Psycho: Narrative and the Film Extract

Joseph Stefano

Hitchcock's Psycho was based on a novel by an author known as Robert Bloch who was a prolific American writer that mainly focused on creating works of literature pertaining to genres such as crime, horror, fantasy and science fiction. Hitchcock and his screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, took some artistic liberties and the story in a way they saw fit. To convey Norman Bates as someone more "normal", Stefano wrote Bates in a way that would make him more, in a sense, appealing and easier to relate to due to the way how Stefano felt his character was too much of an outcast. That being said, the story is told in a non-linear fashion due to its complex storyline and unexpected twists. With the introductory shots, the audience is introduced to the character of Marion Crane, who is a women that is currently in a critical stage in her relationship where she wants to settle down, but her and her boyfriend's debts are standing in the way. At this point, the audience in convinced that the story revolves around this female character, but the fact that she is killed 30 minutes into the film completely changes everything the audience could have predicted about the end of the story. From the beginning, it seems to have a linear 3 act-structure, but when the characters hit certain plot points, the story becomes even more confusing. Every plot point, especially the death of Marion Crane, is a manipulation executed by Hitchcock and Stefano that changes the perspectives of the audience and their initial expectations at the start of the film. One significant principal that the film uses other than narrative sequence as a structure is the presence of the knife. Every time the knife is present in the scene, some new information is always shared with the audience or some new twist is introduced. For example, the first time the knife is shown, the audience experiences the death of the Marion Crane, a character who the audience thought was the main character of the story. 

The nature of our engagement with the story is that we, as the audience, think that we know more about what is going on than the characters do. There are various instances where Hitchcock leads us into believing that Norman is a disturbed yet a nice young man, but as the story progresses, we see in the end that Norman as an extreme psychopathic killer. As Norman is wrapping Marion's body after the shower scene, we can see his concern for his mother, due to his facial reaction. All the facts leading up to the death of Marion make the audience believe that Norman can and will do anything for his mother to keep her safe. When he first sees Marion's dead body, there is a sense of shock on his face which indicates that he may not be behind the murder. The hints quickly add up to make the audience believe that the mother is most likely the killer, which is later "seen" that she is due to the death of Arbogast. The whole time the audience believes that they know something that the other character need to know, but in the end they find out that they don't. This is the one nature of the story that keeps bringing in the audience.