MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Psycho and Style versus Content

Psycho and Style versus Content

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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It is the nature of the moviechat boards(as it was the nature of the imdb boards before it, and the various other boards that are out there now), that people ...chat. And it seems that most of the chat is usually about the plot of a film.

The exposure of plotholes is a major theme. I pity the poor filmmakers who glossed over their plots thinking their audiences would see the films only one time and never really notice -- boy do they notice in chat rooms. Discussion of characters and their traits(and those of the actors who play the characters) are discussed a lot , too.

Psycho gets a lot of this kind of discussion, as befits the moviechat format. But one can almost hear Hitchcock whispering from the great beyond: "the plot was important, but the style was more important."

And if he whispered that to me, I'd say: "No, in Psycho the plot was more important because that movie had the greatest plot you ever had." A story in which the ostensible lead is killed before the movie is half over, and in which a twist at the end reveals that her killer was someone entirely different than whom we thought done it. A story is which the arena for terror - a shabby isolated rural motel and the Gothic mansion looming on up on the hill behind it-- created a setting that has never been equaled in horror movie history(and I choose the Overlook Hotel in The Shining as second.) A story in which the main victim is killed while taking a shower -- a setting for MURDER that has never been equaled in movie history.

No, Psycho was The Greatest Story Hitchcock Ever Told, and for that reason, I suppose we DO have to linger on the plot.

But still: the style. The movie is suffused with "cinema," start to finish. How we see things is as important as the story being told.

Take that shower murder. On balance, it is a powerful concept. It was pretty scary in Robert Bloch's book, with the terrifying central image of Mother's head "hanging in mid-air' popping through the shower curtain before Mother beheaded Marion(by the way, some folks who read the book have written that ALL Mother does is behead Marion -- one stroke -- but we are later told that no, she slashed away at Marion in the shower BEFORE beheading her as the coup de grace.)

For a 1960 film, Hitchcock had to make changes there. No beheading(and no scene of Norman forcibly stuffing Marion's headless body and that head into a hamper.) And he had to get rid of that terrifying image of Mother's head popping through the shower curtain because...he couldn't show her face. And -- as a matter of style -- Hitchcock replaced Mother's wearing just a head scarf into Mother having a granny's white hair in a bun (shades of Jonathan Winters' Maude Frickert and Johnny Carson's Aunt Blabby, yet to come.)

But even with those changes, Hitchcock had to do other things to make his cinematic shower scene work , while getting past the censors, while taking movie content to a graphic new level. For that's what the shower scene is REALLY about(after being about the plot device of killing the semi-heroine off early.)

The shower scene is about: going on forever. A 1950 "Psycho," if it could have been made at all, with have faded out on Mother opening the shower curtain and holding her knife up high.(And a doubt that a 1950 Psycho would have allowed even that.) A 1960 Psycho would end up allowing -- after battles with the censors on the script and on the finished film -- that murder to proceed ...and to proceed...and to proceed some more. And when Mother left the bathroom...we had to accompany the punctured, dazed-and-no-longer-really-on-earth Marion Crane on her final journey to death -- sliding down the shower wall, reaching out to us, grabbing the shower curtain whose rings can't support the weight of her body and allow for the final fall to death...and yet even THAT is not the end: we get that spectacularly stylized camera move(not a zoom, not a dolly), down the shower drain with Marion's blood and up out of her lifeless eyeball to see the sad, dead corpse Marion has become.

Whew. All that length, all that lingering, all that detail -- THAT is what was historic about the shower scene in Psycho. And once Hitchcock was allowed that breakthrough -- other movies would follow, upping the ante on sex and violence through the 60's until the Hays Code collapsed by 1968 into "anything goes" R-rated freedom. (With a re-release of Psycho getting a rather mild "M" -- today's PG.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The shower scene is all about style, from the first shots of Marion entering the bathroom and the shower; to the initial "baptismal cleansing" of the shower itself(a mix between a Dove soap commercial and erotic elements that such commercials could not show); to the opening of a door and a blurry human figure approaching slowly; to the flinging open of the curtain(and the sudden, unending screech of Herrmann's violins) to the murder itself, which is choreographed with great precision and follows a "narrative course."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Indeed, the entire shower scene starts with Marion writing figures at the desk in Cabin One(she's calculating how to replace the money she bought a getaway car with), thus:

PHASE ONE: Marion goes into the bathroom, flushes the paper down the toilet, gets in the shower, unwraps the soap and turns on the flow; luxuriates in the baptismal cleansing.
PHASE TWO: From an "impossible" POV angle(we are "in the shower wall"), we see the bathroom door slowly open, the figure approach. And the curtain is pulled open and there is Mother, her face in dark shadow from the bright light bulb of the bathroom light fixture, her knife held high to inspire terror in her victim.
PHASE THREE: On the "starter image" of a very low angle below Mother, she makes her first stab at Marion, and the killing commences. In this phase, several overhead shots(creepy: the bunned-hair of the mother and an overhead glimpse of her nose and her flowered dress, as she leans into the shower with the lovely, nude Marion; BOTH women get wet) make the case that for awhile, Marion fights back, fends off the blade, might survive -- but no, Mother breaches Marion's defenses and gets in the first stabs that render Marion defenseless.
PHASE FOUR: An amazing "sequence within the sequence." A rapid fire series of cross-cuts -- Mother stabbing at US(her hand bursting through the shower water, gripping the knife handle); Marion's head turning from side to side as she takes in each knife blow. STAB -- head turn. STAB -- head turn. STAB -- head turn. This flurry of stabs accelerates and the message is: this is it, Mother has Marion defeated and will simply finish her off now.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

PHASE FIVE: Marion turns her back to Mother and Mother gets in one final stab TO the back. POV(from shower): Mother leaves the bathroom, her work is done, her victim will die. And then all that incredible stylistic power as we watch Marion die...she ends the scene as a lifeless corpse, a "tear" in her eye that might only be shower water, a mouth open as if to imitate a dead fish....and something of an accusative look at us, the theater goers who came to the movies for a little scare and got THIS landmark slaughter, instead.

Hitchcock famously filmed the monologue-heavy "Psychiatrist's scene" in one day. That scene runs about five minutes. He famously filmed this shower scene in seven days. This scene runs anywhere from 45 seconds to two minutes(counting the lead-up and lead-out.)

And while the shower scene was the most brutal killing ever filmed up to that time, it was carefully stylized to get censorship clearance and hold an audience. Style decision number one: black and while(Hitchcock felt that color and red blood would repulse the audience.) Style decision number two: no shots of the the blade entering the naked body, no blood ON the body. (Though, aha, there is ONE brief shot of the blade held AGAINST the naked body.) Style decision number three: fast-edit montage, jumping all around the shower arena, leaping from extreme close-ups(Marion's screaming mouth) to "high overhead angles"(of Mother leaning into Marion) Style decision number four: shifting the death of Marion crane from the violent(stabbing) to the metaphysical(her slow slide to death, a woman in the last seconds of human life.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

In Joseph Stefano's screenplay for Psycho, the shower murder is a small descriptive paragraph , with a key line: "The knife slashes through the air, as if slashing through the movie theater screen." Hitchcock took Stefano's few words of "stylized" script description and turned them into this great montage sequence -- aided and abetted by two technical additives to the visuals of a knife attack on a nude woman: (1) Bernard Herrmann's great screeching violins (without which, I'm not sure if audiences would have screamed -- and this goes double for the Arbogast murder and (2) the sound of knife puncturing flesh -- we never SEE Marion get stabbed, but we HEAR Marion get stabbed. 11 times I believe(you can count the sounds.)

Indeed, if I might for a moment, I will linger on the fact that the "style" of Psycho isn't limited to Hitchcock's signature camera movements and fast-edit montages. Herrmann's screeching violins are key to the style of Psycho: they make us scream. Later brutal Hitchcock murders (in Torn Curtain and Frenzy) had no music at all, and played in a sickening , realistic way. Hitchcock's screeching violins are as classic as Psycho itself. As are his many other musical cues throughout the picture, none greater than the "three notes of madness" that recur through the film and end the picture.

The sound effects are stylized: casaba melons were stabbed to get those knife puncture sounds. 11 of them for Marion's murder. 3 for Arbogast's (one sound effect for the slash to his face; two on the fade-out as he is finished off at the bottom of the stairs.) There is also a nifty sound effect for Arbogast's fall down the stairs: a "clonk-clonk-clonk" sound that equals his feet brushing the steps all the way down. This is the kind of detail that Hitchcock subtly added to his pictures for impact. (In Frenzy, a strangling necktie tightens round a woman's neck and Hitch adds the stylized sound of the necktie straining as it is pulled tighter.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A man named Richard J. Anobile "crafted" (rather than wrote) a great 1974 "shot by shot" picture book of Psycho. We were years away from VHS, decades from DVD and to have that book was to "hold Psycho in your hands."

But Anobile wrote an introduction to Psycho in which he summarized the plot, and he wrote this of the Arbogast murder: "Another gruesome but extremely cinematic murder." ANOTHER. So you could say that BOTH the shower murder and the staircase murder were "gruesome but extremely cinematic murders" and you would be right.

And so contrasting: the shower murder, depending on where you start or where you finish, has anywhere from 45 to 70 different shots. The staircase murder(once it begins)has FOUR:

ONE: Overhead shot of Mother rushing at Arbogast with knife held high, slashing down on his face.
TWO: His face slashed, Arbogast falls backwards(but standing up, fighting it), all the way back down the stairs.
THREE: Medium shot: Arbogast collapses to the foyer floor, Mother mere seconds behind him, pinning him down and raising her knife.
FOUR: Close-up on the knife in the air, coming down, in the first of what may be 10 blows for all we know, but we have to imagine them, we only see (and hear) two: below the frameline.

A "stylistic add" to the Arbogast murder is: as the knife comes down on him (out of frame) we hear Arbogast's single , guttural scream: a man in pain but also a man in horror of who his killer is. (Note: in the Hitchcock version of this murder, Arbogast never screams until the very end; in the Van Sant remake, Arbogast pretty much yodels his way backwards down the stairs, screaming throughout until he starts grunting in pain from each stab on the foyer floor -- as if being punched in the stomach. 38 more years and an "R-" rating allowed more "vocal detail")
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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

So that's the stylization of the murders in Psycho. Not much plot involved beyond the fact that (a) a woman is horribly killed and (b) the man sent to find her horribly killed But HOW these people are killed makes all the difference. More graphically than the Hays Code had ever allowed before. With more time and budget-consumimg technical expertise than any B-shocker had available. With really good actors playing the victims(perhaps not a matter of style...though you might call it "A list" style to have "A list" actors play the victims.)

But as we know, there is style EVERYWHERE in Psycho. Its a big reason one watches the movie in awe beyond the shocks. A number of the 1960 reviews called out the greatness of Hitchcock's "camera effects and cinematic style" in Psycho. Those critics got it. Though the LA Times critic said "Hitchcock commits malpractice , using his great command of cinematic style on such disgusting material." (Or something like that.)

Style in Psycho can be found(where you notice it right away):

The over-and-ever-lower opening camera pan of Phoenix, all the way through the window of a tryst hotel room. (Herrmann's matched "descending music" is, again, a stylistic match for Hitchcock's visual.)

The highway cop's first close-up. That giant face filling the screen. His inhuman, robotic features. Sunglasses that hide his eyes and his soul -- and render him "insect-like"(in the words of one critic.)

How three men(the cop, California Charlie, and the auto mechanic) line up in a perfectly spaced row to watch Marion drive away with her new used car...

Marion's drive from day to dusk to dark...as rain fills the car windshield(Herrmann's cutting music matches the cutting wiper blades) and voices fill Marion's head.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

How the Bates Motel materializes out of the rain and the darkness. How the huge house on the hill at first cannot be seen at all -- Mother's brightly lit window is like a "floating eye in the darkness" looking over the motel. A more atmospheric introduction to a setting for terror as never been filmed(and so little can be SEEN of the motel and the house at this point -- we need the whole movie to get to know both the motel and the house.)

Cabin One: Norman faces Marion. Close-ups in profile. A mirror reflecting each of them.

The parlor: Marion under a feminine cameo. Norman under a predatory stuffed owl.

A huge profile close-up of Norman's eye at the peephole, watching Marion get nude for her shower. The beam of light carries the erotic image through the darkness, into Norman's mind...and Mother lives there. And she is not happy. As you can see when Norman backs away from the peephole.

Arbogast's first appearance: his head filling the frame like the highway cop's did...but THIS head swallows up the screen and pushes into the movie theater and the audience.

Norman and Arbogast in the motel office: an array of high angles, low angles, studies in darkness and light. The great camera swing under Norman's throat as he gulps down carmel corn and looks like a bird.

The camera following Norman up the stairs when he goes to get mother. This is perhaps the most "overt" and dizzying moment of style in all of "Psycho" -- its bravura, and it while it serves a plot purpose(hiding mother's face), it has a power all its own. There is something chilling about being sent to the highest rafter of the house and forced to look down yet again at the landing where Arbogast was attacked.

The final shot of Norman in the cell, as Mother's face morphs subliminally upon his (well, CGI morphing didn't get invented until about 1989 at the movies with The Abyss; but here is Hitchcock using a dissolve in 1960 to get the same effect).

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Yep, there is a LOT of style in Psycho, and I suppose Hitchcock could get grumpy with critics(and with us) for talking only about its "plot" (spectacular though it was.)

The funny thing is: the movie has style even in the "expository" scenes where you'd think it doesn't need style.

Exhibit A: the first meeting of Sam and Lila with Sheriff Chambers and his wife in the middle of the night. The lighting is intense on Chambers' face(somehow the lighting says "3:00 am in the morning"), the angle low. His head is nicely "framed" by a "V" created by his two-level staircase. And eventually, Hitchcock gives himself a challenge by lining up Sam and Lila on one side of the screen, Chambers on the other -- and putting his wife(Lurene Tuttle) dead center so that in alternating shots (Sam/Lila/Mrs. Chambers vs Mrs. Chambers/Sheriff Chambers), the actress has to hold exactly the same expression. Its like an exercise in acting versus cutting. Will Tuttle ever goof up the shots? Almost..but no. She pulled it off. "All salute Lurene Tuttle."

Exhibit B: The opening hotel room tryst scene. Gus Van Sant said even with the DVD to play on set , he simply couldn't match Hitchcock's shots in this scene. Something about the lenses used, I suppose. In any event, the scene "starts intimate" with Marion lying on the bed and a shirtless Sam hovering over her, then moves to sexy necking on the bed in underwear, and then moves Sam and Marion to a carefully delineated "space" in front of the bed that becomes their arena for sad argument as both get dressed. "The party is over." They have left the bed and the rest of the scene takes place elsewhere in the room.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And lest I not forget: my favorite shot in the film: Arbogast climbing the hill to the Bates House, is about style in THIS way: its amazing. The clarity of the shot. The weirdness of the atmosphere(Arbogast is crossing over into "Mother's world" and he aint coming back.) The themes contained in the shot: "contemporary TV show private eye meets horror movie Gothic". Which is sort of how Psycho plays (neither The Birds nor Frenzy, the next horror movies in the Hitchcock canon, play this way.)

Yes, there's a lot of style in Psycho. A lot of cinematic style. On such a continuous and enthralling level that it is no wonder the movie gets matched up with Citizen Kane a lot --as a matter of landmark style.

But that plot's pretty good too. Might as well keep talking about it.

[–] MizhuB (165) 6 years ago

Hi ecarle. I happen to be on the computer too ;)

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(by the way, some folks who read the book have written that ALL Mother does is behead Marion -- one stroke -- but we are later told that no, she slashed away at Marion in the shower BEFORE beheading her as the coup de grace.)

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As I recall in the novel, as Norman is picking up Marion's head, it says 'Nothing else was severed, only slashed.'

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O/T. I used to have a LOT of books (mostly paperbacks) that were made into movies. You could almost consider them classics. Last time I moved, I decided I wanted to de-clutter, so I threw them out. Now I'm kicking myself in the butt.

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I would say in your description, there's another PHASE after FOUR.

1) There actually IS a stab to the torso after the last of Marion's head turn. It doesn't just press against her skin, the tip actually pierces it. It's a fraction of a second, but it's there. I have a screen cap of it for doubters, but it's a shame you can't upload pics to this site.

2) There is also a quick shot from the right side of Marion's back where you can actually see the shape of her right breast, partially blocked by her arm. The implication is that she gets stabbed in her breast.

Yes, I've seen PSYCHO too many times.