The Fruits of a Fatherless Society

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2003)

`Momma's boy!' I remember the taunt from grade school, directed at introverted and overly sensitive boys who had little athletic vigor. Momma's boys were always objects of social opprobrium, because they were exceptions to the rule.
Or were they? At the time that Hitchcock directed Psycho, Western society had been through several industrial revolutions, which removed the father from the traditional household industry, so that the sons received their fathers' discipline, not their teaching. And, lacking initiation rituals that removed older boys from their mothers and initiated them into the society of other men, most young men were insecure in their manhood, momma's boys who were wannabe men. Unlike the archetypal hero of Norse mythology, who stole the key to the wild man's cage from under his mother's pillow in order to free him, these men had never released the wild man from within themselves, from their mothers' control.
And that's why Psycho is so terrifyingly brilliant: it taps into the hidden fears of a society in which young men enter adulthood overly attached to, and overly socialized by, their mothers. Psycho illustrates the hidden dangers of a fatherless Western society.
Norman Bates, for example, the disturbed young man of Psycho, has twelve cabins, all empty. They represent his masculine development, perhaps even the twelve labors of Hercules, all of which have been usurped by his mother. He's content to leave the cabins unused, changing the sheets once a week, watching the sun rise and set every day without incident. He's totally emasculated by over attachment to his mother. Never having released the wild man, he's incredibly passive; but, his passivity is precisely why he's also a homicidal maniac. He's sensitive and overly delicate, unable to mention the toilet to a woman. If he had any male friends, he wouldn't be able to belch or fart in front of them. But his sexuality is so repressed that, when it breaks forth to the surface, it manifests itself as the fear of voyeurism or the angry control of violence. Is it a coincidence that, at the time the film was made, the larger society as a whole was becoming obsessed with pornography, which offers both voyeurism and the false empowerment of imaginary control? Is Norman Bates an aberrant microcosm of the rest of us? Is that why his character is so scary?
Watch it for yourself, and decide for yourself. This is one hell of a classic.