Alfred Hitchcock\'s Psycho Patrick Mcgilligan

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

Patrick McGilligan writes in his book, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, that "Psycho may well be the most overly familiar motion picture in history" (McGilligan 578). There are innumerable essays, books, college courses, academic symposia, fan clubs, and Web sites devoted to extolling and analyzing this film, yet when Hitchcock first presented it to his agent and staff, he described it as a simple, low-budget American shocker (McGilligan 578).

According to McGilligan, Hitchcock loved to brag about playing the emotions of audiences as thought they were "notes of an organ," however when he read Psycho he must have recognized his own inner music flowing through him (McGilligan 579). McGilligan writes:

It was The Lodger as the Landlord of a motel; it was phantasmagoria with a scary mansion, stairwell, and dark basement; it was a Peeping Tom and a screaming

Jane; it was the world's worst bathroom nightmare, mingling nudity and blood; it was a plunging knifein the muscled grip of a man dressed, bizarrely, as his own mother. It is no exaggeration to say that Hitchcock had been waiting for Psycho - working up to it- all his life

McGilligan 579).

Psycho, with its nudity, violence, transvestism, and bathroom scenes became Hitchcock's most direct challenge to Code (McGilligan 580).

James Cavanagh was replaced by Joseph Stefano as screenwriter for Robert Bloch's novel in the summer of 1959, and Hitchcock immediately liked his ideas of how to enhance Marion's role and capture the audience, which was somewhat a problem since Hitchcock had planned to cast the name on the marquee, yet Marion dies considerably early on in the film (McGilligan 583). Hitchcock always told his writers to write bravely and let him be the one to worry about the censors, and this proved true with Stefano as well (McGilligan 583). When Stefano described how he wanted Marion to tear up a piece of paper and flush it down the toilet, Hitchcock replied, "I'm going to have to fight them on it," because as Stefano recalled, "A toilet had never been seen on-screen before, let alone flushing it" (McGilligan 583). By November the final draft was finished and photography began on November 30, 1959. In the end, the Production Code voted its approval, and the Legion of Decency issued a B - "Morally objectionable in part for all," but had stopped short of condemning it (McGilligan 597).

Bernard Herrmann's score, with its frenetically paced all-strings orchestration, its "screaming violins," has set the all-time standard in film music (McGilligan 597). Film music scholar, Royal S. Brown, notes, the main Psycho theme is "repeated so often and at such musically strong points that it seems to be not only a point of departure but a point of return as well," and went beyond any previous Hitchcock theme "in its array of jarringly dissonant chords, the bitonality of which reflects on the film's ultimate narrative theme" (McGilligan 597). Originally, Hitchcock wanted the shower scene to be silent, but after hearing the Herrmann's piercing music, he decided Marion's ordeal would begin with "an extremely high-pitched string passage, punctuated by Marion's screams and a series of notes that are like whistles," abruptly shifting, after Mother has stopped stabling and fled, "into a loud but slow sequence of bass chords in a minor key," writes film scholar James Naremore (McGilligan 597). After Mother has left, only then does the music fade away, as Marion slides down the wall, with the final shot of her lifeless eye is complemented only by the natural noises of running water and a gurgling drain (McGilligan 597).

In the September 1996 issue of Political Science and Politics, Jonathan Kirshner notes that in each of his films, Hitchcock focused on only a single concept which he expounded through clear communication and used only shots that contributed to the story and promoted suspense and not surprise (Kirshner).

According to Francois Truffaut, "Hitchcock is universally acknowledged to be the world's foremost technician, even his detractors willingly concede him this title," and other critics state, "Hitchcock is one of the greatest inventors of form in the entire cinema," while still others assert that "his films remain central to questions of cinematic practice and critical theory" (Kirshner). Psycho was one Hitchcock's favorite films, because he derived his main satisfaction from the fact that "the film had an effect on audiences" (Kirshner). He once told Truffaut, "I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me" (Kirshner). In a good film, every shot counts, and the basic element of a film is not the scene, but the shot, one continuous exposure of film (Kirshner). A typical movie has hundreds of shots, and the shower scene in Psycho, for example, was 45 seconds of film but involved 70 camera set-ups (Kirshner). According to Kirshner, the crucial thing is not the length of the shot, but ensuring that every shot in the film is absolutely necessary. Hitchcock once wrote, "Sequences must never peter out, but must carry the action forwa4rd, much as the car of a ratchet railway is carried forward, cog by cog" (Kirshner). A good film has suspense, not surprise, and Hitchcock avoided the simple mystery films, where the main point of the movie is to find out who the killer is (Kirshner). Hitchcock did not believe that puzzling the audience is the essence of suspense, "Surprises last only a few seconds, but suspense can be sustained indefinitely...The essential fact is, to get real suspense, you must let the audience have information" (Kirshner).

According to John Belton, of Rutgers University, Hitchcock has endured as a subject for popular biographies and scholarly monographs because of his status as a cultural icon and because college film course are regularly devoted to his work (Belton).