T's Take on PSYCHO

One of my favorite things about Alfred Hitchcock is that he always keeps the viewer in mind stylistically. That's a very base and ridiculous thing to say, as any cinematographer does exactly that, but Hitchcock knows exactly what you're expecting to see in any simulated reality situation. He knows just how long a shot takes to creep you out, he knows just where you'll look for continuity errors, he knows exactly what a story needs to flow and act itself out fluidly. Hitchcock did not write Psycho, of course, but he did breathe the sort of life into it that escalates a movie into the realm of Classic Work.

I feel a bizarre sort of kinship with Norman Bates. Not the mother stuff, of course, that's creepy, but really more with the split personality and murderous psychotic episodes. I remember the first time I shoved a corpse-bearing car into a cloudy marsh and watched all their judgement and cruelty and misconstrued preconceptions just slip into the mouth of an all-encompassing ooze. They just stop talking, you know? They can't hurt you anymore. They're just gone, forever, and nothing they think or say matters anymore. Not that it ever did. Stupid whore bitch.

There is no way, in modern Western society or many others, that a known social person can just dissapear without rigorous inquest and followup from the rest of the world. This is for the most part universally true, and I always enjoy it when a movie or book finds some way to keep bringing things like this up to the killer. The viewer feels a sense of relieved satisfaction in such a scenario. This is especially true in a movie like this where more than one character happens across the twisted freak's doorstep and vanishes horrifically into the sludge behind his home and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. The thing that makes a story like this great is when the happenings teeter on the edge of being overlooked completely. It is this fear that reaches the viewer, and less the impending doom befalling the inquisitors once we see the initial act take place.

Indeed, it was difficult to care at all about some nobody private investigator or the cardboard cuttout sister Janet, or the male lead who liked Lila enough to shack up over the weekends but not nearly enough to take a chance on a relationship and embrace the only woman who loves him at all. The characters here were sufficiently jaded and complicated to be reasonably compelling or at least believeable, but never enough to make me cringe when sociopath Norman descended on someone with a huge kitchen knife. These people were doomed from the start, I accepted that the moment I saw them that they would all be felled by cold steel, it was only a question of when. I was looking for more of a Jason Voorhees flick than was delivered (I remembered it being much less chaste with gore and violence) but all in all I would say that which the viewer is offered to sup here was sufficient.

Seriously, though. I will say that the quicksand he kept piling the cars onto was essentially ridiculous. It was the same spot, both times. You're telling me two more women have disappeared  in exactly the same way? So we're four cars deep, now, and they're still sinking just as quickly? How deep is this thing? What's his plan if they don't sink all the way? Is he going to wade into this (absolute minimum) thirty-foot deep fucking rift in the tectonic plates just behind his motel and jump on the hood? This Norman Bates character certainly isn't a very logical person, if you ask me.

The pacing was extraordinarily good, the characterization was allotted more than adequate time to marinade, the conversations between the Psycho himself and other characters were believably coherent and sufficiently unhinged... My favorite part was the psychiatrist pacing intently around the office monologing about the crazy in the other room. He was getting off on that shit. It was great. And the suits were all perfect, too. Prim and pressed, with everyone's hair shining like diamonds. Beautiful. If I had to rate this movie, which I don't, I still wouldn't. But I will tell you to watch Psycho.