The Shot Where Norman Drives Marion's Car
Seen from the vantage point of 2023 movies with their HD and their digital and their CGI grandeur, Psycho looks -- more and more every year -- like this ridiculously simple collection of images, filmed on a low budget, composed for minimal content and maximum impact, one shot after another following each other as if preordained(they WERE, but the story is supposed to be "real human life.")
And yet -- the movie remains: powerful, hypnotic, unforgettable. And as the Variety guys said a few weeks ago in naming Psycho "the greatest movie of all time": "Every shot is iconic."
Every shot? Well I'd say: damn straight.
Now maybe some iconic shots are more iconic than other shots:
Marion screaming in the shower.
Mother on the other side of the shower, knife upraised.
Marion's dead eyeball on the floor.
Norman's voyeuristic eyeball at the peephole(the erotic image of naked Marion travelling the light into his brain and triggering Mother.)
Arbogast's bugged out eyeballs at the top of the stairs, with a bloody slash on his face.
The house...any of the shots, always from the same angle(except when Lila approaches.)
Norman's leering grin from under a furrowed brow at the end.
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But how about this shot:
At the conclusion of the queasy, grim, and macabre HORROR SCENE of the clean-up of the murder of Marion Crane, with all his tasks completed(blood mopped up, luggage packed in the trunk of Marion's car, $40,000 unwittingly placed in the trunk, Marion's body in the trunk), Norman closes the trunk , gets in the car, turns the key and starts the ignition, and DRIVES.
What follows has always fascinated me a bit in the mosaic of Psycho shots: the action is simple..yet limited: Norman has to drive that car away from the front porch area, around the far away side of the motel(at the other end of the "L" shaped buildings), out around the back BEHIND the motel and then...WHERE?
The audience wonders, and as that car disappears around the back of the motel...we are shown:
A pond. Or more to the point, a swamp. Hitchcock "cheats the distance" by simply CUTTING(no dissolve) to the back of the car(and the license plate in close-up NFB-418, which replaced her earlier -- and more relevant license plate ANL-709) .
There follows the funny/suspenseful sequence of Norman sinking the car in the swamp and it almost NOT sinking.
But that's a DIFFERENT sequence of shots (and a different -- and great -- sequence of SOUND EFFECTS -- the swamp bubbling, gurgling and belching as it eats the car.)
No, here I just want to focus on the brief clutch of shots showing Norman DRIVING THE CAR around the building.
Interesting: Norman can drive. Who taught him? Does Mother have a drive-able car that we haven't seen?(The broken-down Model T behind the motel can't move.) Does Norman drive into town for provisions...or does he call to have them delivered TO the motel? (The shot of Norman driving the car creates these thoughts -- and if Norman can drive, has he ever thought of just driving away FROM the motel? Many times, probably. To no avail.)
Interesting: the water droplets -- so precise(as always in good Hitchcock) so clearly seen on the windows and the sides of the car. A reminder that less than a half hour earlier, the Bates Motel and house were under siege by a pouring rainstorm, now over.
Interesting: Use of lenses and number of shots. Hitchcock was an expert on which lenses to use to show how much of an image and the shots -- two? three? -- of the car circling round the motel's two buildings and around to the back are...interestingly (and again) precise. Hitchocck directed these backlot shots, we can surmise. Hitchcock plotted where the camera should go and how much should be shown. I particularly like the shot of the car heading around back.
Interesting: SOUND. The sound of the car's engine being turned on and rumbling as Norman drives the car on bumpy terrain. Amidst the silence and stasis of this uneasy post-slaughter middle-of-the night horror sequence, the car's nosiy engine is a "risk for exposure of the crime." Will someone HEAR that car?
Interesting: The sudden -- almost dreamlike -- arrival of the car at the swamp. Exactly HOW FAR that swamp is from the main motel is rather a mystery of Psycho. Where is that swamp? 100 yards behind the motel? 200 yards? It can't be very far because Norman can hear Sam call Arbogast's name from there.
When the Psycho twist ending arrives and the mystery is solved, that swamp becomes more "retroactive horror" The bodies of Marion and Arbogast are in that swamp, in their cars -- but we learn there are at least TWO more bodies in their: previous victims("Young girls") of Norman/Mother. And so: Norman's been spending his years with his mother's rotting corpse in the bedroom not far from where he sleeps, and at a motel not 100 yards from a swamp where murder victim bodies are buried.