MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Making Marion "Murder-able"

Making Marion "Murder-able"

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
4 replies | jump to latest

The stabbing in the shower in Psycho : they call it "arguably" the most famous scene in movies, but is it "arguably" anymore? Really?

New young generations don't know of many movies made, say, before 1980 -- even the venerated "Golden Age of the 70s" may be less famous than you'd think -- but that Psycho shower scene clip has been played and replayed and replayed again on TV, on the 'net, and parodies continue to abound. Psycho lives on when other 1960 movies like Elmer Gantry, The Alamo, and even The Apartment (let alone Best Picture-nominated The Sundowners) have been forgetten.

Part of the shock(we are told) is that "the star gets killed before the movie is half over"(which is accurate -- it is at the 47-minute mark, but not -- as some have written -- the 20 minute mark.) Part of the shock is the killer -- an obscenely strong white haired old lady(NOT a little old lady). Part of the shock is the weapon - a truly gigantic knife with a very sharp blade.

A lot of the shock is the setting: a shower. Everybody takes a shower sometime, everybody has thought about Psycho in the shower sometime in their life.

And a lot of the shock is from: the victim. "and Janet Leigh as Marion Crane," a beautiful if ordinary American woman who lets us spend 47 minutes "up close and personal" with her -- undressed with her boyfriend in a hotel room and kissing; undressed in her home and packing($40,000 stolen dollars); behind the wheel of a car(obessing); in the LADIES ROOM of a car dealership, and in the bathroom of her motel room, flushing paper down an in-used toilet.

That's intimate. That's personal. And for all the voyeurism of the time we spend with Marion Crane...we also come to like her. We care about her.

And then Hitchcock kills her. More horribly than anyone was ever killed in movies before then.

But it could have been worse.

Imagine if Marion Crane was introduced to us as a married woman on a trip visiting her nice elderly parents. With her parents warmly looking on, Marion calls home to her happy husband and her two beaming little children, the family dog wagging its tail in the background. "Don't worry," she tells the husband and then the two little children(a boy and a girl, natch) , "I'll be leaving first thing in the morning," and I'll drive all day and then I'll stop at a motel to be safe, and then one more day and I'll be home to you all." And she hangs up, happy and loved by parents and children and husband alike.

If THAT Marion Crane got stabled and slashed to pieces in that famous shower, I expect audiences would have walked out then and there(granted, some did anyway), word of mouth would have killed the movie -- hell, the censors probably wouldn't have allowed it to be released.

So...we have Marion Crane "as we have her." No elderly parents(all clues are that both are dead.) No husband(she's rather DESPERATE to marry Sam, but , hunk that he is, he comes with a ton of baggage, a ton of debt, and lonely backroom housing.) No little children. No dog wagging his tail.

And the only reason Marion Crane ends up at the Bates Motel is because ...she has stole some money. Embezzled it. A lot. $40,000. In 1960 especially, this makes Marion a criminal because, well, regular people don't DO that, no matter how broke they are. And though Marion may decide to return the money, before that she "formed the intent" and indeed committed a crime. (If she deposits the money without detection, she's home free -- if she has to face her boss and Cassidy...they will not prosecute.)

So the Marion Crane who ends up at the Bates Motel is a woman who almost seems "programmed" for the horrible fate she meets. Beautiful or not, life just hasn't gone that well for her. She's pushing 30 (past it?) in 1960 without a husband. She has toiled at th same secretarial job for 10 years. No sense of parents or an inheritance of any size -- she's on her own. The only potential husband in her life is: a possible lifetime of debt and desperation.

Marion Crane is kind of depressed when she reaches the Bates Motel. She's been confronted, scrutinized, and judged by any number of men(and one woman, Caroline), Her crime looks to have failed -- it won't succeed, she won't get away with it, Sam and she won't live off that money...

...hell, its almost INEVITABLE that she's gonna get stabbed to death in that shower. Rather than screaming, she might as well have said "NOW what? Oh, get it over with...")

Marion Crane, it has been said "is a noir figure who isn't." She's not REALLY a criminal -- this embezzlement is a one time obsessive deal("We all go a little mad sometimes.") She's not a femme fatale(she's probably had sex a time or two or three with Sam but...she's a one-man woman and she wants marriage.) And in her final parlor chat with Norman Bates, Marion reveals levels of caring and empathy towards this sad young man -- even as he returns the favor with menace and bile (and yet, she STAYS.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

CONT

The New Yorker/Esquire critic who didn't like Psycho in 1960 -- Dwight MacDonald -- wrote of the shower murder that "it has a Hays Code puritanism to it -- look what thieving/necking girls get." MacDonald was pointing out that in 1960, the fact that not ONLY was Marion Crane a thief, she was promiscuous to boot("necking" is all Dwight will allow, but c'mon, she had to have been having sex)...and thus "deserved to die" -- according to Dwight's disdain for the censors and, indirectly,for Hitchcock. (Marion's willingness to have sex marks her as a forerunner of all those sex-having teenagers in Halloween and Friday the 13th who die while the virgins live.)

But I think we can say that MacDonald got that wrong, didn't he? The shower murder doesn't seem to be punishment either for the embezzlement(which Marion has now renounced) or Marion's sex life(which , while sad in ways, certainly looks fun in others.) To the extent the shower murder IS punishment, its punishment for "taking the wrong road"("Nobody comes here if they haven't done that," says Norman) and punishment for her beauty and sensuality(she turned on Norman, she triggered Murderous Mother.)

And this: while we can say that Marion Crane never would have ended up at the Bates Motel if she had not stolen the money...she only REALLY ends up there because Sam Loomis lives 15 miles away from the motel, in Fairvale. Marion's fate was sealed the moment she met Sam, really -- she is coming to HIM when she stops at that motel...

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Marion Crane as a sex-craving, cash-embezzling single woman of sadness , with a cash-strapped boyfriend,was not invented by Hitchcock and his screenwriter Joe Stefano. She was DELIVERED to Hitchcock that way by novelist Robert Bloch(albeit with a different name, Mary Crane) and maybe the Bloch version is a bit worse: less kind to Norman(because he's a heavy creepy guy, there's no attraction), and doing a nude stripper's bump and grind in the bathroom mirror(Norman peeps on THIS in the book -- Mary shouldn't have been so sexual about herself even in private, poor woman.)

Anyway, its interesting, isn't it? To be "properly" set up to be the victim of the bloodiest, most brutal murder in screen history to that date, Marion Crane had to be "stripped" of the worldly comforts of life(parents, husband, children) and maintained as a "noir character who is not one" -- a truly unique female character in movies of that time(hey, they were either Madonnas or whores, under the Hays Code)...

..and thus one of the most interesting, arousing, and moving female characters in movie history.

[–] Hans-Wilhelm (1356) 5 years ago

Yep, one of the tens of thousands of characters that have died in movies over the last 100 years, or so, could have had a million different possible back stories.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Sure...but Psycho is usually on the list of the top 20 of movies ever made...its characters "count more." And for Marion Crane to be so butchered -- a historic fate FOR a movie character, no one else had died like that in movie history -- she had to be of a certain "type." And thus, she became one of the perhaps 100 greatest characters in movies.