The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [344]
When Marion retires to her cabin to undress to her underwear, we see him spying on her through a hole in the wall. Having decided that next day she will return the stolen money, which is hidden in newspaper, she enters the shower naked. A half-glimpsed grey-haired woman sneaks into the room and, while the shower is running, we then see, to the accompaniment of nerve-jangling music to remind us that this is entertainment, Marion being stabbed fourteen times, sometimes through the shower curtain, sometimes in close-up, sometimes in slow motion, in the most shocking and protracted murder sequence Hollywood had ever shown. When she finally sinks dead to the floor, her blood spiralling down the plughole, Norman comes in to clean up, bundles her body (and the money) into the boot of her car and pushes it into a nearby swamp where it sinks from sight.
A week after Marion has vanished, her sister Lila hires a private detective to find her. He comes to the motel, finds Bates suspiciously evasive, goes away to report what he has discovered, then returns hoping to interview Bates's mysterious mother in the old house. He is climbing the stairs when he is sprung on by a crazed, knife-wielding old woman who repeatedly stabs him to death, in a prolonged murder scene almost bloodier and more violent than the first.
When the detective fails to ring them back, Lila and Marion's lover Sam set out to find what happened to him at the motel. They are particularly disturbed to learn from a local policeman that there is no Mrs Bates. She and her lover had been found dead in suspicious circumstances 10 years earlier. They find suspicious clues that Marion must have stayed in `Cabin 1. While Sam holds Bates in conversation, Lila explores the spooky old house, and finally in the cellar finds the old woman sitting in a chair. When she turns Mrs Bates round, Lila sees that she is a mummified corpse. At this moment another old woman appears in the doorway, ready to stab the now terrified Lila with a knife, but is grabbed from behind by Sam and turns out to be Norman in a wig and female clothing. After Bates has been taken to a prison cell and interrogated, a psychiatrist explains how he was a mother's boy so psychotic that it was he who had killed his mother and her lover 10 years before in a jealous rage. He had then dug up and mummified his mother's body and continued to live with her: sometimes as himself, the neurotic son, sometimes taking on the personality of his lost mother. It was in his fantasy-self, disguised as his mother, that he had committed a whole sequence of murders, culminating in those of Marion and the detective. The film ends with Marion's car, her body and the money being recovered from the swamp.
What was new about Psycho was its obsessional focusing on the physical details of the two murders. Hitchcock spent two weeks shooting the scene in which the heroine is stabbed in the shower. This is the centrepiece of the film, just as the moment of the heroine's ultimate orgasm had been the centrepiece of Lady Chatterley. The gradual working-up of suspense towards this physical image of a naked young woman being brutally murdered provided the story with its shocking highlight, just as in those eighteenth-century novels its equivalent had been the gradual working up to the image of the heroine finally losing her virginity. In a sense the story has become just a frame for these moments of maximum sensation. And although