PSYCHO: Exploring Hitchcock's Revolutionary Narrative Techniques

This discussion board post analyzes the groundbreaking narrative techniques employed in Alfred Hitchcock's film, Psycho. It examines how Hitchcock masterfully uses narration, character perspective, and editing to shock and engage the audience, shifting sympathy and subverting expectations. The post focuses on key scenes like the second scene, Marion's workplace, her decision to steal money, the police officer encounter, and Norman Bates' introduction. It highlights the film's disruption of Hollywood conventions, particularly the early death of the protagonist and the manipulation of audience perspective. The post also discusses the importance of the shower scene and the use of visual techniques to create suspense and maintain the mystery. The analysis emphasizes the film's impact on narrative structure, audience engagement, and its place in film history. The author encourages fellow students to share insights from their readings to further enrich the understanding of the film's production and narrative strategies.

4: PSYCHO and narrative innovations...
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Psycho is one of the most written-about movies of all time.
Scholars from a variety of fields have analyzed this film from just
about any and every angle, as you'll ascertain while researching
and writing the first essay for this class, due next week.
While Psycho features notable sound, editing, and
cinematography, its narrative methods were groundbreaking. I
want to start by clarifying how Hitchcock masterfully narrates in
ways that made this film as shocking as it was, then I'll open it up
for discussion.
Let's start with the second scene of the movie, since you guys are
already discussing the opening. From the rent-by-the-hour motel
room, we go to Marion's workplace. (Anyone catch Hitchcock's
cameo? He's standing in front of the real estate office Marion
works at!) There we meet her colleague (the other secretary is
Pat Hitchcock, actually, Alfred's only child), her boss, and a
wealthy, arrogant client buying a house for his newlywed
daughter. The client waves a stack of bills in her face and grossly
flirts with her.

Earlier we learned that Marion desires to get married, but money
is lacking. Here she's having both money and marriage thrown in
her face -- even the other secretary mentions her husband and
informs us she's married. The worried looks on the faces of
Marion's colleagues indicate that they know this is a sensitive
spot for her. In this scene we clearly have Marion's back, which
we see visually in a shot like this. Mainly we have her back,
though, because we know what she wants and is lacking, while
this turkey shoves it in her face, humiliatingly so. We are thus
positioned to see her being victimized here. And for a fairly noble
cause in 1960. Remember, marriage was much more idealized in
1950s America; for a woman, to be an "old maid" was to be a
stigma, a failure (unfortunately).

With the money in hand, Marion heads home and there we see
her packing and equivocating. She's torn about her decision to
run with the money, and we see that written on her face. She
ends up stealing the cash, of course, but we also sense that this
is a moral dilemma for her; she's not a chronic or born criminal, in
other words. And from the past few scenes we understand the
pressures on her as well as the obstacles in her path. Hitchcock
also lingers on the cash envelope sitting on her bed, fueling the
drama.
This is one of several "fake" McGuffins in the film. A McGuffin is
something that's isolated in a movie for the purpose of triggering
the plot and providing clear character motivation. Viewers are
conditioned to now assume that the money is key to this plot, that

it will drive the rest of the movie. Will she and her boyfriend use it
to flee and marry? Will she get caught? Will she have a change of
heart and turn it and herself in? In most other movies, Marion's
theft would normally be the inciting incident, but here it and the
money are a foil of sorts, driving the plot initially but then
evaporating into thin air (or the swamp water, in this case).
Once she hits the road we get third-person shots of her driving at
the wheel from in front of the windshield. Alternating with these
shots are point-of-view (POV) shots, from Marion's perspective,
looking out the windshield. She sees her boss and thus gets
caught red-handed, since she told him she was feeling ill and
would go home immediately.
The kicker is that we get caught, too, in a sense, since we're

looking through her eyes now and see her boss looking at us
accusatorily. In fact, the whole film up until this point has been
evolving our allegiance to Marion. First, giving us a sense of her
longings and lacks, then exposing us to her victimization on these
points, and now letting us look through her eyes and feel accused
as well as her worry and guilt.
After sleeping the night in her car by the side of the road, we
continue to look through her eyes. She is awakened by a police
officer, and she/we look up to see him glaring at her/us through
reflective sunglasses.
Hitchcock is famous for his distaste for the police. Never are
police officers heroic in his films. Innocents and bystanders end
up solving the crimes. Here we get a flavor for this, but it also

positions us to be on her side when it comes to the law. If it's a
choice between this ominous face of the law and the Marion
we've gotten to know, even if she is on the run, we opt for
sympathizing with the main character.
Given how this movie narrates (releasing story information
through the dialogue, the conflicts, the goals, but also the camera
perspectives and other stylistic choices), we are inclined to
support the lead character, who typically becomes the protagonist
in most movies. The organization and arrangement of scenes
thus far encourages increasing sympathy for underdog Marion.
Audiences then were particularly accustomed to this, as
protagonists almost always found ways to overcome odds,
redeem themselves, and right the ship. Why wouldn't they (or we)
assume the same for Marion, who has "noble" goals?
Once at the Bates Motel, she meets the affable, soft-spoken, shy
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), whose boy-next-door look and
demeanor make him seem innocuous. That's important, because
this film goes out of its way to conceal the real murderer, until the
end. Even outside of the movie's plot, Hitchcock marketed this
film in such a way as to pressure critics and audiences not to spoil
the surprise for those yet to see the movie. So, these "little"
gestures do a lot to keep the mystery going, and thus to shock the
viewer on several occasions.
Speaking of shock, Marion's murder is easily the most shocking
moment in Hollywood history. More on that in a sec. When we
see Norman spying on Marion in her room, as she prepares to
shower, note how we first get a close-up of him looking through
the peephole, then we get his POV looking at her. The movie is
subtly starting to switch our view and our perspective, from
Marion's to Norman's. In having us spy on Marion, Hitchcock
subversively implicates us as viewers, who go to the movies to
spy on people and learn of their darkest secrets. That's crucial to
our love of the movies, no?
We'll analyze the shower scene more closely when we get to
editing, but it has profound implications for narrative, narration

and character arc. I mentioned how shocking this scene was for
audiences. Yes, some viewers even ran out of the theater. We
can't understate this and how disruptive this movie was to
narrative traditions in Hollywood. To kill off the lead character a
third of the way through the movie, who was clearly established
as the protagonist (even if flawed) and was played by a star
actress? Unheard of back then, and rare enough even today.
Hitchcock put a wrench in the Hollywood narrative, and audiences
were as stunned by this as the graphic brutality of the murder or
in finding out who the real killer was.
What adds to the shock value of the scene is how the film lingers
on death in ways that no past Hollywood movie ever had. We look
into Marion's dead eyes for a long spell, as if to be assured that,
yes, the main character is dead and no miracle will save her, as
we may have been thinking. But also note this movie's fixation on
eyes and looking.

Hitchcock up until this point has established a pattern of looking
through character eyes and using the camera to turn the audience
into voyeurs. For me there's some kind of visual transference also
happening. As the bloody water spirals down the drain, like her
life going down the drain, the water flows clockwise, just as the
camera spirals out when looking at her dead eyes. From here the
camera detaches from the dead protagonist and wanders out into
the motel room, searching for the next main character to look
through his/her eyes. This was a new experience for viewers -- to
suddenly not have a protagonist to follow. Then we hear Norman
calling out, "Mother! Blood!" He'll be the character whom we and
the camera will now have little choice but to follow.
Remember how hard Hitchcock and the movie worked to get us

behind Marion (before killing her off)? Well, let's note how he
starts getting us to follow (and maybe even sympathize) with
Normal. Even if we have our doubts about Norman, mainly
because we saw him peeping on Marion as she undressed,
Hitchcock uses Hollywood technique and narrational strategies to
trick (and shock) us yet again.
After Norman cleans up the bathroom and packs up Marion's
body and any evidence of her having stayed there, he drives her
body and remains (including, unbeknownst to him, the $40,000) to
the nearby swamp, where we later learn he's deposited other
bodies. When the car enters the bog, there's doubt if it'll actually
submerge. The movie cleverly cuts between the car and a
nervous Norman, whom we assume to be protecting his mother.
We may not love the guy, but this editing pattern, which plays on
narrational perspective -- first his POV looking at the car, then
seeing her nerves -- historically tends to foster sympathy for the
character. That is, we internalize that tension and may end up
rooting for the car to sink, without rationally thinking about who's
in it and what he is trying to conceal.

This movie made a fortune for Hitchcock, was the talk of the town,
and has since been been praised by critics and scholars. A big
part of its success was how new and shocking the film was for
audiences then. It disrupted convention, kept audiences on the
edge of their seats, and shocked them in numerous ways.
Narrative and narration are central to these feats, and we're still
studying it with this in mind.
There are many interesting stories and facts and techniques from
the making of this movie, so there's a lot for us to learn about it. In
that spirit, please pass along something you learn
about Psycho from the article you read for the first essay. Pick
something that you find interesting or important, and that ideally
helps us better understand this movie's unusual production and/or

narrative, or even its place in film history. No need to summarize
the entire article -- be succinct and narrow in your focus.