Psycho

I just got done rewatching Psycho, which if you don’t know has a very famous shower scene where a lady gets killed with a butcher knife. The guy who kills the lady is named Norman Bates and he is dressed up like his own mother, who he also killed. It’s just dawning on me now that maybe you haven’t ever seen this movie and I just spoiled it for you. One consolation—I just watched Psycho for the third time in my life, and I enjoyed it more than I ever had before, even though of course I knew what was going to happen.

I remember watching Psycho with my dad when I was nine and we lived at the end of a dirt road and I wasn’t scared at all about getting killed by Norman Bates because of a few reasons: #1 Our shower had a glass door on a roller track and you couldn’t get stabbed with a butcher knife through that like you could get stabbed through a shower curtain. #2 The nice lady got killed at a motel; I’d never been to a motel before. #3 The movie was in black and white. #4. I wasn’t a nice lady, named Marion Crane, I was a nine year-old boy and there weren’t any nine year-old boys who were killed in the entire movie, with butcher knives or otherwise, at the end of dirt roads, or otherwise. #4 Our bathroom door had a lock (none of the doors in that movie had locks; a single locked door would have stopped little Norman ‘pipsqueak’ Bates). #5 In real life, I’d been stabbed many times with butcher knives: four times in the stomach; two times in the neck; and once deep in the chest (through my heart)—even at that young age I understood I was impervious to conventional weaponry.

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One of the things I like most about Psycho is the clever thing the movie pulls off on first watch, where if you went in cold (unspoiled) you might wonder, hmmm is Marion Crane the psycho? And then a bit into it you might wonder, Oh is the highway patrol officer that’s stalking her the titular psycho? But all that changes to something of a red herring when she’s murdered by Norman Bates and there’s still an hour of the film to go. But then on your third watch, you might start to think, Oh, so maybe the titular psycho is not just Norman Bates, maybe it really is supposed to be Marion Crane too. They’re mirrored in interesting ways. Then, thinking about that mirroring it’s kind of fun and makes a little more thematic sense why the nice lady would steal that $40,000 and go on the run. She doesn’t think about the consequences, or doesn’t care about the consequences. She has no remorse. She’s driving along and has outwitted the highway patrol officer and then slowly, day turns into night, and the camera keeps doing close-up flashes on Marion’s face and we begin to hear her thoughts/hallucinations of what she thinks people are saying about her (her boss’s voice and the voice of the millionaire she has robbed). She can barely see out the windshield because the rain is so wild and the road so obscured but she doesn’t look afraid. She has this peculiar grin. Later on in the movie, we recognize that same peculiar grin on Norman Bates’s face after he is apprehended by the police, and after he is grilled by a psychiatrist who tells us that Norman is no longer Norman, he is fully his mother, Norma, and he’s totally crazy now and so on and so forth.

And to go on a bit further about all that mirroring: Marion wants to find a man (marry her boyfriend, Sam) and all she cares about is taking this money and breaking free, so later on when Norman Bates (who bares a passing resemblance to her uncommitted boyfriend) meets Marion, he sure is committed to helping her break free of her life—even more interesting, the thing that Norman seems to care the least about is money.

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I wonder now, if I was to do a fourth rewatch, if I’d begin to notice other characters in the movie who were also psychos, and we just hadn’t spent enough screen time with them to diagnose. It takes us a little while to realize even Norman Bates is a psychotic maniac on first viewing. If we spent longer with the highway patrol officer who follows Marion around (why does he leave the highway and lurk around town?) we would probably learn he is a psycho too and has killed his mother; and if we spent more time with Sam Loomis and Marion’s sister, and the private detective, Milton Arbogast, maybe we’d learn they were also vicious killers just like my grandmother Jaqueline had been. RIP to all her slain. On this rewatch I certainly began to be a bit suspicious of the (studio mandated) psychiatrist who appears at the end of the movie (to explain to the dumbest of people in 1960 why Norman Bates dressed up like his mother and killed pretty ladies). That psychiatrist is trying awfully hard to sell his theories not only to us, the audience, but every other surviving character in the movie, including Marion’s sister who just learned her sister was butchered by Bates just a moment before. Boy, that psychiatrist sure seems a bit crazy himself.

So now I’ve put on Halloween to give that a 101st rewatch. Not to spoil Halloween for you but it’s a movie about this six year-old boy who kills his sister with a butcher knife after she gets laid because the guy who made the movie, John Carpenter, really loved the movie Psycho. I first saw Halloween when I was six. My parent’s sat me down and made me watch the movie because my sister, who was seventeen years-old at the time, had begun to date boys and I had tried to set her bed on fire while she was asleep in it. Halloween was a very scary movie for me then for a few reasons: #1 It was in color. #2 The sister looked exactly like my own sister except she gets stabbed to death in the opening scene. #3 The little boy, Michael Meyers, gets punished for murdering his sister—punishment/repercussions—something I had no concept of until I saw it in Halloween. My parent’s explained that if I did kill Cleo (my aforementioned sister) I would go to an institution for the criminally insane and I would never get to have any fun again. Halloween was also a cautionary tale because Michael Meyers never got to grow up to become an astronaut, a career I was also obsessed with at the time. That year I watched Halloween one hundred times with my parents and then I avoided the movie until I first encountered Psycho and realized the influence of Hitchcock’s movie on Carpenter’s movie. For instance, there is a character named Sam Loomis in Psycho who stops Norman Bates from killing, and there is a character in Halloween named Sam Loomis who is trying to stop Michael Meyers from killing. And for this reason, it’s been imbedded in me from a young age, to say the hell away from anyone named Sam Loomis, who’ll only impede my quest.

There’s some things I don’t mean to spoil but I’m going to do it anyway: #1 Jurassic Park is full of a bunch of psychotic dinosaurs that have been brought back from extinction by clever scientists who are psychos. #2 Jaws is a movie about a psychotic shark who kills because he cannot get bitches but inversely he cannot get bitches because he kills; the killing keeps the bitches away. #3 Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a really nice movie, which my friend Jimmy says is the quintessential movie about American families. #4 The Road Warrior stars a psychopath named Mel Gibson. #5 Sometimes I’ll wake up in a strange place and notice a large gap of time missing and I’ll wonder if I’ve killed again but there’s never too much time to dwell on that because there’s always bills to pay and work to do and I’ve got to [A] Get this blood off me [B] Get some clothes [C] Figure out how to get home/commute to work from this strange location. #6 Gremlins is about a psycho named Billy Peltzer who absolutely should not be allowed to have a pet. #7 Evil Dead 2 is about a guy who cuts his girlfriend apart because she turns into a psycho and then he cuts his right hand off because it starts to become psycho—but usually in ‘art’, it’s the left hand that is the wicked hand, the left eye that sees evil—that’s where sinister comes from. Merriam-Webster defines it like this: ‘The word sinister, suggestive of darkness or evil, comes from a Latin word meaning “on the left side.”’ #8 Poltergeist is about a bunch of psychos who live in a TV because they can’t get bitches in heaven or hell. #9 I’ve never seen Halloween 2 or Psycho 2 because I can get bitches—I’m just kidding, of course I’ve seen those movies (actually I haven’t [or have I?]) #10 My favorite movie is still American Werewolf in London even though John Landis is a psycho.

all drawings by Rae ‘Rae Rae’ Buleri
© 2024

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