Pushing the envelope

Rating: Null/10 (9 May 2014)

Alfred Hitchcock is one of America's most famous classic Hollywood directors. A contributor to this is his directing of one of America's most famous horror films, Psycho. Aside from being extremely captivating and an overall great film the movie has a lot of significance in terms of both historic significance and social significance. For film history Psycho was one of the first and most iconic films to really push the envelope on what the current rating system, studio exects, and viewers would allow and embrace. The studio was not very keen on the subject matter and screenplay. In anticipation it would be a dud because of what they thought to be its bad taste, Hitchcock was granted a very low budget to make the film and most of the profits were to go to him. This proved to be a mistake. Psycho was a huge hit among audiences and made Hitchcock a very rich and well known director. Audiences praised Hitchcock and the movie. The reason for the studios and some others distaste in the film were its all around subject matter and some of the gory, revealing scenes. Obviously the most notable is the shower scene in which Norman Bates is seen murdering Marion Crane as she takes a shower. The scene was highly controversial because it revealed an unprecedented amount of nudity, blood, and violence for that time period. This kind of event was never (never ever ever) revealed in a film before. It is now easily the most iconic scene in American film history. Despite the controversy audiences were enthralled with the scene and the movie itself. Other controversial scenes included the opening one in which Marion and her lover Sam are featured sharing a bed together with Marion wearing only a bar and a scene where Marion is flushing a toilet that has toilet paper in it. Furthermore there was controversy over how the killer and villain Norman is depicted. Instead of the audience being left with disgust for his action the conclusion of the film makes us feel almost a sense of sorrow for him. It is revealed he committed the heinous crimes because of the psychological abuse he was subjected to by his mother, as a viewer we begin to attribute his horrible acts to being a result of this rather than him being inherently evil. The fact that the film was such monumental success despite its unorthodox subject matter for that time period is significant of the change in attitude toward film subject matter that was occurring in America. Viewers were becoming desensitized and willing to embrace and even enjoy racey material. This shift in attitude signifies the coming end of classic Hollywood and the code era.