MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > BATES MOTEL: VACANCY

BATES MOTEL: VACANCY

posted 2 years ago by ecarle (14979)
7 replies | jump to latest

As its recent elevation to the Greatest Movie of All Time(yeah, right) by Variety in late 2022 was detailed by that trade paper, pretty much every shot in Psycho is iconic.

You can add to that, every SEQUENCE is iconic -- every assembly OF shots, or single shot of camera movement, or mix of both.

I was thinking about this the other day when some streaming channel put up one scene to lure folks to rent Psycho for pay per view:

Marion Crane drives from Bakersfield, California, north on Highway 99. A very gray black and white "daytime" slowly dissolves into the marled twilight of dusk, both in terms of the car window behind Marion and the POV shots of approaching cars on the highway up ahead. We can FEEL the harsh glare of those headlights before we SEE Marion's eyes flinch at them.

As Marion drives on , she imagines the discussions, suspicions and accusations of the one's she's left behind in her theft.

The most obscene line is Cassidy's "If any of that money's missing, I'll replace it with her fine, soft flesh." What a GRUESOME line for 1960 censored Hollywood.

Gray day turns into bleak dusk turns into the darkness of night itself , but wait --what are those watery dollops splashing on the windshield? RAIN. And soon HARD rain.

Cue the windshield wipers. Cue Bernard Herrmann's slashing,screeching, nerve-wracking strings (sure, they will screech even LOUDER later during the murder scenes, but right now, they sum up the hysteria and internal collapse of the obsessed, slightly mad Marion Crane herself.)

And then Hitchcock does something pretty damn brilliant. He has Herrmanns music simply CUT OFF, chopped off...gone.

And all the cars on the highway behind Marion simply shift off to the side in her back window and disappear -- she has gone off the main highway. She is alone.

Silence. Quiet. Except for the patter of rain on the windshield and the wipers still swishing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Cuts from Marion, looking ahead and what she sees (POV -- Point of View)

POV: Nothing ahead. A watery swirl. Darkness, perhaps a dirt road.

POV: A bright light in the sky cutting through the rain and the darkness. A window?

POV: Slowly coming into view, upper screen left, out of the darkness. A neon sign. Hard to read. Closer. Easier to read. Closer: it can be read:

BATES MOTEL-- VACANCY.

On its own terms, this one scene is nothing but great, classic, and profound. And I'm only counting off from when Herrmann's music is CUT OFF. That night drive WITH his music was pretty great, too.

But this is different. The near silence. The difficulty in seeing what is ahead in the darkness. The patter of rain. The swish of the windshields.

BATES MOTEL -- VACANCY.

What's great about THIS moment -- when the neon sign is in view, and it slowly floats off screen to our left as Marion's car continues to the motel is that: if you want to see one of the greatest images in ALL of movie history, maybe THE greatest image in movie history: this is it.

Imagine what 1960 audiences who DIDN'T know what was going to happen thought. Hmm...BATES MOTEL-- VACANCY. She's reached a motel. What's going to happen NOW. (Hitchcock was such an expert storyteller, people perked up.)

Imagine what 1960 audiences who DID know what was going to happen thought. A few 1960 reviews gave away that once Marion reaches the Bates Motel, horror follows. Some even referenced a shower. So THOSE 1960 movie review readers knew: "OK, now this movie is going to get scary."

But what's even BETTER is how this scene, and that image -- BATES MOTEL: VACANCY -- plays TODAY. And next year. And the year after that . We ALL know the horrors of the Bates Motel...we ALL know that when Marion Crane sees that sign(BATE MOTEL: VACANCY) she and we have arrived -- or in our nostalgic cases RETURNED -- to the greatest arena for a horror movie ever conjured for ANY movie by ANY director. (The Overlook Hotel in The Shining is a Distant Second.)

And hey, about that -- its not JUST the Bates Motel that is historic. Its that HOUSE up behind it, too. The house and the motel are a "package deal" even if the house is more famous to look at.

Which is why what matters here, NOW, and for every year to come when other people see Psycho or see it again...what will always matter is, first and foremost, the sign:

BATES MOTEL--VACANCY.

Open for business. Open for death. Open for eternity..

[–] swanstep (2767) 2 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

How the 'Bates Motel - Vacancy' sign looms up out of the darkness is so memorable... The posters for the Bates Motel TV ended up focussing more on the Bates House and on Vera Farmiga but the *first* poster for the series was all over the sign itself and esp. 'Vacancy':
http://www.impawards.com/tv/bates_motel.html

---

That's a nicely moody "realistic" look at the famous sign but...like "Bates Motel" itself...not really on par with the original.

The way Janet Leigh first sees the sign in Psycho is the way I'll always remember it -- bright white neon letters in the pitch blackness.

Later in the film -- in a crucial moment -- Norman remembers to turn on the sign and flicks a switch in front of Arbogast. Hitchcock goes to the trouble of CUTTING to the Bates Motel-- Vacancy sign and for a split second the sign seems to be in "dusky sunlight" and then IMMEDIATELY becomes dark as the sign comes on . An interesting effect.

The "Arbogast moment" Bates Motel -- Vacancy bit -- the sign TURNING ON -- became the "opening shot" of a "Hitchcock clips montage" for the Universal Paramount/Universal DVDs of the 90s and 2000s. The sign TURNING ON also opens Psycho II -- with a cut to the shower scene, and ENDS Psycho II -- in color -- when Norman reopens the motel for business.

Potent stuff.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

By the way, in the original, when Norman clicks the switch, he dooms himself to Arbogast, thus:

Arbogast: What's that?
Norman: The light...the sign! I'm always forgetting to turn it on. We had an old couple came by last week who said if the sign hadn't been on , they'd think this was an old deserted --
Arbogast:(Cuts him off) Now you see? And that's exactly my point...and you said nobody had been here for a COUPLE of weeks--
Norman: Yeah--
Arbogast: ---and here's a couple came by just last week--
Norman: Yeah--
Arbogast: Well, as you say, old habits die hard. Its possible this girl registered under a different name. Do you mind if I look at your book?

And ...Norman is doomed. But then, so is Arbogast, in a much more deadly way.

The precision of Psycho shines through. Visual (the cut to the sign turning on) the verbal ("And that's exactly my point...") the shift to a new level of suspense as Arbogast moves on Norman...

Still, that LATER use of the BATES MOTEL -- VACANCY SIGN cannot replace the utterly historic way in which that eternally famous sign first comes into the view of Marion Crane.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I've sometimes wondered whether Psycho's fateful Bates Motel helped kill off the individual owner-operated motel in favor of chains of motel franchises (Howards Johnson's, Motel 6, Red Roof Inn, you name it). I guess chain-almost-*everything* happened throughout the 1960-1990 so maybe Psycho had little decisive impact.

---

Hard to say. There were a lot of jokes about it in Psycho's heyday in the press: "Set the motel industry back 20 years.." "Makes you think twice about ever stopping at a building that looks remotely like the Bates Motel."

Needless to say, the atmosphere of Psycho would be blown to hell if it took place at a Best Western or a Motel 6.

I think the chains came as they came to everything else. Both the motel owned by Norman Bates and the hardware store owned by Sam Loomis are artifacts of time before conglomerates took over everything and "chains" became the norm.

A little more:

When I was a kid, our family would visit rural areas and we'd often stay in motels like the Bates Motel. I was not aware of Psycho until several years after this period, but those motels creeped me out THEN. I valued the protection of parents in the room.

Even today as an adult, I travel to various rural and mountainous communities and I can vouch that there are STILL some "Bates Motels." I have stayed at them, but not with much nervousness. Anonymous. No chain ownership -- though I can't say I've seen one with the owners NAME in the neon, maybe that's an old movie canard ("Bates Motel, Loomis Hardware"). No, wait, I recall driving down a rural freeway and seeing ONE motel with the owners name on it -- but it looked old, rundown and closed.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

As great and sophisticated as Psycho truly is, it is also a product of a time when realism as to business life wasn't all that big a deal in movies. This even with Hitchcock swearing that he had every industry researched in his stories, every real person who inspired a character photographed(like a car salesman -- that's where California Charlie got his bowtie look.) "California Charlie" is called that to make sure we know -- with utter simplicity -- that Marion is no longer in Arizona.

I've often cited the "fantastical nature" of North by Northwest and Psycho as to why I love them. North by Northwest is a spy story. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a spy story. One ends on Mount Rushmore, with all sorts of Technicolor adventures and chases and romance before then. One ends at the Berlin wall, with nothing but black and white grim reality before then.

Some critic pegged those movies ...perhaps better...as "Hitchcock fairy tales." Thornhill defeats a flying dragon and rescues a damsel in distress from the villain's castle. A witch-like monster lives in an old Gothic house and kills people "just because." Grim fairy tales.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

How the 'Bates Motel - Vacancy' sign looms up out of the darkness is so memorable... The posters for the Bates Motel TV ended up focussing more on the Bates House and on Vera Farmiga but the *first* poster for the series was all over the sign itself and esp. 'Vacancy':
http://www.impawards.com/tv/bates_motel.html

---

One more thing about that shot of the BATES MOTEL-- VACANCY sign. The sign has to compete with the background: TREES? A MOUNTAINOUS area? (And I think the show further added: by the ocean.)

Well that sure as hell was not the setting of Psycho. Psycho was set in the dusty, bushy Central Valley of California, hundreds of miles inland from the sea, far away from any trees and mountains. It was bleak terrain meant to power a bleak story.

This is where the showrunners tell us "well, we wanted to make an alternative version using the same material and I say: "OK, remake Gone with the Wind and set it during WWII in England."

[–] swanstep (2767) 2 years ago

One more thing about that shot of the BATES MOTEL-- VACANCY sign. The sign has to compete with the background: TREES? A MOUNTAINOUS area? (And I think the show further added: by the ocean.)

At the time I read the tall trees as winking towards Twin Peaks. I actually did watch the first episode of Bates Motel at the time too and kind of dismissed it for that reason: it felt *very* Twin Peaksy and the beach being so close to the Bates House felt like a particular betrayal. A beach overlook felt too inherently glamorous and lacking in the dead-end trap-for-Norman, 'nowhere-ville' feeling of the movie. Maybe Vera Farmiga also bugged me a bit too - she's pretty glamorous after all.

So I bailed on the show immediately... only coming back to it 3 or 4 seasons in, i.e., after it had gathered a lot of good world of mouth, had receieved some critical acclaim, and was loudly starting to converge on the events of the movie (Rihanna was announced as Marion Crane!).