The Moment of Psycho by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books

“YOU NEED SOMEONE TO EXPLAIN IT ALL”

As they worked on the script, Joe Stefano suggested to Hitchcock that too much had been jammed into the last minutes of suspense and action: so Mrs. Bates is a rotting corpse, and “Mother” is Norman in a fright wig. But why? What has happened to Norman’s mind? Hitch was nervous. He said he thought too solemn an explanation might be boring—and even unbelievable. And Stefano actually recommended the big, bluff, garrulous Simon Oakland to play the psychiatrist.

After the scene with the psychiatrist had been shot, Hitchcock is reported to have put his arm around Oakland and thanked him for saving the picture. I suppose what he meant was that Oakland—like all the supports in the film—had done a good, persuasive job in a way that stopped the audience from laughing out loud at fanciful material. But what needed to be “saved” was the film’s and Hitchcock’s indifference to the stated content. I don’t think he ever believed in this idea of a character taking over another—only in the ways it could be filmed. Yet the fact remains, in scenario terms, that once you’ve chosen to go that way, you’re bound to deal with it, or tidy it up.

Oakland’s character (speaking in front of a map of Shasta County) does the second cleanup job. He lets us go home with the sweet dream that this ghastly act has been dealt with. There is an explanation, and there is even the final Norman/Mother scene to go with it. It’s nowhere near enough, just as Perkins’s Norman seems a more sophisticated boy than the real Bates could ever have been. Perkins flirts with the idea of a gay Norman, and that plays into the scheme of him as a frenzied actor, always putting on a different persona. That’s how he wears “Mother” and that’s the quiet, deadly brilliance of the last scene where Norman and Mother’s voice speaks to us in that chilling direct stare—it is as if Norman has always known we would be intimate. And, of course, it ends in the coup of his looking up under his eyebrows, dissolving through the skull of his mother to a view of the car, the white car, being pulled up out of the shit. Marion will be inside, still quite fresh, with the money as good as new. And in that last meticulously controlled optical, the skull itself seems to grin and Hitchcock himself seems to stare through the fussy lace curtaining of “psychological explanation” with what is the real point of the picture: that his pulling our leg took priority over our minds.

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