Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I recently saw it argued that it’s impossible to see this movie the way it was intended, and that’s a pretty easy argument to make. All the big twists are pretty much the only aspects that survive in the public consciousness. The big star lead dies graphically early on and it becomes a different movie entirely. We all know the scene, and maybe we know about the casting making it more unexpected, and we know who did it and some amount of why.

I’m actually worried that with all that foreknowledge, maybe it won’t hold up. If it completely changes gear partway through, does it still all gel? Or is the purported greatness all in the shock and the music?

After watching the movie:

Phoenix office secretary Marion Crane is done seeing her boyfriend Sam secretly and only on his infrequent business trips from Fairvale, California. Sam, a divorced man living in a room in the back of a hardware store, agrees they don’t have to hide anymore, but won’t marry her yet as he can barely support himself while paying alimony and his father’s debts, let alone a wife. Marion returns to work to find her boss’s ostentatious client has chosen to pay for his purchase with $40,000 in cash in an unmarked envelope. Impulsively, Marion suggests she should go home for the weekend after depositing the cash to “nurse a headache”, then goes home and packs a bag and sets off for California to bring Sam enough money to get out of debt and start a life together. But not before her boss catches sight of her in the street. Along the way, a police officer finds her sleeping alone in her car and finds her eagerness to get going suspicious, so he tails her. Trying to shake him, Marion rushes a car salesman through a trade for a car with California plates. On her second night of driving, the rain gets too heavy to see and she stops at the quiet, unassuming Bates Motel. The proprietor Norman, a shy, awkwardly charming young man, tells her the place is practically deserted since the highway was rerouted, and most of the time it’s just him and his mother, who’s ill and spends all her time in the house. After an uncomfortably cordial dinner conversation with Norman, Marion realizes how irrational she’s being and returns to her cabin planning to go home and return the money. And then a grey-haired slasher stabs her to death in the shower, leaving Sam and Marion’s sister Lila to figure out her disappearance.

I should have trusted that Alfred Hitchcock is not M. Night Shyalaman. The film turns on the initial protagonist’s story being ripped away from her suddenly, but that doesn’t leave the first half feeling like a shaggy dog story, nor does it feel separated from the second half. As soon as Marion leaves, Sam and Lila become the protagonists and slot in like they were always there (though part of that may be because I have a real problem telling most women of this time apart). If I could make one change, I’d like to have let Sam have a moment when he can process what Marion’s intentions were and recognize that however unwise, she chose to remove the obstacles in their way, but by the time it’s all over, the spotlight has moved to the authorities explaining what Norman’s deal is.

The music leans heavily on the main theme, but never feels like it’s overstaying its welcome even though the primary section is relatively simple. We all know the music in isolation, but in context, it’s used fairly sparingly and succinctly. And there are plenty of scenes that lend themselves to the whirling panic.

I’m sure Disassociative Identity Disorder has been vilified on screen before this movie and it has certainly been used to make monsters since. There are probably hundreds of academic papers on the pathology of this story and its impact on real cases. But I do want to give special mention to the psychologist at the end who takes every opportunity to speak of the Mother personality in Norman as a legitimate separate person from Norman, even if a twisted portrait of his actual mother, and corrects multiple people describing Norman’s use of her clothes as transvestitism to frame it as “he wears the Mother’s clothes because in that moment the Mother personality is asserting herself”. That seems like a small detail that would be appreciated by plural persons (at the back end of being made out as inherently dangerous, to be clear), especially for the time it was made.

The problem with reviewing the films that stand this tall is that it’s all already been said. It seems like film people should have opinions on this canon of Great Films, but it’s so crowded there’s nothing original to say. But it has stuck around for a reason, and seems like it should continue to stick around, even if the surprises are totally ruined.