Psycho
may well be the most overly familiar motion picture in history.
?
There
are innumerable essays, books, college courses, academic symposia, fan clubs,
and Web sites devoted to extolling and analyzing the film. But when Hitchcock
first presented Psycho to his agents, his staff, and Paramount, he framed it as
a simple, low-budget American shocker, in the style of his TV series, which
would provide a breather from more lavish grandiose productions.
?
Galleys
of Robert Bloch's novel had circulated at Paramount back in mid-February 1959,
but the weird yarn about a psycho killer who runs a lonely roadside motel was
promptly rejected by studio readers as too ghoulish and posing insurmountable
problems for censorship. Hitchcock's office routinely saw the reader reports,
but the director's antenna shot up when Anthony Boucher, in his New York Times
crime-fiction column of April 19, 1959, praised the novel as "chillingly
effective." Hitchcock, a devotee of Boucher's column, asked his assistant,
Peggy Robertson, to him a copy of the book.
?
Bloch,
a Wisconsin author little known outside pulp-fiction circles, had been inspired
by the real-life case of Ed Gein, a Plainfield, Wisconsin, farmer arrested in
1957 for grave robbing, cannibalism, and murder. A search of Gein's property
revealed the remains of an indefinite number of female victims who had been cut
up, eviscerated, and cannibalized; their skins, skulls, and body parts were
displayed throughout his home. The investigation revealed that Gein, who adorned
himself in garments made from the flesh of his victims, had had a tormented,
perhaps incestuous relationship with his mother, whose death triggered his
spree.
?
The
basic facts of the Gein case were spun by Bloch into a macabre suspense story
about a fat, lonely middle-aged tippler who has killed his other and stuffed
her corpse. One rainy night, a young woman who has stolen forty thousand
dollars arrives at the motel he runs; he rents her a room, then spies on her
through a peephole as she prepares for a shower. Dressed grotesquely in his
mother's clothes, he surprises her with a visit.
?
"Mary
started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared,
holding a butcher's knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her
scream."
?
Hitchcock
liked to boast about playing the emotions of audiences as though they were
notes on a organ, but when he read Psycho he must have recognized his own inner
music surging through him. It was The Lodger as the Landlord of a motel; it was
a phantasmagoria with a scary mansion, stairwell, and dark basement; it was a
Peeping Tom and a screaming Jane; it was the world's worst bathroom nightmare,
mingling nudity and blood; it was a plunging knife in the muscled grip of a man
dressed, bizarrely, as his own mother. It is no exaggeration to say that
Hitchcock had been waiting for Psycho - working up to it - all his life.
?
Late
in April, MCA quietly arranged to option the screen rights - so quietly that
the author had no idea who the buyer of his book might be. Only later did Bloch
learn that Psycho was going to be immortalized by Alfred Hitchcock; like some
other authors of books used for Hitchcock films, he always resented the price:
a low, blind bid of nine thousand dollars.
?
According
to Rebello, these "risque elements" were, as usual, Hitchcock's
deliberate" ruse to divert the censors from more crucial concerns."
And sure enough, when Paramount submitted Stefano's draft, Code officials said
it would be impossible to approve such a film, predicting that if Hitchcock did
not modify the objectionable scenes - especially the lunch-hour tryst, the
toilet flushing, and the shower scene - Psycho would also be condemned by local
censors and the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency.
?
Yet
Stefano's script was thoughtful as well as intentionally provocative.
?
One
example is the crucial supper scene, the only time Norman and Marion have a
meaningful interchange and forge a connection. Norman talks about his hobby of
taxidermy and voices qualms about his mother, yet takes offense when Marion
suggests that perhaps Mrs. Bates should be put in an institution. "She's
not crazy!" he blurts angrily.
?
The
book and film versions of that scene aren't vastly different, except Stefano's
script puts the characters in an office den, a room eerily presided over by
Norman's collection of stuffed birds. "The [stuffed] owl, for instance,
has another connotation," Hitchcock informed Truffaut. "Owls belong
to the night world; they are watchers, and this appeals to Perkins's masochism.
He knows the birds and he knows that they're watching him all the time. He can
see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes."
?
But
the conversational "duet" between Norman and Marion is longer in the
film, more substantive, and it boasts some of Stefano's finest dialogue - helping
to lift Psycho out of the category of cheap horror almost into the realm of
philosophy.
?
When
Norman tells Marion she doesn't look as though she's had many empty moments in
her life, she insists she's had her share. "I'm looking for a private
island," Marion admits ruefully.
?
"You
know what I think?" counters Norman. "I think that we're all in
private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and
claw but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge
an inch."
?
Marion
says yes, but (thinking of the money she has stolen) adds that sometimes people
deliberately step into their own traps. Norman replies that he was born into
his trap, but doesn't mind anymore. Marion says he ought to mind, and asks
gently, wouldn't it be better to put his demanding mother someplace safe?
?
"But
she's harmless!" insists an agitated Norman. "She's as harmless as
one of those stuffed birds."
?
Apologetically,
Marion says she meant no offense.
?
"People
always mean well," Norman continues resentfully. "They cluck their
thick tongues and shake their heads and 'suggest,' oh so very delicately. 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. Haven't you?"
?
?
Patrick
McGilligan "Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light" (2003)
