Current Forum: Session 6: Ideology and Gender	Read 10 times 	
Date: 18-Feb-2001 17:09:18	
Author: CURTIS, CARL A. <cac7467@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Psycho 	
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       The establishing shot in Psycho zooms in and through the hotel window where we meet Marion and Sam. From the beginning, the viewer assumes the position of voyeur, but also assumes a position of "authority," a public in which apparatuses determine the definition of "normalcy," a public, judging presence eavesdropping on the couple's "secrets." Marion wants to end the private, secret relationship, desiring a "public" space of "respectability" conferred and controlled by the ideological apparatuses. But, film imitates Foucault's panopticism in which the "gaze is alert everywhere," in the diegesis and in the audience (Mulvey's voyeuristic separation). The audience knows her secrets and her transgressions, and subsequently demands justice 
because the audience members are already subjects who watch and are watched. In this sense, the audience is a collective ideal ego. 
       The filmic representation of authority, on the other hand, manifests as the policeman who follows (investigates ) Marion. Interestingly, the policeman is wearing dark, large-framed glasses accentuating the eye, calling attention to his role of watchman, an anonymous gaze never identified and hidden behind the lenses of his glasses. It has already been mentioned that 
low-angle shot from Marion's POV establishes her feeling of apprehension, but it also establishes a dominant /submissive dynamic. This is where things get complicated. The police 
authority, although patriarchal, is only coded as male after the fact. (In the abstract I believe the authority to be an androgynous, omnipresent gaze.) In other words, the authority is not intrinsically male; it is an external cultural force operating on and through the policeman (although his coded masculinity certainly augments this authority). 
       So, how we do we reconcile this with the theories presented by Mulvey? While a traditional psychoanalytic reading (according to Mulvey) could assert that Marion is here "objectified" and subjected to "a controlling and curious gaze," it must be understood as a composite objectification. At once, Marion becomes a subject, an object of capitalistic production, that has violated or transgressed the cultural/economic system, and she is also the object of the erotic look. I do not think that these are one in the same, but instead intertwine and displace one another. (This may be a reason for Hitchcock's success.) For example, Hitchcock's incorporates the sexual desire to possess (and punish) the glamorous but threatening erotic female by providing an avenue in which that energy is sublimated to the need to punish her for violating the (economic) social contract.