Publication details for works cited in the notes appear in the bibliography.
1.Usefully summarised in Eric Rayner, The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis.
2.Jacques Lacan and Vladimir Granoff, ‘Fetishism: the Symbolic, The Imaginary and the Real’, in Sandor Lorand and Michael Balint (eds), Perversions, Psychodynamics and Therapy.
3.It’s often said that the scandal ended Powell’s career, but this much-repeated story is entirely false, as a glance at his career makes obvious. Apart from anything else, film production circles are more tolerant than academic ideology chooses to suppose.
4.Spectator ‘identification’ is a highly problematic concept. Here at least, it’s equivalent to ‘passionate involvement based on affinity’. It’s stronger than ‘interest’ or ‘concern’, and it does involve a certain shift of perspective, away from ‘objective impartiality’; but it by no mean entails ‘uncritical partisanship of one character only’. Here, many, or most, spectators would identify primarily with Marion, but also, and appreciably, with Sam.
5.On the female counterpart of the Oedipus complex, see, for instance, Christiane Olivier, Les Enfants de Jocaste.
6.‘Subliminal’ is a weasel word, and its tricky ambiguities are beyond us here. Suffice it to say, that many effects and thoughts are subliminal in some respects (their exact mechanisms), but powerfully conscious in others. Similarly, evocative details which the ordinary spectator doesn’t notice – ‘can’t see’ – may be glaringly obvious to the eyes of film technicians. (Conversely, some film technicians can’t see the film for the technicalities.) Continuity and its rules, which are more like rules of thumb, than like syntax and grammar in language, are famously problematic. Sometimes experienced craftsmen violently disagree about how a shot will or won’t read when put near another.
7.Peter Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Howard Hawks.
8.Even Theodore Price omits it, from his 414 pages about Hitchcock and Homosexuality: His 50-year Obsession with Jack the Ripper and the Superbitch Prostitute. Some passages are spot on, but the problem remains, that if you headline certain streaks, and shrug off the wider sympathies and countervailing decencies, it all gets too lurid and inquisitorial, and risks traducing the whole person.
9.Shot dissection, aka scene dissection: the breakdown of scenes (and their actions) into separate shots (cf Sharff; Salt). This aspect of Hitchcock’s style owes less to Russian editing than to German editing (Murnau, Ruttmann, Pabst, Dupont), the pioneer importance of which film histories, mesmerised by Soviet theories, often overlook.
10.Surrealist or feminist spectators may regret Marion’s capitulation to bourgeois resignation, or capitalism, or patriarchy, or all three, and reckon that as a triply oppressed woman she has every moral right to rob nasty men.
11.‘Deduction’ is what detective stories call it, though it’s sometimes called ‘induction’; it’s essentially empirical. It’s a heuristic, not a rigorous, logic; but it’s a logic nonetheless, a pragmatic logic, at the junction of praxis and what Marxists think is their rigorous theory. Medawar speaks of ‘hypothetico-deductive empiricism’, as the logic which understands the material world; whereas verbally rigorous logic has very restricted use.
12.In general principle, it’s akin to the famous trope in Stagecoach, where the camera pulls back from the stage coach far away down there and reveals the Red Indians back here – waiting to attack… In theorising off-screen space, it’s easy to overlook the fact that, even when the camera is ‘in’ the scene, it’s almost always back from the shot: the edge of the frame is varying distances from the camera, with an ‘apron’ of hidden space between camera and picture.
13.The distinction between these two ‘identities’ ties in with David Reisman’s very influential The Lonely Crowd. He distinguishes ‘other-direction’ – conformity to other people’s ideas – as a newly prevalent American attitude – from ‘inner direction’ – conformity to one’s own ideas – a more traditional, puritanical, American attitude. Inner-direction emphasises conscience, guilt and ‘the lone moral stand’; as per Twelve Angry Men (1956). Outer-direction emphasises status, shame and going with the flow of ‘community’. Rebel without a Cause, and its source, turns on the same distinction.
14.This scene reminds me of the strange car drive in Cocteau’s Orphée (1950). A car stops at a level-crossing; on the other side, the landscape is in negative.
15.Why so few real-life problems are soluble by rigorous logic is a problem beyond our scope here.
16.In an earlier text I compared this cop to an Old Testament angel: the figure whose stern warning is very like a threat. The warning is also a test, and if you fail the test, the test destroys you. God, being God, knows in advance whether or not you will destroy yourself, so angelic visitations may result in your damnation. And perhaps that happens here: the cop’s intervention pushes Marion further into folly. That God decides to damn you was heavily emphasised by traditional Calvinists (which the Puritans were), but Catholicism is uneasily aware of the logical problem (as of its more cheerful, but morally more dangerous, counterpart, the felix culpa paradox, whereby your very sins may bring you round to God). Psycho is rather too secular for angels unawares; and in 1960 angels were an endangered species (though devils appeared in horror films). But from the late 1930s to around 1950, angels and other spirits made quite frequent screen appearances (e.g. Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, 1947), and since Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1987) they’re suddenly all over the place again.
17.How short depends on composition, graphics, etc.; it could have been very roundabout; but that’s another essay.
18.‘Opposition’ is a popular term in film theory, but when are opposites ‘binary’, ‘diametrical’, ‘complementary’ or ‘dialectical’?
19.By ‘cultural’ I don’t mean ‘ideological’ in the now prevalent Marxist sense. Rather, I mean that cultural changes interacting with movie market changes plus technical changes etc. allowed many ‘state of the art’ minds to converge – but only if and only insofar as each of them, independently, made different choices which brought different positions together. (Just as two objects converge by moving in different directions.) Culture is far more diverse, far less compulsory, than most ideology theories suppose. The useful paradigm for ‘a culture’ is not ‘linguistic structure’ but ‘ecological system’, rich in extensively autonomous subsystems, cross-currents, niches, etc.
20.More on the dearth of tragedy in Hollywood, especially 1930–60, in Edgar Morin, Les Stars/The Stars.
21.Once set on a course, the primitive logic of the Unconscious is so rigorous, it doesn’t notice differences, only similarities. (As in ‘anything that’s longer than it’s wide signifies the phallus, anything that’s not, signifies the vagina’.) Cf Ignacio Matte Blanco, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-Logic.
22.Cf, for example, Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism, and Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Respectable evidence for ‘full sensory replay’ of memories and/or imaginings, under electric stimulation of the brain, first appeared in the 1930s (cf Richard L. Gregory, The Mind in Science, and Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Natural History of the Mind).
23.An early ‘manifesto’ of the flowing style is the ‘railway-scape’ in Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938). Maybe Bullitt (1968) kick-started the ‘cataclysmic’ driving school. If Psycho works on driving as ‘nowherelessness’, Un homme et une femme (Lelouch, 1986) achieves, in modern equivalent, Dr Johnson’s definition of happiness, as rapid movement in a carriage, with a beautiful female who can add something to the conversation (Anouk Aimée).
24.Did Ivens’ film inspire the assassination scene in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), with its mêlée of rain, umbrellas, crowds, trams? Perhaps, but artists don’t just imitate other texts; sometimes, ‘great minds meet’, and maybe Hitchcock was inspired, not by Rain, but by rain.
25.A keen sense of multiple symmetries, jigsawing in and out of each other, might link with volatile ambivalence: ‘All relations are swiftly reversible’. And obsessions with relations might be a coefficient of splits. Schizos would be obsessive as a coefficient of the splits which limit mental movements, and paranoid because they’re looking in the wrong place – ‘the wrong way’. But all that risks Freudian hypochondria, whereby all turns of mind derive from some deep disease, and good health has no advantages – as if ‘Only cripples can walk fast,’ ‘Only the nearly deaf know how to listen’ and so on.
26.Cinema scares are often attributed to our Unconscious, but maybe that’s too simple. For one thing, fear at a film is neither unconscious nor irrational. It fulfils all the criteria for conscious experience: we expected it, we paid for it, we know we’re feeling it, we gently mock ourselves for doing so, we remember it well, we discuss it with other people and we theorise it by introspection. It also fulfils all the criteria for rationality: it’s adaptive (to our situation, being in a cinema); it’s socially sanctioned, and it’s appropriate (lively response to description is a function of being sapiens). To be sure, our conscious, rational responses are mixed in with Unconscious and irrational ones, but nothing suggests that they dominate, since our behaviour is appropriate.
27.‘Deletion’ and ‘ellipsis’ are different things. An ellipsis omits a major narrative event; and it’s a positive figure of narration (often, indeed, a way of emphasising the event, or its relation to other matters). A deletion omits irrelevant details, for a negative function to clear the way for positive detail. The ellipsis is an exceptional omission within whatever continuity system the narration has set up. Deletions are part of a continuity system.
28.Coleridge’s formulation predates the cinema of course, and was directed against those who confused response to reading fiction with belief in their truth. It’s even more relevant today, given three ideas held even in seriously intended theory:
1. That moving images induce ‘belief’.
2. That this is because they’re ‘illusionistic’ and
3. That ‘illusionism’ follows from ‘realism’.
None of these is true. Moving images may be phenomenally vivid, but that doesn’t constitute an illusion, since, if we can recognise the subjects of the images, we must also recognise the images as images – as we do: we can see that a film is a film. Moreover, we see and know from our other senses, notably kinaesthesia, that we’re in a cinema. Or if the images are on TV, we can see the set around the images, and the room around it. Our occasional feeling of an illusion arises when the moving images have concentrated our attention, thanks to their stream of interesting ideas, and thanks to a dearth of competitive interest from the immediate viewing environment. As for ‘bourgeois illusionism’, butt of Marxists, formalists and anti-realists, bourgeois art appreciation, like this book, depends on paying close attention to the forms of the medium tel quel. There also exists a ‘popular aesthetic’, to which all Hitchcock movies are geared. They rarely refer to forms or medium as such (‘self-reflexivity’, ‘alienation effects’;), for the very good reason that they’ve concentrated their rich meanings on a different level, that of an ‘osmosis’ of diegesis and style, from which level form and medium in themselves are irrelevant distractions. There is no fear of ‘breaking an illusion’; most spectators of Psycho have already recognised Marion as Janet Leigh, Norman as Tony Perkins, and so on; they may be admiring their acting; and, in a general way, assessing the film (‘It’s okay, but there’s not very much happening’). When some good reason exists to upfront film qua film, popular audiences have no problem with it: consider, for example, Hellzapoppin! (1941), Our Town, La Ronde (1950), La Fête à Henriette (1952). As for ‘illusionism’ depending on ‘realism’, consider Bambi (1942) and Dumbo (1941). Adult spectators shed tears over the talking cartoon deer, and the cartoon elephant who not only talks but flies by flapping his ears, but who would call these characters ‘realistic’? (Why they’re so vivid requires another term, another analysis, altogether.) And in just what sense in Herrmann’s powerful Psycho music ‘illusionistic’ and ‘realistic’?
29.Love/hate, as a consciously running theme, had irrupted earlier, notably in Gone with the Wind (1939), and in melodrama, as in The Outlaw (1940–3), Duel in the Sun and Gilda (both 1946). Especially thoughtful is Ruby Gentry. But Psycho found a new, quiet tone: ‘I don’t hate her. I hate what she’s become. The illness.’
30.And even about very simple things – optical illusions, mirror-reversals….
31.I don’t mean to rule out the feminine, and female desire to be desired, admired and envied, which may find covert satisfaction in ‘peeping Tom’ situations (Perkins’ Norman seems attractive, soulful, safe and respectful). Perhaps it’s the high point of her superiority to Norman, for which her naked death, in the shower, is an entirely undeserved payback. But I’d have thought protected modesty the main ‘woman’s angle’ here.
32.One writes ‘the camera closes on it’, and some spectators will register this happening, but the phrase is really a form of words for a less definable effect: our gaze approaches the enlarging object, which, filling our field of vision, monopolises our attention (and, perhaps, presents new aspects). Before it was a, maybe poignant, detail, now it, and its details, acquires a new poetic force. The rule of thumb would be, that, whether or not we briefly think about what the invisible, irrationally present camera is doing, it’s what’s on screen that predominates in our perceptions and our minds. It’s to do, not with ‘illusionism’, ‘mystification’; it’s a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ (and it’s reversible, depending on context and other factors). The mention of the camera in this popular form of words reminds us how aware spectators are that a film is ‘only’ a film, a ‘construction’ and that they don’t normally confuse diegesis with reality. A special interest in camera movements is entirely justified, but it can get out of hand, as when formalists suppose that spectators ‘think’ scenes as if they were being watched by a camera, or that the camera corresponds to an invisible watcher-narrator (who may even verge on being an ‘unacknowledged character in the drama’). Moreover, no camera observes a scene; it only records it. But all that’s another essay.
33.Epitaph… by William Camden, c. 1600, here misquoted, as that’s usual.
34.Hitchcock must have known that ex-Victorian music-: hall-cum-urban-folksong: ‘Your baby has gone down the plughole.’ (An angel advises the poor bereaved mother: ‘The poor little thing was so skinny and thin/It shoulda been bathed in a jug…’).
35.Russian montage is routinely described in terms of ‘collisions’ between ‘hard cuts’, a simplification which for brevity’s sake we’ve followed here. In fact Strike, Mother and Earth make considerable use of cross-fades, whose juxtapositions are formally quite different from cuts (though less congenial to a Communist cult of decisive hardness in all things).
36.The continuity rule is usually given in shorthand form: ‘Always cut on movement’.
37.My acknowledgments to David Cairns (University of Edinburgh) and Benjamin Halligan (University of Aberystwyth).
38.It’s so convenient to write that the camera, or the film or the audience, were in the scene – taking a shower with Marion! And that the shower was constantly expanding, now in one direction, now in another, enough to accommodate, not only the camera, but the space between it and Marion. But that’s hardly spectator experience. Rather, the diegesis and the film apparatus meet outside the diegesis, not within it. The camera is no more ‘there’, in the film, than the shower is ‘here’, in the cinema. The diegesis exists in a sort of Utopia – that is to say, a ‘no-place’, to which the imagination has access (a sort of metaphysical space, which sometimes manifests as space, though that’s probably its metaphor for a system of relations). The movie tel quel is real, visible and concrete, but interest concentrates in the diegesis, as filtered by descriptive style, and to this we pay most of our attention, in the form of a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, which we withdraw if it’s boring, offensive or otherwise fails to meet our requirements. The medium looks like a seamless illusion, only because and insofar as we don’t want pointless distractions. (In fact the impossibilities, intellectual and phenomenological, are too glaring and many to list.)
39.Audience relief when the car sinks seems to me a step beyond what, normally, ‘sympathy’ with a criminal in this predicament would connote, and this would justify the stronger term, ‘identification’. ‘Identification’ is a weasel word, with many, tricky meanings, alas. In the meaning used here, which in my experience is the most widespread one, it doesn’t entail ‘total, uncritical, identification, restricted to heroes only’. That is but one type of identification (identification with an ‘idealised ego’). Most character-spectator identification involves juggling several variables, notably, ‘life-predicaments’, desiderata and values (some moral, some immoral; some official, some vernacular). Routinely overlooked in discussions of ‘spectator identification’ is its opposite, rejection, though it’s obviously involved in the construction of a villain, which depends on spectator repudiation of attitudes on offer in the film. ‘Goodies and baddies’ is, after all, a familiar structure, often vehemently maintained (though it quite rarely coincides with the moral codes of the bureaucratic apparatus of the bourgeois state). Some melodramas maintain a simple ‘soot and whitewash’ polarity: the hero has no serious faults, the villain no redeeming virtues (not even amoral ones, like courage). It’s a ‘binary opposition’, and, like most such ‘oppositions’, exists on a fairly low, even primitive, level of thought. Many melodramas strongly nuance it: the hero has serious temptations, even vices, amounting to villainous tendencies, and commits actions which seriously incriminate him (though they don’t define him), while the villain has many powerful virtues, partial justifications, extenuating circumstances, etc. In many such cases, spectator identification shifts, as the story proceeds, and is frequently split – the splits may shift as the story proceeds, and a ‘binary’ frame may accommodate several changing and competing sub-conflicts. One distinction between melodrama and drama may be, that melodrama upfronts some such moral dichotomy (even when it nuances or troubles it), while in drama it’s not a basic polarity – the conflict may happen upon it, e.g. as a character frequently ‘does wrong’, but heroism/villainy is a description of a character, or his actions, not a shaping structure of the narrative. In drama and melodrama alike, all identifications are open to challenge from other characters, even minor ones – our degree of sympathy with Marion partly depends on Lowery and Cassidy being ‘unidentifiable-with’ – one spiteful, the other mean. Our identifications with Marion, Norman, and Sam, have all along been partial, ambivalent and counter-balanceable. A problem with any terminology is that no clear line divides ‘sympathy’, which is ‘feeling-with’, from ‘conditional identification’. In movies, and art generally, both relate to what anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl called ‘la participation mystique’ and to Edgar Morin’s sophisticated version of identification theory in Le Cinéma ou l‘homme imaginaire.
40.‘Superego’ is a confusing name, since it’s not ‘above’ the ego, but below it, and part of the Unconscious. The name hints at an entity which is above and outside the ego. A position which, oddly enough, would correspond with social constraints – which Freud might have thought worked on the Unconscious mostly through the Conscious mind. But if we think of them working on the Unconscious ‘directly’ (without modification by the Conscious, as Freud conceived it [moral, rational, respectable, adult, etc., etc.]) it would have some affinity with Lacan’s ‘The Other’ (social constraints built into Conscious and Unconscious alike) – just as that has some affinity with Sartre’s ‘the others’ (‘Hell is other people’ – because their minds, merely by looking at us, make us make ourselves unconscious of our real selves).
41.Freud emphasised ‘castration’, but some non-sexual punishments – disembowelling, boiling in oil, pulling apart by wild horses – are at least as frightening, and if psychoanalysis made more of power/survival, as radical/instinctual drives, they might be seen as not ‘substitutes’ for phallic disempowerment, but as even more unpleasant, in their own right.
42.Whence many problems about ‘scenes’ for theory, but that’s another essay.
43.A few years later, crime fiction will dwell on morbid sexual goings-on of every stripe and hue. In his attitude to all this, Hitchcock was, I suspect, less morbid, or complaisant towards morbidity, than our cultural climate since. He was closer to Victorianism, to the Jesuits, and to Freud, than to post-modernism, in assuming that repression was a precondition of being human, and that even though all men are naturally wicked, they were naturally moral also, and that natural morality should be reinforced, by social discipline, into ‘second nature’. Maybe he had suffered an overdose, but that didn’t alter the principle. He never claimed to be some sort of saint: on the contrary, he was uniquely frank (in his canny and controlling way) about certain moral, emotional and sexual shortcomings.
44.Insofar as they attract attention, if briefly only, as the film goes on, they’re different from still smaller details (the preconscious, the subliminal, etc.) which contribute as much, or more, to what Leavis called ‘the texture’ of a work of art. But that’s another can of worms-within-worms…
45.As awful as this seems to have turned out, it’s easy to imagine how a mild prank, in an era when practical jokes were more common and acceptable than now, might have inadvertently gone wrong.
46.Craft terminology is often very approximate, and what ‘natural’ really meant was, I think, more like ‘consistent with the procedures of this world and its style’. But that’s another problem.
47.And not only in narrative. In some paradoxical formulations of information theory, information is surprise. Consistency is tautology and redundancy, except where some surprise or other is expected, so that ‘no surprise’ becomes significant.
48.Does anyone market ‘Bates Hotel’ notepaper, perhaps around Hallowe’ en?
49.It’s arguable, though not provable, that Cassidy, Lowery, the dealer, Arbogast (and later Sheriff Chambers) are all father figures, by age, authority, power and a theme of trust. The cop and (later) the psychiatrist would be young father figures (an unusual, but intriguing, category). Hollywood ‘character stars’ whose roles would represent covert ‘father figures’ (with varying degrees of ambivalence) include Emil Jannings, Edward G. Robinson, PatO’Brien, Paul Muni, Charles Laughton, Karl Malden (in two Brando films), Marlon Brando in his turn (in The Godfather) and, through his last two decades, John Wayne. In Movies: A Psychological Study, psychoanalysts Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites note that 1940s’ villains are regularly covert father figures; this would link with sociological theory about American rejection of the immigrant father (Geoffrey Gorer, The Americans).
50.Ronald Bergan, Anthony Perkins – A Haunted Life.
51.‘Subjective’ shots and ‘point of view’ shots can be confusing terms. In traditional trade parlance, a ‘subjective’ shot is what the audience would see if it were in some obvious position in the scene depicted, and excluces POVs, for which ‘character’s POV.’ might be clearer. ‘Point of view’ has another confusion. Sometimes it means ‘the point from which a view is seen’, sometimes it means that view itself; the latter view applies in ‘point of view shot’. Arbogast’s face is his point of view in the first sense, but not in the second.
52.Detective stories evolved fron ghost stories, via Wilkie Collins and the Gothic (romantic or urban), and have negligible trouble evolving back, as desired.
53.Piers Gerhart and Milton B. Singer, Guilt and Shame: A Psychoanalytic and Cultural Study, and Daniel L. Nathanson (ed.), The Many Faces of Shame.
54.Hollywood films occasionally made characters mini-clones of political figures. In The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1940), the worker-friendly director of a Federal project camp is a ‘mini’ FDR.
55.Perhaps it echoes Hitchcock’s boyish dreams of escape, expressed through drawing up meticulously real (istic) timetables of long foreign journeys. But that’s ‘control freak’ escape, where ‘sailing ship’ escape implies manly adventure. The two attitudes fight it out in Rich and Strange. East of Shanghai (1932), whose depressing conclusion is, that real adventure can get really nasty; but, safe return is spiritually blinkered. Heads you lose, tails you lose; but it’s better to only lose your tail, than your head as well…
56.Piaget attributes basic structures of meaning to ‘sensori-motor operations’ in Main Trends in Inter-disciplinary Research, while Lakoff and Johnson root verbal language in metaphors of bodily experience (Metaphors We Live By).
57.Psycho, like many a good film, offers good topics for debate, a use which would challenge the false consensuses assumed by ideology theory, and the catalogues of ‘stereotypes’ which reduce the better films to the level of the worst. ‘How should Norman be treated?’ might set those feminists who demand the death penalty for rape, against liberals who deplore the American revival of the death penalty, and pose interesting questions, like, should Norman’s violence, which proves that he’s very mad, spare him the death penalty which the violence against women of more typical males deserves? Or is the very distinction between sanity and madness a legal fiction, related to nothing real in human psychology, as radical liberals against conservative ones? But then again, if, as Laing, for the radical liberals, argues, we who seem sane are also mad, though less obviously, should the sane and the mad be equal before the law? Would Norman’s execution be any great loss to society, or to himself? Might it, indeed, count as euthanasia – saving his real self, from a hideous fantasy? There’s nothing like a real madman – saint or sinner – to prompt rich, unmanageable debate.
58.The extent to which psychoanalysis in the US was departing from, or rather, refusing to rejoin, conservative Freudian orthodoxies, is spelt out in Marie-Claire Durieux and Alain Fine, (eds), Sur les controverses américaines dans la psychanalyse.
59.Julien Suaudeau, ‘Dusan Makavejev, The Childhood of Art’.