TU Dresden

Psycho. Construction of Emotions

by

Markus Nowatzki

Wir versuchen, eine gute Geschichte mit einer mitreißenden Handlung zu erzählen. Während der Arbeit entwickeln sich die einzelnen Szenen.

Alfred Hitchcock zu Donald Spoto¹

1 TABLE OF CONTENTS 2

2 INTRODUCTION 3

3 CONSTELLATION OF CHARACTERS 4

3.1 INSIDE THE BOOK 4
3.2 READING THE FILM 6

3.2.1 MARY 6
3.2.2 THE RELATIONSHIP MARY-NORMAN 7
3.2.3 NORMAN 9
3.2.4 THE MATTER OF SAM AND LILA 10
3.2.5 ARBOGAST 11

4 THE STRUCTURE OF THE FILM AND ITS ELEMENTS. 12

4.1 PLOT POINTS ACCORDING TO SYD FIELD 12
4.2 ELEMENTS OF SUSPENSE 13

4.2.1 CLOSE-UP: THE SHOWER SCENE 15

5 CONCLUSION 17

6 APPENDIX 18

6.1 BIBLIOGRAPHY 18

6.1.1 PRIMARY TEXTS AND MATERIALS 18
6.1.2 SECONDARY TEXTS 18
6.1.3 OTHER MATERIALS 18

6.2 STORIES I-V 18

2 Introduction

About fifty years ago a little town in Wisconsin, Plainfield, was shaken by discovering a fiftyone- year old mass murderer living among them. Ed Gein, who had not only killed, but also disassembled his victims, was to become the role model as an archetypical character in the American horror literature. About thirty-nine miles from Plainfield it was Robert Bloch,² who became interested in Gein:

“I wondered how this man, never suspected of any kind of wrongdoing, in a town where if someone sneezed on the north side of town, someone in the south side said ‘Gesundheit,’ was only suddenly discovered to be a mass murderer. I was also puzzled by how unanxious his neighbors were to speak about his crimes. I said to my self: ‘There’s a story here.’”³ It was Bloch’s curiosity about the dark side of Puritan America, about America’s psychology cult, especially about Freudian theories⁴ and the ever strong worship of a mother picture that transformed Ed Gein into Norman Bates, a bogeyman with an Oedipus fixation on “mother,” into a transvestite with a love for taxidermy. According to Stephen Rebello⁵ the book had an instant success in the United States. Of course the contemporary reader, “Stephen King-ed and Cliff Barker-ed to a bloody pulp,”⁶ can hardly imagine the emotions of the audience in the late 50’s, with Agatha Christie mysteries as main stream literature: “Robert Bloch had sexed-up and Freudianized the Gothic, revitalizing such creaky elements as the rattletrap Old Dark House, the stormy night and the crackpot madwoman locked in the dank basement. Into the brew, Bloch stirred a motel on the skids and a randy, alcoholic, mama’s boy whose scrambled psyche and way with taxidermy could keep several shrinks in summerhouses in the Hamptons for years.”⁷

At the time when Bloch wrote Psycho Hitchcock already had been a renowned film director, for whom “Paramount function[ed] practically as a studio setup for him.”⁸ However, this constant success had put Hitchcock on his guard against the “trap of self-plagiarism”⁹ In search for the unexpected, Psycho was his chance to further develop his style of suspense by entering a new field of the Gothic horror. Hitchcock’s trust¹⁰ in the story proved him right, because as the book seemed to be a winner, the film achieved a groundbreaking success until today.¹¹

Fleeing from the hopelessness of life and trying to achieve some “peaceful island” for herself and her lover, Mary¹² Crane steals the money of her employee and becomes lost during a strong storm. She finally arrives at Bates motel, where Mary meets her destiny and the end of her life, while the dominance of the past over the present teaches the audience a dreadful and deadly lesson.

3 Constellation off Characters

Dominance of past over present, sexual secrets and repression, a journey into nowhere or into darkness, salvation, shower murder as sexual act (as substitute for rape¹³), the fruit cellar as clear symbol of (disturbed) sexuality,¹⁴ architecture: there are a dozen references to the horror and the psychic conditions of man, especially in a movie that tries to deal with human passions and human guilt.

3.1 Inside the Book

[...]

2 Rebello. p 7.
3 Rebello. p.8.
4 A perfect example for this interest are the writings by Henry Miller, e.g. Rosy Crucifixion and Tropic of Capricorn.
5 Rebello. p. 11f.
6 Rebello. p.12.
7 Rebello. p. 12.
8 Rebello. p. 16.
9 Rebello. p.17.
10 Please refer to the sudden shower murder: end of part 3.1
11 Psycho was nominated the Oscar for best Actress, Best Direction, Best cinematography, best director. It has won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of 1961, the Golden Globe of 1961, and two Laurel Awards in 1961. Recorded with a budget of $800.000 it roughly made about $ 32million. (Internet Movie Data Base: http://www.imdb.com 2002)
12 The character’s name in the book is “Mary,” in the film she is called “Marion.” For simplicity I will use “Mary,” to describe both, the film’s and the book’s character.
13 Wood
14 Hitchcock, Psycho: “You think I am fruity…”. DVD.