Psycho Casebook, ed Kolker
Note: these are general references to the most significant areas discussed by the authors
- - Truffaut
- - Rebello
- - Douchet
- - Wood
- - Durgnat
- - Williams
- - Kolker
- - Toles

Hitchcock interview with Truffaut
Discussion of Psycho



Stephen Rebello, excerpts from Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho
Role of screenwriting: Joseph Stefano


Jean Douchet, “Hitch and his Audience”
Auteurism: Hitchcock's "exact science of audience reactions"

Three-worlds analysis:
1. everyday world
2. world of desire: form-forces personify secret thoughts & desires
3. intellectual world

therapeutic cinema:
- "voyeur's appetite" fed from the start of Psycho
- viewer's subconcious complicity, accomplice in crime

magic cinema:
- traffic cop's role
- "occultism is at the base of Hitchcock's world
- duel between Light and Shadow



Robin Wood, “Psycho”
Audience identification and complicity: "our moral resistance is skillfully undermined"
- Audience participation and identification
- Spectator as protagonist

Motifs-techniques:
Dominance of past over present
Parent-child relationships
Pairings: Marion & Norman, Marion & Lila, Sam & Norman

Tracking shots
Eyes
Cellar

Freudian psychology



Raymond Durgnat, “Psycho”
Psycho as a "fun picture"
Old dark house film genre and horror cliches
Two false endings

Elements of "a very sad joke":
- byplay between sex and money
- Momism
- characters alone on screen

Notion of "double predestination"
Film convicts spectators of Original Sin



Linda Williams, "Discipline and Fun: Psycho and Postmodern Cinema"
". . . locate within the history of cinematic reception a moment in which the audience response to postmodern gender and sexual fluidity, schizophrenia, and irony began to become not only central attractions of “going to the movies” but the very basis of new spectatorial disciplines capable of enhancing those attractions”

Place of Psycho in film studies
- Hitchcock: “a fun picture”
- Psycho is a “new intensification and destabilization of the gendered components of that pleasure. . . an intensification of certain forms of visuality, . . . that were already evident . . .”

Psycho’s Story of An Eye
- Destabilizing of male gaze: the “schizo-psychotic Norman-Mother who will act to foil Norman’s heterosexual desire”

The New Cinema of Attractions [concept derived from Tom Gunning]
- Contemporary return to sensation:
- special effects, violence, & sexual display are “attractions” that compete with narrative emphasis
- Eisenstein & montage: destabilizing effect
- Roller coaster as analogy
- Roller-coaster concept of film viewing

Psycho & genre study
- Horror genre
- Gendered aspect of horror genre; sadomasochistic pleasure
- Conventional notion of “the monstrous feminine” in horror
- Williams: Psycho actually destabilizes masculine & feminine altogether

Disciplining Fear
- Foucault’s notion of discipline applied to Psycho and postmodern genre
- “tamed audience”
- “new scopic regimes”
- gendered reactions: men vs. women
- women: close down, filter out, but also identify with other women in audience in a ritualized feminine pleasure
- “audience may begin to perceive its own performances of fear as part of the show”
- Hitchcock evoked stabilization of gender & new awareness of performativity of gender roles



Robert Kolker, “Form, Structure, and Influence of Psycho”
“Form is everything”
Hitchcock controlled form “by setting boundaries, even obstacles”

Production restrictions on for Psycho

Horizontal/vertical design
- diagonals or arc-shaped elements
- final two shots of Psycho
- circles & circular patterns

"Anxiety of the Frame"
- shots moving off center and/or upward, straining the grid
- 90-degree position looking straight down

Parlor scene as example of mise-en-scene
- doublings
- mirrors
- one-shots
- Expressionist effects

Shower scene as example of montage
Moving camera
Cross-tracking



George Toles, "'If Thine Eye Offend Thee . . .': Psycho and the Art of Infection"
"Discomfort with the work . . . an endlessly renewable response." It "offers a number of gestures of release . . . which turn out to be no release at all."

The eye as metaphor, "the ultimate goal for any act of violation."

Hitchcock's "indifference, his refusal to be engaged or soiled by his transactions with suffering."
Hitchcock's wit: "allows one to punish to one's heart's content . . . and yet remain blameless."

The shower scene [extended discussion]:
- the eye and "visual analogues"
- eye-drain match cut: "the imaginative center of the film"
- Why does Hitchcock put so much emphasis on this scene?
- aestheticizing of cruelty, the realm of "pure cinema"
- "Film is not a medium for introspection. . . . Hitchcock conceives the act of guilding a patterned sequence of images as a means of asserting control over a problem without ever being required to examine it."
- "Control, as always for Hitchcock, is to be understood here as ability not to internalize."
- "He is persuaded that the search for visual order is a permanent safeguard against fixation."

Eye imagery in Psycho
- inclusion of many eyes and analogues in the film shows Hitchcock's belief that "any painful subject can be stabilized if one locates a point of concentration apart from the 'thing itself.'"

Norman as the ultimate eye of Psycho:
- He experiences any kind of looking as violation
- his ability to "see and do the things that he is forbidden to do without actually seeing anything."
- mirrors, mirror-images, and doubles in Psycho

General review:
This list does not include all relevant terms: see the critical articles references above, as well as website pages for terms in Freudian psychoanalysis, etc.

Names:
Ed Gein
Robert Bloch
Joseph Stefano
Bernard Herrmann
Saul Bass
Anthony Perkins
Janet Leigh
Sergei Eisenstein
Battleship Potemkin
Les Diaboliques
Touch of Evil
Gus Van Sant

Terms:
auteur
director
preproduction, production, postproduction
storyboard
Freudianism:
suspense (vs. surprise)
McGuffin
"absolute" camera
"cutting in the camera"
mise-en-scene
montage
match cut
subjective camera
shot-reaction shot shooting
over-shoulder shooting / cross-shooting
cross-tracking
postmodern

Motifs, images:

Hitchcock's cameo appearance
birds
fly on the wall
bathroom
eyes
food / eating
mirrors
mothers
police
psychiatrist

Psycho scenes:

opening sequence: Phoenix skyline, hotel window
parlor scene: Norman and Marion
shower sequence
Norman's clean-up
Arbogast murder
Lila's discovery of mother
final shots: skull effect