a brilliant puzzle game

Rating: 10/10 (4 September 2007)

*SPOILER* "Psycho" is something of a puzzle game, like the '3 dimensional chess' played in the old Star Trek TV show. When we think the film is moving in one direction, we find it has caught us up from behind on another level.
On one level, the film is about guilt, but not in any way most people think about it. Janet Liegh's hapless victim is actually guilty of a number of old-fashioned sins - illicit sex, theft, lying, sloth, waste, hubris and self-obsession, all of which is soon to be discovered (after the film's end) when her car is dragged from the swamp revealing the stolen money in the trunk along with her body. Of course, the audience knows that she would have repented, had she lived, but nobody in the film will.
Anthony Perkins' character, on the other hand, is guilty of - nothing. That's right, not a thing, nada, zip. That's because he's crazy: even his voyeurism is merely a manifestation of his psychosis. This is not simply a rule of Anglo-American law, by the way - it dates back at least to St. Augustine's Civitas Dei and his definitive statement that where the will is absent, there can be no guilt. And one cannot have will when the mind is so wholly disordered, it can no longer discern a choice to be made (that part is Aquinas).
Perkins' psychopath thus becomes mere act of nature to the people he kills. If Leigh's character had decided to drive to a church for confession to a priest, and then suffered a fatal heart-attack at the wheel, the moral sociology of this would have been the same for her, discovered in a car with stolen money and no immediate sign that she repented of her sins.
Does this make "Psycho" a heavy lesson in Christian morality? Absolutely not! Because Hitchcock is not playing just the one game, but several. As to the morality, for instance, it would certainly be a heavy message if it weren't so dam'ed obvious that Hitchcock doesn't take it seriously! The Freudian explanation, and Perkins' final dissolution into the persona of the dead mother form a bizarre bit of comic relief, intended to provide quick and easy explanations to any audience needing these.
It may help some viewers to know that Hitchcock said that the only really frightening moment in the film - for him - was the sudden cut to a close up of a state trooper wearing sunglasses when Leigh awakes in her car. Hitchcock was almost paranoid about the police (it actually does show up in a number of films, beginning with "Blackmail" from '29). This is one reason his characters frequently seem to have nowhere to turn when they find themselves in legally questionable or suspect situations. And it is this state trooper who first suggests to Leigh that she ought not to sleep in her car but find a bed for the night - which suggestion finally leads to her decision to visit the Bates Motel....
Well, who's guilty now?