MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > A Post About Psycho: Down the Drain

A Post About Psycho: Down the Drain

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

Its interesting about that lil' old shower scene that's so famous now.

Within those famed 78 camera set-ups for 45 seconds of screen time -- and probably on either side of them -- all sorts of "mini-scenes" take place:

ONE: Leigh throwing the torn paper in the toilet, flushing it, and making screen history.
TWO: Leigh entering the shower, turning the water on so it directly hits her(who DOES that without first turning it on and letting it warm up first? This very thing helps start the sense of physical violation that will soon envelop the entire scne.)
THREE: The Most Erotic Shower in Screen History. No nudity, but Leigh's open mouth, closed eyes, and orgasmic surrender to the shower water is...a real turn on.
FOUR: "Through the shower curtain, behind Marion": A door opens, a shadowy figure manifests, the audience's hearts leap into their throats
FIVE: The shower curtain is pulled back, the music begins
SIX: Marion, three times: MEDIUM SHOT: Screaming, head and shoulders. CLOSE-UP: Her head and her mouth screaming. EXTREME CLOSE-UP : Inside the mouth screaming(one of Janet Leigh's bottom teeth is crooked.)
SEVEN: Well...you know...
And after Mama leaves (With that great shot from behind of Mother turning the corner out the door just like Marion turned the corner and left Norman in the office.)
ELEVEN(?): Marion's death slide, hand outstretched to beg us for help...
...
And on and on the scene goes, as much concerned with the moments BEFORE the stabbing(the toilet, the erotic shower, Mom's approach) and AFTER the stabbing(Marion's death fall) as WITH the stabbing(which is about 30 seconds or so.)

And Marion hits the floor of the bathroom, dead.

But wait there's more..

(MORE)

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Once we've seen Marion's body topple over the tub and onto the bathroom floor -- half in the shower bath, half out -- we get the "coup de grace" cinematic finale to the shower scene.

Hitchcock cuts to the dead woman's feet in the tub. The shower is still running(the hiss of the water replaces the screen of Herrmann's murder strings on the soundtrack), the feet are "under water" as the tub remains a bit full, and Hitchcock's camera follows the blood from Marion's feet(not FROM her feet, but from her body "somewhere")...screen right to screen left...reaching a rather mottled-looking silver drain, swirling in a mix of blood and water as we enter the drain and the black hole within and...

this ALONE is brilliant.

One of the things I like about "Psycho" is how a movie that opens "way up in the sky over Phoenix, Arizona"(a God's eye view, and not the only one in the movie), and that keeps diving its camera down over the city, down to a building, down to a window, down into a room...

...now, much later in the film, CONTINUES the dive down , about as far as we can go: an EXTREME CLOSE-UP of a grotty drain hole in a grotty shower in a grotty motel. "From the highest to the lowest." In movie space. In the space of the world.

There is a non-literary, non-narrative, entirely "cinematic brilliance" to what comes next: we go down INTO that hole (and WHERE do things go? Where do our showers and bathtubs and toilets send their effluent) and that OUT of Marion Crane's dead eye, in a shot that is not only great , but effortlessly cinematic and thematic(in "real terms," that drain drains out to the county sewers, in "thematic terms" we are going down into the Otherworld with dead Marion.)

Exactly how Hitchcock got that camera to swirl away from Janet Leigh's eye as the blood had swirled down the drain is one of the great secrets in cinema(especially in 1960, when CGI was decades away), but Hitchcock could be proud that he got EXACTLY the effect he wanted(which included poor Janet Leigh lying there with her frozen face on the floor for multiple takes.) And what about that drop of water under her eye? Just shower water? Or a tear? Both. Powerfully.

I think with the shower scene, you could pull out ANY random ten seconds of it and study them and be rewarded. (Like Mother's approach to the shower curtain.) But for this moment, I'm focused on that drain hole, and how Hitchcock elected to use it as a close-up that filled a forty-foot high movie screen in 1960 and haunts all of our minds today.

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

The Down the Drain shot followed by cutting to the big eye is evidently a masterstroke; one of the defining pieces of shot-making and -design and editing in all of cinema. I do think that for about 10 years after Psycho people people really *tried* to find matching shots to cut between and (like Psycho and unlike early surrealist experiments) work these poetic effects into proper narrative stroytelling, and it's certainly tempting to say that it is was because of Psycho that people did this.

At any rate, we're still applauding, e.g.,

Lawrence of Arabia (match cut from blowing out match to the deserts and sunrise)
Umbrellas of Cherbourg (match cut from dollying in on Deneuve trying on a veil in a wedding dress shop to dollying out from her in that same veil at the altar getting married)
The Graduate (match cut from movement as Benjamin launches himself out of the pool to collapsing onto Mrs Robinson in bed)
2001 (match cut from thrown bone to satellite/orbiting weapons platform)

My sense is that even though lots of match-cutting still goes on, the fast-edited world we've lived in since at least the 1980s with advertizing and music videos has rather devalued match-cuts for carrying meaning in feature films. For their *wow* moments, modern film-makers are much more inclined to go for something within the shot whether it be vast in scale or sfx-ridden or featuring incredible speed through the frame or amazing production design or....rather than an elegant edit.

Sometimes the alternative can work well, e.g., jumping off from Psycho's down the drain/and toilet-flushing stuff perhaps, one of the best and most memorable sequences of the '90s is the 'Worst Toilet in Scotland' sequence from Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996):

https://youtu.be/7RoMaS1pzOE

(which I'm thinking much about right now since I'm off to see Trainspotting 2 today!)

The whole sequence is masterfully edited both visually and sound-wise but it's the propping and production-design of the toilet etc. (together with the basic conception) that makes the whole scene a classic.

Update: T2 Trainspotting did nothing for me. I really can't understand its *very* positive reviews from top critics. No really good scenes, no really good music, no new ideas apart from a generalized mournfulness about middle-age and lost-potential, only one new character, Veronica, who was deadly dull and seemingly picked mainly for her lissome, exotic beauty and just to liven up the frame which is otherwise mostly filled with gloomy middle-aged ex-junkies. [The movie feels a little bit like it is itself a middle-aged ex-junkie grasping at straws of youth and beauty in her person.] She's supposed to be from Bulgaria and not to be really understanding deepest darkest Scotland, but it was the type of performance of relative cluelessness that feels like a cover for someone having no acting talent, or for the directorial and script error of not having given her an actual character to play. She becomes the utterly fanciful plot motor near the end and I didn't buy any of it.

In sum, not only is T2 nowhere near as good as Trainspotting, it's barely adequate as a two hour time-killer. BTW, I was one of only *two* people in the cinema at my session of T2. Admittedly it's been out a few weeks now and is probably in its last week at the multiplexes, but still...

At any rate, I agree with the implicit decision that many seem to have made to catch T2 at home rather than pay full price for a night out. This is strictly a rental: 5/10 (and that's being generous, mainly because, particularly early in the film, there is some flashy camera-work and editing that appeals).

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

The Down the Drain shot followed by cutting to the big eye is evidently a masterstroke; one of the defining pieces of shot-making and -design and editing in all of cinema.
---
Yep. And for me, at least, I STILL can't figure out exactly how he did it. Did that camera spin out from a still photograph of Leigh? Or PARTIALLY from a still, that then resolved into actual footage? And there remains the great "narrative statement" that isn't STATED at all. A drain. An eye. A dead woman. A teardrop? What does it all MEAN?

----
I do think that for about 10 years after Psycho people people really *tried* to find matching shots to cut between and (like Psycho and unlike early surrealist experiments) work these poetic effects into proper narrative stroytelling, and it's certainly tempting to say that it is was because of Psycho that people did this.
---
Well, certainly Psycho was influential in other overt ways. The violence in Bonnie and Clyde, for instance(gun play, but "blast in the face" with the bank clerk.)
---

At any rate, we're still applauding, e.g.,

Lawrence of Arabia (match cut from blowing out match to the deserts and sunrise)
Umbrellas of Cherbourg (match cut from dollying in on Deneuve trying on a veil in a wedding dress shop to dollying out from her in that same veil at the altar getting married)
The Graduate (match cut from movement as Benjamin launches himself out of the pool to collapsing onto Mrs Robinson in bed)
2001 (match cut from thrown bone to satellite/orbiting weapons platform)
--
A great group of comparative shots, but interesting(to me) that Hitchcock's was about a DISSOLVE , not a straight cut.

----

My sense is that even though lots of match-cutting still goes on, the fast-edited world we've lived in since at least the 1980s with advertizing and music videos has rather devalued match-cuts for carrying meaning in feature films. For their *wow* moments, modern film-makers are much more inclined to go for something within the shot whether it be vast in scale or sfx-ridden or featuring incredible speed through the frame or amazing production design or....rather than an elegant edit.
--
Its funny to me. We've evolved to such a technology-driven film making process. Hitchcock wowed us simply with the use of close-up lenses, camera moves, and montage.
Consider the famous "Farewell to Babs" staircase shot in Frenzy. It was taught to us time and time again with regard to the difficulty of getting it(an indoor set matched with an outdoor set) , and the trouble in getting the camera to smoothly make the move out into Covent Garden. AND the shot could be analyzed(just like the Psycho eye shot) as "cinema as narrative": the shot is telling us that Babs is dying a horrible death and invites us to walk away from that death.
And yet, today -- that Farewell to Babs shot would just be a simple order to the CGI lab.
---

Sometimes the alternative can work well, e.g., jumping off from Psycho's down the drain/and toilet-flushing stuff perhaps, one of the best and most memorable sequences of the '90s is the 'Worst Toilet in Scotland' sequence from Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996):

https://youtu.be/7RoMaS1pzOE

(which I'm thinking much about right now since I'm off to see Trainspotting 2 today!)
---
Hoo boy. Havent seen that since I saw Trainspotting back in the day.

--

In sum, not only is T2 nowhere near as good as Trainspotting,

--
Bit sad to think how "un hot" some of the cast is now. At least they got good paychecks...

---

At any rate, I agree with the implicit decision that many seem to have made to catch T2 at home rather than pay full price for a night out.

---

I'm kind of reversible on this. I have to sit in the theater to "get this stuff down." Home viewing I can't concentrate.

---
This is strictly a rental: 5/10 (and that's being generous, mainly because, particularly early in the film, there is some flashy camera-work and editing that appeals).

---
Better luck next time! You are a tough audience, but cinema requires it.

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

Its funny to me. We've evolved to such a technology-driven film making process. Hitchcock wowed us simply with the use of close-up lenses, camera moves, and montage.
Consider the famous "Farewell to Babs" staircase shot in Frenzy. It was taught to us time and time again with regard to the difficulty of getting it(an indoor set matched with an outdoor set) , and the trouble in getting the camera to smoothly make the move out into Covent Garden. AND the shot could be analyzed(just like the Psycho eye shot) as "cinema as narrative": the shot is telling us that Babs is dying a horrible death and invites us to walk away from that death.
And yet, today -- that Farewell to Babs shot would just be a simple order to the CGI lab.

Still the Frenzy example nicely illustrates that it's the whole conception of the scene before the final trick shot that everyone *really* should have been focused on! The initial plot reveal - sound drops away completely and - oh no, Babs knows Bob! (Nice one Shaffer and Hitch!) Of *course* she would know him given that she works in a pub and Bob in public is quite the lad, but we don't see it coming, and after Brenda's death our imaginations instantly go into overdrive with dread. This is 1971, Hitchcock has even allowed us to see Babs half-nude earlier so we know *exactly* what to expect/fear. The camera then trails along behind a chirpy Bob and and Babs with our dread mounting all the way across Convent Garden and inside his building. Then we're denied the awful scene of Babs' death and the trick shot is used to retrace Babs' fatal steps out of the building while we look back and get to build the terrible scene in our minds, reflect upon the whole construction, and so on.

The trick shot would be easy today, but all the good ideas that lead up to it beginning with the plot-reveal (which in turn is arguably set up both by Brenda's awful murder and also the intimacy that the camera has with Babs when she's with Blaney earlier - and kudos to both main actresses for giving Hitch these images to work with) aren't any easier to come up with. And it's the ideas that matter.

That said, there's a new film about to come out called 'Free Fire' (which sounds like the climax of Reservoir Dogs stretched out to 90+ minutes!) directed by Ben Wheatley (of Kill List, High Rise, Fields of England, Sightseers, semi-fame), and in interviews he's been talking about how he pre-vis-ed the whole film, designed every shot and sequence by building the one main set for the film inside the computer game Minecraft, which, e.g., my 8-year old nephew plays. It's kind of amazing to think that my nephew playing Minecraft could have stumbled onto Ben Wheatley's pre-vis set last year sometime! So all sorts of things about movie production and pre- and post-production *are* changing, and new things *are* possible all the time.

And yet, ultimately, if anything's worth a damn it's for the same reasons that it's always been. If Free Fire is a terrific film then it'll be because Ben Wheatley and his writing/producing partner Amy Jump have ideas that are as good as Hitchcock's or care as much about dialogue and tone and tension-building as QT, and so on.

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

2 other examples of cinematic chicanery that I've been thinking about recently:

1. Beauty and the Beast is a huge hit again right now (two of my nieces have seen it and loved it!)... which led me to rewatch for the first time in ages the Beauty and the Beast (1946) directed by Jean Cocteau w/ Henri Alekan as DP. The film is full of beautiful and haunting sfx shots and their cumulative dream-like power is remarkable. Obviously we're a lot harder to wow with such things these days, and a whole bunch of shots and fx from Cocteau's films have become commonplaces, e.g., Alekan in a first overcranks his camera as Belle rushes though the castle so that viewed at normal speed she seems to be floating along, an effect that's a virtual cornerstone of the perfume advertizing industry for example. Indeed, anyone can shoot at high frame rates and generate imagery of this sort with their iPhone these days! And yet Beauty and the Beast (1946) *isn't* just a museum-piece and significant only as the originator of certain looks and effects. Rather, Cocteau's film is full of ideas, visua and otherwise, both good and bad, and deliberately doesn't make a lick of sense at times so that its dream-likeness runs deep (and you have to watch its ending several times to be sure you've even basically understand what's gone on). Belle the film explicitly tells us is a strange girl (and a much more ambivalent one than later Belles) and we hear the echo of that both forward to David Lynch and back to the early surrealists. Cocteau's film hangs together in a way no other Beauty and The Beast ever has precisely because it commits to its own freakiness and elusiveness (the same way Bunuel and Dali earlier had and Lynch would). Disney, god bless'em, can't follow.

2. The famous Japanese anime Ghost In The Shell (1995) (but it has appeared in Japan in many other iterations) which greatly influenced The Matrix, see here:
https://youtu.be/Y3tF7TL0Qh4
has its English language Live-action remake this weekend with ScarJo in the lead. I hear it's sort-of-Ok, and it has looked spectacular in the trailers, *but* it also sounds like they've stripped out all the ideas that made GITS 1995 stand out and resonate with people for the last 20 years or so and substituted in the standard Hollywood Bourne/Total Recall/'they stole my identity and I want it back' storyline. This vid:
https://youtu.be/gXTnl1FVFBw
beautifully explains all the stuff that made GITS so exceptional and resonant that has, it appears, been mercilessly stripped away from the ScarJo action-movie version.

In both these cases, then, even though the later remakes build directly on the old visuals often with far more advanced technology to help them supercharge the original visions, they leave behind a lot of the great ideas that were a huge part of what made the originals stand out and endure.

[–] Drmccormack (743) 7 years ago

Firstly, it is a real pleasure to read this dialogue between you and ecarle. These are rich discussions that make me appreciate the art of film making. Secondly, you make me want to watch these movies with fresh eyes and pay more attention to all these details. Thank you!

The thing I'll always remember from Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast was the set design. It was so simple and beautiful. I loved the wall sconces that were real human hands that moved to light Belle's way. It was ethereal.

[–] Doghouse (447) 7 years ago

"I STILL can't figure out exactly how he did it. Did that camera spin out from a still photograph of Leigh? Or PARTIALLY from a still, that then resolved into actual footage?"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I think that's pretty much it: a freeze frame that was optically rotated and zoomed out from in the lab, transitioning to motion once the rotation ends, and with the camera lens continuing to zoom out (the two are astonishingly well-matched).

The aspect that's always intrigued me is the cut that occurs "mid-door" during the seemingly continuous pan from Marion's face, past the open bathroom door and into the bedroom, dollying in to the newspaper on the night stand. This must have been done either because the camera movement was too cumbersome to accomplish in one shot, or had to do with balancing the bright lighting of the bathroom set and that of the dimmer bedroom; possibly both.

If I recall, you've remarked and speculated in the past about the "floor level" aspect of the Marion closeup as well. I can think of only two ways in which it might have been done: either the entire adjoining bedroom/bathroom sets were constructed on a platform, or what I judge to be the more likely guess, it was done on one of the sound stages with a below-ground-level "well" (of which I think every major lot has at least one). Universal's Stage 28 (the legendary and now-demolished Phantom Of the Opera stage), listed as one of those used for Psycho, was one such.

The "well" was used for, among other things, the orchestra seats and pit for productions employing the opera house set, so there's the possibility that the shower scene was shot on one constructed in the very space occupied by that larger set's stage and proscenium (and later used by Hitchcock for Torn Curtain). I have no way of knowing if that was the case, but inasmuch as the studio involved is responsible for three of the most notable "send them screaming into the aisles" moments in cinema history (the first appearance of Karloff's Frankenstein monster being the third), I find that possibility an irresistibly romantic and fitting one.

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

or what I judge to be the more likely guess, it was done on one of the sound stages with a below-ground-level "well" (of which I think every major lot has at least one). Universal's Stage 28 (the legendary and now-demolished Phantom Of the Opera stage), listed as one of those used for Psycho, was one such.

Interesting.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

quote]or what I judge to be the more likely guess, it was done on one of the sound stages with a below-ground-level "well" (of which I think every major lot has at least one). Universal's Stage 28 (the legendary and now-demolished Phantom Of the Opera stage), listed as one of those used for Psycho, was one such.[/quote]

Interesting.

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And probably possible...even though the Rebello book points out that it was the staircase and foyer of the Bates House that was built on the Phantom stage. But who's to say there wasn't a "corner somewhere" for Hitchocck to stage his ground-level shot.

Its funny about that Phantom stage. The 1960 Bates foyer and staircase might be permanent in our imaginations, but it was soon cleared from the Phantom stage, which was used for things like Torn Curtain(the ballet house, no doubt; a set off of which Spielberg was tossed as a gate crasher) a psychedelic nightclub in Coogan's Bluff(1968) and The Hindenberg in The Hindenberg(1975.) In other words, the Phantom stage was just like any OTHER stage that is cleared from one "play"(or movie) to the next.

[–] Doghouse (447) 7 years ago

Thanks, ec. I really must get around to reading the Rebello book (even though it would appear to make my theorized "romantic" possibility more remote).

About those other usages: Stage 28 would indeed have been like any other stage on the lot, but only up to a point. The Phantom opera house interior set (and you're correct - it did make that Torn Curtain appearance, along with those in '31's Dracula, '35's The Raven, '37's One Hundred Men and A Girl and the '43 Phantom remake among others) remained in place from 1925 on and was dismantled only just before the building was razed a few years back, but it occupied no more than half the stage's floor space, leaving the remainder free for the pretty much constant cycle of construction and striking from one production to the next.

There's probably an element of irony in the fact that the most common instances of standing interior sets remaining in place over a period of years would have been those built not for feature films, but for long-running television series.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Thanks, ec. I really must get around to reading the Rebello book (even though it would appear to make my theorized "romantic" possibility more remote).

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Its a good book, which rather contradictorily plays as a pretty short read with a fairly dense bunch of information about the making of the film.

It came out in 1990, but Rebello had published an article version of it in the late 80's; he was working on it a long time. What's sad to realize now is how many of the folks he got interviews with in the 80s -- Janet Leigh, Joe Stefano, Peggy Robertson, Hilton Green, and(for a few quotes) Anthony Perkins -- are gone now. Flip side: Martin Balsam, Vera Miles, and John Gavin gave him no quotes. (Gavin would relent and give a few quotes in later years to Janet Leigh for her book on Psycho.)

I'm not sure of the alive-status of Rita Riggs, the costume designer on the movie(not quite needing to do Edith Head glamour), who was interviewed. And the book carried a lot of quotes from script supervisor Marshall Schlomm - who turns out to have done that task on quite a few famous movies. I'm not sure if he's alive, either.

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About those other usages: Stage 28 would indeed have been like any other stage on the lot, but only up to a point. The Phantom opera house interior set ... remained in place from 1925 on and was dismantled only just before the building was razed a few years back, but it occupied no more than half the stage's floor space, leaving the remainder free for the pretty much constant cycle of construction and striking from one production to the next.

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Well if there was more floor space on the Phantom stage perhaps they could have done the "deep well" shots of Leigh's face there?

I recall someone from the production noting that the sets of Sam's hardware store and Lowery realty agency were adjacent on the same stage -- amazing, isn't it? In the movie, they are 1,000 miles apart. "Its all in our minds."

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There's probably an element of irony in the fact that the most common instances of standing interior sets remaining in place over a period of years would have been those built not for feature films, but for long-running television series.

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Indeed, I took a tour of the Warner Brothers lot in the late nineties and we went on the Friends sets -- the coffee shop is right next to the apartment sets. They had been there for a few years THEN...I wonder if they still stand for tours today.

On the other hand, back in the 70's in my days of going onto various lots -- both invited and Uninvited -- I remember watching a scene from a TV show with James Franciscus being filmed. When filming was over from one angle of Franciscus talking to another man, this dialogue between director and asst:

Director: Is that all the coverage we need from over Jim's shoulder?
Assistant: Yes, we're done.
Director: OK. (To a grip or someone). Cut down the wall for the reverse angles on Jim.

And the grip pulled out a CHAINSAW and cut down the entire wall in the set so they could move the camera in there to photograph Franciscus.

THAT set didn't even survive a day's filming!

Boy, I sure hope they had their coverage...

[–] db20db (16209) 7 years ago

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