Considered Great Cinema for a Reason

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2004)

$40,000 and poverty. Honesty and lies. Infidelity, trust, and honor. Light and Darkness. Black and white. Life and death. Freedom and traps. Sanity and psychosis. Male and female. Alfred Hitchcock studies each of these in Psycho. In fact, it is the study of these dichotomies, these human conditions that make this thriller timeless and allow it to be considered a true classic.
Each of us has human fallibilities. It is the struggle between the perfectibility of man and the imperfection of the human condition that creates the traps that Norman Bates speaks of. In the foretelling rendezvous in the office parlor, Marion and Norman focus on the human condition and how we each weave our own tangled webs. In this scene, Hitchcock clearly shows the fragile female, using sinister lighting and superior camera angles to make her appear vulnerable and susceptible. Hitchcock pits her against the male on the prowl who is conflicted with his own demons and trapped, seemingly, by a traveler's hotel that gets no travelers. Marion is uncomfortable, alone, and on the run straight into a trap of her own making; Norman is uncomfortable, alone, and trapped on what may as well be a dead-end road. Norman is more than a hotelier; he is clearly the nervous suitor, fetching homemade sandwiches to feed the lovely visitor. Marion is registered under a false name, believing that the police will catch her at any moment. If only she were so lucky.
When Norman reveals his sexual interest by peering through the hole in the wall, losing yet another struggle to be good, Marion is exposed at a time when each of us would be vulnerable: as we disrobe in an unknown environment, to prepare to rest from a long day. As the characters lose the struggles that they are fighting, Hitchcock reveals more about ourselves than he does about Norman.
Hitchcock's sense of pace throughout the movie, starting slowly and building to a climax, with various false summits along the way, are combined with the musical score to keep the audience attentive. We find ourselves rooting for the adulterous embezzler, even after her fall from grace, partly because of her decision to extricate herself from her trap while there was still time. Our desire to find out who done it, even after Marion is no longer a part of the story, is a credit to the skillful manipulation of the audience, and of the realization that any of us could find ourselves in a similar predicament, and we would want justice to be served.
Thus Hitchcock is not just spilling blood to scare audiences, but to get us to appreciate our own contradictions and our freedom to choose which road we will travel, which trap we will set.