We love stories. Lovers of film enjoy the aspect of the telling as much as the story itself. So much of Psycho's greatness is in it's telling. Now for most people when they think about the film "Psycho" they think of the infamous shower scene, the shock and terror of it. This is an incredible part of the film and i'll talk about that and its result in breaking the rules of classic storytelling in a good way later in the essay but for now I want to talk about my favorite part of the film and the thing that I remember first when I think of "Psycho" and that's the journey to the Bates Motel.
I'm on the edge of my seat with a grin on my face every time I watch it because it's mesmerizing. Hitchcock does a number of things to heighten the intensity of this scene that are against the norm. First of all the use of music is so important. There is this pumped up, unnerving shrieking to the music but not so intense that it's too much. It's just enough to raise our blood pressure and get us amped up like Marion Crane, the protagonist is. For the majority of the car ride the camera is coming from the outside and looking in closely on Marion's tense face rather than a more conventional angle looking from inside out to the road. It creates a feeling of urgency and constriction. We hear all of the paranoid voices in her head as she's driving and it gets us inside her head and the fears and possible repurcussions for what she's doing. All the while the music continues and we stay in on her face. There are other aspects to this scene that are more conventional but handled by Hitchcock with precision. She encounters A police officer on more than one occasion and the first time in particular she is sleeping in her car and the officer comes up to her window and he looks so threatening and ominous in a closeup with dark glasses. He actually means well but his image in her eyes is a mirror of her inner paranoia. Towards the end of her journey it gets dark and begins to rain. This time the camera is looking outside the windshield which is now the perfect decision because we see what Marion sees and she is half blind with the darkness and the rain against the windshield. It just adds to the tension of the experience.
We get to the Bates Motel and shift into the second act of the movie. Marion has stolen the money from the bank that she works at, has made it through a stressful drive in the rain, and pulls off the road when she sees this hotel. We meet Norman Bates, the person who runs the hotel. He's got a spring in his step, seems friendly, innocent, well mannered, and a little awkward socially. All of this is endearing. There's also something a little off about him and this makes him fascinating. This section revolves around the rapport between Norman and Marion. We get to know her a little bit better in her relation to Norman and the conversation that they have in the parlor of the hotel over dinner is such a great scene because we have elements of both of them being intimate with each other, honesty, the realization that they are both trapped and we begin to realize this Norman Bates is eccentric if not a little bit crazy. He is an iconic character in film, the slasher before there were slashers, and he's incredibly watchable. We don't know yet that he's a villain, a killer. We don't realize this until the end. He's just a character unlike any that we've seen and this makes him thoroughly interesting. We haven't even gotten to the big shocker, one of the most shocking scenes in all of film, especially up to then.
So Marion Crane is taking a shower and Hitchcock uses the technique called montage where there a number of quick shots cut together in order to create a mood of tension or panic. She's in the shower and the momentum of this scene is building because we get a fluctuating of quick shots of a close up of the water coming out of the shower head and then a close up of Marion's face with the water coming down. This happens for a number of seconds and what it accomplishes is a feeling of being out of control, panic, suspense because the images are happening so fast and so close up that we can't see anything around us and anything can happen at any moment. There is then a shot of the shower curtain and after a few seconds we see a blurred figure walking into the bathroom and getting larger and larger as it gets closer and closer to the shower and then the mother of all terror, literally. The shower curtain is pulled back suddenly and there is a large female figure standing there and the iconic music kicks in and the slashing begins. The slashing is done very intelligently with quick strokes made to look like they're stabbing her but not breaking skin because that would have never passed the ratings board in those days. We get the sound effect of knife piercing flesh, the knife is slashing close enough to the flesh where it looks like it is stabbing her and we can finish the strokes with our own imaginations. Marion has a look of anguish and terror on her face and after multiple, horrifying stabs she falls to the floor pulling the shower curtain down with her. The camera gets a closeup of water mixed with blood going down the shower drain and later Marion's face pressed against the bathroom floor. The whole movie has been turned on its head and less than half way through the movie our protagonist is dead.
The audience is in shock and the mood lingers. The rest of the film is almost like watching a second movie. Through master manipulation by Hitchcock we now identify with a new protagonist who, unbeknownst to the audience is the killer of the original protagonist. Not only are we identifying with a completely different character than the one who we've been identifying up to now but we're going to really get a shock in the end when we realize that this is the villain, the killer. There is a moment after Norman Bates has cleaned up the crime scene of the murder that he knows his mother committed, and he's watching Marion Crane's car with her body and all the evidence in it slowly sink into a swamp, and we are identifying with him and hoping it sinks; the car that has the dead body of the woman who we've been routing for for the first forty minutes of the movie. We are now routing for Norman to get through this. We feel anxious for him.
The final section of the film involves the investigation of the missing Marion and we get more of the fascinating Norman Bates interacting with Marion's sister, boyfriend, and a detective. The tension just keeps building because these people are snooping around the hotel and house and there is a killer ready to strike at any moment, and also because we are relating with Norman and we feel his tension at being found out because he covered the whole thing up. We feel both of these interlocking tensions and it's exhilerating. There is another grizzly murder at the top of the steps inside the Bates house where the killer comes out of nowhere and we hear the terrifying shrieking music again as the detective is stabbed repeatedly and falls down the steps in Hitchcock's signature falling shot that never gets old.
My favorite shot in the whole movie and one of my favorite shots of all time happens towards the end of the movie as Marion's sister approaches the Bates house. We see the house from a low camera angle looming above her like a villain itself and then the camera angle changes to a high angle shot looking down at her as if it is studying her. Through just two opposing camera angles we truly feel the malevolence of this house. The master of "show me don't tell me."
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