IMHO. The viewer doesn't need to know how the extant psychological theories of the time apply to Norman--it's really a bad, unnecessary type of ending. The world, we know now, is inhabited by many failures of humanity worse than Norman. It doesn't do any good to give them an out.
share@Thaisticks. Yours is a popular enough view of Psycho's Psychiatrist scene. A lot of people around here disagree with you, however, so I've bumped a couple of key older threads about the scene to the top of the queue for you to check out. Start with the classic 'Flawless except for the final explanation scene' Thread.
shareA poll has just come up on IMDb called 'The Most Odd Mother-Son Relations' in movies. 'Psycho' was included. The relationship is given as Norman and Norman which I thought was witty. And of course I voted for 'Psycho.'
shareBut then you ignore what the writers were trying to do: give the viewers a reason to sympathize with Norman. Norman was not a failure. A failure is someone who doesn't try to break free from what is causing their mental illness. Norman honestly tried to do this.
shareWe needed an explanation for why Norman was so so crazy!
shareThe psychiatrist gave an explanation.
shareI know. Was referring to those saying it was weak to have one 🤔.
shareOh, okay
shareAnd always remember:
The psychiatrist is not ONLY giving an analysis of Norman's psychosis.
He is providing a solution to a central mystery of the film and he is offering other key information that is available nowhere else in the film:
ONE: Norman tells Marion about his mother's boyfriend, "And then he died...and the WAY he died...its nothing to talk about while you're eating."
Well, how DID Mother's boyfriend die? We need the answer.
Then the sheriff tells Sam and Lila that Mrs. Bates poisoned the boyfriend("Strychnine. Ugly way to die.") AND "took a heapin spoonful of the stuff herself." Murder-suicide!
EXCEPT: the shink tells us -- "No, it wasn't murder-suicide. NORMAN poisoned his mother and her boyfriend. And matricide is the most unbearable crime of all...most unbearable to the son who commits it."
That's a HUGE reveal. The movie HAD to answer that question, and its another twist.
TWO: Norman stole his mother's corpse! But worse, he gutted her and stuffed her with sawdust. In a 1960 Hays Code censored movie, that was INCREDIBLY sickening. This tells us that mother's corpse in the rocking chair wasn't just a "decaying body." Norman had actually cut that corpse open(his MOTHER) , gutted it, filled her with chemicals "to keep her as well as she could keep." This makes Norman's taxidermy hobby into something horrific and ties into his line "why she's as harmless as one of those stuffed birds," which Mother also uses to describe herself.
CONT
THREE: Marion Crane was not Mother's only victim. In the past ten years, Norman killed two OTHER "young girls." Girl = woman back then, so we can figure THEY were motel guests, too, alone, too, and sexually arousing to Norman, too. So Marion was not a "once in a lifetime event," and from the moment she showed up alone at the Bates Motel, Norman KNEW (deep down) that another victim had arrived.
So you can see, the psychiatrist speech was necessary to "solve a few mysteries" and has information we get nowhere else in the movie (NORMAN killed his mother and her lover; Norman gutted and stuffed the corpse, Norman killed two other women) . Classic screenwriting.
Norman stuffing his own mother is horrible by any standard of time u know. It will be horrible again 1000 years from now also.
shareNorman stuffing his own mother is horrible by any standard of time u know. It will be horrible again 1000 years from now also.
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Yes...but in 1960, in a censored "Hays Code movie" offered up to general audiences for the viewing, it was not just horrible...it was as if a taboo was being violated. It was historic that Hitchocck could allow that to be discussed -- but he couldn't show it.
These days, we get plot stuff like that -- and worse(cannibalism as an example, or sex with a corpse) all the time in horror.
I think the "big one" that everybody misses about the psychiatrist's speech is his reveal that Norman killed Mother and the boyfriend. The movie REQUIRES that answer after Norman (with Marion) and the sheriff (with Sam and Lila) set up the question.
Yea true but I don't know any movies at all with somebody's mother getting stuffed like a bird. Its still original.
share