Probably the most explicit and controversial scene in psycho is the shower scene. During this scene I think Hitchcock wanted to get us to experience Marion Crane’s emotions, especialy her fear.
“The point is to draw the audience right inside the situation instead of watching from a distance, and you can do this only by breaking the action into details and cutting from one to the other, so each detail is forced in turn on the attention of the audience and reveals its psychological meaning.”
The scene starts with Marion Crane undressing and entering the shower; cleverly Hitchcock manages to show this without showing taboo areas and manages to create suspense by making the music slow and gentle. Then the camera switches to the opposite side where you can see a silhouette of a woman approaching the shower with her arm raised and a knife perched in her hand. It then cuts back to Marion Crane who is unaware of the danger behind her. Then film suspends time and has a long pause to build up suspense, suddenly Norman’s Mother attacks and the music raises to a higher pitch he does this to make the audience jump. Then the movie speeds up cutting faster and faster, here I think Hitchcock wanted each cut of the film to be a thrust of the knife. Each time it starts off with the knife coming down into Marion and then cuts to her screaming. Slowly Marion begins to stop struggling and the amount of camera angles slow down; this is to show that Marion is dying.
Towards the end of the scene after Marion has been stabbed it shows her with an outstretched hand, I think this is a desperate attempt for help and it also shows repetition of Marion dying. The scene ends with Marion’s face pressed against the floor and her staring at the audience as it pans out to the money. I think when she is staring at you she is penetrating the audience making them feel guilty about no-one coming and rescuing her, Hitchcock did this to make the audience become more involved and to make us relate with the character. Also when it shows the money at the end Hitchcock is trying to get the audience confused by making the audience ask questions about something that has no relevance later on in the film just after they had watched the shower scene. Finally it ends with the water disappearing down the plughole. I think this is a metaphor where the water represents Marion's life and the plughole is the border between life and death, This scene conveys Marion is dying and is repetition of other euphemisms.
The clever, monochrome film is made more effective by Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack especially during the shower scene, which is probably is one of the most recognisable scores in a film. First played under the frantic credits (by Saul Bass) - shown with abstract, grey horizontal and vertical lines that streak back and forth, violently splitting apart the screens and causing them to disappear. I think that the lines are trying to represent slashes of a knife and the music repeats it, also the music is showing what is going on in the film
When Psycho was created Hitchcock wanted us to have an emotional response, he wanted us to immerse ourselves into developments that we had no control over. To do this he made us (the audience) subconsciously feel emotions about different characters by using first person photography and camera angles. Alfred Hitchcock wanted to engage the audience and create a new cinematic experience.
One of the first examples of first person camera angles is early on in the film, where Marion is awoken by a suspicious police officer. This shot is a close up looking through the eyes of Marion. The police officer’s high camera angle gives a sense of superiority and menace. Also his gaze and glasses contribute to this. Marion’s low camera angle makes her look inferior and makes the audience intimidated.
Half way during the film there is a scene where the car is sinking in the swamp and then suddenly stops. At this point in the film Hitchcock uses first person camera angle to make us feel what Norman is going through. Subconsciously we sympathize with Norman when we realise what we are doing this gives us a sense of unease.
Towards the end of the film Lila sneaks into the fruit cellar of the Norman Bates’ house, where she finds an old silent woman sitting on a rocking chair. She then taps the woman on the shoulder and the woman swings round to reveal a rotting carcass. Horrified Lila screams at the rancid corpse. As she draws back her hand, it hits the suspended light fixture, setting it swinging. It adds an unsettling set of dancing shadows of light and dark to the scene and gives the audience a sense of unease.
Irony is difficult to define but dramatic and cinematic irony is when the audience know something that the character doesn’t this usually gives the audience a sense of unease and makes them more involved in the film. In cinematic irony there are two types verbal irony and visual irony, they each make the audience create different emotions and are both used in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Hitchcock used first person photography and irony to make the audience in the cinema feel emotions that the characters would experience during the film. An example of this is, “Checking out time in these kinds of hotels is 3:30, and when your times up…” “Checking out time” and “when your times up” are both euphemisms for death. For the second time viewer this makes them feel uneasy because they know Marion is going to die. Another example is when Norman says, “ Mother isn’t quite herself today.” This is ironic on two levels the first is that she is dead the second is that Norman is his mother.
Psycho shocked many due to its originality, usually films were based around classic Hollywood narrative where you would follow a character from the beginning of the film to the end where everything would be resolved. In Psycho you start following Marion Crane who works for a small company and steals a lump-sum of money. Unusually the main character is killed just under a third of the way of the film and the money which seemed important at the start of the film has no relevance and the storyline adopts a new main character, the detective. But halfway through he also is killed so, Hitchcock does this to make you feel different emotions and to confuse you. The film ends with Norman sitting in a police cell and his mind has been completely taken over by “mother”. It then gives you a short insight into the mind of a killer which gives the audience a sense of unease and explains some of Norman’s revelations.
Psycho is one of the best films of all time, not only did it use ground breaking technology and editing, it set a precedence for the future with its first person camera angles and its ability to create an emotional response from the audience. It also single-handedly ushered in an era of superb screen horrors with over excessive blood use and low budgets like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It changed many censorship laws and challenged many taboo themes such as confused identities, voyeurism, victimisation, Oedipal Complex, transvestism, implied incest, and hints of necrophilia. Psycho is so complex and confusing that multiple viewings are necessary to capture all of its subtlety. Symbolic imagery involving bed-side tables and reflecting mirrors are ever-present. The biggest credit to Psycho is Hitchcock’s ability to create horror and suspense in the minds of the audience.
