God is paranoid and Satan is psychotic

Rating: 10/10 (23 January 2009)

This black and white film needs that black and white artistic elaboration to find its complete value. We are entering a progressive descent into some kind of hell but we go down one step at a time without knowing there will be more steps after this one. This descent is represented in the film by the steps going up to the house behind the motel, then the steps going up and down from one level of the cabins to the next, then the staircase inside the house going up to the rooms but also going down to the fruit cellar. This image, which is a metaphor of the mind when it is swallowed up by insanity, is essential and cannot be in color because an insane mind is a whole set of hues and shades of grey. But Hitchcock in this case constructs the plot itself that way. Sexual temptation for the boy friend, then mutual and reciprocal financial temptation for the money and the girl, then the run, the escape. And then one step at a time the trail is getting hotter and hotter. The boss seeing her driving out of town. The cop finding her asleep in her car on the shoulder of a road. The cop following her and observing her swapping her car for another. The motel to escape the rain and get some rest. The sandwich and the milk, the discussion and the mental trap for her, the poor thief, and for him the poor surviving son. And you can go on and on and that will lead you to the end, but with only one question in your mind. How is it possible that such doom can fall upon someone? But who is that someone? The son, Norman Bates, a killer of his own mother and her lover who was left free to survive in society? The poor thief Marion Crane who was trusted with the un-trustable, so much money that her jaws fell down? There is in this film, maybe more than in most Hitchcock's films, the sense of some kind of doom or fate or destiny governed and controlled by some kind of insane authority. Hitchcock was showing then the God he never alluded to in this film that was governing this world must have gone not AWOL as some may say but insane, frankly schizophrenic. For this sinister world to make sense, you need to state that the master mind of our cosmos is a double personality, good old god on one side and good old Satan on the other side and the fight between the two are not even close to the beginning of an end and our lot will be like that tossed from the benevolent hand of god into the malevolent hand of Satan and/or vice versa as many times as these two will find some pleasure in doing so, as long as we will not cut the branches and the roots of this divine and devilish schizophrenia that is finding its source in our very flesh and mind and that is outsourced by our spirit or brain into some autonomous though totally virtual, an absolute simulacrum, of reality, an outsourcing movement that gives us the illusion of sanity paid for by that mental and spiritual alienation that the invention of these two supernatural beings represents for us. Better be alienated in spirituality than divided in reality. That explains so well the fact that such lines of thinking and representing our own experiential life can lead to all kinds of possible bigotry and fundamentalism, as soon as we decide we are standing on the only side worth it, that is to say the side of good, the side of god, the side of light, without understanding that there are so many shades of light and so many hues of shade that if we all stand one-sided and one-spirited and one-minded for what each one of us consider as pure light we are absolutely doomed to commit our daily genocide every day between our morning shower and our breakfast, just as an appetizer for our day of labor. And Hitchcock builds that fate upside down for the poor Marion Crane: the genocide of Norman Bates' mother happens between Marion Crane's evening snack and her before-going-to-bed shower, a shower she will never finish taking and that will be turned into a long bath in some muddy pond. The final and concluding image of the car containing the body and the money being pulled out of the pond is the wink Hitchcock addresses to us for us to go back in time and enjoy the film as a rotten metonymy of real life. He even imposes onto us a five minutes psychological ranting discourse from the local psychiatrist to convince us that all is normal since everything is upside down, but is it? Is it not the reverse: everything is upside down since all is normal, or is it everything is normal because all is upside down, or whatever? Add a touch of color to that film and you will produce a big meaningless mess. Black, white and grey become death so well, just like mourning becomes Elektra.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines