“If Thine Eye Offend Thee…”: Psycho and the Art of Infection

George Toles

Introduction

• Psycho contains no release…
• Marion begs us to do something while she’s slowly dying in the shower…
• Gradually deprive us of our sense of what “secure space” looks like or feels like
• Eye as metaphor (rather than eye as object)
• “The eye asserts its value and power chiefly through its ‘migration toward other objects’ as Roland Barthes has suggested…” (121).
• Eye represents identity simultaneously at its fullest concentration and maximum vulnerability

Introduction Cont...

• Eye is ultimate goal for any act of violation; it is the luminous outward sign of the private soul one wishes to smudge with depravity (121).
• “The ‘invader’... always breaks in through the same eye window” (121).
• Eye and Mouth resemble each other…
• Content of repression: the vaginal orifice
• Hitchcock and Poe both engage with repressed material
• The eye of the narrative can never go blind

Hitchcock’s Wit

• “Wit is Hitchcock’s less conspicuous means of announcing his indifference, his refusal to be engaged or soiled by his transaction with suffering” (124).
• Mrs. Bates, whose sockets are both full and hollow, directly scrutinizes us (the viewers) with the gelded eyes of decency” (125).
• Wit guards itself in the very act of unveiling (Hitchcock and Mrs. Bates)

Psycho in Stasis

• Fear of making a move - neither the characters nor the imagery seem to possess any alternative to immobility (126)
• “Art that lacks all mobility, as this art does, can only fester in the place where it’s stuck - and hence communicates by infection, spreading the mess that can’t be gotten rid of to whatever it touches” (126).
• Match cut of the drain and the eye define the imaginative center of the film?

Aestheticizing

• Norman’s calm reaction to the dead body mimics the calm camera pulling back from Marion’s eye
• Normative, reasonable
• Perkins argues the shower montage succeeds in “aestheticizing” its cruelty
• We only ever imagine the knife penetrating her
• Death of Marion in the novel was no big deal, especially compared to Hitchcock’s handling of that scene

Aestheticizing Cont...

• “Hitchcock’s style is predicated on the belief that the surface of a screened image is absolute. It never yields to anything ‘within.’ The only interior it has is supplied by the mind of the spectator” (129).
• “Hitchcock conceives the act of building a patterned sequence of images as a means of asserting control over a ‘problem’ without ever being required to examine it” (129).

Eyes

• Dark drain “proposes” a withdrawal from an eye that is dead (?)
• “All of the eyes that matter in Psycho are counterparts of this dead eye - cruel, staring, or frozen, they seem to hold only one expression” (131).
• This look has belonged to Norman all along
• Norman possesses the only acceptable pair of eyes
• Eyes surrender their identity (or life) to Norman
• “By a spectacular feat of absorption, Norman ultimately manages to contain the entire world of the film in his pitiless glare” (131).

Imagery

• Hitchcock’s key imagery throughout the film is nearly all constructed on the same principle (131):
• Mr. Lowery’s accusing glare that launches Marion’s flight by car
• Policeman’s sunglasses looming gigantically over her as she wakens
• Marion peering toward us anxiously from the behind the wheel as we share her thoughts (her final grin mimics Norman’s final grin)
• Toilet bowl and drain both symbolic of eye evacuating its content

More Eye Metaphors

• Two more eye metaphors after Marion’s death (Marion’s eye has resolved itself into Norman’s)
• Overhead close-up of Norman’s mop bucket
• The top of Marion’s car forming a ghostly white spot
• “The hollow eye of the drain is replaced by more clotted and retentive ovals: eyes filling up rather than emptying, but only with unwanted things” (132).
• Objects of Norman’s anxiety look back at him…
• “‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is the chief article of faith in the Bates household” (133).

Norman and Mother

• Norman and his mother can never see the same things at the same time and never in the same way
• Where does Norman go when Mother takes over?
• “...the fact of his presence and involvement in acts that are literally unthinkable for him is ‘dropped from the frame’ (133).
• He must expunge terrible events from public and his own private view
• “His closed world has truly become a beast with a thousand eyes, whose sole end is to keep him under surveillance” (133).
• All of these “holes” Norman has tried to cover up can see the actual disorder and ugliness he’s tried to cover up

Mirrors

• Omnipresence of mirrors and reflections
• Decides to steal the money while looking into the mirror
• Mirror in almost every interior scene, but no one faces them
• Marion’s ability to confront her own image is lost after the theft
• Norman stands in for Marion’s reflection - mirror images
• Norman’s reflection in the window when apologizing for his mother’s rudeness to Marion

More mirroring

• Norman stands in for Marion’s lover, Sam (they look alike)
• Norman as gastly inversion of her love
• She finally gets to eat with Norman
• And he asking her to “take off her wet shoes” is his way of saying “slip into something more comfortable”

Camera Eye and Psycho’s Missing Subject

• The film begins with Hitchcock’s camera entering an eye-like window
• Descent into a vacant eye is the action that brings the film’s world into focus
• “Psycho’s missing subject is perhaps best described as a figure glimpsed but never quite seen: a dim outline in a lighted upstairs window; the spectral imprint of a rigidly coiled form on a mattress” (139-140).
• It is Norman’s trauma (not Marion’s) that seems to draw nearer with Abogast’s and Lila’s searching

Conclusion

• “Hitchcock generates suspense by uniting the viewer’s gaze with a character who, for some reason, is prevented from seeing his situation whole” (141).
• “The landscape of Psycho is one that no one inside the film knows how to look at, and the camera merely reinforces the characters’ arrested gaze” (144).
• “When Norman meets its gaze, the camera halts, as though transfixed by its own reflection. The image dissolves to reveal a half-submerged object, coated with filth, rising toward us from the swamp; and here Psycho ends” (144).

Clips

• Psycho
• Peephole, Mother, Lila, Shower
• Psycho II
• Psycho III
• Psycho IV
• Psycho and the Uncanny (video essay)