Costume design and symbolism in Psycho

Psycho (Movie) Costumes

Analysis of the use of costume in Psycho

Psycho was to prove to be one of the most enduing and successful films in Alfred Hitchcock's career. The film includes many of his central themes including, "...voyeurism, the doppelg nger, and extreme sexual repression" as well as androgyny. (Bell-Metereau, 1985, p. 131) In Psycho, costume and dress play an extremely important if not pivotal role.

This paper will attempt to show this importance and the way the dress and costume is crucial to the promotion of the central themes and intentions of the film. Not only do the costumes used add to the atmosphere and realism of the movie, but costume is also essential in terms of the final impact and meaning of the film.

The use of costume in employed in the first instance to emphasize the essential themes of the film - and especially to underline the difference between appearance and reality.

In this sense dress or costume acts as means of creating appearance and often hiding the true nature of whom and what we are.

As Bates actually obliquely suggests in the film, the central theme of the movie from an existential point-of-view if that we all create our private worlds of despair and entrapment. "You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps -- clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out. We -- we scratch and claw, but only at the air -- only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch."

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho - screenplay) In other words, Bates suggest that we never encounter realty but only the appearance of things that are constructed and created by our own minds. This is possibly the real horror that the film wishes to suggest.

Bates makes the above comment when he first meets Marion Crane, who the audience knows has stolen money and attempted to escape her life and romantic problems in the city.

Marion has absconded with forty-thousand dollars from her employer and this transgression at first seems to the central focus of the film.

It is this almost casual insight that Norman Bates makes at the beginning of the film that leads to the deeper and essential meaning of the film that is revealed at the end. Through the murder of his own mother and the attempt to accommodate this reality within his psyche, Bates has assumed the personality of his dead mother and committed murder as a result of "her" instructions. In effect Bates is trapped in a prison literally of his own making.

The use of costume and the fact that he dresses in his mother's clothes in order to continue the illusion of her still being alive, all adds to the horror as well as the deeper meaning of the film. Just as importantly, for the impact of the horror and the shock of Bates' abnormal and deviant behavior to be successful, the director is careful to create an atmosphere and a world that is normative and conventional.

In order to achieve this, Hitchcock chooses costumes that invoke a conventional and 'normal' mood and atmosphere. For example he refused to use expensive costumes for his star, "...but instead insisting on cheap outfits from a discount store (to match the character's profile

" (Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller) Therefore, the costumes that the characters use are in the common style of the period and without anything exceptional that would detract from the intended atmosphere of mundanity.

In the first meeting between Norman Bates and Marion Crane, we also discover that his hobby, or obsession, is taxidermy.

He relates the story of his relationship with his mother and it becomes evident that there is an underlying tragedy and sadness to his life. In this sense he is initially identified with Marion in that she is acting out of certain despair in an attempt to change her life. Both therefore are living a life of illusion and frustration and this adds to the initial perception that both characters are ordinary people with mundane problems. They are both in private traps of their own making.

On the surface, as the clothing tends to emphasize, the characters seem to ordinary people with ordinary problems. However, as the film attempts to show, underneath this exterior and appearance there are deeper, unseen areas of tragedy and unhappiness which go beyond ordinary appearances. In the case of Norman Bates, the depth of his tragic situation reveals a much deeper dimension of human horror than is at first expected, and which is supported and enhanced by the costumes that the director has chosen.

The prelude to the androgyny and the psychological illusion or psychosis in Bates' character is evident in his initial conversation with Marion. When Marion asks him why he does not leave his ill mother or place her in a home, he states that you don't desert those you love, even if there are contradictory and ambivalent feelings towards that person. "...I couldn't do that. Who'd look after her? She'd be alone up there. The fire would go out. It'd be cold and damp like a grave. If you love someone, you don't do that to them even if you hate them. You understand that I don't hate her -- I hate what she's become. I hate the illness."

Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller)

The irony of course is that he is referring to his own illness, of which he is unaware.

This ambiguity his relationship with his mother is also evident and translated into reality via the psychotic split in the character of Norman Bates. Through the use of costumes and dress the film succeeds in exposing the underlying reality of the situation and makes evident the differences between appearance and reality.

Costume and its usage also relates closely to the main revelation of the film and its central psychological aspect. It is an essential element that is used to explore and show the deviant and abnormal in the human. The fact that Bates needs to dress up as his mother, with a wig and appropriate clothing in order to continue the illusion of her being alive, is a particularly effective technique in the film.

In this way Hitchcock succeeds, partly though dress and costume, in suggesting in a very tangible and expressive way the ambiguity and confusion in the mind of Norman Bates.

The image of Bates acting out a series of murders dictated by his own mind while dressed as his own mother is made visceral and horrifyingly tangible by the actual incongruity of the man in an ill - fitting and inappropriate dress. The costume that Bates wears is purposely mismatched in relation to his angular figure and creates a compelling physical image.

There are also subtle touches in the way that Hitchcock chooses elements of the costume. For instance, the script make reference to the fact that he wears a "cheap" wig, which tends to direct our attention to the pathetic and deranged nature of his psychosis.

The use of female impersonation as a method of unveiling the hidden psyche is a character was something new in American film history.