“We all go a little mad sometimes.” Join Ian & Megs for our 351st episode as we check into the Bates Motel, definitely avoid Cabin One and discover why showers have never quite felt the same since for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) — one of the most influential films ever made, one of cinema’s greatest exercises in audience manipulation… and perhaps a slightly stranger viewing experience than its reputation suggests. Liam isn’t with us this week — he checked into the Bates Motel and Norman assures us he checked out first thing this morning. We have absolutely no reason to question that. Kev is also absent. His mother wouldn’t let him come. This week we discuss: The extraordinary construction of Norman Bates — Anthony Perkins gives us one of cinema’s great characters long before we completely understand who we’re looking at. Awkward, charming, vulnerable, funny and quietly unsettling: how does Hitchcock make Norman someone we instinctively like at almost exactly the moment we should be becoming afraid of him? The narrative pivot that changed movies — Psycho spends almost its entire opening act convincing us that Marion Crane is the protagonist and that the stolen $40,000 is the story. Then Hitchcock pulls the floor out from underneath us. Is the shower scene’s real brilliance not simply that Marion dies, but that the entire movie we thought we were watching dies with her? And then it pivots again — Marion’s crime disappears, Norman becomes our point of identification and eventually the film shifts towards Lila and Sam investigating what happened. Psycho repeatedly hands the narrative from one character to another. Is that structural instability part of its genius — or one reason the middle of the film occasionally feels less propulsive than its reputation suggests? Those pacing issues — for a film remembered as relentlessly suspenseful, there are stretches where Psycho moves remarkably slowly. We talk about whether that deliberate patience increases the tension, whether some sequences simply drag, and how differently the film plays when you already know exactly what is waiting in the fruit cellar. Can a movie survive when its greatest pleasure is a twist everybody already knows? Norman Bates and Mother may be one of the least secret twists in cinema history. So what remains once surprise has disappeared? Does Psycho become richer on repeat viewing because we can watch Hitchcock constructing the deception — or does losing the revelation inevitably remove some of the film’s power? The shower scene beyond the shower scene — one of the most famous sequences ever filmed has almost escaped the movie surrounding it. Does its enormous cultural reputation distort the way we watch Psycho now, leaving us waiting for moments we already know rather than experiencing the story Hitchcock originally designed? Anthony Perkins is doing an extraordinary amount of work — the nervous laughter, the pauses, the tiny flashes of irritation whenever Marion mentions his mother. Once we know the truth, how much of Norman’s performance changes meaning without Perkins ever appearing to deliberately “play the twist”? Marion Crane and the movie that disappears with her — Janet Leigh gives the first half enormous emotional weight, particularly as Marion begins regretting the decision that brought her to the motel. Does killing her make Psycho thrillingly unpredictable, or does the film sacrifice its most compelling emotional storyline for the sake of its greatest trick? That psychologist scene. After Hitchcock has spent the entire film communicating through images, performance and implication, a psychiatrist arrives and essentially explains the movie to us. For a modern audience, it can feel astonishingly clunky — almost like somebody walking onstage after the curtain falls to explain what we just watched. But did audiences in 1960 actually need it? Ideas surrounding dissociative identity, gender, sexuality and mental illness were understood very differently by mainstream audiences. We ask whether the scene becomes more defensible when considered historically — not necessarily because its psychology is accurate, but because Hitchcock may have needed to give contemporary viewers a framework through which to process what they had just seen. And the performance within that infamous scene is actually excellent — Simon Oakland delivers an enormous amount of exposition with authority and conviction. So can something simultaneously be a strong performance and clumsy storytelling? And is our problem really with the scene itself, or simply with how radically cinematic language has changed since 1960? Hitchcock versus the audience — stolen money, voyeurism, false protagonists, sympathetic murderers, hidden identities. Psycho continually makes us invest emotionally in something before revealing that we have been looking in completely the wrong direction. How much of the film is really about Norman Bates — and how much is Hitchcock demonstrating just how easily an audience can be controlled? And finally, whether Psycho is the Best Film Ever — a film containing some of the greatest sequences, characters and filmmaking decisions in cinema history, but one where the pieces might actually be more perfect than the experience of watching the whole thing. Become a Patron of this podcast and support the BFE at https://www.patreon.com/BFE
