“We all go a little mad sometimes” (Hitchcock, movie Psycho). 

“Oblivion – what a blessing… for the mind to dwell a world away from pain. . .  I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect” (Sophocles, play Oedipus Rex).

In order to discuss Hitchcock’s iconic film from 1960, we need to first tackle a play written over two thousand years earlier and its connection to a world-renowned neurologist. Oedipus Rex is an ancient Greek play written in 420BC by the playwright Sophocles, in which the protagonist unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother — while subsequently attempting to avoid the same horrid fate. The audience at the time would’ve known this juicy irony before the play began, and the story proceeds as Oedipus slowly discovers it for himself. The Oedipus Complex was a term  later attributed to Sigmund Freud  — a neurologist in the early 1900s, considered to be the founder of the groundbreaking work of psychoanalysis — describing a child’s psychological development wherein they grow to have a sexual attraction to the parent of the opposite sex and a direct — potentially violent — opposition to the parent of the same sex.

The theory suggests that later in life — whether consciously aware of it or not — we all become sexually attracted to partners who exhibit similar characteristics to our parent of the opposite sex (or that parent/mentor who shares the sexual orientation to which we’re attracted). Seeking someone romantically that resembles your mother if a male or someone that resembles your father if a female seems abhorrent, but on subconscious levels there’s a lot of truth behind it. Your “father” or “mother” in this case is considered to be the person of the opposite sex (or whoever shares the sexual orientation to which you’re attracted) who has the most profound impact on your formative years, most notably your idea of love, during brain development — this could even be a combination of characteristics from multiple people, depending on your upbringing.

The second part of the theory is just as mysterious: it basically states that this attraction is so strong that it elicits a sense of jealousy — Sophocles and Freud both suggest to the point of violence — against any competition for this attraction. So in a sense we would welcome the competition and then need to “prove ourselves” by directly opposing them whether psychologically or physically. Hence, Oedipus kills his father — though unknowingly, or in our case we would oppose such a person subconsciously. 

This theory of attraction and opposition is also supported on a neurological level. During brain development, the human brain forms billions of neuron connections: connecting ice cream to pleasure, fire to pain, darkness to fear, for instance. These connections are so myriad and so numerous, current scientific estimates have 95% of our brain working on subconscious levels — including habits, patterns, automatic functions, emotions, personality, values, biases, etc. Once those billions of connections are made, the brain is wired to simply find those same patterns and confirm those same connections indefinitely, with little deviation. As we age, we continue ignoring any evidence contradicting those patterns which makes the idea of changing them seemingly impossible. It’s a biological imperative, according to current psychological and neurological research, to return to the familiar; however, the familiar can also include harmful characteristics as well. In other words, like it or not, we superimpose our childhood experiences of love — or lack thereof, even to the point of abuse — onto our adult relationships. This coupled with the fact that we’re only conscious of about five percent of the motivation behind why we do things — like why we dislike someone and are attracted to someone else — makes the idea of The Oedipus Complex completely viable.    (National Institute of Health)

Given this premise, the next philosophical quandary is this: If our brain is wired to focus on patterns it’s already found, how much freewill are we utilizing when making what we believe to be choices? If our parents — or the people who had the most profound impact during our formative years — dictate later how our brain will fall in love and with whom we will desire opposition, how much are we freely choosing these things? Psychologists and neurologists would both say that, while more difficult as we age, it is possible to break old neuron connections or patterns and form new ones — but it requires conscious awareness of subconscious patterns, efforts consistently opposing such patterns in practice, and work to recognize the proof to that effect. In a sense, in order to be truly free from the patterns of our past, we must separate from them and work hard to create a new opposing reality — in other words, to put it harshly, we must “kill our parents.” Fast forward two thousand years after Sophocles and sixty years after Freud, the famous movie director, Alfred Hitchcock, uses the idea of The Oedipus Complex in one of his blockbusters, intricately entangling sexual desire and motive for murder on a psychological level.

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s creation, Psycho, was released. In the movie, the murderer kills his step-father — his father figure — and also kills his mother; though due to his projected sexual attraction to the latter, and now guilt, he embodies her personality, as well as her voice, clothes, etc. Continuing, the mother side of his personality grows jealous of his sexual attraction to someone other than her, so “she” kills the other female(s), eliminating any alternate source of his attraction. This fulfills Freud’s Oedipus Complex in the most sadistic way.

Besides its eerie, yet unparalleled, connections to Sophocles (420BC) and Freud (1899), Psycho sets a lot of precedent for the many thrillers and horror movies we know today. To start, Hitchcock spent seven days filming the famous shower scene — the first ever — while the actors were only hired for two. Because it was the first time audiences had seen it, the shock and power of a villain attacking a female in the shower helped make it unsettling and eventually iconic — copied innumerable times since. In addition, the lead actress in the scene, Janet Leigh, (later grandmother of Jamie Lee Curtis), was known for exactly that in the film industry — a lead. Audiences would’ve been in complete shock to see her die after about thirty minutes into the film; in addition, Hitchcock deliberately wrote the script both to set up her storyline as the exposition and her character development as the protagonist. In an unprecedented move, Hitchcock switches the plot focus — and potentially protagonist — after her death, to the lesser known actor Anthony Perkins; and now murder suspect or at least an accessory to it, since the identity of the killer is initially left unknown. Hitchcock breaks not only the rules of story-telling but also the audience’s expectations and comfort levels. The audience has no choice but to follow Perkins as the camera painstakingly follows him, now, cleaning the bathroom and hiding the body seemingly to cover up his mother’s actions — with little-to-no jump cuts in filming to skip ahead to the new plot. Instead the audience is left uncomfortable, uncertain, and in limbo for over ten minutes.  This technique is meant to elicit sympathy and empathy for him, simply because we have no where else to turn after such a shocking, frightful scene. The original plot line gets completely disregarded by Perkins as he literally buries what’s left of it — a stolen $10,000 in cash — along with the dead body of our beloved lead actress.

And Hitchcock must’ve known that the shock of this shower scene coupled with the discomfort of killing the lead successfully struck a nerve, because movie producers in 1960 previewing the film were irate. Despite Hitchcock’s reputation — having successfully made over 40 movies at this point in his career — no one wanted to fund such a project or put their name on it. Producers were convinced that a “slasher film” (a term later coined with John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween, staring Jamie Lee Curtis!) wouldn’t generate any money. Hitchcock, convinced he had discovered something ahead of its time, finally mortgaged his home to front the money himself. Which is why he didn’t use a full film crew, and instead hired the crew from his then television show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” Another reason no one wanted to fund the movie or it’s release is because of a claim that nudity and stabbing were too much for the movie censors at the time to approve. Ironically, however, no actual nudity or stabbing is visible in any of the shots, but every member of the censor board was convinced that it had been — this is due to clever editing, music, and sound effects. Hitchcock, heard what they said and agreed he would edit the scene to their specifications; but merely showed up a week later with the exact same cut — at which point the film got approved, with Hitchcock fronting the bill. 

So Hitchcock successfully created the very first “shower-scene,” to shock and scare his audience, and he did it without using nudity or punctured-stabbing. To understand how he accomplished this trick, let’s first explore how he shot the scene by starting with the blood: forced to be inventive, Hitchcock had to figure out what most accurately mimics human blood in a running shower. He eventually lands on chocolate syrup to capture a consistency and realism not yet achieved in 1950’s movie-making, and the color didn’t matter, since the movie was shot in black and white. Once they had the shocking script and the chocolate syrup, his shot-jumps in film editing coupled with striking musical chords of lone-strings worked together to create the illusion to which movie producers and censors originally testified to “seeing” something that wasn’t there.    (NPR)

The score was written by Bernard Herrmann who also composed scores for “The Twilight Zone” (1959), and movies like Citizen Kane (1941), and War of the Worlds (1953). The Psycho theme song consists uniquely of continued and maintained musical dissonance, used traditionally in music only momentarily to create tension before moving forward in any given piece to chords of consonance. Today, film professors are said to refer to this technique and the particular chord he used as “The Hitchcock Chord.” Also, due to their low budget, Herrmann didn’t have the resources he usually did when composing. But Herrmann and Hitchcock realized that less is more and limitation breeds success — the continued dissonance is played only by string instruments, initially a budget necessity, but morphed to absolute genius. Initially, there’s no music or any additional track to start the shower scene — the audience hears the toilet flush, the water running, the curtain rings move — and this absence of music and additional sound creates it’s own type of suspense and of course heightens the Hitchcock chord as soon as it begins. Only when the knife is raised, when the silhouette of the knife-wielding maniac is revealed, do the strings’ dissonance begin. As for the camera, with each flash of the knife raised, the unsettling note strikes, then there’s a shot of Leigh’s face or stomach or water rushing, then back to the knife and with each cut-shot, the dissonant cord is struck again. Then, the music stops again when Janet Leigh’s character is officially dead, water and chocolate syrup circling the drain.

Other sounds in the scene, besides Leigh screaming, include the sound of the knife puncturing flesh. Like the chocolate syrup, Hitchcock had to get creative. He brought in over a dozen different melons and quite a few large cuts of steaks, testing the sounds in an attempt to once again mimic the scary reality, until finally Hitchcock said “Casaba!” — a type of melon in the honeydew family. Imagine the movie industry not having a recorded sound for a knife stabbing flesh! For seventy years, filmmakers have since used similar sound effects, dissonance through string instruments, and jump cuts, to create all levels of tension and suspense — not to mention tricking audiences into believing they experiencing something they’re not. These were all luxuries Hitchcock did not already possess, but was forced to imagine and then create.

Another Hitchcock creation is scheduled movie-times. That’s right, movies used to play on a loop and people would come in during the middle or the end, and perhaps stay after in order to see the beginning. If this continued, Hitchcock’s vision of Psycho wouldn’t land as he intended, so he imposed strict, never-before-implemented, rules to the limited number of theaters showing his movie. In addition to scheduled times, as moviegoers entered the theater, Hitchcock insisted on a recording of his voice playing on repeat over the loud speakers: “No one will be allowed to enter the theater after the picture starts and please do not reveal the ending.” He also insisted on guards standing outside the theaters so no one could leave early or enter late. This created mass hysteria around the film, which of course boosted attendance and popularity — setting another precedent for “advertising hype.” The tension of all of this resulted in screams from the audience and, coupled with screams from Janet Leigh’s character along with the screeching violins, created a moment in a theater when people might not have felt safe — perhaps the first moment ever like it! Here was a respected director, and he broke the covenant of the filmmaker-audience relationship: the likable, well-known protagonist is killed by an unknown character for no apparent reason. She’s punished even after she has decided to seek redemption. The uncaring universe kills her — and in the most brutally shocking way — so people had no choice but to sit with the devil and wait to see where Hitchcock took them next.   (History.com)

Needless to say, Hitchcock got to buy his house back.

Ultimately, Hitchcock took the idea of “mother” and had her break out of the perfection and idealism of the American ’50s, and literally turned her into a monster. Like Freud and Sophocles, and many psychiatrists today, Hitchcock conveys the idea that your greatest fears, your worst habits, even your love life, can all be traced back to the impact of your mother — the menacing figure behind the [shower] curtain of your mind.

 

Sources:

NationalInstituteofHealth.gov ; NPR.org ; History.com