#14 ‘Psycho’
Mommy’s Boy Murders Woman, Audience Applauds
Let’s pull off the highway of narrative convention and check into Psycho—Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 “masterpiece” of suspense, shock, and sanctified misogyny. You know the one: shower scene, screeching violins, taxidermy. It’s been canonized as a turning point in cinema history. And sure, if your idea of innovation is brutally murdering your female lead halfway through the film and then spending the rest of the runtime psychoanalyzing her killer instead—then yes, Psycho changed the game.
Let’s start with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a bored secretary who dares—dares!—to steal money from a sweaty businessman and flee town for a better life with her equally boring boyfriend. For this transgression, she is stalked, moralized at by a smug cop, ogled by a pervert, and finally knifed to death in a motel shower. Naked, of course. Because if Hitchcock was going to kill a woman onscreen, you’d better believe she wasn’t getting out of it with her clothes—or dignity—intact.
And don’t be fooled: Marion’s murder isn’t a plot twist. It’s a statement. A thesis. Punish the woman who acts outside her domestic lane. Send her off alone, make her squirm with guilt, then stab her repeatedly while violins scream like the embodiment of female trauma. And what do we get in return? Forty more minutes of Norman.
Ah, Norman Bates. The twitchy man-child taxidermist with a "mother problem" so severe it could be bottled and sold as patriarchal perfume. He peeps. He gaslights. He rocks in a chair in drag. And the film lovingly lingers on every moment of his unraveling. We’re expected to find him tragic, fascinating—a victim of smothering maternal love. Please. Every woman in the world has a Norman Bates in her life, and none of them deserve a close-up.
But Psycho doesn’t care about Marion’s story. Or her desires. Or her desperate, guilty drive across the desert. It cares about his breakdown. His sadness. His inner torment. She’s just the trigger—literally—and once she’s gone, the camera forgets her completely and pans lovingly across his descent into psychosis, because what’s more riveting than a cis white man losing his mind and blaming his mother?
Let’s also talk about that final scene: a smug psychiatrist delivers a clunky monologue that sounds like it was pulled from a Reader’s Digest article on “split personalities.” It’s the cinematic equivalent of a man interrupting a woman’s funeral to explain how she was probably asking for it—psychologically speaking.
Yes, Bernard Herrmann’s score is brilliant. Yes, the shower scene changed editing forever. But let’s not confuse craft with conscience. Psycho is a gorgeously made, deeply misogynist morality tale in which a woman’s ambition gets flushed down the drain, along with her blood and any pretense of narrative equality.
2 out of 5 stuffed birds
(One for the score. One for Janet Leigh, who deserved so much more than a curtain rod and a scream. The rest is locked in the fruit cellar with Mother and a century of unresolved gender trauma.)
