Introduction

The Artist Proposes, the Public Disposes

‘Psycho’, The Master said, ‘has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them like an organ.’ By playing the audience, through ‘pure film’, Hitchcock’s great love, Psycho works through suggestion, through atmosphere, not stating ideas, but generating them, in the minds of the audience. As Thorold Dickinson, another formidable ‘audience-buster’, observed, ‘No film ever frightens an audience. The audience frightens itself.’ Psycho upfronts many unresolved problems, right across film theory, media studies and aesthetics. This little book must limit itself to a, by now traditional, mixture of:

1.Assumptions as to usual, or normative, audience responses.

2.‘High culture’-type critical responses.

3.The critic’s own observations, with which readers may enjoy ‘comparing notes’, and

4.Hitchcock’s intentions, declared or presumed, including his private meanings, for kindred souls to pick up if they will, and his self-expressions, sometimes inadvertent. ‘What did the author mean?’ and ‘What ideas helped shape this discourse?’ are basic, perennial, and probably instinctive, responses to all discourse whatsoever. They ought not to monopolise cultural history, nor stop readers using texts entirely for their own agendas and enjoyment. Nonetheless, the interaction between the man, the auteur, the text, and its ‘primary target audiences’, must loom large in cultural criticism, without conceding the problem of substantially different, or incompatible, audience responses.

Auteur Theory Versus Collaboration Theory

How far Psycho’s merits derive from Hitchcock, and how far from his collaborators, is a question beyond our scope here; our priority is the tale, not the teller. The credit sequence, so remarkable that it’s rarely discussed, is surely a solo flight by Saul Bass, who more than anyone put modern(ist) visuals into Hollywood movies (which had lagged behind some popular subcultures). Bass’s other credit, as pictorial consultant for the film itself, might help explain a certain visual ‘wildness’, unlike Hitchcock’s more ‘classical’ tendencies (although Hitchcock would have well understood, and developed, the trend). Collaborators testify that while directing the shower sequence Hitchcock worked from a storyboard by Saul Bass, which, insofar as it influenced both mise-en-shot (camera angles, compositions, tonality …), and mise en scène (action in the frame), might seem to fulfil certain directorial (and editing!) functions. Nonetheless, in experienced opinion, the shower scene was Hitchcock’s directorial creation; and after all it was he, not the ‘illustrative sketches’, who controlled the timing and rhythm, the dramatic modulations, the quality of light and all the other ‘indefinables’ that transform a ‘grammar’ into a ‘poetic’.

Hitchcock selected writer Joseph Stefano, not just to write down what Hitchcock dictated, but for his rare skill at dialogue rich in ‘colour’ (implications about character and background), at which Hitchcock felt himself not gifted. Moreover, Hitchcock regularly left to his actors much of the character ‘detail’, that is to say, the substance of performance (hence the dry, blank characterology of many Hitchcock films, e.g. those with Cary Grant, a light, ‘abstract’ actor). That Norman, at morbid moments, nibbles a little sweetie is easily taken for a ‘Hitchcock touch’ (prompted by his recurrent theme of food, and akin to the chocolate factory scene in Secret Agent [1936]); but the idea would seem to have been Anthony Perkins’, unprompted. Again, it’s easy to see why Hitchcock, famously mean with praise, said to Simon Oakland, playing the psychiatrist in the film’s penultimate scene, ‘Thank you …you have just saved my movie.’ In an earlier sequence, Perkins and Martin Balsam, acting together, hit a rhythm so fast and tight that watching technicians broke into applause; but its very speed gave the editor great problems. To give the audience time to think some dialogue implications through, he had to find some pauses, which the original continuity lacked, and then, by thorough re-editing, to recreate that rhythm, but at a slower pace. As for Bernard Herrmann’s ‘background’ music – would Psycho be itself without it? Movie auteurs, unlike literary authors, are rarely one-man bands. Many a first-rate film has no identifiable auteur; its author is a team, an interaction of talents – a conspiracy of inspirations, a Platonic ‘symposium’.

Admiration for Psycho needn’t imply equal admiration of Hitchcock’s films in general. In Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, Robert Kapsis shows just how much the Hitch ‘legend’ owes to his being the first, and for many years the only, director to compound his own publicity sense by retaining a permanent press agent. (It’s also true that few directors have been as articulate, and open, about his artistic principles, and his personal life, when interviewed by fellow artists, like Truffaut and Bogdanovich.) Claims for his genius often focus on the moral and dramatic aspects of his films, but, as argued elsewhere, his claim to pantheon status may rest on his cinematic forms, which fuse very refined craftsmanship, love of ‘pure film’ and an aestheticism which, instead of being ‘decadent’, amoral and idly sham-aristocratic, is moral, robust and ‘democratic’. Psycho is both conventional and inventive, and marvellous to study. (In this little book, we have little to say of the music – deplorably, no doubt; our excuse is, that every spectator is shaken by it, yet, its very ‘language’, and its relation to emotional dynamics, is difficult to discuss. Clearly, its nervous quality owes much to its being all strings, played percussively. But its quiet, reflective moments, its evocation of thought indistinctly ‘stirring’, are just as interesting as its shrill attacks.)

Consensus or Dissensus?

Impossible here to review the many interpretations of Psycho, which must by now be well into three figures. Interested readers may like to ‘compare and contrast’ this ‘reading’ with others akin to it in one way or another: for example, Robin Wood, perpetuating the – perhaps narrow, but healthy – spirit of 1950s ‘Eng. Lit.’ (some English film critics reckoned they could have talked F. R. Leavis into acknowledging Hitchcock’s genius); V. F. Perkins (a liberal humanist/pragmatic formalist); Richard Griffith (who rightly attacks my apparent agreement with the ‘guilt-inducing’ school of movie criticism); William Rothman (a psychoanalytical moralist of great perspicuity and intolerable severity); François Truffaut (whose dialogue with The Master is sometimes telepathic, sometimes a ‘dialogue of the deaf’); Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer (whose religious tendencies, characteristic of Cahiers du cinéma in its glory years, from Bazin through the nouvelle vague, made them the first to look behind the ‘Master of Fun Suspense’ and posit a ‘Master of Catholic Guilt’); Jean Douchet (another Cahier-ist, whose ‘gnostic mysticism’ is supersensitive to strange passional surges in Hitchcock’s films). As for my earlier ‘run-through’ of Psycho, its concern, which I should no doubt have defined more clearly, was, not so much what happens in Psycho, as, its emotionalisation of a sufficiently typical ‘target audience’. Contrasting with (and complementing) these ‘moral-literary’ approaches, we especially recommend a chapter on the ‘patrolman’ sequence in Stefan Sharff’s The Elements of Cinema – a micro-analysis which revivifies the Eisenstein tradition of ‘pure film’ formalism (unfettered by paradigms imported from linguistics, which of all human sciences has the least relevance to film), and applies it to the fine detail of narrative editing and visual semantics. Useful, too, is Sharff’s book-length analysis – The Art of Looking in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. After all, observation, a skill and an art, is not reducible to sexual pleasure, and even less reducible to some voyeuristic or scopophiliac tendency than the visual arts in general, or reading and writing.

Questioning Looks

In discussing Psycho’s motifs, we make much of eyes, mirrors, looks direct to camera, POVs (shots from near enough a character’s point of view) and other ‘optical’ matters. This interest entails no acquiescence in all those academic theories which relate film to a scopic/scoptic drive, or voyeurism, or a deplorably obsessive male gaze, or murderous starings, or mirror-phases, or psychopathology – as if looking were beyond the pale of rationality and somehow more libidinal than language or conscious thought. In our view (!), however, film, and visual art generally, has the same – very high – degree of autonomy from unconscious structures as, say, poetry, music, logic or most conscious thinking. The ‘optical’ motifs in Psycho are on a par with its non-visual ones – like Bernard Herrmann’s brutal and haunting music. (Is music The Most Unconscious Art?) As for two ideas, often combined – first that POV shots by themselves strengthen spectator identification with character, and second that spectators often think of the camera as ‘a pair of eyes like a person’ invisibly present within the scene the principal objections are: one, that in fictions like Psycho, camera and diegesis are logically incompatible, so that diegetic space and camera space read as a non-continuum, and, two, that most spectators overlook (!) camera POV, much as they disregard (!) cuts, which, if taken literally, would jump them about in space, like performing fleas. The reasons are well known in visual art theory and in scientific psychology.

Another problem: merely to pursue a motif in the film, through its various appearances and forms, risks suggesting that each time it reintroduces the same idea, it’s a simple, static repetition. Often, however, its reappearance signals some kind of change – a modulation, or development, or new aspect revealed. The new context or new presentation (e.g. a different camera angle) is part of the changes which a story is. (Story as change and story as statement are very different things; but that’s another essay.)

In academic Film Studies just now, psychoanalysis is a ‘theory of first resort’. The meanings of films, and of the medium itself, are sought in the Freudian Unconscious – realm of the ‘libidinal’ (the forbidden) and the ‘repressed’. Easily overlooked is what Freudians call the Preconscious – that vast domain of operations which are neither repressed nor articulated in consciousness. (Some can become conscious, as and when required; others can’t, like much perceptual processing, since it’s preliminary to consciousness itself.) Freudian tradition, while appreciating its existence, constantly underestimates its powers, partly because Freudian analysis concentrates on the Unconscious, partly because Freudian traditions routinely confuse ‘the conscious mind’ with what’s rational, moral, adult and articulate. Furthermore, the Freudian, capital-U Unconscious is easily confused with ‘unconscious’ in the ordinary, small-u, sense, as in ‘I must have done it unconsciously’, where ‘unconsciously’ means ‘absent-mindedly’ – the mental operation was preconscious. With special relevance to film, and Psycho in particular, most body language is unconscious but not Unconscious. Its movements, and the prompting attitudes, may not reach consciousness, but should consciousness wish to monitor them, it has only to pay attention. Most of our thinking is preconscious, and its boundaries with the conscious are so fluid, that perhaps they’re not boundaries at all. All that’s another subject, but it helps explain why Freud insisted that the meanings which psychoanalysis can discern in art are more often marginal than central.

Fear and Desire

If, and it’s a big if, Mrs Norman Bates’ knife is ‘phallic’, that’s not why it sets Marion, and the spectators, screaming. Their thrills arise from the reality principle, and from conscious thought: a knife in your stomach may seriously endanger your health. When Marion tries to avoid getting stabbed, what, in her motivation, is to psychoanalyse? Worse yet, the very diagnosis, ‘phallic’, represents, not an Unconscious association, but a conscious, educated, construction, which has already been censored (or should we say ‘castrated’?). Even when ‘knife’ carries some hidden meaning (e.g. ‘prick’), the hidden meaning is merely accessory, and carries negligible power. Psychoanalysis has a place, of course, but, when applied by lay persons, who dip into it, self-taught, in their spare moments, in the margins of art study, it’s best offered, not as rock-solid theory, but as speculation (!) and reflection (!). In the psychoanalytic theories offered here, violence, fear, and other compulsive drives, are neither caused nor dominated by sexuality; it may influence them but, reciprocally, they influence it: often, indeed, more strongly since sexuality is the repressed, not the repressing, force. This general position is argued, on strictly Freudian grounds, by Jean Bergeret, in La Violence et la vie: la face cachée de l’Oedipe; it’s long established among the ‘independents’ within English psychoanalysis; and well before the break with Freud it was the basis of the ‘inferiority complex’. Bergeret goes on to argue that Freud’s very emphasis on ‘castration’ is a defence mechanism, misattributing to the ‘sexual’ fears actually derived from survival/power drives, as prioritised in non-Freudian psychology, and in realpolitik-al theories (Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Marx). It’s perhaps significant that Psycho roughly coincides with the spread, in and around psychoanalysis, of ‘English school’, mother-centred, theory (Melanie Klein, James Robertson, Donald Winnicott)¹, which many feminists, surprisingly, overlook. Their acquiescence in Lacanian phallocracy might almost persuade one that Helen Deutsch’s postulation of female masochism was correct; however, alternative ‘deconstructions’ are easily available.

Psycho and psychoanalysis have some common interests (in Mr and Mrs Norman Bates); but, as Hitchcock lucidly pointed out, if Psycho were ‘serious’ as psychology, it would be a clinical case history, not a ‘roller-coaster’ thriller. Psychoanalytically, themost relevant text I know is ‘La Mère morte [The Dead Mother]’, a chapter in Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort by André Green. Regarding Norman’s more normal, sensitive side, Green’s concept of ‘la psychose blanche’ – white (or blank) psychosis – seems interesting; especially as the whole film abounds in both white-ish visuals and mental blanks, some tiny, some gaping…

Žižek’s introduction to Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) makes a richly stimulating read; the ‘convergences’ between its Lacanian ideas, other psychoanalytical schools and ‘traditional humanism’ are well worth examining. Nonetheless, much Lacanian writing suggests, even to friendly sceptics, that, if you begin by reading Lacanian paradigms into Hitchcock’s ambiguous patterns, the result can only be – Lacan in, Lacan out. More worrying, for theories of film form, is Lacan’s own position, which explicitly denies the existence of visual metaphor in dreams (neatly disqualifying ‘knife as phallus’!).² This blind spot for visual structures eclipses even Barthes’ proposal that film studies should ‘progress’ from linguistics to – decoding film stills! So much for movement, the kinetic, the cinematic! The Grand Error is the wholesale importation of paradigms from structural linguistics, whose special expertise can know nothing of visual, perceptual or cognitive processes, or general semantic structures, or the structures of discourse (so that 90 per cent of textual meaning lies beyond its ken). Competent aesthetics do exist, but their application to film is beyond our scope here.

From Script to Film

Our references to ‘the script’ mean the shooting script commercially available. Its pages carry various dates, the last being 7 December 1959, about a week before shooting. Stephen Rebello’s thoroughly detailed book on Psycho’s production history strengthens my impression that this version of the script is near enough the draft that lay on Hitchcock’s lap while shooting (though what he had in mind was very likely rather different).

While (and even before) scripting, Hitchcock made storyboards (sketches of every shot), often precisely designed, as the chosen lens would see them. He sometimes said that, being a man who worried a lot, he liked everything prepared in advance, so that once he’d written a film, all he had to do was shoot it. Like most showbiz legends, that’s true in spirit, but not letter. Certainly this script and the final film show countless changes. Some are quite minor (for example: the script has Marion hail a cab to get from hotel to office, but the finished film omits the cab altogether and cross-fades directly from Sam left alone in the hotel to Marion entering her office). Other changes, noted as we go, are substantial. In the script, Marion is ‘Mary’, and Dr Richmond is ‘Dr Simon’.

In general movie practice, shooting scripts are written in numbered ‘master-scenes’, roughly akin to theatrical scenes. The breakdown into shots is never done by the writer, who can rarely anticipate the countless factors which govern them – the creative ideas of director, actors, set designers, cameramen, editors, etc., and countless production practicalities. Psycho credits the script to Stefano alone; but its writing involved sometimes weekly, sometimes daily, conferences with a producer–director famous for his original, and auteur-ial, vision. Though Stefano wasn’t Hitchcock’s glove puppet, Hitchcock’s requirements lay heavily upon him. Neitherman was the film’s ‘only begetter’. Film, like theatre, ballet, opera, etc., is a ‘collaborative’ art, and although it has its auteurs, they rarely if ever correspond to some literary notions of ‘authors’ as solitary, all-controlling, individuals (notions that overlook literary collaborations (the Goncourt Brothers, Erckmann – Chatrian …).

The script of Psycho has its inconsistencies. By and large, it’s conventionally laid out in numbered master-scenes. Sometimes master-scene generalities do specify a particular angle or effect. Occasionally, though, master-scene numbers are allocated to particular shots, as if Hitchcock’s mind’s eye had storyboarded this scene from the start. The shower scene is written as six shots, though in the film it has around 70 (depending where you reckon ‘the shower scene’ begins and ends). Sometimes the numbering breaks down altogether, presumably to accommodate recent script changes, without having to change the scene numbering to which everyone in the unit was already working. Scene 118, headed ‘The Dead Body’ (curious scene description!), is clearly a shot, and, if you fully visualise it while reading, its description is ‘necessary and sufficient’ to stage it very exactly. Left implicit is a visual point to which most studio executives would strongly object – but which they probably wouldn’t stop to visualise exactly. The shot was made, but not used; Van Sant decodes and restages it for his 1998 remake, times having changed.

Grateful thanks from the author to Rob White, Jason Wilcox, Dr Barry Salt, Tom Luddy, Stefan Sharff and Maurice Rapf.