ain't only local history, Sam. It's the only case of murder and suicide on Fairvale ledgers. Mrs. Bates poisoned this guy she was involved with when she found out he was married. Then took a helping of the same stuff herself. Strychnine. Ugly way to die.
Mrs. Chambers: Norman found them dead together - (whispering) in bed.
Sam: You mean that old woman I saw sittin' in the window out there wasn't Bates' mother?
Sheriff: Now wait a minute, Sam. Are you sure you saw an old woman?
Sam: Yes! In the house behind the motel. I called and pounded but she just ignored me.
Sheriff: You want to tell me you saw Norman Bates' mother?
Lila: But it had to be, because Arbogast said so, too. And the young man wouldn't let him see her because she was too ill.
Sheriff: Well, if the woman up there is Mrs. Bates, who's that woman buried out in Greenlawn Cemetery? -- Play clip (excerpt):
With a determined look on his face, Norman leaves the motel office and goes up to the house and stairs (walking effeminately with shifting hips) to the second floor bedroom - his 'mother's' bedroom. He tells her that it is time to move her to a new location - the fruit cellar. The cackling old lady protests vehemently with a macabre joke as he explains the necessity of the move:
Norman: Now mother, uhm, I-I'm gonna bring something up...
Mother: Ha, ha, I am sorry boy, but you do manage to look ludicrous when you give me orders.
Norman: Please, mother...
Mother: No! I will not hide in the fruit cellar! Ah ha! You think I'm fruity, huh? I'm staying right here.This is my room and no one will drag me out of it, least of all my big bold son.
Norman: They'll come now, mother. He came after the girl and now someone will come after him. Mother, please, it's just for a few days. Just for a few days so they won't find you.
Mother: Just for a few days? In that dark, dank fruit cellar? No! You hid me there once, boy, and you won't do it again. Not ever again! Now get out! I told you to get out, boy.
Norman: I'll carry you, Mother.
Mother: Norman, what do you think you're doing? Don't you touch me! Don't! Norman! Put me down! Put me down! I can walk on my own.
-- Play clip (excerpt):
During their argumentative dialogue, the camera pans up the stairway to above the bedroom door and then to a disorienting, spiraling overhead shot as Norman emerges with his mother in his arms and carries the frail figure down the staircase to the basement fruit cellar. [The audience is equally imbalanced and disoriented - who is the woman that he argues with and carries downstairs, immediately after the Sheriff revealed that Mrs. Bates is buried in a grave?]
[Sunday, December 20]
Churchbells sound to indicate the end of the Sunday services at the small-town Fairvale Church. On the steps in front of the spire-topped church, the Sheriff tells Lila and Sam that he found "nothing" but Norman at the Bates Motel when he visited earlier in the morning:
I saw the whole place, as a matter of fact. That boy's alone there...You must have seen an illusion, Sam. I know you're not the seein'-illusions type, but no woman was there and I don't believe in ghosts, so there it is.
The Sheriff suggests that they file a "missing person" report later that afternoon in his office: "The sooner you drop this in the lap of the law, that's the sooner you stand a chance of your sister being picked up." To "make it nicer," his wife suggests they do their reporting at their house around dinner time.
Disbelieving and unsatisfied, Lila and Sam decide to return to the motel on their own to see if Arbogast ran out on them. To "fool" Norman, they plan to register as guests - as "man and wife" - and then "search every inch of the place, inside and out." After they arrive at the motel, Norman spies on them from the upstairs window and Lila notices someone there. When Norman speaks to them about registering for a room, they explain that they are journeying to San Francisco, but don't like the looks of the weather: "It looks like a bad day coming, doesn't it?"
Sam and Norman face each other tensely across the front desk. Appearing assertive and insistent, Sam signs the register and demands a "notarized" receipt because his trip is: "90 percent business." Without luggage, Sam reminds Norman that it's odd that they don't have to pay for their room in advance. After paying ten dollars for the room and showing themselves to cabin number ten near the end of the porch, Lila wishes to search cabin number one where Arbogast told her Marion stayed: "No matter what we're afraid of finding or how much it may hurt."
Lila is suspicious that Norman, the motel manager of this "useless business," had a motive "to get out, to get a new business somewhere else - 40 thousand dollars." They are both anxious to search for clues that Arbogast had uncovered and evidence of the missing $40,000:
There must be some proof that exists now, something that proves he (Bates) got that money away from Marion somehow...He (Arbogast) wouldn't have gone anywhere or done anything without telling us unless he was stopped - and he was stopped. So he must have found out something.
They begin at Cabin One where they find two major clues. Sam notices that the shower curtain is missing and Lila finds a scrap of paper stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl, showing a notation - some figure has been added to or subtracted from $40,000. That might prove that Norman found out about the money. Lila is convinced that the "old woman, whoever she is, she told Arbogast something. I want her to tell us the same thing." They plan to split up and have Sam divert Norman's attention and keep him occupied within the office while Lila sneaks up to explore the house - she confidently assures Sam: "I can handle a sick old woman."
The camera subjectively tracks her climbing progress up the hill, both with eerie point-of-view shots and backward-tracking shots as the gothic house looms larger and she confronts its horror. She anxiously enters the solemn, archaic hallway of "Mother's House." In this final scary sequence, with parallel editing cutting back and forth between the motel office and Lila's assault on Norman's private world in the house, Sam abrasively corners Norman in the motel office's entrance. He aggressively and mercilessly banters away with the much-quieter, timid motel manager - challenging ('baiting') him to confess that he would "get away" given the right chance:
Sam: You are alone here, aren't you?
Norman: Hmm, hmm.
Sam: It would drive me crazy.
Norman: I think that would be a rather extreme reaction, don't you?
Sam: Just an expression. What I meant was, uh, I'd do just about anything to get away, wouldn't you?
[Lila explores the house in three areas - the bedroom, the attic, and the cellar - all parts of Norman's segmented personality.]
Lila first sees a black cupid statue in the hallway, and then a painting of a maiden at the top of the stairs. She enters Mrs. Bates' Victorian, baroque, stuffy, upstairs bedroom. She notes the ornate fixtures and strangely preserved, Victorian artifacts including an antique dry washbasin, a nude goddess statuette, a cold fireplace and empty chair, an armoire-wardrobe with old-fashioned, high-necked women's clothes neatly hung, a vanity table with large mirror, hairbrush and comb. There's also a jewelry box (a bronzed sculpture of two crossed, lace-cuffed hands clasped in prayer) on the dressing table. She gasps, seeing herself in multiple reflections in an opposing full-length mirror, but is relieved that the nightmarish apparition is only herself. She touches the deep-curved, indented imprint of a single reclining figure in the large double bed - Norman's "only world."
In the office, Sam doubts Norman's contentedness and acceptance of his poverty - assuming that he would "unload this place...to get out from under" if he had the money:
Sam: I'm not saying you shouldn't be contented here. I'm just doubting that you are. I think if you saw a chance to get out from under, you'd unload this place.
Norman: This place? This place happens to be my only world. I grew up in that house up there. I had a very happy childhood. My mother and I were more than happy.
On the third floor, Lila enters Norman's little-boy's room containing a mysterious, aberrant combination of children's (boy's and girl's items) and adult's things [signifying Norman's stultified personality development]. The isolated room contains a rocking chair; another stuffed bird; a doll, a model car, a toy schoolhouse and a stuffed teddy bear in a pile on a wall shelf; a stuffed rabbit on Norman's slept-in single bed; a phonograph record of Beethoven's Er-o-ica [one letter short of erotica] Third Symphony on a box-like turntable; and a world globe and small piggy bank safe next to a stack of books (one of the books has no title or author on its cover). She turns open the book cover to inspect its contents [is it pornographic, a book of black magic, Norman's diary perhaps, or is it an album that contains pictures of the Bates family?].
The shot cuts back to the motel office, where Sam continues his pleasantries to question a now-frightened Norman who stands confrontationally across from him [they are remarkably similar - almost mirror reflections of each other as they stand across the counter from each other]:
Sam: You look frightened. Have I been saying something frightening?
Norman: I-I-I don't know what you've been saying.
Sam: I've been talking about your mother. About your motel. How you're gonna do it?
Norman: Do what?
Sam: Buy a new one in a new town where you won't have to hide your mother.
Norman: Why don't you just get in your car and drive away from here, OK?
Sam: Where will you get the money to do that, Bates? Or do you already have it, socked away?
Norman: Shut up!
Sam: A lot of it, forty thousand dollars. (He pursues Norman into the parlor.) I bet your mother knows where the money is and what you did to get it. I think she'll tell us.
Realizing that the girl Sam came with has disappeared (he deduces that she may be in the house) and that he has been set up in a diversionary trap, Norman struggles with Sam, knocks him out, and races up the hill. As Lila is coming down the stairs, she looks out the curtained front door window and sees Norman rushing toward her. She runs around and hides behind the stairs in the stairwell leading to the basement steps - she is framed behind the 'bars' of the stairs. As Norman goes upstairs, Lila decides to tiptoe down into the darkness of the cellar [symbolically going deeper into the hidden secrets of the psyche or Psycho-path] - sensing that Norman's mother might be located there.
She enters a basement door, and then proceeds through a second creaking door into the fruit cellar, where she sees a lifeless, silent figure (with her hair drawn back in a bun) facing away from her in a chair - seated under a glaring bare-bulb light fixture. She walks up to the body, calling out "Mrs. Bates?" and taps the woman's shoulder. The body slowly swivels in its chair and jiggles back and forth as it completes its turn. She has discovered Norman's perverted and terrible secret and penetrated into his deadly world where she has found "Mother" - Mrs. Bates - a stuffed, dried-up, shrunken and withered mummy's skeleton with empty eye sockets and a wide, toothy grin. Horrified, Lila's wide-open mouth screams at the preserved corpse. As she draws back her hand, it hits the suspended light fixture, setting it swinging. It adds an unsettling set of dancing shadows of light and dark to the scene. As she screams, violin screeches match her own shrieks as she turns toward the sound of heavy footsteps.
A grey-haired woman with a knife wielded in the air suddenly jumps into the open fruit cellar door frame. 'Mother' pauses there for a moment and then steps forward to strike. Sam appears behind the matronly old woman, and grabs, overpowers, and subdues the knife-brandishing attacker. In the film's dramatic climax, Norman is metamorphosized and revealed as his "Mother" [Norma?] when his drag disguises (the wig and dress) are stripped away and ripped off. His body convulses and spasms (orgasmically?), his eyes squint, and his face grimaces in pain when his decaying illusion is exposed. His fingers claw upward and cling to the knife as he collapses to the floor. The 'Norman' self completely dies, while his macabre 'Mother' self is brought to life - illustrated by the cadaver's hysterically-laughing face, with its mummy's eyes 'moving' - animated and resurrected by the light. The 'living dead' eyes of the corpse that see Lila mock her - they appear lifelike but they are indeed lifeless. -- Play clip (excerpt):
The mummy's face dissolves into the next scene set in front of the County Court House - the face appears imprisoned behind the four white pillars holding up the establishment's law and order building.
[This final sequence or epilogue has been criticized as being too talky, and an over-explanation of the film's plot. However, Hitchcock was known for providing expositional content in other films, such as in his US remake The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), North by Northwest (1959) and Rear Window (1954).]
Sheriff Chambers remarks: "If anyone gets any answers, it'll be the psychiatrist. Even I couldn't get to Norman and he knows me." As a footnote to the entire series of events, the smug and officious police psychiatrist, Dr. Richmond (Simon Oakland) in the Office of the Chief of Police reconstructs or 'explains' the mystery of Norman's schizophrenic psychosis after questioning 'his mother' [Was he 'made a fool of...by a woman'?] - since Norman Bates no longer exists.
[A wall calendar behind the psychiatrist reads '17', a discontinuity error and a Hitchcockian self-reference to his earlier film Number 17 (1932). The date of the final scenes of Psycho should be December 20. In her first scene, Lila told Sam that Marion left Phoenix "a week ago yesterday"; the plot climaxed the day after that, which would be Sunday the 20th.]:
I got the whole story, but not from Norman. I got it from his 'mother'. Norman Bates no longer exists. He only half-existed to begin with. And now, the other half has taken over, probably for all time.
Lila asks if it is true that Norman actually killed her sister. The psychiatrist first answers "Yes...and no," but then confirms that Norman was the murderer of Marion, Arbogast, and possibly other individuals (in unsolved missing persons cases) who registered at the hotel and were deposited in the swamp in the vicinity of the motel. Then, he goes on to explain how a "disturbed" Norman had an incestuously possessive and jealous love for his mother, so he poisoned both her and her lover after he discovered them in bed together. [It has been speculated that there's another likely possibility - Mrs. Bates may have killed her own husband and then killed herself. Norman's delusional mind, with his accusatory 'Mother' enshrined inside, may have caused him to become mad to rid him/herself of guilt. The 'Mother' part of him directed him to commit the murders.]:
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 them both.
To wipe clean and obliterate the unbearable, intolerable crime of matricide from his conscience and consciousness, a remorseful Norman developed a split personality. In this way, he could keep the illusion that she was still alive. To make that illusion a physical reality, he dug up and stole her body, and used his taxidermist skills to preserve and stuff her corpse, keep her 'alive,' and then he would ease his loneliness by lying with her in bed:
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. -- Play clip (excerpt):
In his diseased imagination, he would play-act and fantasize that he was his mother - and that she was as jealous of him as he was of her. When attracted to a young woman, Norman would completely become his mother and be jealously and pathologically mad. His "mother" side, escalated to full reality, would stab to death the females he was attracted to - and commit the horribly violent crimes. After the murders, Norman would awaken and appear horrified by his 'mother's' crimes. However, from Norman's pathologically-crazed point of view, the murders were symbolic sexual acts of rape/revenge - his knife a potent phallic symbol against his 'Mother'.
So he began to think and speak for her, give her half his life, so to speak. At times, he could be both personalities, carry on conversations. At other times, the 'mother' half took over completely. 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 as jealous of him. Therefore, if he felt a strong attraction to any other woman, the 'mother' side of him would go wild. (To Lila) 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!...
He was a transvestite - "but not exactly." He would act out the "mother" side of the split personality, donning her clothing to keep his illusion of her being alive. Following the disclosure of Norman's crime, his weakened self-identity had been so completely and totally absorbed and possessed by the "mother" side of his split personality that his male Norman side no longer existed. When his two personalities fused, he became his dominant mother's final victim:
In Norman's case, he was simply doing every thing possible to keep alive the illusion of his mother being alive. And when reality came too close, when danger or desire threatened that illusion, he'd dress up, even to a cheap wig he bought. He'd walk about the house, sit in her chair, speak in her voice. He tried to be his mother. And, uh, now he is. Now that's what I meant when I said I got the story from the 'mother'. You see, when the mind houses two personalities, there's always a conflict, a battle. In Norman's case, the battle is over, and the dominant personality has won...These were crimes of passion, not profit.
A policeman brings a chilled Norman a blanket ("He feels a little chill") - off-screen, a woman's voice responds gratefully: "Thank you." As Norman sits still - staring out into space in his box-like jail cell [a bare "place" with "cruel eyes studying you" - Norman's words to Marion], he is wrapped and insulated from the world and huddled in a blanket. His frail character and self-identity have been fully possessed by his mother. As the camera slowly tracks toward Norman, the voice of "Mother" speaks in Norman's head, and condemns her son for the crimes, while she claims that she is harmless:
(off-screen) 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. 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 except just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds. Oh, they know I can't even move a finger and I won't. 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. -- Play clip (excerpt):
[The police and, more directly, the film's audience are 'watching' him/her through the peephole of the door. This scene recalls the scene of the policeman with dark sunglasses gazing at Marion with his "cruel eyes." The prison guard is an uncredited role for Ted Knight, the Ted Baxter character of the popular TV show The Mary Tyler Moore Show.] With darting eyes, he/she watches a fly crawl across his/her hand, displaying his/her innocence by sparing the insect's life. [One can only recall that Marion's life wasn't spared.] As he looks toward the camera, a grinning smile slowly creeps over his face - subliminally superimposed by and dissolving into the grinning skull of his mother's mummified corpse:
I'm not even gonna 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.' -- Play clip (excerpt):
The film ends with a dissolve into the dredging of the swamp - Marion's car with her body and the almost-$40,000 in the trunk is hauled trunk-first from the muck by a heavy clanking chain on a winch - she is liberated, withdrawn and reborn from her grave. Horizontal black bars partially, and then completely, cover the final image.
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The Making of Psycho Part 1/5
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