Psycho is a 1960 horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Janet Leigh. The film’s about a woman, Marion Crane, who stole $40,000 and ran away, ending up at the Bates Motel after she got lost in the highway because of the rain. She finds Norman Bates, who is the owner of the motel and registers to spend the night. He asks her to have dinner with him at his house and when she’s getting ready, she hears a fight between him and his mother. Norman comes back to the motel with some food for her and stays with Marion while she eats. While they were talking, Norman tells Marion that his mother is sick, and he gets furious when Marion suggests that she should be institutionalized.
Marion returns to her room to take a shower, without knowing that Norman was watching her through a hole in the wall. Then, she is stabbed to death. Norman takes her body out of the cabin and puts it in the trunk of the car, as well as all her belongings, and sinks it in a swamp to take care of the evidence of what he just did. Back in Phoenix, Marion’s sister Lila and boyfriend Sam are concerned about her sudden disappearance. Arbogast, the detective, confirms Marion stole the money from her employer, so he starts tracking her and ends up at the Bates Motel too. When he asks Norman about Marion, he notices that Norman is evasive and nervous, so he starts getting suspicious. Norman mentions that Marion met his mother, so Arbogast wants to speak to her to see if she could give him some information to find Marion, but Norman refuses. Arbogast later goes to Norman’s house looking for Mrs. Bates, but he gets killed too.
Lila starts worrying because Arbogast hasn’t called to update her, so she and Sam decide to go to the motel to find out what was going on. But first, they reach the local sheriff and explain him what was going on. In response, the sheriff tells him that Norman’s mother has been dead for ten years, along with her lover, in a murder-suicide. Meanwhile, Norman fights again with his mother and tells her that he would hide her just for a while, so he takes her to the fruit cellar. Sam and Lila rent a room at the Bates Motel and search the cabin that Marion stayed in. Lila finds a scrap of paper with "$40,000" written on it while Sam notes that the bathtub has no shower curtain, so they concluded that Norman was responsible for Marion’s disappearance and also for taking the money from her. Sam distracts Norman while Lila sneaks into Norman’s house, looking for Mrs. Bates. Norman realizes something’s wrong and chases Lila. She hides in the fruit cellar and discovers Mrs. Bates sitting in a rocking chair. She calls Mrs. Bates but gets no reply, and then she comes closer and discovers that Mrs. Bates is just a corpse. When she screams, Norman comes into the cellar, dressed as his mother and ready to kill Lila, but Sam comes in and stops him.
Norman is arrested. A psychiatrist talks to him, just to find out that Norman was excessively controlled by his mother, but when she took a lover, he became jealous because she had "replaced him", and so he killed his mother and her lover. He later developed a split personality to erase the crime from his memory. At times he is just Norman, but other times the mother personality takes over. The psychiatrist also discovers that it was actually Mrs. Bates who killed Marion and two other girls, because she was “jealous” of them as Norman was with his lover. The movie ends with Marion’s car being recovered from the swamp.
Psychological analysis of Norman Bates Norman Bates has severe personality issues. He’s a very anxious, nervous and lonely person who doesn’t trust anyone and has no self-esteem at all. Because he was very attached to his mother, he probably developed the Oedipus complex due to the lack of opportunities to explore his sexual desires with other women besides her. This is why he was jealous of her lover, so he killed them. Eventually, he starts feeling guilty and he takes his mother’s personality, “bringing” her back to life by impersonating her. When he meets Marion, he is attracted to her and treats her “nice”, as everyone would do when looking for acceptance from the other person, but then the mother personality takes over and feels jealous about Norman liking another woman, so she decides to kill her.
Parallelism with Buñuel’s "Un Chien Andalou" Freud divided the human mind into three conflicting parts: the ego, the superego and the id. The ego rests between the id and the superego and provides us with a sense of self. He also considers the moral consciousness, self-observation and the development of moral values and ideals as expressions of the superego. The superego is defined as the “heir of the Oedipus complex in terms of parental demands and prohibitions”. Freud compared the human mind to an iceberg. The tiny part of the iceberg, which appears above the water surface, represents human perception. Below the surface lies a much darker, larger part of the iceberg representing the unconscious. Like Freud, Hitchcock chose for his movies, ladies that appear cold as ice in order to reveal their oppressed thoughts and desires. There are several Freudian aspects in “Un Chien Andalou” and “Psycho” regarding to the unconscious mind, especially, about sexual desires.
“Un Chien Andalou” attempts to show the hidden or repressed dimensions of the psyche. In other words, it tries to represent the unrepresentable, the unconscious. Through the whole film, Buñuel presents several aspects that symbolize fetishism as well as the sexual repression and desires of the characters. One of these symbols is the hand from where all the ants are coming out, representing how a hand can bring pleasure (through masturbation) and pain at the same time to a person. In “Psycho”, the sexual repression is observed in Norman. Supposedly, he masturbates while he’s watching Marion through the hole on the wall, so we can assume that he liberates the sexual tension he’s having at the moment. Apart from this, the most important aspect is the Oedipus complex that Norman has. The Oedipus complex refers to the unconscious child's desire to have sexual relations with the mother and to kill the father. It is unconscious because, as the child grows, he starts to realize that incestuous behaviors are socially unacceptable, so the only thing he can do is to fantasize about the mother.
Scenes where Norman’s insanity is exposed
When Marion goes into Norman’s office and sees al the stuffed birds.
When he sees Marion through the wall while she’s taking her clothes off.
When he’s taking care of all the evidence of the murder, but he doesn’t seem to be emotionally affected at all. His face is expressionless.
The scenes where he’s discussing with his mother.
Definitely, when he appears dressed up as Norma Bates.
MacGuffin A MacGuffin is an object that all the characters are interested in and that propels the action forwards. It is normally an object, but could also be a person. In this case, the MacGuffin is the money that Marion stole. This is why everyone is looking for her, and if it wasn’t for it, Arbogast wouldn’t have found the motel, giving Lila and Sam a path to find out what happened with Marion, and also to discover the atrocities Norman did.
Different characters’ empathy There are many situations through the film that made the audience feel identified in some way with the characters’ thoughts and feelings. To begin, the scene at the hotel room with Marion and Sam would make people think different things. For example, a part of the audience would think that Marion and Sam were having an inappropriate behavior for engaging in sexual activity without being married. Other people would think that there’s nothing wrong with it, and maybe they wanted to do the same thing because “it must feel nice to be intimate with someone”. Cassidy's statement that unhappiness can be bought away with money, makes the audience excuse Marion for stealing the $40,000 and even considering to do the same thing if they were in her same situation. Also, as the film continues, we see Marion having thoughts of what she did and considering to take the money back, so it makes the audience be like “you see, she’s a good person, she’s returning the money and everything will be normal again” The audience’s empathy for Norman is the most important. Even though he’s a psychopath, the audience feels kind of sorry for him because he’s mentally ill and he’s not himself. At first they see him at first being just Norman, and he seems nice and just looking for love and support, but after he kills Marion and Arbogast and the psychiatrist discovers that he is also portraying his mother’s personality, people can also justify his actions because he was so traumatized as a kid that he did what made her mother happy and satisfied, in this case, killing every women that represented a threat to her.
Sexuality In this film, sexuality is shown as a very strong feeling for both men and women. At the beginning of the film, we see Marion and Sam at the hotel room in a very intimate and passionate moment. Hitchcock didn’t mind the fact that sexuality was an inappropriate topic to be shown or talked about in public, and he incorporated scenes that could make the audience uncomfortable, for example, Marion using underwear only when she’s with Sam at the hotel. Another example of sexuality being interpreted as a human weakness is when Norman gets aroused by watching Marion (just using underwear, again) through the hole on the wall. The film also makes women look like weak human beings. The best example of this is when she is murdered when she’s taking a shower. When Norman opens the curtain, the first thing Marion does is (besides screaming) try to cover her naked body with her arms, making us see that she was completely defenseless and couldn’t do anything to fight for her life.