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A selection of critical views
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Reflexivity as a Dramatic Component of Psycho
by Edward Recchia (Michigan State University)
* Most of Hitchcock’s films are designed to attack social
complacency by depicting the way we, ordinary and
respectable citizens, accept the illusory values that society
has pre-packaged for us. Hitchcock typically lures his viewers
to share empathically the adventures which strip his film
protagonists of their often blasé social attitudes and force
them to grow into stronger, more committed individuals.
Spectacularly violent action occurring at scenes normally
representing social stability – The Statue of Liberty, Mount
Rushmore, the United Nations Building – shock both the
Hitchcock protagonist and us in the audience into
appreciating “the precarious balance between order and
chaos, between innocence and evil, between repressions and
anxiety” (James Naremore). As a result, the main character
undergoes a kind of therapeutic shock treatment, and so also
do we.
*
* By eliminating the film protagonist, the normal conduit to the
viewers’ vicarious emotions, Hitchcock directs his drama
outward, toward each seat in the movie theatre. As Donald
Spoto says, “In Psycho, with perhaps greater insistence than
elsewhere, Hitchcock directs the audience more than he
directs the actors”. The key to the film’s effectiveness is that
the drama takes place between the mind of the viewer and
the theatre screen, luring viewers into interacting with the
screened “reality” in the same way they interact with life
when they are outside the theatre – according to a set of
learned conventions. Accordingly, he uses traditional film
conventions to tell the first half of his story and has his film’s
characters act in the way that traditional film characters are
expected to act, so that his viewers will react in the way that
traditional film viewers are supposed to react: all of this to
create a series of therapeutic shock effects for the viewers
through the second half of the film.
*
* In believing that money will solve a deeper human problem, Marion is only doing
in a more extreme form what Hitchcock feels society does all the time: using
social surrogates for what should be more authentic human values. An early
symbol of that tendency is the highway patrolman who awakens Marion on the
highway outside of Phoenix. With his dark sunglasses and implacable manner, he
seems robot-like, as though his official persona robs him of his normal human
emotions. By the end of the film, we are provided with a multitude of reinforcing
symbols: the circular shower head, through which flow the waters of seeming
absolution when Marion showers after deciding to return the stolen money, is
paralleled ironically by the circular drain down which her blood, now mixed with
water, flows after she has been murdered, both scenes paralleled by the
spiralling water in the toilet bowl down which Marion earlier flushed all but one
piece of paper on which she wrote down the amount of money she had stolen.
Reinforced by Norman’s frantic attempt to wash away all signs of his “mother’s”
crime by sinking Marion’s body and car in a bog, these symbols suggest what a
very thin line separates destructive psychotic defence mechanisms from socially
acceptable sublimation. The surface is what is important – to Norman and to us.
If something looks a little dirty, our tendency is to apply some antiseptic
cleanser, flush the dirt down the drain, and pretend that it never existed. By
symbolically suggesting this parallel between the Norman attitude and the
“normal” attitude, Hitchcock establishes a thematic framework for the more
vital dramatic awakening that is to befall his viewers by the end of the film.
*
* From beginning to end, the film’s
narrative never stops turning
around the question of privacy
Bill Schaffer
Cutting The Flow:
Thinking Psycho
A paper presented at the Alfred Hitchcock
conference For the Love of Fear convened by the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, April 2000
*
*As the action commences we find
ourselves descending from the sky,
sliding like snakes under the window
of a motel room where an illicit
couple struggle in secret over the
idea of going public with their
liaison. From then on,
*With every new development
in the plot another invasion of
privacy takes us deeper into
zones of experience where
the divisions between the
private and the public begin
to bend and blur or are
deliberately transgressed:
* Cassidy's unwanted
solicitations;
* Marion's initial act of theft;
* the mutual double-take when
her boss recognises her in the
escape car;
* the policeman who appears at
her window, his face cut out
of space, absolutely frontal,
like a wall, a death mask, a
living poster, a talking head
on TV - taking to the limit the
austere, TV-like shot/reverse
shot claustrophobia of all her
encounters
*
* the hole in the wall
through which Bates
watches Marion
* our own almost
unprecedented
observations of her
movements in the
bathroom;
* the murderous attack
upon her in the shower.
*
* Bodies, faces, looks, cars, knives – all
penetrate the zones of privacy and control
over proximity Marion tries to establish around
herself from moment to moment.
*
* the Private Eye whose whole business is to
conspire against the rights of privacy;
* the psychoanalyst who makes it his job to expose
the intangible secrets of the unconscious;
* the penultimate scene where we penetrate into
the devastated interior of a man unable to
experience privacy even within his own head, the
voice of his dead mother impossibly intoning
'they're probably watching me now';
* the final scene where the car containing Marion's
body is finally retrieved from the sludge and
brought into the light of day.
* You know that the public
*
The director never sees his viewers,
never gets his living spectators in sight,
but he nonetheless makes it his
business to violate their privacy on a
regular basis.
always likes to be one jump
ahead of the story; they
like to feel they know
what's coming next. So you
deliberately play upon this
fact to control their
thoughts. You turn the
viewer in one direction and
then in another; you keep
him as far as possible from
what's actually going to
happen.
* At the base of Hitchcock's engagement
with cinema, if we take him at his own
word, was a fantasy of transparency
and control through which the director
would draw the pliant viewer towards
… a position of unnatural intimacy,
even as he simultaneously strove to
minimise all contact with the viewer,
to achieve a level of control through
which the viewer would … ultimately
become nothing more than raw matter
which Hitchcock sculpted freely in
time.
* Where the fiction of Psycho explores the
themes of voyeurism and privacy from being
seen, Hitchcock's explicit reflections on his
own role as director address the quite different
question of the privacy of seeing.
*
* For Hitchcock, deliberate violation of the
privacy of seeing constituted the director's
ethical obligation, defined the very contract of
perversity binding him to the mass of viewers
he would never meet. There are two
dimensions of privacy, then, just as there are
two sides to the cinematic address: the side of
the director, who works with cameras and cuts;
and the side of the viewer, who expects only to
be carried away in the flow.
*
*It is the singular way that
Hitchcock makes these
dimensions communicate opens the one to the other
through the precise effects of
closure he exerts upon every
frame - that must be
articulated anew.
* All of this is effectively
demonstrated by
Hitchcock in the
apparently simple,
repeated act of framing a
frame and passing through
it. This gesture calls
attention to itself …
* But not:
* to exploit the
fundamentally voyeuristic
nature of the spectator's
identification with the
camera as it effortlessly
penetrates and dominates
space,
* nor as a purely negative
gesture aimed at exposing
the mechanisms of that
identification.
* Nor, even, both at once.
* Something altogether
different is at stake, even
if it sometimes includes an
appeal to voyeurism as
one of its elements. The
dominant note when Hitch
plays his viewers is neither
that of subjective
mastery, nor of its
exposure as merely
imaginary.
* Our manipulated passage
back and forth across the
threshold between two
worlds, a passage which is
going all the time, from
moment to moment,
frame to frame, whenever
the action rolls, signs
itself here as an
invocation of fate and the
demonstration of its
irreversibility
*
* Not only the fate of the
characters, but even more
so, the fate of the viewer,
the fate of my affect,
which is intensified, not
diminished or held at a
critical distance, by the
very conspicuous and
idiosyncratic way
Hitchcock's camera calls
attention to itself.
*
* In Hitchcock, cinema asserts
itself as aberration of
movement and dispossession
of point of view. What is at
stake here is a positive and
specific experience of
indeterminacy: of not
knowing what is coming and
where I will stand in relation
to it.
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