Touchstones of a Queer Childhood (#2): Psycho
By: Joe Shetina
Tags: Film, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho, Horror

Touchstones of a Queer Childhood (#2): Psycho

Spoiler Alert: This piece will divulge plot details of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which is literally 60 years old.

The 1999 Alfred Hitchcock Centennial release of Psycho

A new — and altogether different — screen excitement!

No one… BUT NO ONE… will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance of ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S PSYCHO.

Alfred Hitchcock, hot off the heels of a big-budget MGM hit with North by Northwest, turned to a pulpy horror novel by Robert Bloch for his next project. With its lurid and melodramatic elements involving illicit love affairs, embezzlement, brutal murder, and mummification, Bloch’s book lacks the glamour, far-reaching adventure, and international intrigue that had become a staple of Hitchcock’s 50s work.

Plot-wise, Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano don’t stray too far off the beaten path. Stuck in a seemingly dead-end affair with a hunky hardware store owner named Sam Loomis (John Gavin), a secretary, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), steals $40,000 from a client and skips town in order to help Loomis pay longstanding debts so that they may finally start a “respectable” life together. Plagued by paranoia and bad weather, the inexperienced criminal takes refuge from the rain at the near-abandoned Bates Motel. There, she meets troubled motel owner Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who, though kinda hot, has the saddest God damn life she’s ever seen. Working as caretaker to both the motel and his sickly mother, Bates is a well of grief, loneliness, and suffering under his devotion to an abusive woman. Deciding the criminal path she’s just started down will leave her as lonely as Bates, she makes plans to return the stolen money to its rightful owner. Then, in the second most unfortunate shower scene in film history (the first being that horrendously-miscalculated seduction scene in Mommie Dearest), Marion is dispatched by an old woman with a butcher’s knife. Loomis then teams up with Marion’s sister, Lila (Vera Miles) to uncover the mystery of Marion’s disappearance, the Bates Motel, and the shadowy figure in the window of the house overlooking the property.

Cinematically speaking, Psycho has more descendants than a soap opera family. What The Sopranos did for long-form television, Psycho did for horror. Without Psycho, there would be no… Honestly, you could plug in any horror movie made after 1960 and it would probably be apt. Everyone’s already written about this movie, but if its influence hasn’t already been talked to death, it’ll take more than two media-obsessed queers with a blog to finish the job.

For those reasons, I’m freeing myself of the burden of contextualizing it too much. It’s been done.

Seeing Psycho for the first time was one of the few defining media moments that my brother and I specifically remember sharing. It continues to loom large over our shared media vocabulary and, in some ways, seemed to determine our own divergent, but adjacent media journeys.

Joe Shetina on Psycho

MARION: Sam, this is the last time.

SAM: Yeah? For what?

MARION: For this. Meeting you in secret, so — we can be secretive. You come down here on business trips. We steal lunch hours and — I wish you wouldn’t even come!

SAM: All right, what do we do instead? Write each other lurid love letters?

[…]

MARION: (putting on her blouse) Oh, we can see each other. We can even have dinner. But respectably. In my house, with my mother’s picture on the mantel, and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.

SAM: And after the steak, do we send Sister to the movies? Turn Mother’s picture to the wall?

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin) in Psycho

Considering how closely the film follows the novel’s plot, perhaps the biggest difference between Robert Bloch’s Psycho and its film adaptation is in the pure aesthetics of it. Where the book doesn’t skimp on the lurid and let’s say ‘trashy’ details, Hitchcock’s involvement brings the necessary artfulness to the proceedings. It’s what Hitchcock did best — that careful balance between the glamorous and the grotesque. One major change in the glamour direction is in the character of Norman Bates. The Norman in the book is not the sad soft-eyed boy next door that Anthony Perkins makes him. In fact, he’s more like the clumsy, Cheeto-eating toy collector in Toy Story 2 with a drinking problem. Perkins’ dreamboat face and haunted eyes are almost designed to make you feel for him, like him.

“A boy’s best friend is his profile.”

And for all of the grotesqueness of the film, the book is almost callously indifferent to its violence. I remember vividly how quick the now-iconic shower scene is in the book. All in one paragraph, Mary Crane undresses for her shower, steps inside, fails to notice the bathroom door opening and is murdered. Her death is quick and largely played for shock, described by the author in a line that went, brutally, “it was the knife that cut off her scream — and her head.” But as we know now, Hitchcock took this scene ten steps further. A beheading would be shocking, but it also lets the audience off the hook in a way. It’s not nearly as horrifying and grueling as the rain of stabs wrought on Marion in the film’s most famous scene. The shock of that swinging shower curtain, the piercing Bernard Herrmann score… these are shocking, yeah, but it’s the almost endless onslaught of stabs, slices, and cuts that horrifies. And that we never once see the blade make contact is not just a sly filmmaker and editor dodging the censors — it never allows us a breath, a catharsis. There’s no chance of release. That, to me, is the true success of the Shower Scene.

Psycho has wrapped its vines around American film and pop culture like kudzu. Its 1960 release is still legendary: a perfect combination of glitzy Hollywood fanfare and the kind of exhibition gimmicks B-movie directors like William Castle employed. Fitting, considering that so much of Alfred Hitchcock’s career seemed to be a tap-dance along the dotted line between glamorous and grotesque. “No one…” reads an original poster, “BUT NO ONE… will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.” Audiences were undaunted by this condition and the long, block-busting lines it caused. Before Jaws turned the ocean into a nightmare, Psycho made the shower a venue for voyeuristic terror.The film’s violent sights and melodramatic subplots, iconic shots and shrill music cues inevitably inspired new filmmakers to treat the whole enterprise as a blueprint upon which they could make amendments, employ stylistic deviations, and ratchet up the gore. Even if you’ve never seen Psycho, you’ve seen its influence — and for a first-time viewer, that’s kind of the problem.

As an undergrad at the University of Illinois, I took a film class with a friend. It was one of those classes that sounded a lot more fun on paper but turned out to be a steaming pile of boredom in practice. My friend withdrew a couple of weeks into the semester, but I stayed, went to half the scheduled classes, and still managed to eke out an A-minus. Psycho was the first film on the syllabus. My friend had never seen it, and I had seen it far too many times to be that excited about watching it again, but I brought my copy over to their apartment and we sat down to watch.

I’m not proud of it, but I can be the kind of person who needs to gauge the other person’s enjoyment of the things I like, so it was kind of a blow when I looked over and saw my friend beginning to doze off about 20 minutes in. There were some subdued “Huh”s and “Oh”s, but by the time Marion Crane drove up to the Bates Motel, their interest had waned. At one of the most tension-filled parts of the parlor scene between Marion and Norman Bates, my friend’s eyes narrowed in disdainful recognition, and they croaked, “He’s the mom, isn’t he?” The shower scene drew a half-interested, “Damn,” from them before they finally fell asleep.

Maybe screams of its original audiences only exist in memory, newspaper articles, books, and cinematic recreations now (such as the ones lovingly depicted in Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock). Its twists and turns have been cribbed and referenced to the point of banality. The movie’s terrors are just as commonplace now as a lukewarm shower. The shower scene itself may still surprise with its violence, despite its relative bloodlessness, because it does feel like a bludgeon of unexpected savagery in an era of film where the aesthetics might look and seem more sterile and clean-cut (and maybe less “real”) to a modern audience. I wasn’t surprised by my friend's guess at the ending. The unseen Mrs. Bates’ presence looms too large over the proceedings to be anything other than myth or misdirection. Any first-time viewer would think the movie is intentionally broadcasting this final revelation from a mile away. Though it’s patently unfair to task Alfred Hitchcock et. al. with enough foresight to make the film’s twists and turns as rich and suspenseful for audiences that are six decades apart, if that’s what you’re in it for, you’ll probably leave scratching your head wondering, “Is that all there is?” when it’s over.

Despite being born 33 years after it was released, that wasn’t my experience of watching Psycho for the first time.

I had the benefit of being a six-year-old watching it, but I was a somewhat culturally-literate six-year-old, I think. I had already discovered Cher, Tina Turner, and Selena thanks to my mom’s CD collection, my brother had shown me Clue, Blazing Saddles, Beavis & Butthead, and the first few episodes of South Park, and we were over a year out from VH1 Divas Live, a monumental television event that I 100% believe made me gay.

But I had never seen anything like Psycho.

SHERIFF CHAMBERS: Your detective told you he couldn’t come right back because he was goin’ to question Norman Bates’ mother. Right?

LILA: Yes.

SHERIFF CHAMBERS: Norman Bates’ mother has been dead and buried in Greenlawn Cemetery for the past ten years.

I was a six-year-old fat kid with a bowl cut, and Tostitos with microwave-melted cheddar cheese still seemed like a delicacy. Gluttonous little shit that I was, I think I ate a whole plate of it by myself the night we watched Psycho for the first time. My aunt had rented the VHS for me and my brother, probably from Hollywood Video. The three of us watched it in my aunt’s upstairs bedroom. I liked her room because it always smelled like the hand lotions she kept and it was on the side of the house that caught the most breezes, so it always felt comfortable and cool to me. I remember feeling cool and full and wide-eyed by the end of the movie, whose resolution rendered me shocked and scandalized — and then the power went out. The three of us shot puzzled glances at each other, maybe to make sure nobody was orchestrating a prank. The lights dimmed to almost nothing for a few confusing, heart-stopping seconds, then returned to their normal brightness. A “brown-out.” I didn’t know they existed before that moment. I’d never seen one. Suddenly, our experience of Psycho, which my brother Michael and I had just watched for the very first time, felt all the more significant — a formative moment punctuated by an unsettling and timely exclamation point.

Vera Miles as Lila Crane in Psycho.

In that way, I think I got as close to the original experience as any 90s kid could. From the screaming of Bernard Herrmann’s strings that herald the main titles to the eerily dubbed howling placed in Anthony Perkins’ pained, crooked mouth as John Gavin wrestles him out of his homicidal rage, I was irrevocably hooked. I watched, eager to know what would happen to Marion Crane, not yet fully putting together how entwined her fate would be with the hypnotizing, bone-chilling, and iconic picture of her face mid-scream on the VHS cover. Munching my way through a plate of melted cheddar-topped Tostitos, I was so invested in the mystery of Norman Bates’ mother that when the grizzled sheriff (John McEntire) asked, pointedly, mysteriously, and gravely, “Well, if the woman up there is Mrs. Bates… who’s that woman buried out in Greenlawn Cemetery?” that I started expounding all my theories — all of them wrong — to my brother and knowing aunt who probably told me to just shut up and watch the movie.

But I was watching the movie! And I was watching it in a way I’d never watched anything, viscerally experiencing things like editing and production design and cinematography — concepts I had no words for yet: the black and white photography that’s at once crisp and threateningly harsh; those music cues, sour and foreboding and shrill and scary in equal measure; the flurry of cuts and sickening plunks of the knife during the shower scene; the high angle shots, dooming Janet Leigh and Martin Balsam before a knife ever touches them. As I chased down more and more of his work, it became clearer what made a Hitchcock movie a Hitchcock movie, and from there, it was becoming clearer what made one movie different from another, what made this filmmaker different from that one. This understanding carried over into music, TV, books, even if I had experienced them before. I was discovering style. Hitchcock’s work is the perfect entry point for that kind of realization. His are the kinds of movies whose choices announce themselves proudly. They invite you to marvel at their artifice, at how efficiently you are being fooled.

MOTHER: I am sorry boy, but you do manage to look ludicrous when you give me orders.

NORMAN: Please, Mother!

MOTHER: No! I will not hide in the fruit cellar. Ha! You think I’m fruity, huh? I’m staying right here. This is my room and no one will drag me out of it — least of all my big, bold son!

NORMAN: Now come now, Mother! He came after the girl and now someone will come after him! Mother, please! It’s just for a few days. Just for a few days so they won’t find you.

MOTHER: (mocking) ‘Just for a few days!’ — In that dark, dank fruit cellar! No! You hid me there once, boy, and you won’t do it again. Not ever again! Now get out! (pause, then quietly, ominously) I told you to get out, boy.

NORMAN: I’ll carry you, Mother.

MOTHER: Norman! What do you think you’re doing! Don’t you touch me! Don’t! (From overhead we watch Norman carry a frail body out of the bedroom and down the stairs.) Norman! Put me down! Put me down! I can walk on my own…

It seems fitting that my brother and I saw Psycho for the first time together. After consuming his media for so long, it seems to me like that movie started me off on a separate course. I started curating my own tastes with intention. If Hitchcock was the meeting point of glamorous and grotesque, I’d say his tastes veered more toward the glamorous and mine toward the grotesque. That’s not to say we stayed in those camps. Some of our favorite “shared texts” straddle that line of glamorous-grotesque — with varied success. Watch any ’70s disaster movie and you’ll see what I mean.

But we both still have a longstanding admiration for Hitchcock. We tore our way through his filmography with vigor and enthusiasm, our journeys with his work swerving away from each other, and then overlapping (“crisscross”) at various points. And though I can’t speak for him, I think Hitchcock gave us both a look at what actually went into a film. One of the more vivid memories I have of that first viewing was watching the climax — during which a light-bulb swings across the frame and sends a glare striding across the screen. I imagined for the first time the people behind the camera making this happen. A curtain lifted in my unformed brain, exposing the apparatus. It was like grasping object permanence for a second time.

After Psycho, a movie couldn’t just be a make-believe story to me anymore. It was a story being told through a series of artistic choices made by people who labored over and cared for it. It was something that lived — lives — before it flashes across our TV screen and lives on even after the lights go out.

Michael Shetina on Psycho

HARDWARE STORE CUSTOMER: (Looking at can) They tell you what its ingredients are, and how it’s guaranteed to exterminate every insect in the world, but they do not tell you whether or not it’s painless — and I say, insect or man, death should always be painless.

It’s difficult to remember associations Psycho had for me at the time of our viewing, when I was about ten years old. As a queer adult, of course, I desperately want to claim that I saw something in Anthony Perkins — or even in those shots of a shirtless John Gavin — but, truthfully, I think I was just responding to Norman Bates in a rather literal narrative sense. I slowly began to sense Perkins’ queerness — and Norman’s — during my many teenage viewings of Psycho.

Also, yeah. Fat kids with bowl haircuts. Thanks for that memory. I also recall that our clothing was similarly hideous.

I definitely concur that I learned about auteur theory watching Psycho, even if it would be a few years before I knew the term. There’s a decent chance that it wasn’t actually my first Hitchcock movie. I suspect that I would have seen Lifeboat (1944) first, given my Titanic-era obsession with all things involving passenger vessels and watery graves. But watching Psycho, Hitchcock simultaneously became the rotund jokester who hosted the trailer included on that VHS tape and also a series of signs, symbols, concepts, and attitudes that made me want to seek out more of his films. As far as the violence of the film goes, I had already seen Wes Craven’s Scream (1996). Thus, by the time I saw Marion Crane killed in the shower, I had watched a bleeding Rose McGowan exit this mortal coil through a doggie door, not to mention the disemboweling of Drew Barrymore. Scream was my introduction to horror deaths as self-reflexive fun. It didn’t really prepare me for Psycho, which, for all its droll Hitchcockian qualities, is somewhat more earnest in its dealings with Marion Crane.

Earnestness is, in a person, a most dreadful fault of which I am often guilty. As a child, I was an unabashed sentimentalist. I wonder how straight I took Psycho. Bernard Herrmann’s insistent strings, George Tomasini’s cheeky edits, and the kitsch intensity of Saul Bass’s famous opening credits — I bet I was genuinely transported by them without a hint of irony. As an adult, it’s hard to transport myself back into that headspace. For instance, the death scene of Arbogast (Balsam), the private detective, is just too strange to viscerally affect me anymore. It begins frighteningly enough, with that famous high angle shot in which a knife-wielding “mother” enters the frame just as Arbogast reaches the crest of the staircase. Herrmann’s strings scream. The knife slashes his face. So far, I’m into it. But then the next shot holds on Arbogast’s face, a streak of blood dividing his forehead and cheek, as he falls backwards, all the way to the bottom of the stairs, Balsam’s eyes gazing at us as if we are Norman Bates running down to finish the job. It’s a strange shot but it doesn’t add to the eeriness of the surroundings so much as perplex the viewer. The unnatural posture of Balsam’s body — achieved with a complicated rig — is just bizarre. It takes me right out of the movie. It’s a shot that marvels at its own technical achievement instead of serving the movie.

But this is nothing compared to the movie’s letdown of a reveal of Norman as “mother.” What is so jarring about this reveal is the masterful construction of the preceding sequence in which Lila searches the Bates home while hunky piece of driftwood Sam tries, unsuccessfully, to keep Norman occupied at the hotel (some of his dialogue could come straight out of a Grindr chat log). The tension as Lila explores the Bates home is still vivid in my mind. So too is that final moment in the cellar when she gingerly touches Mrs. Bates’ shoulder. The chair swings around. We see the corpse. Its eyes are missing. She screams and strikes the hanging light. It flares on the lens. And then Norman shows up looking as though he had to put together a Sophia Petrillo Halloween costume on the fly. It’s not scary. But, like the Arbogast death scene, it’s also not enough of a misstep to produce a satisfactory camp experience. Instead, I am transported to some kind of purgatory between camp and excellence in which I’m more bewildered than affected. And there’s the epilogue in which a psychiatrist (played by Simon Oakland, who the next year would go on to let a bunch of teenagers murder each other as Lt. Schrank in West Side Story) explains it all to us. The scene feels tacked-on as if the studio felt duty-bound to contain the threat they’ve unleashed on the audience, much like the reassuring framing scenes added to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) that threaten to dilute that movie’s McCarthy-era menace.

NORMAN: (coughs nervously) Well, Mr. Arbogast, uh, I guess that’s about it. I-I’ve got some work to do if you don’t mind.

ARBOGAST: Well, to tell you the truth, I do mind. You see if it doesn’t gel, it isn’t aspic — and this ain’t jelling.

It occurs to me that I’ve been talking a lot of shit about a movie I love. And I do love Psycho — but my love of the movie has changed significantly since that first viewing. Psycho is no longer just an individual movie for me, but rather a type of movie. In many ways, it is the archetype. We conceive of 1960 as a moment of creation, and thus talk about the later movies that Psycho inspired and enabled, charting connections between Psycho and its macabre descendants, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Dressed to Kill (1980), and an extensive list of horror franchises. Entirely new genres and subgenres seem possible in Psycho’s wake.

As exciting as all that is — especially for horror fans — I am most fascinated by how Psycho reflects Hollywood at the moment of its creation. Psycho is famously a turning point for Hitchcock. It is his sixth and final film distributed by Paramount, where had been based since 1954, before he moved to his last creative home at Universal. Though distributed by Paramount, the film is essentially a Universal production. Psycho was filmed at MCA-Universal’s Revue Studios, where Alfred Hitchcock Presents had been shot since 1955, and its credits list a mix of Universal employees, such as production designer Robert Clatworthy and sound department head Waldon O. Watson, and Hitchcock regulars from Paramount, such as editor George Tomasini and composer Bernard Herrmann. Although his longtime cinematographer Robert Burks would later reunite with Hitchcock at Universal for The Birds (1963), for Psycho Hitchcock used Alfred Hitchcock Presents regular John L. Russell, who had mostly worked in B-movies and television.

Even though it was necessitated by budget concerns, the choice to use Russell, as well as other crew members from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was a fortuitous one. To say that a feature film looks like it was shot for television is a common cinephile slight on both the movie at hand and the entire medium of television. Psycho looks like it was shot for television — albeit with a high budget for set decoration — particularly the kind of anthologized drama series that dominated American television before they were eclipsed in the mid-1960s by drama series with continuing characters and storylines. The movie’s first 48 minutes essentially function as an extended episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents — or maybe The Twilight Zone. In fact, I can almost hear Rod Serling (that perpetually smoking intellectual daddy of 1950s TV) intone:

This is Marion Crane. She is, at present, employed as a secretary for Lowery Real Estate in Phoenix, Arizona…

It’s economical TV storytelling, though the length of the feature film gives it more room to breathe. We quickly establish Marion’s circumstances — and her motive for theft. We then follow her as she takes the money and runs. Marion is an anxious amateur criminal. Her boss (Vaughn Taylor) sees her leaving town. Then, a highway patrolman (Mort Mills) catches her sleeping in her car on the side of the highway. Marion uses some of her stolen cash to hastily trade in her car for a new one, arousing the suspicion of the dealer (John Anderson) and the cop who has followed her to the dealership. The witness list is already three-deep (“The Prosecution calls California Charlie to the stand”). Forced off the road by a rainstorm before she can reunite with Sam, Marion pulls into the nearly abandoned Bates Motel. There, she meets the meek mama’s boy who runs the place for his ailing but domineering mother. This desperately lonely and awkward amateur taxidermist shows Marion the cost of living in seclusion. She decides that she cannot simply run away. She’ll return the money and accept the consequences. Relieved, she takes a shower. In an episode of The Twilight Zone, few would be shocked when a deadly ironic twist ending interrupts her act of repentance. It’s only because it’s a movie that the death of our lead character is, or at least was, shocking. Cue Rod:

Marion Crane, age thirty-two. She was en route to her own private island, via a tiny California town called Fairvale. She didn’t make it. There was a detour… through the Twilight Zone.

Russell’s crisp cinematography certainly evokes late 50s/early 60s anthologies. That bland, arid establishing shot that pans compassionlessly across Phoenix’s diminutive skyline of sleazy hotels is as visually economical as the opening of an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. Those disturbingly tight close-ups on the highway patrolman whose face is obscured by his straight-from-the-wardrobe-department hat and sunglasses are pure Twilight Zone. And then there are those long shots of Marion at the wheel of the car, with Janet Leigh absolutely earning that Oscar nomination, subtly reacting to conversations that Marion imagines her boss, her sister, and others are having as they try to understand her disappearance, packing so much into the narrative without ever leaving the close-up on Marion. Indeed, the narrative economy of Marion’s section of the film is matched by a visual economy: generic sets, uncrowded location shots, long sequences on sparsely populated highways. As if to signify an impending narrative shift, we get our first glimpse of the suffocating, overstuffed Victorian interiors of the Bates home just moments before Marion’s death — which occurs in the movie’s most austere set: a gleaming white bathroom.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Psycho

NORMAN: The rain didn’t last long, did it? So… where are you off to? (pause) Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.

MARION: Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’m looking for a private island someplace where I can be alone and no one can find me.

NORMAN: What are you running away from?

MARION: Why do you ask that?

NORMAN: No reason. No one really runs away from anything. It’s like a private trap that holds us in like a prison. You know what I think? I think that we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.

MARION: Sometimes… we deliberately step into those traps.

In our piece on The Poseidon Adventure, Joe wrote about the dread they felt as the movie prepares to kill Linda Rogo. When Marion turns on the shower in Psycho, my stomach still drops. When the dark shadow of the opening door appears against the blinding white of the shower curtain, I recoil. In the moments before the curtain is wrenched back and Marion is left fatally exposed, I hold my breath in anxious anticipation. That horrible, endless shot of Marion’s pupil as life drains from her body fills me with dread — even as the part of me that sees this movie in meta-textual and industrial terms wonders about Janet Leigh’s level of discomfort and the atmosphere on set.

The Hitch-Hiker (Leonard Strong) and Nan Adams (Inger Stevens) in “The Hitch-Hiker” (The Twilight Zone, Season 2; Episode 16)

The formulaic storytelling doesn’t soften the blow; it enhances it. It’s the same feeling I get when I watch that seminal Twilight Zone episode “The Hitchhiker” (ep. 1.16, 1960) in which cross-country motorist Nan Adams (Inger Stevens, who would absolutely play Marion in the anthology version of Psycho) gradually comes to understand that she has already died in a car accident, finally picking up the Grim Reaper/hitchhiker (Leonard Strong) who has appeared alongside the road at multiple points in her journey. The very fact that I know Nan will die — or rather is already dead — is what engrosses me. Of course she’s going to die — she is a victim of forces much larger than herself: the advertising revenue generated by late 1950s network television that encouraged formulaic products. It’s the Twilight Zone, how could I expect anything else? Similarly, how can I expect anything else for Marion? Her death scene is literally on the cover of the VHS tape. It’s the setup that still captivates me, that expert marriage of the visual and narrative languages of film and television at the turn of the turbulent sixties.

Psycho is a harbinger of things to come in many ways. The aesthetics are often pure television, but the content is so horny that it pushes even the cinematic boundaries of 1960. The dance of glamour and grotesquery that animates so many of our shared texts turns into something of an erotic dance between cinema and television in Psycho. On an episode of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, or even Playhouse 90, Piper Laurie would not fondle Cliff Robertson’s neck and face quite so fantastically as Janet Leigh paws at John Gavin’s in Psycho. It’s as if Hitchcock knows that television is the ideal medium for this story but cinema is the only place, in 1960, that he can get away with it.

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins)

As I watched Psycho on the same TV set I had first marathoned The Twilight Zone, I couldn’t help but note the similarities. If Psycho made us both conscious of film style, it also imbued me with my first understanding of film as a medium and its relation to other mediums, particularly television. In 2019, when the boundaries between cinema and television are perhaps the most porous that they have ever been, it seems appropriate to examine Psycho’s polymorphous existence between them. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood recently re-created the other end of the 1960s, in which “Hollywood” means a whole lot of things, among them: the decline of TV westerns, the rise of spaghetti westerns, late Dean Martin comedies, Roman Polanski’s classy horror thrillers, and the collapse of the old studio order. When Hitchcock was first at Universal, on loan from David O. Selznick to make Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hollywood was easier to define. In 1960, the stresses of a changing Hollywood ripple through Psycho like its razor-sharp edits and puncturing score.

They rippled through me, too, initiating my lifelong obsession with movies not just as texts but as sensory objects produced in specific times, places, and mediums. Just as I didn’t yet know the word “auteur,” I didn’t yet have “aesthetics” at my disposal. But I didn’t need it. Like most important discoveries, I felt this one long before I theorized it. When I see the crispness of Psycho’s images and the textures of its mise-en-scéne, I remember what it feels like to marvel at an image onscreen and ask a simple, yet thrilling question: “Why does it look like that?”