MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Why Does Norman Kill?

Why Does Norman Kill?

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
6 replies | jump to latest

Er, I guess my heading was a spoiler but...well, c'mon. "Why Does Mother Kill?" would not quite get to the point.

Though maybe it does. Maybe Mother's bloodlust is as intriguing as Norman's.

Well, maybe they both are.

As Psycho gives sit to us, Marion Crane is our protagonist, and our lead, and she takes a fateful shower -- fateful even before horror enters in. For she has decided to take the stolen money back and bank it before she can be detected(with 700 put back in to cover the car), and she is taken a "cleansing baptismal shower" to wash all her sins away.

And then an old lady with a shadow for a face and the physical strength of a gorilla comes in with a big butcher knife and stabs Marion, repeatedly, to death.

As critic Robin Wood said: "It is the MEANINGLESSNESS of the shower murder that helps make it the most terrifying scene in cinema history"(to that date.) Norman had given Marion some clues in the parlor("She just goes a little mad sometimes") and had actually given a "reverse endorsement" of the reality: "Its not like she's a maniac, a raving thing"(but she IS, she IS..Norman tries to divert attention from his reality.)

So there IS meaning in the shower murder: what's meaningful is that Marion has chosen to spend the night and take a shower at a motel in which a human being lives who simply HAS TO...kill other human beings. Most violently. For no reason at all.

But, oh, there are reasons, yes? The shrink tells us: Norman kills WOMEN. Not men(unless they come snooping around like Arbogast, who, we learn at the end, was Norman's only male victim.)

So the drive for Norman to kill these women is: sexual. I mean, the shrink tells us so: "When he met your sister, he was touched by her, AROUSED by her...and then set off the jealous mother and mother killed the girl!"

Hey...wait a minute. A man is sexually aroused by a woman and so he changes into an old woman whose only interest is in KILLING the woman? (In other words, Mother has no sexual desires towards Marion at all.)

Well, that's understandable, too, though I guess I'd have to go deeper into Freud than I know how. It would seem that Norman has sexual desires...but has created Mother to get JEALOUS of those desires, and to hate the woman who creates them, and thus to have to kill that woman.

But there is more irony here: as a practical matter, Marion had no sexual(or even romantic) interest in Norman. When she took that shower, she had pretty much closed out any further interaction with Norman Bates. She was leaving, done with him forever, on her way. There was no reason for Mother to BE jealous.

Unless another reason Mother killed Marion was because she WAS going to escape back to a better world. Jealousy again, and probably more on Norman's part.

In any event, I think Psycho asks us to really THINK about what went on in the mind of Norman Bates that he could serve a dinner and talk nice(most of the time) to a woman and then...ten minutes later...kill that woman in the most horrible manner imaginable. "Just because." Sort of.

I link Norman (yet again) to the more direct display we get 12 years later with Bob Rusk, in which we see his initial "love" of a woman(twisted, I'll grant you, but its sex he wants from Brenda Blaney and he "courts" her before taking it)....turn, on a dime, into murderous rage. He rapes her in a "positive way"(for him, at least -- "Lovely, lovely) and then suddenly HATES the woman and kills her with the ominous phrase "Women...you're all the same. I'll show you" before strangling her.

As Hitchcock quoted from somone, to Truffaut, "You always kill the one you love."

As I think I've remarked before, what makes Norman and Rusk different from psychos Uncle Charlie and Bruno Anthony is that they "kill because they are killers." Uncle Charlie kills rich widows to avenge their dead husbands who died working to death, to make the widows rich; Bruno Anthony murders to engender a "perfect murder plan"(criss cross -- an estranged wife for a father.)

But Norman and Rusk kill because.. they are killers. And I don't think it is ALL a matter of sex, or thwarted sex, or impotent sex. There's a hatred within them, a desire to destroy.

Sort of like suicide bombers, but without the suicide...

[–] Otter (24464) 7 years ago

Norman kills her because "mother" is so jealous of his attraction to her that "she" has to kill her rival before Norman can so much as look at her again! This implies a fantastically perverse and destructive relationship between Norman and his mother, a level of sexual jealously and possessiveness that would be considered between two lovers, but which is so horrific between a mother and son that it can only be implied, not shown.

The implication is of incest (either physical or a devouring possessiveness between them), not just "mother" being jealous of Norman's attraction to other women, but of Norman being jealous enough to kill his mother - wasn't she about to marry again when it all blew up? So much of this is taking place inside Norman's head, his own insane possessiveness towards his mother, his assumption that she's insanely possessive towards him.

Of course none of this could be shown openly in 1960, only implied, because Hitchcock loved nothing more than working implied perversity into movies that were considered safe for the whole family! But that "Bates motel" TV show may have gone where Hitchcock couldn't go back in the day.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Norman kills her because "mother" is so jealous of his attraction to her that "she" has to kill her rival before Norman can so much as look at her again!

---

Yes...I think what is important in this analysis is that Norman has "created a raging being" to lord over him...with a basis in sexual jealousy. Even as the beast is..him.

---

This implies a fantastically perverse and destructive relationship between Norman and his mother, a level of sexual jealously and possessiveness that would be considered between two lovers, but which is so horrific between a mother and son that it can only be implied, not shown.

---

Yes. Its why the psychiatrist's speech at the end is pretty important. Not only for the answering of key questions that MUST be answered(Norman killed Mother and her lover), but for giving us at least a sense of how Norman's madness flowered.

A mother/son couple who lived alone "as if there were no one else in the world"(the shrink's line) would indeed be threatened by outsiders. Or at least NORMAN would be. He was threatened by Mother's boyfriend(but killed them BOTH.) He was threatened by Marion Crane. And yet he yearned for Marion, reached out to her ,invited her for dinner...

---

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

The implication is of incest (either physical or a devouring possessiveness between them),

---

The "incest thing" was suggested in the Bloch novel, as I recall, but still more a matter of Norman's imagination -- HIS sexual thoughts towards his mother.

Screenwriter Joe Stefano discussed with Hitchcock placing into the original Psycho a flashback to Young Mother and Little Norman playfully wrestling on the floor until Norman got an erection...and Young Mother raged at him, hit him, and put lipstick on him(why that? I can't remember)...Hitchocck rejected all this, but Stefano got the scene into Psycho IV, which he wrote as well(and not nearly AS well) as the original.

--

not just "mother" being jealous of Norman's attraction to other women, but of Norman being jealous enough to kill his mother - wasn't she about to marry again when it all blew up?

---

Yep. David Thomson posited the idea that Norman only wanted to poison the boyfriend but that mother drank the boyfriend's wine, too.

I think Norman wanted to kill Mother for "sexually betraying him" as much as killing the boyfriend. But..."matricide is the most unbearable crime of all." So Norman brought Mother back to life...

---

So much of this is taking place inside Norman's head, his own insane possessiveness towards his mother, his assumption that she's insanely possessive towards him.

---

I've lived long enough to have some "normal" women speak jealously to me, and its amazing how much they assume about what I am thinking, or doing. They've been wrong...but CERTAIN that i did certain things for certain reasons that had no basis in truth. And I'm sure I've projected the same type of jealously towards women -- in short, we can all relate to Norman Bates "assuming that someone is as jealous of him as he is of her."

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Of course none of this could be shown openly in 1960, only implied,

---

Yep. Hitchcock managed to get away with a lot , though. I think one reason is that "Mrs. Bates" sounded decidedly old and witch-like, she was never presented as a "sexual being," more like a puritanical monster out to literally kill her son's love interest.

---
because Hitchcock loved nothing more than working implied perversity into movies that were considered safe for the whole family!

---

Absolutely. Hitchcock and others (Wilder, Preminger) operating under the Hays Code learned how to "sneak things by the censors" all the time; it was kind of a game, and it suggested a great deal of sophistication. Once the R rating hit, there was no need for that anymore. Frenzy shows us what Hitchcock could show and say without full censorship.

---

But that "Bates motel" TV show may have gone where Hitchcock couldn't go back in the day.

---

It did, and while I know the show has many fans, and especially of Farmiga as Mrs. Bates and Freddie Highmore as her son, it seemed to explain too much, and to make the great cinematic characters of Norman Bates and Mrs. Bates too "readable" for their classic iconography. It cheapened the characters.

---

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I might add here about Norman that not only should I ask: "Why did Norman kill?" but "Why did Norman kill LIKE THAT?" The murder of Marion Crane(being without the "cover up" motivation of the murder of Arbogast) is rather abritrary in its savageness. A knife. A BIG knife. Stabbing not once to the heart, but over and over and over again, inflicting non-fatal wounds along the way.

David Thomson complained that Perkins as Bates was portrayed just too nicely to "match up to" the savagery of his knife attacks. Oh, yeah? Why not? The homicidal rage within Bates seems to be part of the psychological horror of his mind.

Of course, another reason Norman kills LIKE THAT is..he probably didn't want to go buy a gun. A knife doesn't require the up close and personal intimacy of a strangling. Etc.

As a "cinematic" matter, by having Norman slash and stab away at Marion, the whole sequence could play out abstractly. The knife blows keep coming, and Marion keeps screaming, but the actual penetration of murder isn't shown. 12 years later in Frenzy, Hitchcock gave us an equally overlong strangulation (via necktie) of a female victim and despite all his attempts to fragment THAT, too -- he couldn't, really. The intimacy of strangling was too disturbing to reduce to the abstract.

Another reason Norman uses a knife: well, Mrs. Bates is the killer, and a woman's tools are found in the kitchen...

[–] Otter (24464) 7 years ago

Criminologists say that stabbing someone multiple times is a sign the killer is motivated by rage and hatred, not, say, expedience. Someone who'll kill for money may strike quickly and effectively and get it over with, someone who's blinded by anger may stab over and over and over. (Which BTW, is why the multiple and hvariable stab wounds in "Murder on the Orient Express" were so puzzling).

Norman is full of anger and rage; the rage he thinks "mother" feels towards a sexual rival, the rage he feels at Marion for threatening his relationship with mother by being an attractive and kindly woman, anger at a normal person for showing him what a ruin his life has become, etc. He'd keep stabbing until that poor woman was reduced to a cube steak, with all the fuckery boiling around in that sick head of his.