A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’ by Raymond Durgnat

(London: BFI Publications, 2002)

It was Raymond Durgnat, with Films and Feelings (1967), who taught me to conceive of a film’s “wavelength” (1). Putting the matter as succinctly as I can, Durgnat on Psycho reminds me of an FM radio that very often brings in one’s favourite station perfectly, but at other times loses the signal or is swamped by “noise” and static. Here’s an example of the “tuned-in” Durgnat:

The first half of Psycho is really a ‘lyrical drama of uncertainty’, a description of a mood, of deteriorating morale. It’s a mood painting in cinematic form, with a few symbolic figures, who do little more than touch off mood-change in Marion herself. […] Her drive is built, less from plot, than from Stimmung, and less from narrative than from narration (the control of information, e.g. retrospective detail after ellipsis). […] That is to say, it’s an exceptionally well-constructed film: it disregards the formulae, every last detail is custom-made. (pp. 68-69)

This is splendid stuff, equalling, let’s say, the best of Lotte Eisner. And Durgnat is just as astute about what is happening immediately following Marion’s murder: “Hitchcock’s primary interest [as Norman cleans up after ‘Mother’] is, not Norman’s ‘inner’ psychology, but Norman’s practical thinking and actions and their relation to the ‘heart of darkness’ that runs through all things.” (p.130)

No-one will object, I take it, to Durgnat’s saying that “every last detail is custom-made”, though of course the film’s storyline is basically that of Robert Bloch’s novel (1959) – which has a mood and lyricism of its own – including such significant matters as Marion’s headache, the stolen $40,000, the rain, the elaborate mirror imagery, and such characters as Sam, Lowery, Cassidy, and even “California Charlie” (as the film names him). We must allow Durgnat his approximations for the sake of their greater truth. Such a truth also underlies the reference to Stimmung (moody lighting) – confirmed when Durgnat describes Marion’s drive through the rain as expressionism disguised as lyrical realism (p.82). In support, I’d note elements in Psycho that may recall the quintessential German Expressionist play, Georg Kaiser’s From Morn till Midnight (1912, filmed in 1920) (2). Here I must quote at some length the scholar R.S. Furness:

[In Kaiser’s play, a] nameless bank cashier (3) passes through several stations in a process of self-exploration; he revolts against his meaningless life, steals 60,000 marks and sets off (‘bricht auf’) in search of frenzied excitement. […] The action becomes barely causal; the cashier indulges in the pleasures of the flesh […], and with an undeniable sadism exults in the frenzy of a six-day cycle race (4). Finally, in a Salvation Army Hall, he realizes the worthlessness of money and hurls it amongst the audience, who fight like wild beasts for it; betrayed by the Girl he shoots himself before a crucifix: his dying words sounding like ‘Ecce Homo’. […] (5)

Kaiser does not attempt to create rounded characters of flesh and blood: psychological naturalism was of no interest to him. The characters are stripped to bare essentials; they are frequently abstractions, types who point out the main tenets of the argument. The Salvation Army penitents could well be emanations from the protagonist’s mind, as in Strindberg; the symbol of death – the skeleton in the wintry trees, and finally in the wires holding the chandelier – is a warning and a projection of the cashier’s dread (6).

Further, Durgnat’s description of the first half (more accurately, the first third) of Psycho as being about “deteriorating morale” (though Marion, at least, seems to pull herself together shortly before her death) evokes a still more fundamental expressionism (7). At the end of his book, Durgnat “free-associates” from Psycho to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Books 1 and 2 of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), explaining that these are all “spiritual journeys”. (p.229) It’s on thinking back to the reference to “deteriorating morale” that you surmise Durgnat’s free-association may not be as glib as it sounds (8). After all, both poems are indeed about “morale”, and Coleridge’s has an especially intriguing ending. On the one hand, the Wedding Guest has become “sadder and wiser”; on the other hand, the Ancient Mariner goes on his way reinvigorated in his endless quest to share his story of painfully won knowledge (9). You might almost equate the Wedding Guest with Sam and Lila at the end of Psycho, while the Ancient Mariner might be the film’s audience who have had their own story – or psychological profile – retold by Hitchcock, albeit without their ever becoming quite conscious of the fact. In which case, Hitchcock’s “expressionism” certainly isn’t remote from that of Strindberg or Kaiser. And the film’s recurring image of a grinning skull does function as a warning and projection of dread – that of Marion, in the first instance, but basically ours, the audience’s.

The only trouble is, I seem to be doing a lot of Durgnat’s work for him! He speculates and the reader interprets! I even have a similar quibble – if that’s what it is – about his reference to “the ‘heart of darkness’ that runs through all things”. Durgnat has taken the idea, unacknowledged, from the end of Robin Wood’s celebrated essay on Psycho where Wood notes that the film’s “themes are of course not new – obvious forerunners include Macbeth and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (10). In turn, Conrad very probably took the idea from Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) – one of his major inspirators (11) – whose concept of the world’s immanent Will is without parallel in Western thought in its description of that Will as “blind” and destructive as well as life-renewing and procreative. A death-force that is also a life-force – the very thing that I have been saying for years is fundamental in Hitchcock’s work (e.g., its ambiguous images of the sea) (12) and which Hitchcock himself all but equated with the very nature of film! (13) But Durgnat’s reading seems not to have extended to Schopenhauer (14), so, regrettably, he misses the opportunity to note the massive overlap of Schopenhauer’s thought with Coleridge’s! And here I must make a generalisation. It’s more than a quibble this time, and will sound arrogant. But I’ll try and demonstrate its truth. The fact is, ultimately Durgnat strikes me as writing in the dark, with an at-times hit-or-miss macho desperation – though that may be the secret of his appeal to his fans!

You see, there’s another scholar and critic whom I would rate above Durgnat on almost every count, and that’s Camille Paglia. Besides her excellent monograph on The Birds (15) – in which she indeed likens Hitchcock to Coleridge, on the grounds that The Birds (1963) belongs to “the main line of British Romanticism, descending from the raw nature-tableaux and sinister femmes fatales of Coleridge” (16) – I’m thinking of her masterly Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) (17). Practically every sentence in that 700-page book is brilliantly crafted, erudite, and to the point. Nor, I think, does the reader ever have occasion to question what Paglia’s point is. She has a marvellous thread concerning “the chthonian” and its relation to sex, nature, and the feminine realm, a topic you would think inherently (as well as literally) murky yet which she brings off with apparent ease – and which illuminates several Hitchcock films, including Psycho. (At one point she quotes Erich Neumann on “the linguistic connection in German between Mutter, mother; Moder, bog; Moor, fen; Marsch, marsh; and Meer, ocean”. (18) Think about it!) Her estimation of the power of imagery far exceeds Durgnat’s, I would say. Compared to her, he looks shallow and erratic.

Reader, you now know where I’m coming from! In what follows, please be aware that I’m not ungrateful to Durgnat for the stimulation he gives – namely, in those passages, often striking, where he hits on something essential about Hitchcock’s film, and the broadcast “signal” is loud and clear. As a reviewer, though, I’m duty-bound to report on Durgnat’s less impressive efforts, and several errors, and to draw conclusions. The most egregious instance first. This is sheer misinformation: “As usual with wide-screen,” Durgnat claims, “Psycho uses mostly a 28mm lens, or thereabouts.” (p.14) In fact, according to script supervisor Marshall Schlom (quoted in Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho) (19), throughout the film’s shooting Hitchcock insisted that a 50mm lens be used so as to approximate the normal field of human vision. (“He wanted the camera, being the eyes of the audience all the time, to let them [see as if] with their own eyes.”) (20) And another, almost as specious, claim, this time about the scene in the sheriff’s hallway when Sam and Lila come calling: “lovers of film-craft can find subtle delight in the plethora of discontinuities and cheats (e.g. how those columns shift around)”. (p.186) While it’s true that the technician Hitchcock often cheats (21), the scene in the sheriff’s house is hardly a rich instance of it (if at all). What is interesting about those columns is, first, that the sheriff, a pillar of the law, is consistently photographed either through them (as, grim-faced and tying his dressing-gown, he descends the stairs) or with them behind him. As far as I can reasonably judge, there is no discontinuity. (The columns are echoed in the design of the mantelpiece in the background. Perhaps that is what confused Durgnat.) Second, the columns anticipate those of the County Court House, to the façade of which Hitchcock cuts near the end of the film … (22)

Several of the film’s principal motifs, visual or otherwise, simply seem to elude Durgnat. I had forgotten how, in the script, the opening scene has Sam dreaming “of a far-off island where love comes free of complications”. (pp.31-32) This of course would have been the first of the film’s “private island” references, consistent with the greater “lost paradise” (or “corrupted garden”) theme that informs virtually all of Hitchcock (and Orson Welles). In this respect, the pivotal Cuban scenes in Topaz (1969) are exemplary. Durgnat makes neither the internal connection (to Marion and Norman’s conversation in Norman’s parlour, about “running away”) nor the external one (to Hitchcock’s other films), let alone attempting to relate such imagery to – notably – Psycho‘s swamp. Instead, we are offered another Durgnat “free-association” that I find maddening because, as so often, the stab in the gloom almost touches the truth yet ends up both skewed and pretentious. Love doesn’t in fact come free of complications, Durgnat notes. He continues: “As even Hollywood knew it never did: cf Bird of Paradise (1932, 1951), Pearl of the South Pacific (1955) and Enchanted Island (1958), based on Herman Melville’s Typee; the worm in the island paradise is cannibalism.” (p.32) Unfortunately for Durgnat’s theorising, something more fundamental than cannibalism animates the Hitchcock worm (23). (Paglia would have got it right!)

I admire Durgnat for taking some sort of stand over the controversial matter of Marion’s “ANL” number-plate – yet even here he fudges things! This is the gist of what he writes: “A close-up shows Marion’s number-plate; it reads ‘Arizona 59, ANL 705 (24), Grand Canyon State’. A-N-L, some critics believe, spells ‘anal’. It’s possible. By 1959, Freudian ideas of oral, anal and genital stages in child (and adult) sexuality were just entering ‘general educated knowledge’ (in England, this happened about ten years later). But, A-N-L is just as likely a random series, like 7-0-5, which no one ever offers to decode. But, Hitchcock was famous for practical jokes, and why not play a joke on Freudian decoders (and all those educated idiots who feel compelled to interpret every scrap of print they see)?” (pp. 61-62) So far, excellent! Go, Ray, go! Those “educated idiots” he mentions do seem to congregate in Hitchcock studies, more’s the pity! And Hitchcock was very capable of the sort of joking Durgnat refers to (cf. Annie Hayworth’s reference in The Birds to shallow Oedipal analysis). But he continues: “Marion [, though,] shows none of the anal characteristics listed in Freudian catalogues, so the ‘anal’ tag on her car tells us nothing at all.” (p.62) Oh, Ray! I mean no disrespect, but, in the context you’re invoking, that’s nonsense! Don’t you remember your great line in Films and Feelings – “Norman has pulled the chain” – comparing the Psycho swamp to a cesspool? (25) Haven’t you read David Sterritt’s discussion of cloacal imagery in Psycho in The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (1993) (26)? Don’t you see that the stolen money, if not the car itself, is likened by the film’s expressionism to a turd (27)?

Durgnat adds: “As for ‘Grand Canyon State’, a colleague insists that a canyon is a split, and that Freudian dream interpretation might well treat ‘Grand Canyon State’ as unconscious awareness of a ‘Seriously Split Mind’ (Marion’s ‘impulsion’, and, of course, Norman’s). So – OK Hitch, you win, I’m teased …” (p.62) But that’s too easy, Ray! Consider. I live in a State (Victoria, Australia) called the “Garden State”. If Marion’s number-plate had come from here, would I have had to consider it as confirmation of Hitchcock’s “lost paradise” theme? Besides, just about every other time in the book that you cite an opinion of your “colleagues”, it sounds (equally) unconvincing! (28) (Sorry, gentlemen!) And there are a couple of things that you should know. Joseph Stefano, who wrote the Psycho screenplay, has denied that there’s anything more tendentious about Marion’s number-plates than a way of telling the audience that she has left Arizona and is now in California (29). Of course, given that the script doesn’t specify what’s on the number-plates, it’s possible that Hitch, without telling Stefano, ordered them specially made for the film – except that there seems no record that he did. Indeed, director Richard Franklin (Psycho II) tells me that at least one of those number-plates (the California one, bearing the initials “NFB”) was that of a vehicle belonging to a member of Hitchcock’s crew, namely, assistant director Hilton Green! (30)

In sum, all that one can really conclude about this number-plates business – and probably much else in Hitchcock’s “pure cinema” – is that he applied his intelligence to it so as to discourage foreclosure, single interpretation. Multi-valence was all! (31)

Durgnat’s “forgetfulness” about his earlier analysis of Psycho in the excellent essay “Inside Norman Bates” (in Films and Feelings, et al.) seems to me to point up something else about latter-day Durgnat: his “political correctness” and/or his loss of nerve. Several would-be cogent observations in A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’ come to little: now you see them, now you don’t. Several of them concern sex or bodily functions. When, late in the book, Durgnat finally allows the “anal” into his Psycho-analysis (forgive punning), in a short section called “Secret Structures of the Anal Eye” (32), he is apologetic. (I suspected a leg-pull, but the apology seems seriously meant.) Here he contradicts what he had said about Marion not showing anal characteristics. Referring to the scene where she subtracts figures on a notepad and then flushes the figuring down the toilet, Durgnat writes: “the calculation expresses punctiliousness (another ‘anal’ characteristic)”. He briefly mentions the film’s suggestive “black hole” imagery: “the eye-plughole cross-fade ‘collapses’ the ‘looking’ theme into a black hole through which dirty things escape.” (p.225) Then he concludes the section revealingly: “As we go to press, I came across this note from the director of WR – Mysteries of the Organism (1971), a deeply thoughtful movie about psychoanalysis and America: ‘the sphincter is the most authoritative of muscles, that which concentrates the greatest number of social pressures. Western society, which is extremely anal, through its obsession with profit, work, leads to paranoia.’ However, psychoanalysis [is] certainly not a ‘master-key’ to Psycho‘s structure, or Hitchcock’s films, it’s just one aspect among many others.” (p.226)

Quite true, though you would think that the film’s title – and the psychoanalytic subject-matter of the earlier Spellbound (1945), not to mention Hitchcock’s stated predilection for stories with “lots of psychology” (33) – would warrant psychoanalysis being given more than just one or two apologetic pages (out of the book’s 200+). For that matter, some direct comparison with Spellbound‘s surreal b/w images (e.g., peering eyes, gleaming bathroom fittings) and paranoia-inducing authority-figures (doctors, policemen, desk clerks) would have been in order.

To round out my point about Durgnat’s “forgetfulness” and/or loss of nerve, I note that another of his keen observations from “Inside Norman Bates” – that the Eroica record on the gramophone in Norman’s house suggests “erotica” – goes unmentioned this time. Now we’re simply asked, “adulthood briefly attained, or pathetic aspiration or megalomania?” (p.205) For what it’s worth, Durgnat might have invoked here the scene in The Wrong Man (1957) where Manny’s two boys quarrel over a piece of Mozart and one of them claims that he is old enough to have written it himself! I call such moments in Hitchcock instances of the director’s “outflanking technique” – which is another idea (like a film’s “wavelength”) that I probably got from Durgnat in the first place! (34)

“Inside Norman Bates” was a succinct, enjoyable essay in which everything mentioned could be seen by the reader to fit – or, at any rate, to have a stylistic warrant on Durgnat’s part for being there. The essay’s very provocativeness, and pungency, helped concentrate the reader’s mind wonderfully! (35) A Long Hard Look is more likely to leave the reader feeling, if not exhausted, then inclined to ask, “What was all that about?” It lacks sustained focus. It doesn’t end – it runs out. When the patrolman’s dark glasses are mentioned (p.59), it’s by way of an anecdote about how they weren’t “foreseen by Hitchcock, they were suggested, on set, by the actor”. What Durgnat doesn’t note is the happy continuity, in that case, with the “blinding” theme that opposes (and complements) the “looking” theme, and which culminates in the dark, staring eye-sockets of “Mrs Bates” in the fruit cellar. (The “blindness” in Psycho is that of authority and the law, of human beings generally, and ultimately of the world’s Will.) In turn, the theme relates to the “black hole” motif and the film’s several tracking-shots into darkness – first pointed out by Robin Wood. Note the connection to the “heart of darkness” (and madness) idea. The whole of Psycho is a long day’s journey into night. A pity that Durgnat doesn’t mention it.

In this context, the film’s several allusions to (mother’s) milk (e.g., Cassidy’s remark, “It’s as hot as fresh milk in here!”) find their place. The journey into night is, after all, from womb to tomb; and the connection of our “chthonian” nature with mothers and motherhood has been well demonstrated by Paglia. Marion steals Cassidy’s $40,000 (intended by him to buy a house as wedding-gift for his “baby” daughter) so that she can marry Sam (paying off alimony to his ex-wife “on the other side of the world somewhere”) (36) and have a baby by him. The money is, in effect, a “stand-in” baby, as well as a turd. She had intended to present it to Sam, much as a child, until properly toilet-trained (37), might present its faeces to its parent as a “gift”. For most of these connotations there are precedents in Hitchcock, though Durgnat is probably unaware of them (38). That doesn’t stop him from writing this neat observation in a paragraph headed “The Hidden Persuaders” (invoking Vance Packard’s best-selling non-fiction book from 1957): “By 1959, many analysts of ‘sales appeal’ would have linked ‘Momism’ […], and its special fondness for breasts and for drinking milk, with Marion’s white bra, her two firm packs of dollar bills and the curvy milk jug on Norman’s tray (it’s his civilised self playing Mother).” (p.100) Prompted by the reference to the jug, I checked the scene in the film and was struck by its resemblance to the famous moment in Suspicion (1941) when Johnnie brings Lina a glass of milk that may be poisoned. On that occasion, Hitchcock put a light in the milk. (Incidentally, the multi-valence of the milk in Suspicion involves two ironic symbolisms: respectively, a mother’s milk, a husband’s semen. Which of course anticipates Psycho‘s ironies.) (39) For the Psycho scene, I shouldn’t be surprised if Hitchcock spotlighted the jug. Certainly, as Norman carries the tray past the open door of his office, light streams out and the jug positively glows!

Finally, and crucially, there’s the film’s shower-murder scene. What does Durgnat make of it? I have to say: little that is new. Again his nerve failed him. A nice observation gets spoilt: “At the start,” writes Durgnat, “[the shower-head] blesses Marion with its ‘healing rain’, and she turns her face gratefully up to it, like a sunflower to the sun; as she soaps her face and neck, her hands come together, almost like a prayer (serendipitously I’m sure).” (p.120) Right on – except that I’m far from certain that Marion’s prayer-like gesture (which I had never properly noticed) is serendipitous. On the contrary, it now looks to me like a deliberate piece of choreography by Hitchcock, absolutely consistent with both an expressionist notion of Marion-as-sacrificial-victim (40), and, specifically, with Kaiser’s betrayed bank cashier uttering the words “Ecce Homo” as he dies. Even more specifically, my own interpretation of Marion as an aspiring “angel” brutally cut down at Heaven’s gate (as I’ll explain) readily accommodates such a “penitential” gesture. Durgnat himself quotes a rhyme by William Camden (1551-1623): “Between the stirrup and the ground/ He mercy sought, and mercy found”. (p.117) As Durgnat might have put it (and probably did, in “Inside Norman Bates”!), Marion decides, after her conversation with Norman, to “come clean”. Presumably, on her trip back to Phoenix to return the money, she’d have worn her white bra again. The clearest-possible prolepsis of her death is the moment in Norman’s parlour when the camera lingers in close-up on a framed oval painting of ascending angels – over which is cast the ominous shadow of a crow with a knife-like beak. And the shower-head is nothing if not suggestive of a halo or nimbus, much like when Marion’s sister, Lila, in Sam’s hardware store, is repeatedly photographed with an “effulgence” of garden rakes behind her (41).

The bathroom, with its “blinding white tiles” (something that Hitchcock insisted on) (42), has a double aptness not noted by Durgnat. It brings the “blinding” theme home with a vengeance, in keeping with the use of the 50mm lens to approximate the audience’s act of looking (43) and the effect on the viewer of the knife-murder itself (44). Also, the American bathroom is a symbol, invoking the mother’s voice. (In Hitchcock’s film, of course, “Mother” is heard loud and clear – and preternaturally – just before Marion and Norman take supper.) In this respect, Durgnat makes passing reference to anthropologist Margaret Mead (45), but fails to zero in on details. Here’s a passage he might well have used, from Male and Female (1949), in which Mead links the mother’s voice to toilet-training, a universal growing-up experience: “The clean white-tiled restaurant and the clean white-tiled bathroom are both parts of the [social] ritual, with the mother’s voice standing by, saying: ‘If every rule of health is complied with, then you can enjoy life.’” (46) Because it was new and different, Psycho on its first release was one of the scariest movies ever made (47). But its continued, and justified, reputation surely concerns something else – let’s call it the art (as opposed to artiness) that proceeds from an engaged imagination and which, in Goethe’s phrase, has “the dignity of significance”.

To sum up. Too much of what Durgnat writes is off-beam, occasionally nonsense. He thinks that, for the sake of plausibility, Marion should have phoned ahead to Sam to tell him she was bringing him a nice surprise (p.55) – but surely Sam would have tried to dissuade her and she’d have done it all for nothing? Which is why, I imagine, in the film she doesn’t ring ahead. It’s the equivalent of the typical situation in Hitchcock’s thrillers that he knew must always be worked out, involving the question, “Why don’t the hero and heroine go to the police?” Another problem that many readers of Durgnat’s book will encounter is that there is so much dross. When an observation is skewed or unconvincing, it is also irrelevant – even if you can find core arguments for it to be relevant to. On the other hand, Durgnat in small doses can be a stimulant and a tonic. I’m grateful for the information that “English culture is less ardently optimistic [than American culture] and English audiences [as opposed to American audiences] didn’t become hysterical” when Psycho was released (p.75). I’ve no ready means of testing what Durgnat says here, like a lot of other assertions he makes, but it’s thought-provoking. And, Heaven knows, a director as devious, cosmopolitan and multi-valent as Hitchcock needs someone like Durgnat – a “lesser” Paglia, it’s true, yet still impressive! – to help explicate his work to all concerned.

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