Understanding Psycho: The Uncanny

it's not as if she were a maniac a raving things she just goes a little mad sometimes we all go a little mad sometimes haven't you psycho is the film that's probably most associated with Alfred Hitchcock it's certainly his most successful film and he made it relatively late in his career 1960 with its then shocking depictions of sex and violence psycho completely revolutionized the horror and thriller genres now if you haven't seen it stop this video now and go watch it because yes it really is as good as your film friends say it is and I'm about to spoil the whole thing right now quick recap psycho begins when Marian the secretary played by Janet Lee impulsively steals a large sum of money from the office where she works hoping that this will help her marry her boyfriend Sam while trying to put distance between herself and this crime she stops at a motel run by Norman a repressed young man under the thumb of his domineering mother and he by now famous shower scene we see what appears to be mother stabbing Marian to death in a fit of jealous rage but the subsequent investigation actually reveals that it was Norman who did the killing mother being his oedipal alter ego one of the strange things about psycho as a film is that there's no single protagonist to carry the bulk of the plot at first it seems like the psycho in question might actually be Marian as she flees with increasing paranoia from the repercussions of her crime but when she suddenly killed off the film abruptly switches its focus completely from her theft to her murder for a lot of critics and theorists this whole Marian story is basically just a red herring an elaborate setup by Hitchcock in order to make the sudden murder all the more shocking when it happens but personally I think that explanation is pretty thin from start to finish Marian stories about 45 minutes long taking up over 1/3 of the total film time if you've ever watched a procedural from law in order to Poirot you'll know this is an absurdly long time to set up what is essentially a backstory for your murder victim so why is so much attention given to Marian at all why do we need to devote 1/3 of the film's time to a setup that seemingly has nothing to do with the murder or the murderer to understand this we're gonna have to take a quick detour to the field of psychoanalysis now Hitchcock's fascination with psychoanalysis is pretty common knowledge at this point and no where are his Freudian themes more overt than in psycho a film academics often referred to as the first psychoanalytic thriller Norman's sexual fixation on his mother is the most obvious Freudian element but there's also the way three levels of the Bates home top-floor ground floor and basement mirror Freud's three levels of the human subconscious super-ego ego and it respectively but to really decode psycho we're gonna have to turn to a lesser-known Freudian concept the uncanny the uncanny or on heimlich in the original German literally meaning on home Lee is a concept coined by Freud to describe the feeling of unease you get when you experience something familiar as suddenly unfamiliar like seeing a teacher outside of school or visiting an empty museum in the middle of the night that is something commonplace seen in a way that is suddenly strange point was particularly interested in literature and the recurring motif of the uncanny double or doppelganger that is someone or something that is disconcertingly like the self and yet completely separate from it uncanny doubles can be found all over the horror genre taking the form of mirrors shadows dolls dummies and mannequins mummies ghosts zombies robots and clones even twins Freud would argue that all these creepy figures are creepy because they are like the self and yet threatening Lee author in psycho we get an uncanny double in the form of mother Norman's alter ego but what's easier to miss is that Norman and Marion are also set up as uncanny doubles of each other their names contain most of the same letters in a deliberate change from the original novel and in most of their interactions we can see a carefully placed mirror in the background suggesting that they are in fact mirroring each other in his reading of the film slavo Dziedzic writes Marian's world is the world of contemporary American everyday life whereas Norman's world is its nocturnal reverse the relationship between these two worlds is that of the two surfaces of a mobius strip if we progress far enough on one surface all of a sudden we find ourselves on its reverse in other words Marion and Norman's seemingly separate stories are not separate at all they are complementary and cyclical like day and night and it's only by looking at the two together that you can begin to understand the film as a whole so how does Hitchcock turn Marion's story into Norman's story well let's look at a scene early in the film where Marion's driving to the Bates Motel imagining what her boss will say when he finds out she's stolen the money what's going on in this scene well a number of things up until this point the film has been shot in a realist style very cut and dry but now we're hearing Marian's thoughts in the form of voiceovers which suggests that we're moving to a more subjective experience of how she perceives the world and this subjectivity is reinforced by changes in the cinematography for instance earlier in the film scene transitions are marked by fades which is classic film speak for time passed in between these two shots but now even though the sky outside the car is getting darker and darker we're showing this in cuts not fades because Marion isn't aware of the time passing the shots get tighter and tighter on Marion's face the depth of fields decreases meaning that her surroundings become out of focus the darkness and rain make it impossible to see anything out of the window and the lighting shifts completely from clear daylight to deep shadows and sharp contrasts in a practical sense Hitchcock is moving us from day to night but in a stylistic sense he's moving us from an apparently objective reality to a subjective Moorish internal reality he's effectively taking us from Marion side of the Moby trip - it's uncanny nighttime flipside norman's world and at the climax Marian smiles and looks right at the viewer look familiar so many people miss this but when you see these two smile side-by-side you have to ask yourself what is Hitchcock trying to tell us you know if anyone ever talked to me the way I heard the way she spoke to you these scenes give us a glimpse into Norman and Marion's deepest anxieties Norman imagines mother talking accusingly about him as I should have years ago she was always and Marian imagines Cassidy the millionaire for whom she stole the $40,000 talking accusingly about her what we're hearing is the imaginary internalized voices of authority parental authority Cassidy's interaction with Marian near the beginning of the film is sexual but it's also disconcertingly paternal which will later be echoed by Norman's incestuous relationship with his mother as a voice of authority Cassidy is vulgar but he's protected by the veneer of respectability afforded him by marriage and money the two things Marian is trying to steal for herself but when she flees to the other side of the Mobius strip and to the supposed safety and sanctity of familial respectability she finds that the voice of authority that reigns there is every bit as demanding and obscene in his writing Freud argued that the reason the uncanny disturbs us is because it represents some aspect of our hidden desires which is to say that the uncanny isn't just the familiar turned unfamiliar but a fantasy turned monstrous as an ax child who wishes his or her dolls would come to life if Norman is Marian's uncanny double then he must represent some hidden desire of hers which raises the question what does Marion want well we're told in the very first scene of the film in fact it's the very first line never did eat your lunch did you that's Marion's lover Sam he and Marion are meeting in a hotel room on her lunch break and the line is accompanied by close-up of her uneaten sandwich to emphasize the illicit 'no sat there meeting sex in an anonymous hotel room and respectable people should be having lunch pretty risque stopped for 1960 as they're getting dressed marion tells sam she doesn't want to keep meeting him like this oh we can see each other we can even have dinner but respectively in my house with my mother's picture on the mantel and my sister helping me boil a big steak for three compare this conversation to the conversation Marion and Norman have later on in the motel and you'll see that Marion's fantasy of a respectable meal is being fulfilled to a weirdly specific degree Marion tell Sam she wants to stop meeting in hotel rooms and have dinner respectively with her mother's picture on the wall that is under the symbolic gaze of authority later when sharing sandwiches and milk with Norman he uncomfortable with any hint of sex moves the dinner from her motel room to his parlor and the parlor of course is filled with the symbolic gaze of authority not only are they watched by the uncanny on seeing eyes of paintings and stuffed birds but the whole scene takes place in the shadow of the big family house from which mother shouts shrill accusations it's a very twisted answer to Marion's desire for domestic respectability in fact even the murder when Norman kills Marion often replaces her as the protagonist of the story could be read as a grotesque metaphorical response to Marion's original fantasy in her desire to become normal Marian becomes Norman and this is more than just a Freudian twist the fact that Marion and Norman's worlds turn out to be so similar in their hidden perversity he's a pretty shocking indictment of 50s ideals in which the domestic sphere was set up as a safe haven against a morally compromised encroaching outside world as G Jack says Hitchcock is showing us that these two worlds are just two sides of a mobius strip keep going on one surface and eventually you'll find yourself on the other it's the final scene of the film with all its apparent objectivity that takes us back to the surface where we started just as Marion was consumed and replaced by her uncanny double so is Norman consumed by his a neurotic woman concealing a crime just like Marion was the final shot superimposed for a moment over Norman's face is of Marion's car and body dragged back up from the swamp we've come full-circle the uncanny night time is over and in the light of day Marion surfaces again resurrected [Music]

Channel: Is This Just Fantasy?

Views: 646,913

Keywords: film, psycho, alfred hitchcock, the uncanny, sigmund freud, slavoj zizek, norman bates, marion crane, psychoanalysis, cinema

Id: _FMkGEZP3w0

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 01 2016