with Dmetri Kakmi

Psycho

USA, 1960

Director: Alfred Hitchcock 

Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, Martin Balsam, John Gavin

One of the many fascinating things about Psycho is that the main character, Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, is killed approximately 40 minutes into the film. It’s a daring move. Aside from the shock factor, there’s a risk of losing the audience, especially when there’s little over 45 minutes left to go before the climax. 

But does Marion really die or is something else going on?

Forty minutes is a long set-up to kill off a seemingly minor character who ushers in the “main” story. This alone tells us that Marion Crane is key. On the surface it appears her sister Lila, played by Vera Miles, takes over the narrative—one blonde replaces another blonde and carries the audience to a horrific conclusion. That’s the critical consensus. But there is more than one way to break into the Bates mansion’s basement.

When we meet her, Marion Crane is lying on a rumpled bed in bra and slip. A semi-naked Sam Loomis (John Gavin) stands over her. They are in a cheap hotel room during her lunch break. The dialogue makes clear the battle they wage between decency and indecency, respectability and the disreputable. They are an average couple trying to stay above board and finding it difficult.

As a woman, Marion has more to lose than Sam. She can go from respectable to shady in the blink of a watchful eye, while he remains relatively unscathed. “They also pay who meet in hotel rooms,” Marion says to Sam, indicating her conscience is bothering her. Later, when Sam suggests their next meeting can be respectfully executed in her apartment after they send out her sister and turn “Mama’s picture to the wall”, Marion points out that he makes “respectability sound disrespectful.”

Following the dictates of time and class, Marion wants to be respectfully married to a guy who loves her. But they’re strapped for cash and they can’t settled down. In a mad moment, Marion steals $40.000 from her employer and drives cross-country to reunite with Sam.

The journey from Phoenix to Fairvale is an important part of Hitchcock’s schema. It announces the passage from one world to another. Brilliantly edited and scored these ten or so minutes display Hitchcock’s mastery of pure cinema — telling a story with image and music alone. 

“To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross the deadly space between,” writes Herman Melville in Billy Budd. So it is with Marion. The drive through day and night, sun and rain, windshield wipers slashing away to the tune of Bernard Herrmann’s unnerving music, is a transitory period that transports Marion from a rational state of mind to the irrational.

As Norman says to her, “We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”

Marion has indeed lost her mind. In doing so, she undergoes radical sex change from encumbered female to unencumbered male. Symbolically speaking, in spilt blood we have the perfect emblem of sacrifice and metamorphosis. In the film’s emblematic world, Marion’s death during the sacred act of ablution becomes the altar of her transgression and transformation. 

In trying to be normal, Marion becomes Norman. She rises like a phoenix from the ashes of discarded womanhood to become emblematic man, just like Norman forsakes manhood to become avenging woman when he is triggered by lust. Significantly, this reshaping occurs for Marion when a shadowy Mother (always an important trope for Hitchcock) enters the room, piercing knife in hand.

Marion’s link with Norman is in two visual cues. One comes early in the film and the other at the end. 

Moments before Marion spots the sign for the Bates Motel she entertains thoughts about what her employer Lowery and his business associate Cassidy might be saying about her absconding with the money. 

It’s night. Marion is blinded by headlights of oncoming vehicles on the highway and the windshield wipers are working hard against the rain. For a brief moment, as Cassidy’s voice utters the words “I’ll replace it [the stolen cash] with her fine, soft flesh”, the pensiveness and apprehension on Marion’s face is replaced by an expression we’ve not seen before. A calculating, gleeful smile lights up her eyes and transforms her face from that of a decent law-abiding individual to a woman who is capable of delighting in any transgression.

If the eyes are the windows of the soul then this soul is well acquainted with hell.

There one second, gone the next, the grimace reveals Marion’s dark side. She, like all of us, has the capacity for wrongdoing. Under the right circumstances, we might all steal, kill or take pleasure in another’s misfortune. 

The second clue is in the film’s second to last frame. Norman is captured and awaits in a prison cell. Mother, now dominant, is talking to herself. As she says, “I hope that they are watching, they will see, they will see and they will say ‘why she wouldn’t hurt a fly’”, the same deviously malevolent grin spreads across Norman’s face, uniting him in unholy matrimony with Marion. His visage is then superimposed over Marion’s car rising from the swamp’s dark embrace. Marion, like Mother, resurfaces, having seen the abyss.

It’s as brilliant a body-swap as the one in Lost Highway (1997), when middle-aged Bill Pullman turns into youthful Balthazar Getty after killing his wife. Both films are psychological fugues in which a guilt-ridden individual assumes another identity to right a wrong. Only no one comes out of it unscathed.

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Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His dark fantasy novel, The Woman in the Well, will be published in April 2025. He is working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.