Politics of Sight and Height: The Ocular and Epistemological Illogic of Psycho

Rating: 8/10 (25 March 2006)

For those who can stomach it, Psycho is a technical and visual chef d'oeuvre deserving of multiple viewings. It has yet to be surpassed in the horror/thriller genre. It participates in Hitchcock's lifelong fixation with sight, a theme addressed by these notes, which assume the reader's shot-by-shot familiarity with the film.
Hitchcock's interest in the human eye is manifold: aesthetic, physiological, psychological, epistemological. Does eye imagery signify knowledge? Or its opposite? How? Eyes function as the mediating nexus between the unknown, outside world and our internal reckoning of it. But far from being the locus of strength and understanding for protagonist, audience, or even antagonist, eyes (and vision) instead serve Hitchcock's epistemologically sadistic project of illogic and fracture. Hitchcock delights in buffeting his protagonist's eye to assault who resides behind that superficies, just as he enjoys striking through the very screen at the audience seated uncomfortably behind it.
That Marion's struggle (and our own) is fundamentally an epistemological one is made transparent by her run-in with the disembodied head of a highway patrolman, eyes shielded behind ludicrous sunglasses. His eyes are not the first to accuse herwe remember her boss' glareand they signal her informational disadvantage. They take in information but betray none of their own secrets (or vacuity?). Thus does Hitchcock subvert Carol Clover's assaultive/projective/masculinereactive/introjective/feminine dipole: the patrolman's gaze is informationally assaultive precisely because it is introjective only. (We will see the assaultive power of the introjective gaze suggested when Norman eyes Marion through the peephole.)
Hitchcock showcases his editorial encoding of the epistemological (pseudo-)order of Psycho's world in the driving sequence immediately following this encounter. This sequence intercuts with rigorous regularity among three types of shots: third-person shots facing Marion; POV shots through the front windshield; and POV shots of the patrol car. The exacting regularityfacilitated by mirrors, a classic Hitchcockian tropepretends to signal an order, a logic. We imagine Marion trying to parse the auteur's sententious geometry. But no understanding emerges. Elegant as it is, the shot pattern means nothing and reveals nothing, since Hitchcock is a cynic. Alongside such theoretical obfuscations, physical objects designed to enlighten instead prove occlusive: rather than informing, a newspaper conceals (money); rather illuminating, headlights blind (Marion).
Eye imagery participates in another spurious rule-of-thumb: the equation that height equals knowledge and therefore power. Hitchcock implies this parsimony in the dinner scene in the parlor. At first, level shots of Marion are interpolated with steep low-angle shots of Norman's birds eyeing her as their prey. Then level shots of her eating take turns with shallow low-angle shots of Norman, a subtler predator but a predator nonetheless. At the first mention of his mother, his eyes turn up the hill to her, the most psychically powerful predator of all. In contrast to the retina-dominated view we have heretofore had of him, his upturned eyes now acknowledge their own master (Mother) and expose their whitesthe polar opposite of the policeman's absorptive black holes. (There are several other eye references in this scene. For instance, Marion mentions wishing for her own "private island," a pun on the "private eye-land" that the Bates residence will become when Abrogast arrives.)
This particular ocular motif is one of several at work during the most profoundly dissociative crisis of the film: Marion's murder. The first noteworthy shot is Marion's POV as she looks up at the projective eye of the shower (a six-foot showerhead was built to get the shot). A virtually identical shot follows her murder. But whose POV is it now?! That the POV outlasts its owner is a callous offense to be sure, one which forces the viewer, in the name of consistency, to retroactively recast the first instance as an aperspectival moment of purely aesthetic cinema. Our identification with her is retroactively denied. As we fall into the black hole of the drainwhich, in concert with the projective showerhead to which it cinematographically replies, constitutes a further sham logic on the director's partand then emerge from Marion's vacant retina, we are cast out of all comprehension. The ultra-close-up dismembers her face, as if unseating her very self from her eyes and draining it out her gaping mouth and nostril. It is no accident that her eye now lies an inch from the ground. Her effacement from the land of the knowable is consummated when she is swallowed down into the swamp's mammoth retina.
Culminating the corruption of the height heuristic is the relegation of the final battle to the Freudian basement, rather than the Freudian attic, the latter which is understood as the true pinnacle of psychodynamic knowledge and power for several reasons, viz: (1) topologically, the attic has the highest altitude on the Bates estate; (2) historically, it bears all the artifacts of Norman's imprisoned childhood (particularly ironic is the "Eroica" record), the personal font of his identificatory crisis; and (3) symbolically, it represents Mother, the ultimate authority. Instead, Marion discovers the truth in the unceremonious fruit cellar! And what a truth: far from projecting from on high, Mother's eyes are instead absorptive sockets, penetrable by a mere swinging light bulb. Meanwhile, the paradoxical co-location of Norman-qua-Mother in the same room with Mother's corpse collapses the Bates family structure, necessitating Norman's exile from Eden.
Hitchcock's cinematic forked tongue utters its final deception in the spurious resolution of the last shot, the excavation of Marion's car. Structurally, the shot replies to the opening (rather than swooping down, we are dragging up) and, of course, to the film's fulcrum (the submergence of the car). Has the truth been excavated? The revelations from the exhumation will prove forensic at best, and the arbiters of forensic truththe policehave been shown to be so off-base that we should expect little enlightenment from them. "Murder will out," we hear Chaucer groaning. But will it? Let's not forget: Hitchcock is just kidding, here as always.