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More Hitchcock
Last Laugh: Vertigo
Was Hitchcock's masterpiece a private joke?
Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone
A photo study of the Master's fetishes — uh, motifs
Touch of Psycho? Welles' Influence on Hitchcock
Touch of Evil and Psycho: John W. Hall asks, "Can you tell the difference?"
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The first shot of the famous "Psycho house" is intriguing, because it’s practically a quote from a scene from Vertigo, where Jimmy Stewart follows "Madeleine"16 to the McKittrick Hotel, formerly the house of Carlotta Valdez, with whom Madeline is supposed to be obsessed. The McKittrick Hotel is a gothic pile, quite similar in appearance to the Bates home. Scottie watches Madeline enter the hotel, and shortly thereafter we see the light go on in the left second-floor window, the same window in which we briefly see the tall, imperious figure of Mother. (We could note as well that in both films we are seeing women who, in effect, don’t exist.) Hitchcock returned to the gothic house a third time in his next picture, The Birds (1963). The schoolhouse where Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) teaches is an intriguing gothic cube.17
Marion was about to leave the Bates Motel when she catches sight of Mother.18 She honks the horn and Norman, making an exceedingly quick change, comes dashing out into the rain to offer her succor. Hunching his shoulders, grinning, stammering, trembling at bathrooms, cunning, ruthless, endlessly ambiguous, Norman Bates is his own double and doppelganger, the most famous murderer in film history.
In appearance, Norman is surprisingly reminiscent of the (very) young Gregory Peck of Spellbound (1945), although Hitchcock reportedly did not want Peck for the role, thinking he was too young. In Spellbound, Peck plays a neurotic, though heroic, soldier who thinks that he has murdered his therapist, a false conviction rooted in the fact that as a young boy he accidentally killed his brother (naturally, he has suppressed the memory of this event).19 Norman also resembles a famous murderer from the silent film era, Conrad Veidt, the "Somnambulist" from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).20
After Marion has checked in, for a third time we see her anxiously moving about a bedroom. Once she has found a new hiding place for the money, wrapping it in the newspaper she bought at "California Charlie’s," she can relax a little. She puts the package in plain sight, ostensibly as a clever hiding place, though really so that Hitchcock can include it in the scenes that follow.
The long, talky scenes between Marion and Norman drain away all the accumulated tension of the film and bring it to a virtual standstill. Norman and Marion seem to move toward a mutual recognition of themselves as somewhat forlorn and desperate characters, and Marion at least resolves to mend her ways.
Norman of course does not. Their long conversation over Marion’s dinner in the "parlor" under the watchful eyes of Norman’s birds has a number of intriguing shifts in tone. At first Marion is rather condescending, although a bit intimidated by Norman’s menagerie. Hitchcock has said that the birds see Norman’s guilt, and he knows it. However, it seems to me that the birds are expressions of Norman’s secret desires. (They don’t look at all "passive," to use his term.) The watchful owl (as watchful as Norman) about to take flight over his right shoulder seems to be headed directly toward Marion, while the mournful raven, with his long, drooping beak, casts his shadow against the wall over her head.21
Throughout this and the following sequences, Hitchcock works endlessly with contrasts between black and white, which alternately conceal and reveal the characters. It is always night at the Bates Motel, except for the climax, when the secrets are finally illuminated.
Norman at first wins our confidence by making embarrassing revelations about himself — "A hobby should pass the time, not fill it"; and, much more surprisingly, "A son is a poor substitute for a lover." But his anger over Marion’s suggestion that he have Mother committed, an anger that seems to grow with its expression, almost without limit, is frightening. Rather than an equal, Norman is an example from which Marion can profit.
Marion’s "good night" to Norman are the last words she will ever speak, and the last words we will hear for the next 16 minutes (other than Norman’s "Oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!).
For the fourth time, with Norman’s assistance, we will spy on Marion in a bedroom. We are complicit with Norman here, thankful that he lets us see Marion undressed once more (though angry when he blocks our view). The extraordinary close-up of Norman’s eye, filling the screen, reminds us of the watchful camera (the first entrance into Sam and Marion’s hotel room, the tracking shots of the envelope stuffed with cash and the suitcase) and the relentless eyes of Cassidy and the state trooper, and look forward to the bathroom and shower scenes, which blend images of the eye and circling water — the vortex — in a remarkable manner.
After Marion puts on her robe, Norman retreats to the house, which we enter for the first time. The layout of the Bates home is exactly the same as the McKittrick Hotel, a large, ceremonial staircase to the right of the screen, and a passageway to the left. The staircases have a remarkable similarity — the first post of the banister is an elaborate affair, supporting a lighting fixture that reaches up toward the second floor. In the Bates home, there is a bronze statue bearing a triple arrangement of lights. (Where did the Bateses get their money, one wonders.) In the McKittrick Hotel, a long, slender column bears a Tiffany-style lamp.
As he enters, Norman approaches the foot of the stairs aggressively, then slumps and retreats to the kitchen. Somehow, he was going to defy Mother — it’s hard to imagine exactly how — but he lost his nerve. This staircase, of course, will play an extremely important role in Psycho, as staircases do in many of Hitchcock’s films.22 This particular scene is quite similar to one in Notorious, when unrepentant Nazi Claude Rains, burdened with a living Mother (Leopoldine Konstantin), does make it up the grand ceremonial staircase in his mansion and does defy her, marrying Ingrid Bergman.23
While Norman frets, we cut back to the beginning of the famous shower scene. Bathrooms were another of Hitchcock’s obsessions. The Lodger has a "bathtub" rather than a shower scene, in which Daisy takes a bubble bath while conversing with "the Lodger" through a closed door.24 In later Hitchcock films, bathrooms are used for more prosaic purposes. People hide in them (Cary Grant in North by Northwest) or count money in them, as Marion does earlier in Psycho.
However, the bathroom scene that most resembles what takes place in Psycho occurs in Spellbound, when a dazed and confused Gregory Peck stumbles into a bathroom almost as snowy white and glowing as the one in Psycho. (The fact that bathrooms are often "pure" white is of course a sort of denial of the dark deeds that occur there. Hitchcock both relished this denial and shared it.) Peck’s problem is that white reminds him of snow, and snow reminds of a murder that he witnessed while skiing, a murder for which he feels guilty. His psychosis activated by the glowing white tiles, Peck pockets a straight razor and stumbles out to do God knows what. Fortunately, a kindly old Jewish psychologist (Michael Chekhov, one of the very few sympathetic male authority figures in Hitchcock) slips him a mickey before he can do any damage.
Marion, of course, receives no such protection. In a rather forced sequence, we see her write down the sum of money she spent on the car from California Charlie and subtract it from the $40,000 — as if she needed to do this to keep track of how much she owes. We see the real purpose of her action when she tears up the sheet of paper and, instead of throwing it in the trash, flushes it down the toilet instead. Thus, the coiling vortex of the water washes away all traces of her sin, as though it never happened. If only it could be that easy, says Hitchcock.
The vortex, for Hitchcock, is closely linked to sexual desire, the loss of self control, the dark, hidden side of human nature that seems so much stronger than the rational and the good. The image of the vortex is most vivid in Vertigo and Psycho — in fact it dominates both films — but it does occur in his earlier work. In fact, the very first shot in the very first Hitchcock film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), is of chorus girls descending a spiral staircase. In The Lady Vanishes, when heroine Margaret Lockwood is hit on the head, Hitchcock superimposes a shot of swirling water over what Lockwood is seeing, to suggest her confused state.25 In his conversations with Truffaut, Hitchcock says that when he and his wife Alma were in Paris in the twenties they once tried to locate a club that featured belly dancers, because Hitchcock wanted to get a shot of a belly dancer’s navel as an instance of the vortex.26
But it is not until Vertigo that the vortex image comes into its own. The opening shot of Vertigo (the credits) shows a twisting image spiraling over Kim Novak’s right eye. Later, this spiral will be associated with spiral in "Madeleine’s" hairdo (Grace Kelly wore her hair in exactly the same style in the 1954 Rear Window), as well as the curls in "Carlotta Valdez’s" hair. The spiraling petals in the roses that Carlotta carries in the portrait of her pick up the same image, but the real payoff, of course, is the spiral staircase in the mission, the staircase that so intimidates Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) that he is unable to prevent "Madeleine" from leaping to her death.27
In Psycho, the spiral is perhaps not as obvious, but it is even more pervasive. After Marion has flushed the scraps of paper down the toilet, she steps into the shower. She turns on the water and it pours down on her. A shot taken directly beneath the showerhead shows it staring down like a great blind eye, the water spiraling out of it.
Hitchcock succeeds remarkably in making Marion’s shower a near-religious experience. Her relief at her decision is palpable. She is being cleansed, relieved of the burden of her folly. No longer will she flinch at the staring eyes of strangers. She is a free woman once more.
Then we glimpse the dark image of Mother against the light filtered through the shower curtain, inverting the image of the neon "Bates Motel" shining in the darkness. Mother approaches the shower curtain and pauses for just a second, as if even now she could reconsider, and turn back, as if there might be time for mercy, even now. But there will be no mercy in Psycho.
When Mother draws back the shower curtain, as Hitchcock himself wrote in the script, we have "an impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film." When Mother pulls back the shower curtain, it is Hitchcock himself who is ripping open the screen, Hitchcock himself who is taking the knife to all the impossibly beautiful actresses who have taunted and teased and betrayed him.28
As Norman stands before Marion, he pauses to let her take in the full horror of her situation. Her scream is the great turning point in Psycho, the point that announces how far beyond ordinary experience we are going to go. Too late, we realize that we are trapped inside a movie where the most basic expectations of human decency will be deliberately violated.
After Marion’s first scream, Hitchcock cuts to an extreme close-up of her mouth, linking it with the images we have already seen of the shower drain and the toilet. Like these, a woman’s mouth is a vortex that draws us inward. This time, however, it is the woman who will pay the price.
The cutting of the shower scene was first worked out by Saul Bass29 rather than Hitchcock. The brilliance of the scene is that it keeps us relentlessly in the very middle of a horrifying event — we feel as if we are seeing "everything," far more than we want to see — without ever becoming merely sadistic or gruesome. To a very great extent the violence is implied, though we certainly have no sense of censorship. In part, we are caught between two desires, the desire to see the naked body of a beautiful woman (Hitchcock has been teasing us with this for the whole film), and the desire not to see a brutal murder. But Hitchcock won’t give us the one without the other.
It is only as Mother ceases her assault and strides away that we realize that we haven’t quite seen everything. We haven’t seen her face. All we saw was a back-lit, black-faced demon. This is an image that Hitchcock has also used before, notably in Vertigo once more, though not nearly with such effect. We see it for the first time in Vertigo when "Madeleine" comes to see Scottie at his apartment early in the morning. He has the lights off, and the only source of light is the sunrise behind her. Later, after Madeleine’s death, this image is re-created when Scottie is in the process of changing Judy into the image of Madeleine. Finally, when Scottie takes Judy back to the mission tower in what turns out to be an all too accurate recreation of the murder, a nun suddenly appears ("I heard voices") wearing a veil that renders her features completely black. Confronted by this dark vision, Judy topples over the edge of the tower and falls to her death.30 In Psycho itself, the shots of Marion at the end of the first driving scene were back-lit, and we will see this again.
Once Mother has left, Marion, slumped against the bathroom wall, briefly recovers from the passivity into which she has fallen, reaching a hand directly toward the audience. Her hand continues forward and to the left, reaching for the shower curtain. There is a last desperate sense of life and purpose here as she grasps the curtain. Clutching it, she lifts herself to her feet — and the eyelets pop, one by one, beneath her weight, and she sprawls lifelessly over the edge of the tub.
Over and over again in Hitchcock, hands reach out for help, for kindness, and for mercy. And over and over again, that help, and that kindness, and that mercy are denied.31 In Strangers on a Train, Farley Granger is holding desperately onto the pole of one of the horses of an out-of-control merry-go-round. Robert Walker smashes his foot into Granger’s hand, over and over again. In a very similar scene in North by Northwest, Cary Grant is clinging to a ledge, his arm around Eva Marie Saint. Cary cries for help, and Martin Landau smashes his foot on Cary’s hand.
But perhaps the most striking image of all occurs in The Lodger. Like so many Hitchcock heroes, he’s wrongfully arrested for murder and handcuffed. He escapes, of course, and races through the London streets, chased by a mob. He attempts to leap a cement wall topped with ornamental spikes. Instead, the handcuffs catch on a spike, and in close-up we see his hands writhing helplessly.32
When the shower curtain collapses, Marion’s life is spent. Her grotesque posture tells us more about Hitchcock’s attitude toward women than we want to know: she lies with her bare fanny upward, her head resting against the toilet. The pitiless showerhead continues to drench her, the water bearing her life’s blood down the drain.
As we watch the bloody water circle down the drain, Hitchcock makes the famous dissolve to Marion’s eye. The camera tracks backward, circling as it does so. Having spiraled down into the vortex, we have to unspiral to get out of it. And a woman’s eye, like a drain, like a toilet, is an entryway to the darkness, the sewer, the fury and mire of human veins.33 The camera continues to back away, and then turns, panning across the bathroom and finally moving through the bathroom door. Then, in deliberate repetition of the shot that occurred when we saw Marion preparing for her flight from Phoenix, the camera advances for a close-up of the folded newspaper containing the $40,000, now so horribly useless, before moving to the window for a shot of the house, where we can hear Norman shouting "Mother! Oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!"
Norman’s clean-up, which follows, is as harrowingly clinical as the murder itself. Norman switches off the lights in the motel room, but leaves the bathroom light on, so once more he is illuminated in violently contrasted shades of light and shadow. We watch him relentlessly removing every trace of Marion’s agony, hoping against hope that he will somehow miss the money, that somehow some good might come of it, that Marion’s suffering might somehow not be completely in vain. But Norman doesn’t miss the money. At the last second he grabs the package, not even bothering to open it. He doesn’t care. It’s a sign that Marion lived, and therefore it must be destroyed.
The scene at the swamp recalls the sewer imagery once more, in a rather "Tales from the Crypt" manner. The swamp, a hideous black bog, swallows up Marion’s white car as efficiently as a toilet disposes of a load of crap. Out of sight, out of mind.
We escape at last from the Bates Motel, to the text of a letter to Marion that Sam, sitting in his own "parlor" at the back of his hardware store, is writing, a letter proposing marriage. It’s a pretty cheap, and cruel, shot on Hitchcock’s part, but at this point we’re too stunned to care. The voiceover, a woman customer complaining to a clerk about insect poison — "Man or insect, death should be painless" — is a little too cute. Fortunately, Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles34) enters almost immediately, with news of Marion’s disappearance.
Lila barely has a chance to fill Sam in when Arbogast (Martin Balsam), a fairly sleazy private detective, appears, having followed Lila from Phoenix. Arbogast is shrewd, self-satisfied, and cunning, a small-time hustler who thinks he’s seen it all. He knows from broads, boyfriends, and bucks, and he knows how the three work together. He tells Sam and Lila to stay out of his way, and he takes off in search of Marion’s trail.
By the time Arbogast reaches the Bates Motel, it’s night again, the same near-Stygian darkness that prevailed on the night of Marion’s death. Arbogast and Norman spar in the motel office in a fascinating scene. Arbogast is lit from his left only, in the sort of harsh half-light that Hitchcock had used earlier with Norman. Arbogast is the aggressor here, tough, manipulative, and worldly, while Norman is the hapless mama’s boy, twitchy and defensive. The camera cuts back and forth between them, and then drops down for a very low-perspective shot of Norman. Just at this point, Norman apparently leans forward (to look at a sample of Marion’s handwriting that Arbogast is using to determine if she signed the motel register), so that we are looking up directly under his chin, watching the convulsive working of his throat muscles.
Norman can’t quite keep his mouth shut about Mother, and, when going to change the bed sheets, can’t quite get the nerve to enter Cabin One. This is all Arbogast needs to know, or so he thinks. He pretends to be stymied by Norman and departs, intending to return in hopes of getting a little one on one with Mrs. Bates when Norman isn’t there. Norman, for his part, smiles contentedly as Arbogast departs. Arbogast has been around, but he’s never been around anyone like Norman.
Arbogast then drives to a pay phone, stepping out of character to phone Lila and tell her everything he’s learned or suspects, including the fact that Marion stayed in Cabin One and that he’s planning to return for a chat with Mrs. Bates, and that he’ll call again in about an hour with the results of that conversation. Since Sam and Lila are really "the enemy," there’s no reason for Arbogast to do this. In the course of his conversation with Norman, Arbogast has somehow turned from bad guy to good guy.
Arbogast enters the Bates home with his hat off, holding it before him with both hands, like a man entering church. He seems quite abashed at this point, far different from the pushy tough guy we met only a few minutes ago. He glances to his right, to a doorway that is never opened in the film, one of the many mysteries of this house, apparently guarded by a Cupid-like statue. (We will catch another glimpse of this statue when Lila makes her ascent of the stairs, but we never get a good look at it except in the trailer that Hitchcock made after Psycho took off.)
A number of critics have remarked on Arbogast’s near-penitent attitude as he prepares to meet Mrs. Bates, quite similar to Marion’s state as she takes her last shower. I would point out that as a boy Hitchcock was required to make a spiritual accounting for himself before his mother every evening, a ritual that was not uncommon in Catholic homes.35 Whether Hitchcock half-expected his mother to come at him with a carving knife is another matter, but it wouldn’t surprise me.36
NEXT PAGE: Mother strikes again
NOTES
16. The "Madeleine" whom Stewart is following and with whom he falls in love is a made-up character deliberately invented to deceive him.
17. In The Birds, hordes of crows assemble on one side of the school. When Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette lead the children out of the school, the birds come swarming over the roof and descend on the children, driving them toward the town and lake. Since the crows, as they come over the roof, are rendered through animation, they look like bats flying out of a haunted house, a cheap and hackneyed image, not worthy of Hitchcock. One of the posters for The Birds uses this shot.
18. This is another of Hitchcock’s "if onlys". If only the policeman had followed Marion to the motel and Norman had seen him; if only Marion had kept on driving; if only she hadn’t seen Mother.
19. He kills his brother by sliding down a balustrade that flanks an outside staircase leading up to a house. The brother, seated at the bottom of the balustrade, is knocked onto an iron fence that is topped with spikes. Hitchcock’s real (older) brother, with whom he was not close, died shortly before Spellbound was made. Staircases play an enormous role in Hitchcock’s films.
20. Veidt, who sleeps in a coffin, commits murders under the orders of Dr. Caligari. One might say that Norman commits murders under the orders of Mother. Caligari is the most famous example of German Expressionist film, and is well worth seeing today. Hitchcock was in Germany in the early twenties, working with many of the leading figures of Expressionist film. The Lodger shows many influences of Expressionist film.
21. Birds occur endlessly in Hitchcock’s work. Donald Spoto, Hitchcock’s biographer, refers to them as the "birds of chaos," Birds may have symbolized chaos to Hitchcock — if all birds see our guilt, as Norman’s saw his, then they might become the chosen instruments of God’s wrath upon us — but he doesn’t convince me of that. Hitchcock’s next film, The Birds, made possible by the enormous profits from Psycho, collapses under the weight of his ornithological obsession. However frightened Hitchcock was of birds, they just aren’t that dangerous, and the lengths to which he goes to convince us that they can be lethal only make the film ridiculous. The character of both The Birds and its successor Marnie was radically affected by Hitchcock’s obsession with his leading lady. The real "purpose" of both films, one might say, is the rape of Tippi Hedren.
22. The staircase at the mission in Vertigo is, of course, an essential part of the film. Staircases are crucial in Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (front and back), and Notorious, and play an important role in The Paradine Case, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Birds, and Marnie.
23. Later, Bergman collapses at the foot of these stairs, fleeing from the pair when she realizes that they’re poisoning her. Finally, Cary Grant rescues her by leading her down the same staircase under the noses of Rains and the other Nazis.
24. Nothing else happens. Lavish bathroom and bathing scenes were standard in films made during the twenties.
25. Because of this blow on the head, she at times wonders if she ever saw "the lady" (Dame May Whitty) or only imagined her.
26. Instead they were taken to a brothel. "Now, I have never had anything to do with that sort of woman to this very day!" Hitchcock told Truffaut.
27. What happens in fact is that he is too late to discover what really happened — too late to see his "friend," Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), throw his wife (the real Madeleine) from the top of the bell tower while the false Madeleine (Kim Novak) stands by.
28. I think it is significant that Norman seems to stand carefully on his "side" of the screen, stabbing into it, but never crossing over. It does not seem as though he ever touches Marion except with the blade of the knife, although she does grab his wrist at first.
29. Bass also mapped out the other murder scene in Psycho, of Arbogast on the staircase, and also designed the opening credits of Vertigo.
30. The "black" veil of the nun is a crude special effect that detracts significantly from the impact of the scene. Why would a nun be wearing a veil in the first place? Everything about the scene is quite unconvincing, in my opinion. In Psycho, the shots of Margo Epper, the actress who played Mother in the shower scene, had to be retouched as well, but the work here is subtle and doesn’t call attention to itself.
31. In the Jesuit school that Hitchcock attended as a boy, misbehavior was punished by blows to the hand with a sort of rubber truncheon or club. Only three blows to each hand per day, because after the third the hand became numb. In Sabotage (1936), a kindly grandfather who manufactures bombs sticks out his hand for his grandson to smack when the grandfather has been naughty. In the first scene in Vertigo, after the credits, we see an enormous bar stretching across the entire screen. A hand smacks into it. As the camera draws back, we realize that we’re seeing the rung of a ladder.
32. Other remarkable images of hands in Hitchcock’s work include the painful close-ups of Robert Walker’s hand in Strangers on a Train as he struggles to retrieve a cigarette lighter that has fallen down a sewer. And in Dial M for Murder, Grace Kelly reaches her hand desperately toward the audience when she’s being strangled by Anthony Dawson (in the 3-D version, her hand would be going right out into the audience). In the "scene of the crime" trailer that Hitchcock made for Psycho, he embellishes his account of the murders with elegant hand gestures.
33. The phrase comes from the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, whose attitude toward sex and women appears similar to Hitchcock’s ("But Love has pitched his mansion in/ The place of excrement"), though more accepting.
34. Hitchcock "discovered" Miles when he saw her in a television show in the early fifties. He planned to make her "the next Grace Kelly" and used her in The Wrong Man, starring with Henry Fonda, as well as a number of episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series. Miles, who did not enjoy Hitchcock’s obsessive attentiveness, never got the sort of classy bad girl roles that Hitchcock gave to Ingrid Bergman and Kelly. He wanted her for Vertigo, but she was pregnant with her third child (she was married to actor Gordon Scott, who played Tarzan in five films). Apparently, Hitchcock found this level of fecundity unprofessional and thereafter wrote her off as a complete cow. But he still had her under contract, and so used her in Psycho. It’s also Miles, not Janet Leigh, who screams in the shower in the trailer for Psycho that features Hitchcock.
35. Alfred E. Smith, twice governor of New York State and the first Catholic to run for President (in 1928) as a grown man used to kneel before his mother every night to receive her blessing.
36. In Sabotage, the heroine, Sylvia Sidney, kills her husband with a carving knife (because he blew up her brother with a bomb). In Blackmail (1929), the heroine, Anny Ondra, kills a would-be date rapist with a knife as well. In Dial M for Murder, Grace Kelly dispatches her assailant with a pair of scissors.
