Mother's Hair
I want to put my "buried lede" right up front about Mother's Hair:
Famously in Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho (and its three sequels) Mother's hair is steel-gray edging to white, and in a bun -- big helmet of hair up top, small knot of hair behind it.
The hair looks like a wig -- because, we find out late in the game -- it IS.
And here's my buried lede:
At the fruit cellar climax of Psycho, as Lila advances on Mrs. Bates in her chair, its that HAIR that stands out. Something seems weird about it, "off" about it -- as if we sense it IS a wig, as if it seems disconnected from the human wearing it.
But this: flash forward to the climax of Frenzy(1972.) Richard Blaney is slowly advancing on Rusk in his bed, much as Lila is slowly advancing on Mother. In both films, Hitchcock uses his patented "travelling POV shot" to show the hair ahead of us. Mother's "off" gray bun in Psycho here becomes Rusk's "off" bright blonde-red hair. In the case of Rusk, the hair seems to be too high up and we can't see any head attached -- the bedspread covers the body and head of the sleeping Rusk, only the red-blonde hair is visible.
Blaney brutally clubs the sleeping Rusk with a tire iron, pulls back the bedspread and -- voila! -- the red-blonde hair is on the head not of Rusk, but of a naked woman, already dead from the tie round her neck long before Blaney clubbed her....
I linger on Mother's Hair in the fruit cellar in Psycho and Rusk's hair in his bed in Frenzy to point out that: Hitchcock sure could borrow from himself, and in both movies, the effect is the same: The Hair Has a Life of Its Own. And the hair seems a bit fake, a bit weird.
Its a "Hitchcock effect" that often turned up in his movies, as a means (to my mind) of making his movies feel special, not like other people's movies.
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The Psycho/Frenzy hair was my main point here, but I've got more:
Mother's "grandma bun" hair, was, famously, Hitchcock's change to Mrs. Bates from the book, where she wore only a head scarf (no hair visible) -- which was Novel Norman's way of separating Mrs. B out from himself without going "full wig." Indeed, as the shrink points out in the movie, Norman had to go BUY that wig -- probably mail order, I don't think Fairvale had a wig store -- and it was probably a Halloween costume wig "to play an old lady for fun."
We first see Mother's hair from behind, at distance, through a gauzy curtain. When Marion first sees the woman in the window. The great shot of Mother moving in the bedroom(its Norman, because it moves -- Mother in the window will never move again) is great for a lot of reasons -- how she "glides" like a ghost and yet physically moves like the monster she is; how her arms are crossed in front of her to suggest a Puritanical righteousness, but mainly -- how we see that HAIR. The old grandma hair. The bun. (And the flowered dress, too -- it was a modern "shapeless" dress on a fat man in Bloch's novel.)
Thereafter in "Psycho" when we see Mother's hair again -- she's in "murder mode." The other thing we see is ...her killing knife. To kill Marion(where, for some of the attack seen from above, we see that grandma bun and where, in departing the bathroom, Mother's grandma bun is very clearly seen from behind.) To kill Arbogast (Mother's hair and her glittering, raised knife , are part of the same "killer's effect" -- and, cheekily, you can clearly see Mother's NOSE peeping out from under the wig, er hair. Even Joe Stefano noticed that nose.)
Psycho III made clear reference to how the wig and the knife were interconnected: Norman opens up a chest in his Mother's bedroom and there they are, together: the wig and the knife. His "tools of the trade": how he transforms into a killer(the wig); how he kills(the knife.)
We see Mother's hair one more time before the climax -- when he carries her weirdly limp body down the stairs -- and for me, that hair is a "memory of murder" : this killer looks like THAT.
Finally(for purposes of the movie): when the wig falls(or rather slides) off of Norman's head during the fight with Sam in the fruit cellar, Hitchcock indulges us with a shot of the wig on the cellar floor in the changing light. And it no longer looks like grandma's bun. It looks like a small ANIMAL. Its a creepy, hairy shot -- symbolic(this is Norman's mode as killer) and lightly humorous(it looks like a dead, furry dog on the floor.)
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But wait, there's more: in the 60's, two comics used the Mrs. Bates get-up -- so terrifying in Hitchcock's film -- for comedy: Jonathan Winters as "Maudie Frickert" and Johnny Carson as "Aunt Blabby." I'm sure that the Carson look came after Psycho(and was thus influenced by it) , I don't know if Winters did Maudie Frickert before Psycho or not.