Why RIPs Aren't Really OT at the Psycho Board

RIPs, among our celebrities as well as those among our real life relatives and friends, are big deals. I like the modern term for memorial services: "A Celebration of Life."

With movie stars like Kirk Douglas and Olivia DeHavilland (both of whom lived past 100), the media dutifully waited for their RIPs to review careers that had really ended decades ago, and peaked decades before that (Douglas: Spartacus in 1960; DeHavilland: GWTW? Well, she made fine films after that.) The obituary indeed becomes a celebration of life.

Recent RIPS shared here include a very big star -- Sean Connery -- and some decidedly lesser stars: Helen Reddy and Mac Davis(who made a little history by dying at the same age on the same day.)

Connery certainly was a Hitchcock star -- Marnie(1964) -- and thus gets closer, if not close enough , to being a "Psycho" story. Though here is a thought: the blockbuster success of Psycho, coming after the big hit North by Northwest and the ever-respected Vertigo, probably helped Connery agree TO "Marnie"(which has "Psycho" overtones in the mean mother who doesn't want her child soiled by sex.)

But if Psycho is relevant to these celebrity RIPS, I would suggest it is on the "dark side" -- not the celebration of a life well lived, but the inevitability of death. Which we don't REALLY like to think about.

Few of us knew Sean Connery personally, but a lot of us knew him as a "personality in our lives." And for some of us, Sean Connery was there a very long time IN our lives. I saw Dr. No on release in 1962(or more likely 1963 when it first hit the US. I went to Sean Connery movies for over 40 years thereafter. He was part of my life. Certainly part of my movie life. And now he is gone, off the planet, there will be no more "Sean Connery was today seen" stories. Of course, as a movie star, Connery will get immortality: his Bond films will run forever as well as a handful of other great ones(Connery was one of those movie stars who was always a great star, but not always in a great film.)

Psycho is about a lot of things, but one of the things it is about...is DEATH. And in various terrible ways. Marion Crane got the worst , most horrific, and most shocking death in screen history to its time, and all these decades later, it is still not forgetten. The death of Arbogast is perhaps less "revered," but sure seems just as famous in terms of being a clip rather endlessly trotted out -- both as a "capsule example of HItchcockian suspense AND as one of the first great "jump scares' in movies.

The historic shock and power of the murders of Marion Crane and Arbogast focused the audience on the death of these two particular characters in a way that frankly the multiple teen victims of the Friday the 13th series never developed.

And Marion Crane is missed and prematurely mourned through Psycho -- by her sister Lila and her boyfriend Sam -- who investigate and solve the mystery but will be forever haunted by how Marion died (near Sam's town -- lifelong guilt for him.) Arbogast has no on screen mourners, but that only makes us wonder about who those people might be. (He was around 40 years old -- was there a wife? Children? Or a girlfriend? Certainly there were adult siblings, maybe living adult parents. We WONDER.)

Its a macabre thought, but I've often felt that, given how long Janet Leigh(Marion) lived in real life(to 77 I believe, in 2004) and how long Martin Balsam(Arbogast) lived in real life(to 76, I believe,in 1996)...you can see how long Marion and Arbogast COULD have lived if they were not murdered in 1959. Murder prematurely ends a life...sometimes decades before it could have lasted. Psycho reminds us of that in the power of the two killings and in the UNFAIRNESS of them.

Meanwhile, beyond the murders we see on screen(and hear about offscreen) one particular death is blasphemed: that of Mrs. Bates herself(poisoned by Norman.)

In "normal" society, no matter how much we may have loved our parents, when they are dead, it is time to bury them...or to cremate them -- and to put them in hallowed ground and away from our lives. They are dead and gone...they live on in our memory...but not in our HOMES.

But Norman Bates broke that taboo. He stole his mother's corpse(before burial, "a weighted coffin was buried" says the psychiatrist.) He gutted the corpse and stuffed it with taxidermy chemicals and sawdust("to keep it as well as it would keep" says the psychiatrist) and then he kept "it/her" in the family house...evidently for TEN YEARS when we first meet Norman. Lying in a bed in her room...near where Norman slept. In the window...in the fruit cellar.