Hitchcock’s Psycho – a Humanist tract?

I must admit, straight off, that I do not expect the Humanist movement to embrace Psycho as a core text henceforth. It is unlikely that key images from the film will ever be used as icons of Humanism. The grim reaper behind the shower curtain is hardly an appealing image. Janet Leigh in her bulging bra, as featured in the original advertising posters for the film, is better, but might be considered somewhat misleading, given the usual programme of events at your local Humanist group. The seedy motel, the gothic house, Norman Bates’ parting grin … no, iconic images are out. Nevertheless, I think that there are aspects of the film that merit special attention by Humanists. Indeed, there are good reasons to regard it as a significant text for us, part of a canon of Humanist art and literature, if such a thing exists.

Psycho was made in 1960. In terms of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, it follows after the great successes of Rear Window, Vertigo and North By North West. All of those films feature a murder or murders, but they are less gruelling than Psycho. The simple fact that it was made in black and white, whereas they were all made in colour, suggests that a bleaker, less cosy outlook on life is being presented.

Everyone knows that Psycho is a suspense-horror film. Even if you have never seen the whole film, you will have encountered references to the shower scene and you will know that the story contains gruesome murders. Everyone knows that. But Hitchcock did not describe it in those terms. Instead, he always referred to it as a comedy. He said that only people with a sense of humour would appreciate it. These comments have intrigued the critics. What exactly did he mean when he said that the film was “fun” (his word)?

One possible answer is that he was laughing all the way to the bank. Because Paramount did not want to make the film – they considered the story too grim – Hitchcock struck a deal with the studio. Instead of his director’s fee, which had now climbed to $250,000 a film, he offered to take 60% of the box office and to fund the production costs himself. Paramount readily agreed. There was minimal risk for them and if Hitchcock did manage to make some money out of it, they would still get 40%. Of course, Paramount had seriously underestimated the film which was a colossal success and made Hitchcock himself a multi-millionaire. So no doubt he found it very amusing that he proved the studio bosses wrong, proved himself right and made a fortune all at the same time.

But the box office success comes later. The film is filled with touches of black comedy, many of which are only apparent on a second viewing. For example, the policeman advises Marion not to sleep out in her car because it is dangerous – she would be better to find some place safe like a motel. Likewise, in another seemingly innocent line, Norman says that his mother is not herself today. Marion, whose surname is Crane, is said to eat like a bird – while she is sitting under a display of stuffed birds. There is a vein of black comedy which runs through all the dialogue, right to the end.

Another form of comedy is based on fun which Hitchcock has at our – the audience’s – expense. He takes delight in thwarting our expectations. The idea of building up the audience’s interest in, and sympathy for, a character, only to have them suddenly murdered, must have appealed to him. The story is constructed to encourage us to focus on that one character and to identify with her. We see her in close-up, we hear her thoughts, we understand why she feels badly treated and why she steals the money. We expect to be involved with that character until the end of the story, but Hitchcock knows what we are thinking and deliberately thwarts us.

Genre expectations come into play too. We recognise the story as a version of melodrama where a young couple are driven apart by financial and social obligations, one of them rebels and turns to crime, and finally there is redemption and the restoration of love, honesty and order. Hitchcock encourages us to see the story in those terms and then the shock - when that whole line of narrative is stopped dead - is all the more shocking. Likewise with the detective story. Arbogast is a good detective and he soon picks up the flaws in what Norman says. We know that some of the clues that he is following are the right clues, but any expectations we have that he will solve the mystery are thwarted as suddenly as our expectations of redemption. The signs that suggested to us that we are dealing with a conventional detective story turn out to be false signs and we are denied the comforts of routine genre narrative once again.

So it is clear that Hitchcock is playing with us, the audience. By this stage in his career he was a master craftsman. Psycho was his 47^th film and he knew how to get his effects. He places red herrings in our path and deliberately misleads us as to the genre of the story that we are watching. He encourages us to identify with characters who either turn out to be not what they seem, or turn out to be dead all of a sudden. We are in his hands and he has a lot of fun at our expense. He teases us, misleads us, shocks us and then, just when we think the worst is over and order has been restored, he adds some more story to make us feel uneasy again and rob us of our feeling of closure at the end.

But Psycho is not just an effective shocker. So what more is there to it?

For one thing, it should be included in the pantheon of classic film noir. Critics like Paul Schrader have defined film noir in such a way that Psycho is often excluded, but it has all the key characteristics, though not in their usual form. First there is the black and white photography, which is especially noir when Marion is driving through the night, for example. Typically of film noir, low angle and high angle shots are used to striking, sometimes jarring, effect. There is a low angle shot, for example, when Sam is questioning Norman and the camera moves right under Norman’s chin so we see his jaws working with tension and his nose pointing forward like a beak. A grimly effective image. Film noir stories often feature a cynical private investigator, and Psycho has one of them, and there is always some kind of criminality involved, which Psycho has in spades. Thematically, there is usually a feeling of entrapment in film noir and that is certainly present. Marion and Sam are confined by their financial problems and Norman is confined by the demands of his mother. Norman goes so far as to say that we are all in traps and that none of us can escape. Which is an expression of fatalism, another thematic trope of classic film noir. Plans do not work out. Hopes are dashed and people have to limp along, trying to cope with their failures.

But the aspect of film noir which Psycho delivers with great force is its social criticism. Which is not to say that it is a political film, but it is still a slap in the face to conservative complacency. We see the sheriff and the other pious folk of middle America leaving church on Sunday morning and we feel that they are completely out of touch with what is happening. The sheriff questions the key suspect and is easily fobbed off with a few lies. He has no conception of the reality of the situation. Classic film noir has often been regarded as an expression of resentment, a cynical riposte, even, to the smug complacency of the affluent classes in unequal post-war America.

Hitchcock had been up against pious hypocrisies all the time he had been working in cinema. He had worked with many gay actors and had even made a film about the Leopold and Loeb case, in which two sadistic gays commit a murder for no good reason – but the censors in Hollywood did not allow him to acknowledge the existence of gay people. There was no mention of any such thing in any film, whether by Hitchcock or anyone else. Anything relating to sex had to be approved by the Production Code Administration (PCA) and they were like maiden aunts with a very puritanical streak. That is why whenever we see Janet Leigh in her famous bra, she is always putting her clothes on. They could not accuse Hitchcock of titillation since striptease requires that she would take her clothes off.

When Hitchcock made The Lodger in 1926, the first commercial film that he directed, he was compromised in many ways. The star, Ivor Novello, was a closet homosexual and that fact had to be kept hidden. The story concerned a Jack the Ripper-type serial killer loose in London and Novello played a sinister lodger whom others come to suspect as the killer. The original story ended in ambiguity, but with Novello as the lead, the ending was changed to proclaim his innocence. As Hitchcock later said, he had to “.. spell it out in big letters: He Is Innocent”. There was also a behind-the-scenes campaign against Hitchcock, conducted by a disgruntled colleague, and former boss, Graham Cutts, which almost terminated both the film and Hitchcock’s career.

The situation was very different in 1960. Hitchcock had a string of cinema successes to his credit, stretching all the way back to The Lodger. He was highly regarded within the film industry as a consummate professional and equally esteemed by the general public as a master of suspense. He was also one of the few film directors to have turned the challenge of television to his advantage, with a popular series of short murder mysteries, called Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His film-making was still compromised by the demands of the PCA, but he was an experienced and cunning director who knew how to deal with the censors and how to save his work from their scissors.

The shower scene presented a huge problem to the PCA. It was the most cruel mixture of sex and sadism ever seen in mainstream cinema at that time. Hitchcock deliberately included a shot of a nipple, knowing that the censors would demand its removal. They did and he removed it. That way he kept all the rest of the scene and the censors felt that they had protected public decency.

Psycho broke new ground in other ways too. It was the first film, as far as I know, to feature a toilet. We see Marion tear up a note and flush it down the toilet. It is not a major aspect of the film, but it does indicate the kind of reality that Hitchcock wanted to achieve – the kind of reality that the PCA tried to avoid. Later we see Lila searching for clues and she finds a scrap of paper in the toilet. The sequence has something of Hitchcock’s black comedy about it, ie. looking down the toilet for clues to Marion’s disappearance, but it also has the merit of facing up to the realities of life.

Those brutal realities are most telling conveyed in the shower scene. The victim is utterly helpless and vulnerable. She has no defence. She is simply a human being, with nothing that she can call upon or use to ward off the attack. It is a shocking, relentless portrayal of human vulnerability and mortality. It is hard to watch because we recognise our own helplessness in hers and we know that we would be simply a victim too if we were in her place. It is hard to watch also because the victim is naked and there is a guilty voyeurism involved in watching. At the end of the attack, the victim slumps forward and we see her dead eye in close-up, seeing nothing. It is a bleak image of human mortality which offers no comfort of restitution or reunion. Death is the end of all her hopes and all her thoughts.

Why would Hitchcock have wanted to make such a blunt statement about human mortality? I have suggested that he was giving the pious complacency of middle America in general, and the PCA censors in particular, a rude slap in the face.

But I would like to speculate a little bit further. In 1957, just three years before Psycho was made, the first full-length study of Hitchcock’s films was published. It was written by Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer and it paid great tribute to Hitchcock’s skill as a master of film narrative. They also analysed his films thematically and concluded that there was a pattern of sin and redemption, which they connected to his Catholic upbringing. They claimed that his films exemplified Catholic moral teaching.

I would say that, whatever we make of Psycho, it is clearly not a story of redemption. Marion is tempted to commit a crime. She strays from the path of conventional morality. But there is no cosy scene of the prodigal returned here. There is a finality about her exit which rules out all possibility of redemption. Her life is over. She has been brutally murdered and any hopes that were raised about her return to ordinary, everyday society have been extinguished with her.

Even the fact that the villain has been captured makes no difference. There is no recompense for her needless death in the enforcement of the law and the pronouncements of justice. The villain accepts no responsibility and has escaped into madness, beyond all claims of justice. The psychiatrist tells us a plausible story about the origins of Norman’s madness and explains why he committed such terrible crimes. But neither the explanation nor the incarceration can diminish the brutal facts of Marion’s death. The last image of the film is of her car being dragged from the swamp. The winch makes a harsh, grating noise. We know that her corpse is in there and we cannot avert our eyes from the grim reality.

Part of Hitchcock’s vision is clearly Humanist. He tells the short, sad story of Marion Crane without any comforting fantasy of a life after death. When Sam and Lila learn the truth of what happened to her, there are no pious reassurances or religious panaceas to soften the bare facts. Nor is there any divine principle of justice which imposes order on a violent world. There is nothing to guarantee that the brutal injustice of her death will ever be remedied - indeed, how can it be, even if the murderer is caught? It makes no difference to the victim whether the murderer is punished or not.

Perhaps Hitchcock is more of a pessimist than a Humanist? Is there anything in Psycho which offers a basis for those positive values which Humanists claim to uphold? Well, there are some things in the film: Sam and Lila care for Marion and show courage and determination in their search to find her. They honour her memory, too, by not falling into each other’s arms at the end. And the psychiatrist sounds calm and rational, despite the horrors that he confronts. But these are small tokens of the positive to set against the enormity of the murder.

I think we must step outside the story to find the answer. It lies in the shock which Hichcock expects us to feel when he confronts us with the horror of the murder. We are shocked because we have ordinary human sympathy for the victim. No sympathy, no shock. And that sympathy is the foundation of all our morality, as Hume explained long ago. Humanists do not base their morality on the decrees of an imagined deity, but on the realities of life where each of us must accommodate the exercise of our liberty with the equal liberty of others. Our moral rights and duties are based on our common humanity. If the day ever comes when people watch Psycho and feel no shock at all, then Humanism, and humankind, will be in a perilous state.

Les Reid

(this article is based upon an introduction to Psycho given by the author at Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast, in October 2006)