Psycho Structure
THREE ACTS OR FIVE ACTS?
Hollywood scriptwriters, more than English ones, think in terms of three-act structures, roughly: Act I – Exposition up to first main conflict; Act II – Complications; Act III – Crisis and resolution. In some ways this fits Psycho: Act I is Marion’s story; Act II brings the complication, Arbogast; and Act III brings the film’s climax, with Sam and Lila. However, Marion’s story is a very long and winding road, while Arbogast’s act is short and sharp. So maybe Psycho is best treated as a two-act drama, in which Act I is Marion’s story, and Act II is Sam’s and Lila’s (the latter subsuming Arbogast, the sheriff and Dr Richmond). Or perhaps it’s a five-act story, in which Acts I to III centre on Marion (I – Marion Leaves Phoenix; II –Marion on the road; III – Marionmeets the Bates family), and Acts IV and V centre on Sam and Lila (IV–Their hesitations; V– In the Bates house). However, both formulations scant the last three scenes (Dr Richmond, Mrs Norma Bates, Up from the swamp), which, action-wise, are the ‘post-climax’ resolution (traditionally called the ‘falling action’ and more recently, ‘closure’). We notice also that Psycho, a well-constructed bourgeois narrative, approximates the Marxist-modernist shape of Antonioni’s L’avventura. Arguably, therefore, the structures are variations of one another. The basic structure of any drama is a two-act affair (Act I – The problem, Act II – The solution). But since first moves to a solution can complicate the problem, problems and solutions may shade into one another, so that ‘Second Acts’ have no clear demarcation. To put it another way, dramas trade not in logical problems, but in human complications.
Detecting some ‘deep structure’ in Psycho is hazardous, since, as suggested in The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, the symmetries and variations in Hitchcock’s story patterns accommodate a wide variety of ideas and idea-systems (especially if, as most aesthetic theories do, we admit parts of structures into story ‘sub-themes’). The following came repeatedly to mind, while thinking the film over, but I’ve no desire to discourage other readings.
A ‘MYTHIC’ STRUCTURE
Literary criticism often appeals to ‘mythic’ or ‘thematic’ structuralisms (e.g. ‘Cinderella’ stories, or ‘Oedipus’ stories derived from Freud’s simplification of Sophocles). Psycho fits the structure prioritised in The Writer’s Journey, an application of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, currently popular among writers seeking sure-fire narrative structures. In Campbellian terms, Psycho belongs with MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939): ‘a woman’s journey’. Marion, like Dorothy, leaves a mundane, destructive world (Phoenix, Kansas), travels a winding road, encounters tests, thresholds, helpers and enemies (including a trickster – like the car dealer?) and ‘approaches the inmost cave’ (which in this case is a house) where dwells a ‘wizard’ (in Oz, a father figure, whom the daughter exposes, in Psycho, a mother-witch, who kills the daughter). Marion doesn’t return from ‘over the rainbow’, she goes down the plughole, into the black swamp. The ‘return journey’, which in Oz provides the ‘falling action’ (!), is performed in Psycho by Marion’s ‘representatives’, Lila and Sam. Topography and meteorology loom large in both films. Such structural similarities coexist with obvious and enormous differences – of genre, mood, morality, optimism/pessimism, etc. – which testify to the inability of any given structures to prescribe very much.
AN ORGANIC STRUCTURE
Many structuralisms concern themselves with narrative shapes. An ‘organic structuralism’ might start from thematic elements in a particular story. Marion, Lila and Mrs Bates are ‘three faces of motherhood’. Mrs Bates, to be sure, is not a real woman, only a projection of Norman’s sick, male, filial imagination, but her apparent presence overlaps with such ‘terrible mothers’ as Medea and Jocasta, the destructively jealous mother, especially as described by Christiane Olivier in Les Enfants de Jocaste, her enlightening riposte to Freudian Oedipal theory and Lacanian phallocracy. A fourth face of mother is Caroline’s pill-providing mother, a fifth is Mrs Campbell’s motherliness, and the script provides a sixth – for Marion and Lila are orphans mothering one another. This also establishes another ‘mother’ possibility – no mother – plus sisters as reciprocal mothers (which strictly speaking makes a seventh). ‘Fatherliness’ appears via Cassidy’s spiel, Lowery’s age, the Sam sheriff relation – and Norman’s Oedipal jealousy of his stepfather and the PAC relations. The characters all pattern into one another. For instance, Marion forms one kind of pair with Sam (romance), another kind of pair with Lila (sisterhood), another kind of pair with Norman (‘ships that pass in the night’), another with Caroline (needling workmate). Marion’s journey sets up another ‘group’: Lowery at the crossing, the patrolman, the car dealer and the storm – their ‘escalation’ of ‘confusions’ gives her ‘impulsion’ its nasty twists. The office people make a quartet of contrasts. Sam–Lila–Arbogast make a trio. The useful paradigm is ‘variations on a theme’, and recombinatory structures, both very familiar in discussing musical structures. They’re not formed by binary oppositions, and similarity as well as difference influences their meanings. The variations on all the set themes constitute the special agenda of the film. From this angle, Psycho, like Hamlet, is devoted, not to one theme, but to a combination of them – every theme is a thread, in a ‘web’ of attitudes, such as cultures constantly set up. Major psycho-moral themes here include impulsive/obsessive desire (Marion) versus treated stick-in-the-mud depressiveness (Sam), fierce loyalty (Lila) versus self-doubt (Sam), madness versus ‘false lucidity’ (the sheriff, the psychiatrist), and in particular the chaotic nature of thinking (‘half-right, half-wrong’).
A GENETIC STRUCTURE
In his ‘genetic structuralism’, the Marxist Lucien Goldmann’s relates texts or intellectual positions to the alternative possibilities, from which their auteur chooses. Along these lines, one could say that Psycho selects all its elements from the diversity of American cultural possibilities – including mythical and first discovered ones. Their similarities with other American films explain why ‘difference’ can’t define meaning. Nonetheless, Psycho is a unique text because it’s a unique structure; and it would also follow that the defining structure of Psycho is the ‘moment by moment’ flow, from one event to the next, through 90 minutes. From this angle, the three Psychos – Bloch’s, Hitchcock’s, Van Sant’s – aren’t ‘variants on the same story’, but ‘three different structures (of ideas) using one narrative structure’.
In some respects, Marion’s journey is loosely picaresque (‘brief encounters along the way’). In other respects, its structure is very tight, though it’s tied together, not by some ‘logic’ of events (for at any point the story could have developed differently), but by the recurrence of ideas and motifs (birds and birdlike traits, mirrors and rear windows, desert/swamp, two overhead shots, etc.). In its plays on variable meaning within reiterated motifs, one might posit a tension of classical and baroque, as in Racine.
A Visual Thematic
Strangers on a Train had a ‘criss-cross’ motif (the plot, tennis-court serves, tennis rackets on a lighter, railway tracks intersecting, like individual destinies). It integrates with other visual motifs (e.g. the fairground ride spinning out of orbit), thus avoiding monotony. Psycho makes much of a ‘Janus-face’ structure. In two bedrooms (the hotel, and at home), Marion U-turns round a bed. The cop drives in from the left, and then from the right. Mirrors are ‘Janus faces’ – the original looks one way, the image the other. Marion’s relentless drive forward makes much of a rear window, i.e. looking backward. Marion turns about in the shower, while being attacked; but while dying, she turns back again, completing the turn. Lila, on entering the Bates house, also does a full turn (looking each of four ways, which, in folk tales, might symbolise due caution, against evil forces – unlike Marion’s one-way rush). Other structures and themes abound, of course, as noted in the text.
Secret Structures of the Anal Eye
A psychoanalytical colleague makes a, to my mind, sensational suggestion, which I hesitate to put forward, lest it overshadow everything else. If, he says, a patient had conveyed to him, as if it were a dream, the story-space of Psycho, he might indeed suspect some ‘A-N-L’ theme. The turnabout motifs direct attention to what’s behind Marion; the burly policeman approaches her from behind; a black car tries to overtake; a second black car bangs in bringing belongings on its back seat, and driven by another virile, lower-class male. Marion puts in the toilet papers bearing money calculations, thus evoking the Freudian equation, money equals gold equals shit. In Marion’s case, the calculation expresses punctiliousness (another ‘anal’ characteristic), and the film separates her from the other Freudian association with anal, obsession with power. At this point, readers who are easily shocked (we know you’re out there somewhere), please stop reading here now, skipping the next paragraph, which offends me too.
Marion, weakening under Norman’s blows, turns about frenziedly in the shower, turning her back to her assailant; later, the eye-plughole cross-fade ‘collapses’ the ‘looking’ theme into a black hole through which dirty things escape. Simply put, a hidden theme of the dream is sodomy – though whether the dreamer wished to commit it, or feared it, or both, isn’t clear. In Hitchcock’s day this practice was strictly illegal, even between married couples, though differently regarded in different subcultures (vide Lady Chatterley’s Lover). Hitchcock’s ‘root’ culture deemed sodomy vile, and Hitchcock might have found it nastily intriguing. (He certainly knew tying up could have erotic vibes, though Truffaut, the innocent young Frenchman, seems to ignore Hitch’s little nudge.) All this might go into a bin labelled ‘Polymorphous Perversity’, and we note that the story-as-dream successfully disguises the theme, which only surmise can propose. It converges, however, with power/survival/dominance themes, and with the ‘Excremental Vision’, as earlier proposed, and a psychoanalysis might diagnose ‘anal’ structures in the Hitchcock oeuvre (in Psycho, for example, the date/time punctiliousness). As we go to press, I came across this note from the director of WR –Mysteries of the Organism (1971), a deeply thoughtful movie about psychoanalysis and America: ‘the sphincter is the most authoritarian of muscles, that which concentrates the greatest number of social pressures. Western society, which is extremely anal, through its obsession with profit, work, leads to paranoia.’59 However, psychoanalysis insists that all adult psyches contain some infantile elements. It’s certainly not a ‘master-key’ to Psycho’s structure, or Hitchcock’s films, it’s just one aspect among many others.
Genrology Psycho
(To our gentler readers, welcome back.) Psycho posed problems for trade categorisation. It’s both ‘thriller’ and ‘horror’. It blends ‘drama’, ‘suspense melodrama’ and, perhaps, ‘woman’s picture’ (such as feminists prefer to call ‘melodrama’, thus adding another sense to that overloaded signifier). It might now be categorised with noir, though in 1960 Hollywood hardly knew the word. Does a word exist for trade-offs of ‘Gothic’ and ‘realism’, in the sense of ‘ordinary little people’ films, à la Chayefsky? If it does, does it denote a genre, or ungenrable exceptions? Since ‘poetic realism’ is a genre, would Psycho’s ‘lyrical realism’ qualify as its ‘cousin’ (with a gothic tinge)? In terms of film genres, I’d plump for ‘lyrical melodrama’ – somewhere between Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955). Looking beyond movie genres, perhaps it’s theatre of cruelty (a bourgeois version of). Perhaps it qualifies as a tragedy – not, of course, ‘pure tragedy’, as per I. A. Richards, but as ‘impure tragedy’ – a modern mutation, all the more interesting for its many forms, and for ending in ‘inconsolable restitution’, which Aristotle would have called a ‘mixed end’. All the genres proposed here are loose categories, and none prescribes stereotypical story elements (kinds of hero, story shapes, ‘attractions’, etc.).
A Sterility Tragedy
If comedy arose from‘ satyr plays’, and obscene fertility rituals, maybe tragedy constitutes ‘sterility ritual’. Psychomight testify to that. From a ‘Golden Bough’ perspective (as pursued through several Pasolini films), Marion’s blood falling into the bath would evoke menstruation (fertility falls on sterile soil), there’s a desert theme, Mrs Bates isn’t fruity (an aspect of fertility), her coconut-head is dried, Norman’s incestuous ‘fusion’ with his mother is a sterile one, and so on. It’s not fully developed, but a side-theme only – as ‘fertility’ is, in much modern life. Much modern sexual theory, perhaps including Freud’s, divorces sex and Eros from their ‘right true end’ in Mother (and Father) Nature, the reproduction of the species, and reduces sex to a source of individual, and if possible sterile, pleasure (a sort of narcissism). Does the strange aridity of Psycho, with its impulsions and empty surfaces, somehow reflect the fear of fertility, in modern society?
Progeny
After Hitchcock’s death, Psycho spawned three follow-ups, Psycho II (1983), Psycho III (directed by Anthony Perkins, 1986), and Psycho IV: The Beginning (written by Stefano, in 1990). They’re essentially potboilers, with the odd smart touch, but nowhere near the first film’s class.
Gus Van Sant remade the original in 1998 for a generation which takes as a norm both colour and more explicit sexuality. It follows the original pretty closely, often line for line, move for move, shot for shot. However, the fame of ‘the shower murder’ makes the shock of surprise near impossible, and Van Sant’s forté is the description of drifters and wilful waifs; bourgeois marriage obsession seems way off his mental map. The leads behave more like fickle teenagers than frustrated adults (partly because cinema audiences are younger than in Hitchcock’s days, partly because adults are less settled in their ways). Anne Heche relies on a sort of ‘negative girl’ baby-charm; the colour palette (soft pinks, orange, salmon) evokes ‘1970s road regionalism’, not the weight and thrust of Hitchcock’s visuals. (Their monochrome ‘muscle’ does have a colour equivalent: it’s images using heavy shades of one or two strong colours.) Hitchcock’s characters were all originals: Van Sant ‘quotes’ a lot (Dan Duryea, Red Skelton). The remake is not insensitive, but it’s indecisive and fey. The two Psychos have near-identical structure, narrative, dialogue and ‘attractions’, yet the world of difference between them demonstrates the power of fine details whose forms and meanings are so hard to describe in words that we’re always tempted to think of them as ‘mere style’, or ‘superficial detail’.
Perhaps the most interesting ‘spin-off’ is the art installation by Douglas Gordon, first presented at the Hayward Gallery in 1996, designed around a slow-motion showing of Psycho timed to last 24 hours. The extreme slow-motion ‘expands’ the film’s micro-moments, and makes constructive use of the best elements of a meticulously crafted film. A welcome change, since high culture modernisms, like ‘pop art’, and post-modernism, rarely recognise what in the ‘mass’ and ‘popular’ arts is sensitive, careful, elaborated and traditional – whether or not bourgeois. Hitchcock’s Psycho is deeply bourgeois – it’s persuasive because it is deeply so.
‘Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!’
—exults the highway cop in The Phantom Tollbooth, as he hands its hero a ticket for moral incorrectness. In an admirable article in Film Comment, Professor James Griffith groups me with a monstrous regiment of critics, who want Psycho to make the spectator feel guilty (of voyeurism, misogyny, etc.). Griffith’s shrewd point back-foots me, and, what’sworse, jabs a nerve. On page 332 of The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock I do say, ‘The film is a practical joke: it convicts all the spectators of Original Sin’, and link it to ‘a religious ritual, involving confession’. Alas, I didn’t foresee the imminent takeover of Anglophone Film Studies by a combination of academic ‘political correctness’ and neo-Freudo-Marxist anti-humanism. After the deluge, any mention of guilt might seem to acquiesce with the later position. Instead, I’d have appealed to Aristotle’s idea of catharsis, expanded from only ‘pity and terror’, to a more general ‘shake-up’ of ideas about ‘the world one has to face’. It’s a familiar reaction in the performance arts. Cinema managers have testified that, after certain (popular) films, the audience leaves in sombre silence, as if plunged in solemn gloom, though later on, they’ll talk about it with friends over coffee, and warmly recommend the film to others. Ingmar Bergman’s films are famous for this effect, and I remember reacting like this to The Seventh Seal, to Fellini’s La Strada (1954), Clement’s Gervaise (1956) and other box-office stormers with long legs. Critically disliked films may also exert this effect (e.g. Judgement at Nuremberg [1961], Ruby Gentry [1952]).
Occasionally, I speak of an element of guilt in relation to Hitchcock’s films but I never make it the major element, dominating identification. In general, I argue, exactly as Griffith does, that the hero’s guilt does not trouble us much – as in the case of Rear Window.
Did Hitch Climb Parnassus?
Whether or not ‘evaluation’ is a primary task of criticism, people wax passionate about it. Unfortunately, it involves just about every controversy to do with art, culture and honest witness to experience. Once upon a time, Parnassus accommodated all the Muses; today so many subcultures and specialisations thrive, that ‘classic’ status looks more like ‘horses for courses’ and ‘for each art, its own (ever-quarrelling) gods’. Valuation-wise, these pointers spring to mind.
1.In the movie pantheon, the place of Psycho seems secure: the BFI’s idea of devoting a book to it raised no eyebrows to my knowledge.
2.Psycho occupies a sort of ‘inter-cultural’ space, linking the formal-aesthetic refinement of traditional ‘high culture’, with middlebrow socio-moral thoughtfulness (as in, say, Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson), some modernist characteristics, an emotionality (melodrama) verging on ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and libidinal material which some modernists like to think is ‘pulp’.
3.In high culture, interest in ‘minor works’ is thoroughly traditional.
4.In The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, I argued that Hitchcock’s films have such craftsmanship, such aesthetic elegance, that, as he said of Strangers on a Train, ‘Isn’t it a beautiful design? You could study it for ever.’ Nonetheless, I thought his Hollywood showman prudence often clipped his artistic wings and kept most of his films on the foothills around Parnassus. Psycho, however, was one of the exceptions.
5.In the annals of ‘mainstream movies’, and of socio-cultural history, it marks a turning-point (the ‘turn’ from conservative-liberal consensus to 1960s ‘liberation/alienation/uneasiness’, and from humanism to post-humanism).
6.That impact is probably unrepeatable, and winning a place ‘in the history books’ isn’t ‘immortality’. Recently a young lady presenter on BBC2 introduced it with jokey-comfy comments about ‘twitching curtains’ and perhaps it’s entering the category of ‘films that don’t actually scare you, but you like to think they do, for their other, quieter resonances’ – a melancholy, yet honourable category, to which most ‘horror’ stories in fact belong.
7.In the course of studying it, I found things which had strong immediate impact (the shower sequence, the music) lost their power first, but the discovery of finer points integrated remembrance of the shock into a sensitising context.
8.In film culture, I’d place it alongside the best Powells, above the best Murnaus and within hailing distance of Persona – though perhaps it helps to see Persona first!
9.Thinking around for literary equivalents my free-association kept turning up The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Books 1 and 2 of Paradise Lost, maybe because they’re all ‘spiritual journeys’ – poetico-lyrical descriptions of twisted moral impulses – though more ‘realistic’ than, like Coleridge, romantico-transcendental, or, like Milton, ‘worldly-puritanical-theological’. Though this free-association prioritises themes over ‘cultural level’, it might be a hint that Hitchcock’s best films can lay claim to a small-holding on Parnassus.
10.Another possibility: much as D. H. Lawrence was a ‘vitalist’ of eroticism, whose ‘genius’ moments stem from his lyrical sense of Eros as a driving force, Hitchcock’s best films achieve a ‘vitalism’ of fearfulness, and of ‘petty bourgeois prudence’, as a ‘transcendent’ human drive.
11.Given the collapse of criteria across ‘high post-modernist culture’, the formidable powers of complex craftsmanship to work new ‘inter-cultural’ zones (see point 2) of ‘honest witness to human experience’ require reassertion.