Norman Bates (the owner) likes Marian, but is clearly very uncomfortable and nervous around women. Norman thinks very carefully and decides to give Marian the room one key. When showing Marian the room he is again uncomfortable and will not enter the bathroom. He invites her to tea in his office and Marian, being very hungry accepts. In the office there are stuffed birds everywhere, this is important, it shows that he is always around death!
The scene I will be focusing on is the shower scene. In the scene before this Norman was watching Marian through a hole in the thin wall between the office and room one.
The shower scene was a masterpiece and took seven days to film. This shows that Alfred Hitchcock took great time, care, effort and detail in this scene.
It opens with Marian ripping up her plan to do with the money. This makes the audience feel sympathy for Marian as she is planning to give the money back. In the sixties the audience would never sympathise with a thief. Marian takes her clothes off but no nudity is dare shown. We hear only natural noises and this begins to make us feel as if we are there. Her being naked is symbolic of how vulnerable she is. The raw editing by Hitchcock is intentional and most camera angles are from inside the shower. This again makes us feel as if we are involved in the scene. The camera zooms in on Marian and then shows us the showerhead, as Marian would see it, again making the audience feel part of the scene.
The next key shot is when the killer is introduced to us. The mid shot is concentrated on Marian, showing the shower curtain in the background. Then the camera tails of to the left and we see movement from someone. At this point for the first time in this scene music is played. As the ‘Psycho’ gets closer and closer the music gets louder and louder and we want to call out to Marian and warn her, then suddenly the shower curtain is ripped back extremely fast and the loud, shocking, piercing music startles the audience as we have been sucked in to the scene. The light behind the ‘Psycho’ creates a chiascoro were the killers face is shadowed to hide their identity. Hitchcock does this to create a sense of mystery about the character. The piercing music synchronises brilliantly with our killer stabbing Marian repeatedly. We do not actually see the knife piercing Marians skin, Hitchcock has left that to our imagination, however we do hear the sound of Marian being stabbed, which is actually a knife piercing a water melon, and it makes us cringe every time the helpless victim is stabbed. For the first time Alfred Hitchcock distances us from the scene, by not showing the killers identity, even though Marian now knows.
The music now slows down to reflect Marian’s heartbeat. As she slides down the wall she reaches out to us asking for help and as a last act falls forward grabbing and tearing away the shower curtain. Buckle after buckle the shower curtain is ripped off symbolising Marians hope of surviving slipping away helplessly. She drops to the floor and everything is quiet apart from Marian’s blood trickling down the drain as her life is draining away.
The killer has came and left very swiftly and again we are left alone with Marian, Hitchcock shows us this bye showing the shower head once again and returning to the natural noises of the shower beating against the bathroom floor again.
Hitchcock now uses a extreme close up of Marian’s lifeless eyes and white face before zooming out and finally tailing right to show us that the $40,000 is still there and this tells us that the killing was not a act for the money.
This was a classic and an all time great horror move made by one of the best directors of the decade. Although Psycho has been remade, in my opinion the original has never been bettered and maybe never will be. This movie has a guaranteed place in film history.
David Macfarlane
