30. Marion Crane in 52 short takes, Part 2
I don’t believe Hitchcock was really interested in Norman and his troubled psyche at all. I don’t even think he really believed in it.
It wasn’t until I saw Psycho again some time in late 2017 that I put it all together, all the imagery of things enclosed within other things and stuff wanting to burst out of whatever is supposed to contain it.
You’ll say that it’s obvious—that it’s what Psycho’s all about, Norman’s buried alter ego, his fractured self.
But I don’t believe that. And here’s why. I don’t think the second half of the movie is anywhere near as good as the first half.
I don’t believe Hitchcock was really interested in Norman and his troubled psyche at all. I don’t even think he really believed in it.
The disinterment of Norman’s other self is one of the most laughably silly things in black-and-white movies. Audiences at New York’s revival houses certainly never took it seriously. Bracing for the titters that would greet the explanation of Norman’s psychopathy as laid out by Simon Oakland’s jailhouse shrink was an integral part of the experience of seeing Psycho with an audience when I was in my teens. The laughter wasn’t unkind, it was just embarrassed. It seemed to be saying that Hollywood split-personality tropes were, like Hollywood clinicians, something you had to put up with if you loved old movies.
It’s become fashionable among Hitchcock fans and aficionados to dismiss the $40,000 Marion steals as a “McGuffin,” the term Hitchcock invented for whatever sets the plot of a picture in motion—the point being that it doesn’t have to make sense because the audience doesn’t really care about it.
Marion’s theft of the money, people argue, doesn’t make any sense, so it must be beside the point. And anyway the money gets buried in a car at the bottom of a swamp.
It doesn’t stay buried, though.
It’s true that it doesn’t make sense for Marion to steal the money. She can’t possibly get away with it, and she must know that on some level. But I think that’s the point: it’s an irrational act. But—and this is why I sort of want to argue that Psycho is in a kooky way the first modern Me Too movie—in the autumn of 2017, when we were all thinking about women and powerlessness, I came to feel that the money Marion steals in Psycho, that gets buried and buried and buried and is finally getting dredged up at the very end, is the concrete expression of what the first half of the movie is partly about: Marion’s rage over what it meant to be an unmarried woman past her first youth at that particular time in America. Which society didn’t allow her to express.
If Marion’s desire to be married is the explicit subject of the dismal first scene in the seedy hotel room, that desultory lunch-hour tryst with the unmarriageable Sam, full of post-coital gloom, it’s also the implicit subject of the next scene, in which Marion returns to the real estate office where she works.
First there is her much younger office-mate, Caroline—wittily played by Patricia Hitchcock, the director’s daughter—who can’t stop reminding Marion with innocent schadenfreude that she herself is married while Marion is not.
Caroline mentions aspirin when she thinks Marion might be suffering from a headache. She adds: “I’ve got something. Not aspirin. My mother’s doctor gave them to me on the day of my wedding.” She smiles nostalgically reminiscing. “Teddy was furious when he found out I’d taken tranquilizers!”
When Marion asks if there have been any calls, Caroline reports dutifully: “Teddy called … me. And mother called to see if Teddy called.”
Most of the rest of the scene consists of Marion being sexually harassed by an important client, Mr. Cassidy (Frank Albertson), who waves in her face the $40,000 in cash he’s spending on a house for his soon-to-be-married daughter, Mr. Cassidy sits on Marion’s desk, leans in too closely toward her, and forces her to look at and pretend to admire a photograph of the (also much younger) daughter. He leeringly addresses everything he has to say directly at Marion, managing to make all of it sound suggestive. He literally licks his lips as he looks her up and down, implying with nearly every utterance, gesture, and intonation that she must be sexually experienced and sexually active—in view of her age, presumably. A couple of times the camera shows us her boss, Mr. Lowry (Vaughn Taylor), looking a little alarmed. He says nothing, though.
Throughout, Marion has to remain polite and professional. Afterward, when the two men withdraw to Mr. Lowry’s office, Caroline exclaims: “He was flirting with you! I guess he must have noticed my wedding ring.”
But what Mr. Cassidy is doing isn’t flirting. Nothing about his behavior suggests that he finds Marion interesting or attractive. Nothing about it is flattering. It’s intended to demean her. It implies that since she is past the age of innocence she is open to extramarital sex, and since she is not married she is unprotected by any patriarchal figure—two assumptions that relegate her to the status of someone he can have a little fun with. He can make her uncomfortable with complete impunity. She can’t object or retaliate. She can’t ignore him. She can’t discourage him or put him in his place. She just has to submit.
The money Marion steals, I began to feel in 2017, represents the same thing that marriage represents in the picture: status and security. Neither of the two marriages we hear about in that scene—Caroline’s to Teddy or the upcoming marriage of Mr. Cassidy’s daughter—present the wedded state as particularly desirable. Caroline’s mother’s doctor thinks she’ll want to spend her wedding night barely conscious. Mr. Cassidy is purchasing a house to celebrate his daughter’s nuptials as a way of “buying off unhappiness.” And there’s nothing alluring about the marriage that Marion might look forward to with Sam, licking stamps to put on alimony checks out in the backroom behind Sam’s father’s hardware store.
Marriage here represents not a beginning or a goal but an end to something: powerlessness and non-personhood. It’s protection; it’s about having people who will check up on you and check to see that others have checked up on you. It’s not having to worry. It’s daddy buying you a house to live in with a man he suspects isn’t any nicer than he is himself. It’s not having to put up with a man like Mr. Cassidy openly insulting you without anyone coming to your aid.
Of course, what I’m describing goes by in a flash, and the movie makes nothing of it. I am making something of it now because that fall it jumped out at me.
I’m not saying that Hitchcock was consciously commenting on the plight of a woman in Marion’s position, but it’s interesting the way the money and other things associated with his doomed heroine suggest something hidden that’s being carried around and scarcely contained. Throughout the picture we see the envelope full of cash peaking up out of the bag Marion carries it around in, just as we keep seeing her encasing herself in the punishing outfits that made it so hard for women to move around freely back then.
And the message in the unsubtle talk of traps that takes place in Norman’s parlor under the dead eyes of the birds he stuffs is far more effectively expressed in the way the vehicles that Marion tries to use to escape consistently bring her trouble and misfortune. Marion can’t catch a break with a car, that quintessential symbol of American manhood.
Stealing the money is nuts, it’s crazy, it’s completely psycho. But it’s hard not to see it as an impulse to upend a structure that leaves Marion with no legitimacy or acceptable role in society. It is perhaps the final indignity visited on her that it’s the money we’re thinking of during that final shot in which we fleetingly glimpse the car being dredged up from the bottom of the swamp.
Nowadays when I see Psycho, it occurs to me to wonder what could have lent Hitchcock insight into the plight of a woman in Marion’s position or even sparked his interest. I can’t help relating her sense of powerlessness and non-personhood to Hitchcock’s well-documented frustration over not being taken seriously in England and America—being dismissed as a director of mere genre pictures. It would be a few years before English-speaking culture caught up with the French Nouvelle Vague’s view of Hitchcock as an important influence and master of anything more than suspense. Meanwhile, at home and in Hollywood he was always the bridesmaid and never the bride. Psycho itself was a movie that Hitchcock literally could not get made and ended up having to finance himself.
That was—in the fall of 2017, when we were all suddenly looking at the situation of women in a new light—what seemed to me to be buried and in need of being dredged up from the bottom of the swamp in Psycho.
I guess I’m bringing it up here because so much of what Marion has to put up with in 1960 was still going on thirty years later, in 1990. And those were the very things that, in the first blush of the Me Too reckoning in 2017, seemed as though they might be changing.
Next time I watch 'Psycho', I'll watch out for the signs you mention and try to think about those things in the light of what you've said.