Current Forum: Session 6: Ideology and Gender	Read 9 times 	
Date: 18-Feb-2001 15:49:54	
Author: DRAKE-BOYT, ELIZABETH D. <edd1290@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: In the killer's eye 	
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       I would like to thank Kyle for discussing a shot in Hitchcock's movie, Psycho (1960) that has troubled me a great deal, simply because I could not understand it. The shot in question occurs 
when Arbogast questions Norman about whether or not Marion had stopped at the hotel. As soon as Arbogast sees her signature in the hotel log book, we (the film viewers) suddenly and awkwardly find ourselves looking up at Norman from under his chin. As Kyle suggests, it does seem that Norman is "stretched out" on display and offered to be examined by this extreme close-up and low-angle shot. Certainly this leaves Norman vulnerable to both the gaze and a physical fragmentation, a pictoral treatment usually reserved for women (Mulvey: 135). In this context, I agree that it does suggest a feminization of Norman. 
       But this particular low-angle shot also makes Norman more powerful, instead of weak the way a high angle shot does. When the police officer stops Marion and questions her about why she did not sleep in a hotel we also see him in a low-angle shot as a figure of threatening authority towering over her, and possibly discovering her guilt. By contrast, Marion's guilt of theft and her vulnerability as a woman alone by the side of the road is emphasized when she is seen in an opposite high-angle shot. 
       While I find Kyle's explanation logical in terms of Norman's abnormal subsumation of his own mother (and the irony of his name, suggesting a merging of the words "normal" and "man") to become essentially female, I would suggest that this particular shot also shows Norman tremendously empowered. He knows what Arbogast does not know, and so has the advantage of that knowledge. Arbogast has touched on a "weak" spot in Norman's secret--that is, Marion has signed her name in the book, directly refuting Norman's previous statement that she had not 
even been to the hotel. Are Norman and his "mother" going to get caught? Not yet! As soon as he "smells" how close he has come to being discovered, Norman aggressively "stretches" across the book and meets Arbogast eye to eye, providing a smooth lie as if he were a hunter (or even a bird of prey--his beak nose stretched with keen anticipation and seen hovering above by a cowering mouse) about to trap his bird. This is an empowering thrill to Norman--to come so close to being caught, and yet still be so clever as to evade detection by a "superior male". I submit that it is a thrill to the audience as well, who at that point takes Norman's point of view. It is something like the thrill of stealing a library book, or shoplifting, for example. He feels perfectly equal to the challenge Arbogast has provided. 
       This hunter/victim stance is part of Norman's deception. He plays the part of the mild-mannered, almost innocent, and very patient young man devoted to his mother. He is the victim of his mother's viciousness, and this appearance evokes pity in Marion when she hears "them" fighting. Compared to every other male in the film, and especially to the males in the movie 
audience, Norman comes across as emasculated, or an "inferior male". The audience viewer is also placed in a superior position relative to Norman; if a "schmoe" like Norman can get away with murder, then the film illusion suggests that any better man by comparison could get away with even more than murder. This is despite the fact that Norman's feminine deviousness is the source of his success as a murderer. 
       This "chin shot" also shows Norman's neck and chin in a very bright light, while the rest of him, or the upper part of his head, is left dark. This is, in my analysis, one of several ways Hitchcock cues us to Norman's abnormality without coming right out and telling us that something is really wrong with him. Very often we see Norman in extreme contrasts of light and 
dark, or high-key lighting, which suggests his "split" personality, his paradox between his own mild personality and his murderous "mother" personality. I find it an irony that punishment for the guilty look is not only meted out to the woman who evokes that look in Norman, but is administered by Norman himself, in the "person" of the mother rather than the father. Houston ("Psychoanalytic Criticism": 127) states that it is fear of the father's punishment that evokes the Castration Complex in a boy as part of his maturation as a normal male. But in Norman's case, his mother is also his father, adding a greater danger to the son of being absorbed by the female, and thus emasculated. Instead of becoming male along the identity 
pattern set by the father, Norman deviates from normal maturation by becoming his own mother. 
       The eye and the guilt of its gaze is further exploited by Hitchcock for suspense, especially as we both see Norman's eye in the peephole watching Marion in the shower, and see what he 
sees, one right after the other. The quick juxtaposition of a close up of her eye in horror as she is dying with a close up of the drain down which her life blood flows connects this series of intense, "iris-shots" which focus on the detail of the gaze and join it with the punishment of the woman who has elicited that gaze. By contrast, the Bates house is always seen looming at a 
distance, as eerie as Kane's mansion, and as forbidding in its containment of evil secrets. When the viewer is inside, Hitchcock gives us weird, vertigo-inducing angle shots, as if to make the viewer dizzy, or off balance. Norman's relationship with his mother is thrown off balance (made abnormal) by an extreme high angle of them as he carries her down the stairs. We not only know something is not quite right about all this, but pity the vulnerability of mother and son as "they" struggle. Later we associate this "unbalanced" domesticity with Norman's unbalanced mind. It is a "death of reason" or a death of Norman's individual personality, very much in the same way as Arbogast and Marion both physically fall off balance as they are killed. 
       I would also like to bring up the point of view shots in the movie, which places the audience in the position of the killer. This is Hitchcock's genius; to place the viewer directly in the position of the abnormal character, as if the viewer were participating not only in the guilty viewing of the woman (Marion), but in the punishment of that look. However, in the end we identify with the "normal" people of Marion's boyfriend and her sister Lila, and speculate on the two of them pairing up in a more normal love interest. 
       Finally, I did not agree with the extended psychological explanation of Norman's psychosis at the end of the movie--it seemed so obvious what was going on without all that. But then, the movie was made in 1960, and audiences are perhaps more sophisticated now than when it first came out.