A Long, Long Wait 'Til the BOO

This is another Arbogast post, but perhaps to a more "global use."

The deal as Hitchcock planned it was for Mrs. Bates to first reveal her horrific murdering side in the shower scene...and for Mrs. B to thereafter haunt the entire movie as "a lurking menace." Once we have seen exactly what she is capable of(stabbing a victim multiple merciless times with a great big butcher knife)...we cringe everytime ANYBODY comes to the Bates Motel or enters the Bates house. That's how Psycho "works" from the shower murder on.

Once Arbogast arrives in the movie...and then arrives on the porch of the Bates Motel at dusk..the "Mrs. Bates menace" mechanism kicks in, and the entire Bates property becomes a "zone of danger" much like the ocean in Jaws: once you enter, there's every chance you get attacked and killed.

What's amazing, I think, is how LONG it takes for Arbogast to get it, how long Hitchcock milks the possibility of Mother materializing to kill the man.

She's "lurking" in our minds as Arbogast and Norman talk in the motel office(it grows dark, Arbo's back is to the outside door, Mother COULD come up behind him); as Arbogast and Norman talk on the porch in the darkness(again, Arbogast's back to the house -- Mother COULD come up behind him); when Arbogast makes his phone booth call(he's got information of great danger -- Marion was here, Mother exists) and she just might be capable of driving up in a truck or something and killing him; and then back at the motel, where Hitchcock angles things so the audience worries that Arbo could be attacked both as he gazes at the stuffed birds and when he kneels down to examine the safe(on his rise back up, I'll bet the audience's closed their eyes.)

And then it all tightens up without mercy as Arbogast climbs the hill to the house, enters the foyer, climbs the stairs....

Its a great big BOO when Mother comes racing out at Arbogast to kill him, but I would contend that Hitchcock had this moment building since practically the moment Arbogast first arrived at the Bates Motel. In the structure of "Psycho," Mother is an unseen menace who isn't seen much, and doesn't do much, until the suspense has been ratcheted all the way up and the story all the way out.

And when she comes rushing out that door...its time. She's just as horrible as she always was, just a monstrous as we thought she was. Again.

Compare this to the usual Friday the 13th slasher movie pattern, in which we get a new bloodily stabbed, sliced, hacked victim about every ten minutes or so. Hitchcock didn't work in a period where you could DO that, but I doubt that he would have wanted to, anyway. He's "the master of suspense," and saving, saving, saving Mother's next attack(after the shower) is how he operates and keeps Psycho at high tension even in "dialogue scenes."

Once both Marion AND Arbogast have been gorily stabbed to death, the whole machinery kicks in again for the visit of Sam and Lila to the Bates Motel...and rises to peak suspense as Lila explores the house alone. It has been said that "Psycho only has two murders" but we don't know that when we first SEE it. Lila is fair game, and so is Sam, big guy that he is(Mother is quite capable of ambush, as Arbogast found out.)

In this third act finale, Hitchcock again plays the "zone of danger" card(the rooms of a house in which we have not been before) and the "Menacing Mother" card(she could pop out anywhere, as the "mirror jump" moment confirms)....and its a long, long, LONG wait to perhaps the biggest BOO in the picture: the double whammy of Dead Mother and Norman Mother in the fruit cellar.

These are elements of Psycho that we have brought up before, but I think what I would like to linger on here is the long period of time BETWEEN shocks, and how Hitchcock rather expertly stretches out the story AND the suspense until these shocks finally arrive as if to justify how long we had to wait.

I mean, both the Arbogast murder and the fruit cellar finale are GREAT shocks, scream-worthy(with Herrmann's strings) when they happen and incredibly cinematic(by Hitchcock's direction) in the play-out(think of the high shot of Mother's attack on Arbogast versus the swirl-around close up of Dead Mother's face -- different presentational techniques.

And funny: both the "zone of danger" mechanism and the "Menacing lurking mother mechanism" come into being only AFTER the shower murder. It is as if the most shocking scene in the movie exists rather separately from the suspense-horror movie that follows it.