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Regina Granados Moreno

Punishment, Victimhood, and Violence in Psycho by Robert Bloch

and Film Adaptation Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock has got to be one of the most written-about filmmakers from the

twentieth century; his work has been analyzed from a variety of angles going from the

symbols and motifs that obsessed him, like birds, windows, and sexuality, to the way he

meticulously cured the shots and the music in his films to convey a certain mood or to

manipulate the viewer. His directorial work is indisputably accomplished; however, it still

raises concerns about the representation of violence against women on screen. His 1960’s

film, Psycho, can be credited for establishing a model for the psychological horror genre, and

it most notably features the iconic shower scene that has been reproduced and reinterpreted

many times since. Adapted from the homonymous novel by Robert Bloch, published just a

year before Hitchcock’s version, Psycho follows a young and attractive Marion Crane who, in

a chivalrous attempt to relieve her boyfriend from financial debt, steals a large sum of money

from her job and ends up in a roadside motel where she will be violently murdered. After the

death of the protagonist in minute 47, the second half of the film is centered around the motel

host and (turns out) killer Norman Bates who lives tormented by his nagging mother. In the

novel, the main chain of events remains essentially the same, but there are significant

differences in the way both Norman and Marion are depicted that tell us something about the

construction of victimhood in Hitchcock’s work. He is known for using film techniques to

involve the spectator in morally questionable behavior, prompting us to empathize with

characters that deviate from clear-cut definitions of good and evil. The case of Psycho is no

different; it deals with two complex main characters that do not fit perfect definitions of
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victim and victimizer, or innocent and guilty. Although the analysis of Norman’s character is

also relevant to the question of innocence and punishment in relation to the criminally insane,

in this essay I will mostly focus on Marion and how she is constructed as an unperfect victim,

as a deviant woman deserving of punishment.

In her 1984 article, “Hitchcock’s Women,” scholar Susan Jhirad pointed out the

director’s tendency to design his female leads in very particular ways. She identifies a

"distorted view of women in his films: the stereotypes of the cold but perfect blonde beauty

queen at one extreme, and the nagging castrating mother at the other." (33) Hitchcock was

notably vocal about his directorial intent and the decisions he took for his films, so it is

relevant to consider his inclination for casting blondes and brunettes in two types of

characters, in the book Hitchcock’s Motifs, Michael Walker quotes the director’s archetypes

that Molly Haskell identifies as:

“blonde: conceited; aloof; brunette: warm, responsive, … a fascinating

switch of the traditional signals. The sexual connotations of the old iconography

remain– blonde: virgin; brunette: whore– but the values are reversed, so that it is

the voluptuous brunette who is ‘good’ and the icy blonde who is ‘bad’. For

Hitchcock … the blonde is reprehensible not because of what she does but

because of what she withholds: love, sex, trust. She must be punished, her

complacency shattered; and so he submits his heroines to excruciating ordeals,

long trips through terror in which they may be raped, violated by birds, killed. The

plot itself becomes a mechanism for destroying their icy self-possession, their

emotional detachment.”

(Haskell in Walker 72)

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Following that quote, Walker argues that Haskell is forgetting about the ‘warm

blondes’ who do not fit this pattern, and in this category, he mentions Lisa from Rear Window

and Marion from Psycho. However, I argue that Marion does fit rather perfectly into this

archetype of a bad entitled blonde who reminds the male protagonist of his sexual frustrations

and so she is punished and subjected to great violence, which ultimately destroys their

intimidating image and fulfills the desire to see these uncomfortable women broken. Through

a comparison with the novel, I will point out the instances in which Hitchcock adapted the

original story to fit this trope and also those that fitted already.

First, we can look at the way Marion’s moral and emotional makeup is

constructed in the film and compare it to her book counterpart Mary. In Hitchcock’s Psycho,

the opening shot pans over through a window to find a half-dressed Marion laying in bed,

saying goodbye to her lover; during the first few minutes of the movie we are made to believe

that the reason they are meeting at odd hours of the day to have sex in a motel room is way

more devious than what is really going on. Marion and her boyfriend Sam, like in the novel,

are simply in a long-distance situation that can not be promptly resolved for Sam’s financial

trouble. However, in the text, the emphasis is on Mary’s desperation to get married and

preoccupations about becoming a hag: “In two years she’d be Twentynine. She couldn’t

afford to pull a bluff, stage a scene and walk out on him like some young girl of twenty. She

knew there wouldn’t be many more Sam Loomises in her life.” (Bloch, 10) There is little

mention of the couple’s sex life. The film highlights the fact that they are not currently

married so they are out of wedlock practices could be read as morally wrong; Marion even

shows remorse, keeps referring to their meeting as a secret, and expresses a desire for the

symbolic approval of an authority figure: "We can even have dinner, but respectably, in my

house with my mother's picture on the mantel." (4:38-4:44) This scene in the film sets the

tone and it cues the viewer to be alert of Marion’s moral judgments. Hitchcock’s dislike for
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sexual explicitness is no secret for it shows in his films where “[e]xcept for the occasional

kiss, there is little overt sex in Hitchcock's films[, and e]ven for his times, he was a chaste

director,” (Jhirad. 33) but he too has been quoted by Walker expressing his “dissatisfaction

with the tendency of English actresses to want to appear ladylike [and sexually appealing] at

all times” (70). By bringing attention to this aspect, Hitchcock creates a correlation between

sexual impurity and moral impurity which will be reaffirmed later in the movie by Marion’s

criminal maneuver and calculating personality.

In addition to her morally corrupt characterization, Marion is made to be an

uncomfortable presence for the male protagonist both in the film and the novel. Given that

after her murder, two-thirds of the movie follows Norman, and that the cleaning scene shows

us an anxious son looking after his mother, we empathize with him, and even think him a

victim of his mom, and perhaps of the intrusive and entitled attitude of his guest. Marion is set

to provoke the outburst that leads to her murder for two reasons: she was petulant and

emasculating in her conversation with Norman and she also was sexually attractive to him.

On this point, Jhirad notes that: “For the murderers of his films, paralysis and impotence

breed violence." (33) In the book, the conversation prior to the shower scene takes place

inside the house, representing an invasion of his space, however, in the film it is set on private

space behind the motel office, which is indicative of Norman’s discomfort around any sign

female sexuallity, also shown bye his body language in minute 34:24. On one hand, in Bloch’s

novel we get a description of Mary’s thoughts while talking to Norman and we see that she

feels superior to him and sorry for being old, fat, and pathetic: “He was the lonely, wretched,

and fearful one. In contrast, she felt seven feet tall. It was this realization which prompted her

to speak;” (17) in the other hand, although a bit more coy and timid at first, film Marion is

also forward with her critiques and teases him with her comments: "If anyone ever talked to

me the way I heard, the way she spoke to you..." (38:37-38:46) and with her body.
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Ultimately, Marion/Mary is killed because of her sexual attractiveness and she suffers

a sexually violent death. We know that Norman snaps out when faced with feelings of arousal

and desire, he thinks about “so many things he wanted to do with a girl like that. Young,

pretty: intelligent, too,” (Bloch, 23) but he is unable to do so, and instead his split mind opts

for venting his frustration on Marion’s vulnerable naked body. In the murder scene we see

parts of her body, objectified, fragmented, symbolically penetrated by the knife, and finally

laying down in a sexually suggestive position, looking at us looking at her through the

camera. In the article mentioned before, Jhirad argues that, although he is not to be blamed for

a structural societal problem, Hitchcock’s film does uphold a patriarchal attitude that blames

women for their own victimization; she writes, “Tony Perkins must punish Janet Leigh for

arousing him. We are appalled, but not really surprised, when her naked body is slashed to

ribbons in the shower. After all, didn't she bring it upon herself by being so unconsciously

seductive?” (Jhirad, 33) Death comes to her as a punishment for being sexual, unlawful, and

threatening, so in Hitchcock’s narrative trope, violence is justified when inflicted upon

deviant women. This point is emphasized by the numerous mentions of the fact “she’d taken

the wrong turn [...] and she was on a strange road” (Bloch, 13), a bad decision sent her in the

way of her downfall. By the end of the first act, she is killed before she could undo her

mistakes, very symbolically in the middle of a cleansing shower. “Come clean, Mary. Come

clean as snow” she thinks as she opens the shower; in the film she opens her mouth evoking

sensual pleasure, stretching her suggestive neck, just before she is slashed.

As Linda Williams mentions in her essay “Fim Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”,

the female body functions as the embodiment of fear and pain in the horror genre; it is used as

a device to create an aesthetic and rhetorical effect. The violated image of Marion’s body

achieves the goal of causing discomfort to the audience and at the same time, it fulfills the

desire of watching a woman being punished for bad behavior. This desire can be traced back
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to Hitchcock’s reported feelings of animosity towards traditionally feminine qualities that he

found annoying (and probably menacing); Walker recalls how “he elaborates a fantasy of

directing Claudette Colbert so as to reveal the sluttishness underneath the glamour of her

public persona. (Buchanan in Walker 70) This, of course, is not an issue exclusively of

Hitchcock, not even of cinema, but instead a larger social problem. However, Hitchcock’s

work does its part in upholding the archetype of the deviant unsettling woman who deserves

to be punished when she takes the wrong turn, which, given his position as a deservedly

acclaimed director and the reach of his influence, is not a small part.
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Works Cited

Bloch, Robert. Psycho. Crest Book, 1959.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Psycho. Shamley Productions, 1960.

Jhirad, Susan. “Hitchcock's Women.” Cinéaste, vol. 13, no. 4, 1984, pp. 30-33.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41692559. Accessed 2 Dec. 2022.

Walker, Michael. Hitchcock’s Motifs. Amsterdam University Press, 2005.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mtpf. Accessed 1 Dec. 2022.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly,
vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, pp. 2-13.