MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Double Meanings in Psycho

Double Meanings in Psycho

posted 6 years ago by jasonbourne (1027)
8 replies | jump to latest

I'm watching the movie for the umpteenth time, but I never noticed the double entendres in the movie before. Here are a few:

Opening scene in bedroom of cheap hotel. I think he wants to take her again, but there's not much time before checkout. She teases him with a kiss, but then moves to put on her shoes. A bit later:
Sam: And besides, when you say I make tax-deductible excuses you make me out a criminal.

Marion: (having to smile) You couldn't be a criminal if you committed a major crime. (Marion doesn't know it but is about to commit a major crime!)

Sam: I wish I were. Not an active criminal but... a nice guy with the conscience of a criminal. (goes close to Marion, touches her) Next best thing to no conscience at all.

The dialog sets up the situation (trap?) they're both in due to lack of money. She's less innocent than he is.

At the real estate office where Marion works.
Marion: Isn't Mr. Lowery back from lunch? (She doesn't really care about his lunch, but she doesn't want him to notice that she's late back from hers.)

...

Marion: It'll pass. Headaches are like resolutions... you forget them soon as they stop hurting. (I guess she has a headache from rushing back and the situation she's in.)

Caroline (Hitch's daughter): You got aspirins? I have something... not aspirins, but (cheerfully takes bottle of pills out of desk drawer) my mother's doctor gave these to me the day of my wedding. (laughs) Teddy was furious when he found out I'd taken tranquilizers!

She rises, starts for Mary's desk, pills in hand. (Chill pill for a headache. It's humorous that it only makes sense to her, but tranquilizers are used for mental disturbance.)

...

Cassidy (buying house): Tomorrow's the day! My sweet little girl... (laughs as Mary looks up at him) Not you, my daughter! A baby, and tomorrow she stands up there and gets her sweet self married away from me! (pulling out wallet) I want you to look at my baby. Eighteen years old... and she's never had an unhappy day in any one of those years! (flashes photo)

...

He's flirting with Marion, but also intriguing her with money buying off unhappiness:
Cassidy: (ignoring Lowery) You know what I do with unhappiness? I buy it off! You unhappy?

...

At Bates Motel while Norman and she has supper.
Marion: Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps. (She's referring to stealing the $40 K while Norman was born into his and a bit later the motel turns into a trap for her.)

Any others?

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Those are some great examples of the double meanings in Psycho. It is rather filled with them.

Some other:

(About the cheap hotel): Marion: They don't care when you check in, but when your time is up.... (Marion's time is up. And it will end at a motel after starting at this hotel.)

Arbogast: Then your mother met her? Can I meet your mother? Marion may have told her something. You know, sometimes sick old ladies are pretty sharp. (He doesn't know HOW sick, HOW sharp...)

Cop: You slept (in your car) overnight? There are plenty of motels in the area. You should have...I mean, just to be safe.

Norman: My mother? Why, she's as harmless as one of those stuffed birds (She IS stuffed, like the birds.)

Norman: (If I left), the fire would go out. It would be cold and damp...like the grave. (Without Norman to "animate her personality" from within himself, Mother is just a corpse.)

Norman: Mother...my mother...what is the phrase? She isn't quite herself today. (No, she's Norman.)

Lila: I can handle a sick old woman! (That's what she thinks.)

The film also has various echoings and foreshadowings: Sam speaks of his dead father's debts; Marion refers to a picture of her mother on the wall(the woman must be dead); Caroline is controlled by her snooping mother....

By the way, the dialogue above in your post where Sam talks about being a criminal...that's not in the movie. Is it in the script?

[–] jasonbourne (1027) 6 years ago

Ha ha. Enjoyed your post. Maybe you've seen this movie more than I have.

Even the last line...

Mother's voice (V.O.): They're probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. (A pause, as the fly lights on Norman's hand) I'm not going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They'll see... they'll see... and they'll know... and they'll say... 'why, she wouldn't even harm a fly...' (She still could be the one despite it all.)

ETA: I got the script from here -- http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Psycho.html. Maybe it was changed in the movie?

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Ha ha. Enjoyed your post.

---

Hey, thank you for reading it.

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Maybe you've seen this movie more than I have.

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Maybe!

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Even the last line...

Mother's voice (V.O.): They're probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. (A pause, as the fly lights on Norman's hand) I'm not going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They'll see... they'll see... and they'll know... and they'll say... 'why, she wouldn't even harm a fly...' (She still could be the one despite it all.)

---

What a great piece of "interior dialogue," read by a woman, over extremely disturbing footage of a man's face(Norman's) as the "nice young man" of earlier scenes morphs first into the monster he really is(that leer, those darkening eyes) and then merges with his mother's current skull face and then into the swamp where the car of his most famous victim is being exhumed. But the words DO mean something -- and "she wouldn't even harm a fly" is straight from the final line of Bloch's novel. The book provided the perfect curtain line.

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ETA: I got the script from here -- http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Psycho.html. Maybe it was changed in the movie?

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Indeed, it was. I suspected so -- I have read the script a few times and its interesting when lines pop up that didn't make it into the final movie. I suppose the discussion of tax deductablity of Sam's trips was considered extraneous -- but then again, they lost the connection of "committing a crime, being a criminal."

Though numerous lines were cut from the script, many lines were kept from the script, and most of them were said just as written in the script.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

With one exception: Most of Arbogast's lines changed in their readings by Martin Balsam. He was known as a "Method Actor improviser" and it reads to me like Balsam gave himself more dialogue and "warmed up the character." For instance, lookee here:

THE SCRIPT:

Arbogast: Or if she had you say...gallantly protecting her..you wouldn't be fooled...you'd know she was just using you. Wouldn't you?

THE FILM:

Arbogast: Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that she asked you to "gallantly protect you." You'd know you were being used, wouldn't you? You wouldn't be made a fool of?

Balsam made little changes like this all through his lines.

When William H. Macy played Arbogast, he called the role "the best written role in Psycho" -- but Martin Balsam helped write it. And Macy read the lines in the remake just as Balsam said them, not as written in the script by Stefano.

[–] Otter (24464) 6 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

"Marion: Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps."

And little does she know, but Norman is probably a person who's quite deliberately stepped into a trap, or so I assume. By (presumably) killing his mother, hiding the corpse while pretending she's still alive, and taking over the unprofitable family business, he's trapped where he is. Of course the situation gives him what he wants most, control of the family home and of "mother", but there's still a part of him that longs for some freedom, and Marion brings it out.

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This entire stretch of the "parlor scene" between Norman and Marion about "private traps" is one of the most rich and profound parts of Psycho. I think, Otter, that you've taken it an "extra distance in meaning" that is very good -- how Norman, by killing mother and taking over a failing business with no one to help him(except "Mother") has created his own trap. People do that sometimes -- killers, especially. They do something horrible to change their life...and it changes the wrong way.

But Norman also says of private traps "I was born in mine" -- trying to tell Marion that life with Mother Bates was hell from the start(likely particularly given that he was born to a couple where the father would die when the boy was 5 and there were no siblings.) Norman was also "born into the trap" where Mother "would meet a man" who would take over("He convinced her to build this motel; he could have convinced her to do anything.")

Of course, the "private traps" definition cuts in all directions: Marion herself(as we have seen) is in a private trap in her dead-end real estate job with no husband or children or parents; Sam is in the private trap of living in his hardware store backroom saddled with alimony and his father's debts.

And Norman is speaking to the AUDIENCE -- in a very "depression stimulating way" he says "I think we're all in our private traps." And audiences from 1960 to today have had to consider Norman's words in terms of their own lives.

The "private traps" business isn't in Bloch's novel; I expect that Joe Stefano added it, and I ALSO expect he added it after viewing Hitchcock's own Shadow of a Doubt, where crazy Uncle Charlie(Joseph Cotton) rages more angrily about "the world is a sty" and how if you rip open the fronts of houses, "you'll find swine."

(Stefano said, that as preparation to write Psycho, Hitchocck had him watch a series of older Hitchcock films in Hitch's private screening room. We can figure that the psycho movies The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Strangers on a Train and Rear Window were viewed. Stefano also saw Vertigo -- which ties into Psycho -- and told Hitch, "I think that is your best film.")

But for all of the enveloping depression of Norman's speech about private traps, it seems that Marion Crane realizes she has a chance to break out of hers -- "I'm going back to Phoenix, before its too late for me, too." FOR ME,TOO. She sees Norman as trapped forever. But she will escape.

Oh, no -- she won't.

But we can.

[–] swanstep (2619) 6 years ago

One general response I have to the OP's nice observations (esp. about Psycho's opening Hotel scene) is that Stefano's script is working in the noir/post-noir tradition of focussing on people who are at least slightly desperate, near the end of their rope, etc., maybe with one last chance to get on easy street or at least the straight and narrow. Punchy dialogue layered with omens or at least grim awareness of the odds is a commonplace both in movies and in TV on Alfred Hitchcock Presents throughout the '50s. Stefano starting with a broke man and a desperate woman in an anonymous hotel room was a big change from Bloch's book…and I think Hitch liked it for the tradition it was plugging into as well as for its strong dialogue. Marion's dying at the 40 minute mark would then not just be a surprise because of the apparent leading lady dying but because the original audience would experience it as an interruption of a whole dark relationships drama they'd predicted/projected with Marion and Sam ending up on the lam, tearing each other apart - all set up by that first scene (We can imagine Sam being mad as hell when Marion arrives in Fairvale and now he's got to deal with her crime! But then they have sex… and just through that delay he's implicated. The pictures on the wall seem to taunt them, before Sam's Fairvale squeeze or maybe an ex- from High School stops by and sees the money.... or something.).

I'm led to make these remarks by recently viewing both an original AHP episode, 'Enough Rope For Two' starring an end-of-her-rope Jean Hagen (just a few years after playing the awful Lena in Singin' In The Rain), and its 1980s remake, re-written and directed by a young David Chase (i.e., Mr Sopranos).

[–] swanstep (2619) 6 years ago

ERFT (1957) is watchable here (the image is L-R reversed to avoid copyright-blocking):
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x59gr3f
and ERFT (1986) is watchable here:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xx8xdr

ERFT (1957) is strikingly in the same world as Psycho albeit with a whole lot more 'Out of The Past'-style jeopardy from the beginning. Lots of talk of cages and the horrors of being 32 female and single etc. (Hagen and her lover Maxie look 50 by today's standards).

ERFT (1986) greatly changes everything. Everyone's younger, hotter, music blares, lots of neon and art projects. Here the Maxie figure is completely innocent (albeit he's the sort of frat-boy figure that's easily hated) and Hagen's character is no longer a desperate collaborator rather she's a scheming video vixen of uncertain psychology. The out-of-jail/past character Joe is no longer an aggrieved party he's just another monster/psychopath.

Overall I'd say that ERFT (1957) is more intricate, articulate, and believable whereas Chase's version is more nightmarish and unbelievable/movie-ish/characters don't feel real. The Sopranos were still a long long way away for Mr Chase!