Psycho
The impossible embodiment
Three versions of the protagonist’s journey
Lila
(m)Other

Norman’s =
= Marion’s
Narrative and stylistic form
Tripartite structure
(essentially from
Marion’s, Norman’s and
Lila’s points of view) =
the ‘golden section’
 Expressionistic use of
lighting, sets, montage
and casting

Narrative and stylistic form

Tawdry populist thriller
plot & devices / overtly
high culture allusions and
aesthetics

Vertical v. horizontal
composition

Production design:
Gothic/past vs.
modern/future in ‘flat’
black & white tones
Themes / motifs

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Death
Sexuality
Psychic drives
Search for authentic life / self-expression
Animal symbols of passion and excess
Psycho-religious binaries of Dionysian v.
Apollonian drives
incarnation / embodiment
arms / hands
spiral / vortex
Supporting characters & doppelgangers

Sam - Norman

Arbogast - Lila / Sam

Cassidy - Norman / Mrs

California Charlie

Judge Tate -

Psychiatrist -
Bates
Search for authentic life leading to the ‘death drive’: the
impossible embodiment
From ‘I’ (eye) to ‘a’ (camera)
From ‘I’ (eye) – a
subject who has
responsibility for their
actions (the gaze as
symbolic
identification)
 to ‘a’ – an object; an
object[ive] observer
without the ‘stain’ of
will or desire

From ‘I’ (eye) to ‘a’ (camera)

Before the viewer identifies with persons from a
diegetic reality, he/she identifies with
him/herself as pure gaze – the abstract point
which gazes on the screen.

This ideal point provides a pure form of ideology
in so far as it pretends to float freely in an
empty space, not charged by any desire – as if
the viewer were reduced to a kind of absolutely
invisible , disembodied witness to events which
take place ‘by themselves’, irrespective of the
presence of his or her gaze.
From ‘a’ (camera) to ‘I’ (eye)

the anxiety automatically arising in the viewer
– a token of his/her solidarity with Norman –
suddenly reminds him or her that his/her desire
is identical to Norman’s
From ‘a’ (camera) to ‘I’ (eye)

At this moment, the viewer’s
gaze is de-idealised, its
purity blemished by a
pathological stain, and what
comes forth is the desire
that maintains it: the viewer
is compelled to assume that
the scene he witnesses is
staged for his eyes, that his
/ her gaze was included
from the very beginning.
Hitchcock’s subversive strategy of the tainted gaze
By means of a reflexive inclusion of his/her own
gaze, the viewer becomes aware of how this
gaze of his/hers is always-already partial,
‘ideological’, stigmatised by a ‘pathological’
desire.
 Perversion as a socially ‘constructive’ attitude
where one can indulge in illicit drives, torture
and kill for the protection of law and order: the
Law is split into Law as ‘Ego-Ideal’ – symbolic
order which regulates social life and maintains
social peace – and its obscene, super-egotistical
reverse

Hitchcock’s subversive strategy of the tainted gaze

The deepest identification
which ‘holds a community
together’ is not so much
identification with the Law
which regulates its ‘normal’
everyday circuit as, rather,
identification with the specific
form of transgression of the
Law, of its suspension (in
Southern white communities forgave
minor transgressions but disowned those
who refused to take part in KKK lynchings
psychoanalytic terms, with the
specific form of enjoyment).

Precisely when Hitchcock appears at his
most conformist, praising the rule of Law,
the fundamental identification with the
‘transgressive’ mode of enjoyment which
holds a community together – in short:
the stuff of which the ideological dream is
effectively made – is contaminated beyond
cure…
Psycho’s Möbius band

The film's Golden Mean structure (the
ratio of the first third to the last two thirds
coinciding with that larger part’s ratio to
the whole) contains a rupture at the death
of Marion Crane…
a
b
Is the Protagonist’s Journey a fatal inversion of the
American Dream?
[car; motel; policeman;
road; office; money;
detective]
[villa /'haunted castle';
stuffed animals; mummy;
knife; false clothes]
marioN Norman
American alienation:
financial insecurity,
fear of police,
desperate pursuit of a
piece of happiness the HYSTERIA of
everyday capitalist life
a PSYCHOTIC reverse:
the nightmarish world of
pathological (mentally
disturbed) crime
Or the passage from hysterical desire to psychotic drive?

The relationship between
these two worlds of American
alienation and pathological
crime misses the simple
opposition of surface &
depth, reality & fantasy – it
only suits that of the two
surfaces of the Möbius band:
progress far enough on one
surface, all of a sudden we
are on its reverse.
Marion’s death as the zero-point

The spiral first enters
the drain, then exits the
eye, as if passing
through the zero-point
of an eclipse of time –
in sci-fi terms, we ‘pass
the doors of time’ and
enter another temporal
modality
The passage from Norman to Marion = the ‘regression’
from desire to drive
the Name-of-the-Father

Marion stands under the sign of the father – that
is the symbolic desire constituted by the Nameof-the-Father: the hysterical feminine position
addresses the Name-of-the-Father
the desire of the mother

Norman is entrapped by the mother’s desire not
yet submitted to the paternal Law (and as such
not yet strictly a desire but a pre-symbolic
drive): the psychotic clings to the mother’s
desire
Marion’s desire as a signifier of the symbolic order

Marion’s desire to become a wife and
mother, to take on the Name-of-theFather as Mrs Sam Loomis, gives her a
‘subject position’ within the symbolic order
of patriarchy, even while it places her in
pursuit of the ‘lost object of desire’: by
definition, desire is always unsatisfied and
drives the subject onwards from one
signifier to another (‘a little piece of
happiness’; $40,000; a husband…)
Norman’s psychotic drive as alienation within the
maternal Other

Drive is always-already satisfied:
contained within a closed circuit around its
object, it finds satisfaction in its repeated
failure to attain the object – Norman, as
the son of the (m)Other’s incestuous
desire, re-enacts the killing of symbolic
desire whenever he is attracted to a
young woman who symbolises ‘normal’
patriarchal desire.
Norman’s psychotic drive as alienation within the
maternal Other

Norman cannot take a ‘subject position’
with the Other because he has not
escaped the Mother’s control. The ultimate
function of the Law is to confine desire –
not the subject’s own, but the desire of
his/her (M)Other
Psycho’s two great murder scenes = desire vs. drive


Marion’s violent death comes as an
absolute surprise, a shock with no
foundation in the narrative line which
abruptly cuts off its ‘normal’ deployment
Shot in a very filmic way, its effect is
created by editing – one never sees the
murderer or Marion’s whole body: the
murder itself is dismembered into a
multitude of fragmentary close-ups
succeeding one another in a frenetic
rhythm – as if the repeated strikes of the
knife have contaminated the reel itself
and torn up the continuous filmic gaze (or
its opposite: the murderous shadow
stands in for the power of editing itself…)
Psycho’s two great murder scenes = desire vs. drive

Arbogast’s death surpasses the shock
of Marion’s ‘intrusion of the Real’ by
Hitchcock's presentation of it as
something expected…
= we endure the most brutal shock
when we witness the exact realisation
of what we were looking forward to:
the most terrifying disturbance of our
sense of reality which wholly upsets
its symbolic structure – the smooth
running of automaton – takes place
when a structural necessity simply
realises itself with blind automatism.
Psycho’s two great murder scenes = desire vs. drive
Behind its apparent simplicity,
Arbogast’s death relies on a refined
dialectic of expected and unexpected
– in short, of (the viewer’s) desire.
 What we have here is the ‘split
subject’: ‘I know very well that X will
happen (Arbogast will be murdered),
yet I don’t fully believe it (so I’m
none the less surprised when he is)’
 Where does the desire reside, in the
knowledge or the belief?

Psycho’s two great murder scenes = desire vs.
drive

Contrary to the obvious answer (in the
belief – ‘I know that X will happen, but I
refuse to believe it since it runs against
my desire…’), psychoanalytically it is in the
knowledge.
Psycho’s two great murder scenes = desire vs.
drive

The horrifying reality one refuses to ‘believe in’,
to accept, to integrate into one’s symbolic
universe, is none other than the Real of one’s
desire, and the unconscious belief (that X could
not happen) is ultimately a defence against the
Real of desire: as viewers of Psycho, we desire
the death of Arbogast, and the function of our
belief that he will not be attacked by the
‘mother’-figure is precisely to enable us to avoid
confronting the Real of our desire.
Psycho’s two great murder scenes = desire vs.
drive

And what Freud calls ‘drive’ – in opposition
to the split nature of desire – is precisely
the absolute ‘closure’ where what actually
happens corresponds perfectly to what
one knows exactly will happen…
Psycho takes desire vs. drive beyond an abstract
concept
The first murder takes place in a motel
epitomising anonymous American modernity
 The second takes place in a Gothic house
epitomising the American tradition

Psycho takes desire vs. drive beyond an abstract
concept

This opposition – symbolised throughout
the film’s contrapuntal visual design of
horizontal and vertical lines – introduces
more than an unexpected historical
tension between tradition and modernity…
Psycho takes its opposition of desire and drive beyond
an abstract concept
It also locates Norman Bates’ notorious
psychotic split spatially as a kind of
impossible ‘mediator’ between tradition
and modernity, condemned to circulate
endlessly between the two spaces
 Norman’s split thus epitomises the inability
of American ideology to locate the
experience of the present, actual society
within a context of historical tradition, to
enable a symbolic mediation between the
two levels.

Psycho takes its opposition of desire and drive beyond
an abstract concept

Consequentially, the very duality of desire
and drive can be conceived as a libidinal
metaphor of the duality of modern and
traditional society:
 The
matrix of traditional society is that of a
‘drive’, circulating around the Same, repeating
and reproducing the status quo
 Modern society is characterised by linear
progress, embodied in the metonymic objectcause of desire that is money (e.g. $40,000)
Psycho’s hybrid narrative: sticking together two
contrary parts
M A morality play in which,
giving way to temptation,
the heroine enters the
path of damnation, only
to be cured by the
encounter with Norman,
who confronts her with
the abyss that awaits her
– seeing a mirror-image
of her own future, she
soberly decides to return
to normal life, the shower
scene’s purification
providing her narrative’s
closure.
N A traditional unravelling
of the mystery of a
pathological serial killer.

Marion’s murder occurs in
an interval between the
two narrative parts: it
plays a joke on the
ideological presupposition
that once the subject
really ‘makes up his/her
mind’, the carrying out of
his/her inner decision in
social reality will
automatically follow…
Psycho’s hybrid narrative: sticking together two
contrary parts


The entire subversive effect of Psycho hinges on putting
together these two inconsistent pieces – mockingly
reversing Aristophanes’ myth of ideal love from Plato’s
Symposium, that men and women are all split halves of
an idealised androgynous whole.
Taken alone, Psycho’s parts are consistent and
harmonious – it is their fusion into a larger Whole which
makes them unnatural

In contrast to the abrupt ending of Marion’s story, the
second part seems to accord perfectly with the rules of
‘narrative closure’: at the end, everything is explained,
put in its proper place… Yet on a closer look, the
denouement proves far more ambiguous.
Psycho’s androgynous narrative whole: the story of a Voice
in search of its bearer

How can film express the absence of
embodiment – the presence of a subject
in the absence of a physical being?
Ch.7
Psycho’s androgynous narrative whole: the story of a Voice
in search of its bearer

Psycho ends with the
moment of ‘embodiment’
when we finally behold the
body in which the Voice
originates – traditionally a
moment that should
demystify the terrifying
phantom-like Voice and
dispel its power by
enabling us (the viewers) This reversal whereby the
to identify with its bearer… unfathomable Phantom assumes
shape and body – reduced to a
common measure – is not limited
to horror movies (The Wizard of Oz)
Psycho’s androgynous narrative whole: the story of a Voice
in search of its bearer

While Psycho also
‘embodies’ the Voice, the
effect of it here is the
exact opposite of
‘gentrification’, which
makes possible our – the
viewers’ – identification: it
is only now that we
confront an ‘absolute
Otherness’ which
precludes identification.
The Voice has attached
itself to the wrong body…
What we get is a true
zombie, a pure creature of
the Superego, totally
powerless in itself (‘wouldn’t
hurt a fly’), yet for that very
reason all the more uncanny
Psycho’s androgynous narrative whole: the story of a Voice
in search of its bearer

The crucial feature of Psycho’s
allegorical function is that at this
precise moment when, finally,
the Voice finds its body, Norman
– in the penultimate shot of the
film immediately preceding ‘The
End’ – raises his gaze and looks
directly into the camera (i.e. into
us, the viewers) with a mocking
expression which displays his
awareness of our complicity:
Psycho’s androgynous narrative whole: the story of a Voice
in search of its bearer
= The reversal of our gaze from ‘I’
(the viewing subject’s neutral
gaze of the Ego-Ideal) to a (an
object of the Other’s gaze). We
look for the ‘secret behind the
curtain’ (who is the shadow which
pulls off the curtain and
slaughters Marion?), and what we
obtain at the end is a paradox:
we always-already partake in the
absolute Otherness which returns
the gaze.
A triumph of the gaze over the eye

Pat Hitchcock’s character sees Cassidy’s ‘wad of
cash’ in the real estate office and her reaction
makes it into something more than it is;
something obscene. Normally the ‘eye’ sees and
integrates what it sees into a logical sense of
reality: the Symbolic Order. But if some thing
cannot be integrated in that way it leaves a stain
A triumph of the gaze over the eye

The transfixed gaze isolates a stain of the Real,
a detail which ‘sticks out’ from the frame of
symbolic reality – a traumatic surplus of the Real
over the Symbolic; yet the crucial detail of these
scenes is that this detail has no substance in
itself – it is ‘substantiated’, caused, created by
the transfixed gaze itself.
A triumph of the gaze over the eye

Norman’s final mocking gaze turns us into a
stain of the Real, sticking out from the frame of
symbolic reality – the diegetic reality that
operates within a film – as creatures of his
perversion: we are the Thing he/she desires but
cannot have…
Margaret Mead in Male and Female (1949) links the mother’s
voice with toilet training:

The clean white-tiled…bathroom [is
part] of the [subsequent] ritual, with
the mother’s voice standing by, saying:
“If every rule of health is complied
with, then you can enjoy life.”
Unable to separate from the (m)Other, Norman
fails to integrate into the Symbolic Order as a
whole subject, an I (eye) whose truth can, like
Marion’s, be seen and understood through
others (her conversation with Norman releases
her from her hysterical trap of desire).
 Dominated by the Voice of the (m)Other,
Norman can only associate pleasure with filth
and repression, killing automaton-like the Things
he loves.

Lila confronts an abject embodiment of the (m)Other
Bill Schaffer, ‘Cutting The Flow: Thinking Psycho’,
April 2000

A suspenseful sequence can remain
suspenseful even when I have seen it
before, even if I know all too well what is
about to happen and when. …
Bill Schaffer, ‘Cutting The Flow: Thinking Psycho’,
April 2000

What remains indeterminate even when
the narrative outcome is certain, what
may have changed in the interim since my
first viewing and which may now be ready
to reveal hitherto unknown dimensions, is
not something in the film itself considered
as an object kept at a distance, it is the
film in me, as it lives in me. Ultimately, it
is myself.
Bill Schaffer, ‘Cutting The Flow: Thinking Psycho’,
April 2000

What I really hope / fear may emerge, at
any instant whatever, is an image of my
own secret body, an image of my fate, the
body that is seen by time but does not
appear in space: the virtual body which
expresses me as pure possibility.
Bill Schaffer, ‘Cutting The Flow: Thinking Psycho’,
April 2000

Watching a Hitchcock film we are
manipulated in a way that brings us to the
threshold of an experience that cannot be
manipulated, neither by director nor by
viewer, a moment of 'real' affective risk …
Bill Schaffer, ‘Cutting The Flow: Thinking Psycho’,
April 2000

Thus the suspense in Hitchcock turns not
only on the violent moment of
convergence between opposed forces
(already mastered by D.W. Griffith), but
on the possibility that this will also
function as a moment of reversal in which
all of the characters change their relation
to each other – and therefore force us to
reconsider our relation to ourselves.