Does the end of the movie ruin it for you?
Did we really need the psychoanalyst explaining the story? I've never liked that.
shareWell, you've hit a rich vein of discussion both at this Moviechat Board on Psycho and on its predecessor at IMDb.
Psycho is an acknowledged classic, "one of the greatest movies ever made" and yet it has many folks who say that this occurs DESPITE having this awful, overlong, too obvious, psychiatrist scene at the end.
And the debate has raged for years.
Noteables like critic Roger Ebert and screenwriter William Goldman(Butch Cassidy) say the scene is bad.
Non-noteables -- like ME -- say the scene is good.
I'll leave the debate to others from this point on, but I always like to make this point about information given to us by the psychiatrist that is nowhere else to be found in the film:
ONE: Norman murdered his mother and her lover. (And "matricide is the most unbearable crime of all" -- which led to Norman's split personality madness.)
TWO: Norman stole his Mother's corpse, gutted it, and stuffed it using taxidermy chemicals and sawdust(otherwise, we'd just think that was Mother's decomposing body in the fruit cellar.) This was HORRIFIC information to 1960 audiences.
THREE: Norman(as Mother) killed two OTHER young women before Marion. Marion was not his first victim. She was just the one with a private eye on her trail who could discover Norman and report him to Sam and Lila.
I think for those three plot points alone, the psychiatrist scene is important and necessary. But the scene has other attributes -- how the shrink is so "all knowing" and obnoxious in his prounouncements, how he doesn't know everything. And yet, how he clarifies some things about Norman: "He was never all Norman, but he was often only Mother." And the whole business about how Norman's lust for Marion(watching her through the peephole) triggered Murderous Mom.
Its a long sequence, but I think everything the psychiatrist has to say is interesting and adds a lot of depth to Psycho. The shrink also essentially tells us a "campfire horror story" about Norman's horrific past...which makes what we have seen(the murders of Marion and Arbogast) all the more horrific. Poor Marion and Arbogast: THEY had no idea why they were being killed, and by who. And why.
By means of comparison, 12 years after Psycho, Hitchcock gave us one more film about a psycho killer(Frenzy) and told us nothing much about the killer's past(though we do see him with his still-alive mother, whose photo is the only photo on his mantelpiece.) Without much to go on about the Frenzy psycho killer's past, Frenzy ends up less interesting than Psycho.
Could the film have found a way to 'show' these things without 'telling' them?
shareI think if they were to 'show' them, rather than just explain them, it would've been even more involved. And possibly labelled even more boring, longer. I remember reading a review from back in the day that said the shrink scene was a 'hat grabber'. So, among some, it's always had that reputation.
But c'mon. The scene isn't really that long at all. It's all done very succinctly. Chock full of info. There's a LOT more information that comes out during it, as ecarle said. You not only get an explanation about Norman, you learn a lot more about his past. The things he'd done.
Five minutes is a very short amount of time to get all that information.
Could the film have found a way to 'show' these things without 'telling' them?
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Well, as the psychiatrist says in this famously controversial scene...
"Yes! ...and No!"
We can figure that the shrink scene could have been done with filmed visual flashbacks to Norman killing Mother and her boyfriend; to him stealing her corpse ("a weighted coffin was buried"); to him gutting and stuffing her; and to the murders of the earlier two women.
But in 1960? Very, very little of this material COULD be shown. Part of the way to get past the censors was to simply have a "scientific expert" EXPLAIN it.
That said, they finally made a prequel(as part of a sequel) in 1990 called "Psycho IV: The Beginning," which some have called: "The Psychiatrist Scene: The Movie" because that R-rated TV movie DID show Norman murdering mother and lover(a very graphic poisoning of both, with fluids pouring out of their mouths as they couldn't breathe;) DID show Norman stealing the corpse, putting rocks in the coffin; DID show Norman gutting and stuffing his mother(discreetly) and DID show the murders of the two women(one of whom is strangled, not stabbed, thus breaking with Psycho tradition.)
It wasn't a very good movie and it wasn't very impactful seeing all these events dramatized.
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But I digress. I expect in 1960, showing matricide and corpse stuffing was beyond the pale. As would be the presentation of more gory murders.
So really...Hitchcock practically HAD to go with a "dialogue only" psychiatrist scene.
Which reminds me: the censors objected to the DA bringing up the idea "he's a transvestite." Such things weren't discussed in movies in 1960. Only by having the psychiatrist -- as a scientific expert -- note that Norman was NOT a transvestite(NOT dressing up for sexual satisfaction), but rather just trying to be his mother -- did that material get on screen in the speech.
I remember reading a review from back in the day that said the shrink scene was a 'hat grabber'. So, among some, it's always had that reputation.
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I think Hitchcock himself used that phrase ("hat grabber") in telling Joe Stefano that he was worried about both the scene and its length. But Stefano convinced Hitchcock that audiences needed and wanted this information.
And Stefano himself defended the scene in one interview, saying he was at screenings of Psycho and the audience was pretty rapt listening to the shrink unveil his horror story disguised as analysis.
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But c'mon. The scene isn't really that long at all. It's all done very succinctly.
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What I like is that the scene is fully STRUCTURED: The psychiatrist:
ONE: Ends the suspense for Lila and Sam by confirming that Marion is dead, "the private investigator too." WE knew that , but THEY didn't, and its a relief to see them learn the sad truth.
TWO: Gives us the whole backstory: death of father; entry of boyfriend; murder of mother and boyfriend(in the movie the sheriff told us it was a murder/suicide.) Stuffing of mother.
THREE: "How Norman Bates madness WORKS": Talks to himself as mother. Dresses up when "danger or desire threaten"(Arbogast was danger; Marion was desire.) Returns after the murders "as if from a deep sleep" convinced that Mother did it. And there is also the bit about how Marion "aroused" Norman and, "that set off the jealous mother, and MOTHER killed the girl." But crucially, "Norman was never only Norman, but he was often only Mother." And more crucial still: "When the mind houses two personalities, there is always a conflict, a battle. In Norman's case, the battle is over, and the dominant personality has won."
But c'mon. The scene isn't really that long at all. It's all done very succinctly.
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I think so. The way it moves from confirming Marion's death to the backstory of Norman to how his psychosis "works", the speech flows along with purpose and clarity.
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Chock full of info.
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And me, personally, I LOVED getting all that info. You know a lot of "well written" Broadway stage plays have characters give long speeches about their pasts. Here we get a variation.
Again: the "Frenzy" killer(Bob Rusk) got no such analysis and hence, was less interesting (though a cop, a lawyer, and a doctor all opine on the TYPE of killer that Rusk is, and it rather matches with Norman less the split personality: "They seem like adults , but are really dangerous children...kill when the mood strikes them...impotent....sadists."
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There's a LOT more information that comes out during it, as ecarle said. You not only get an explanation about Norman, you learn a lot more about his past. The things he'd done.
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Yes. This is my main complaint with people like the late Ebert, who seemed to think that the psychiatrist "wasn't telling us anything we didn't already know." Was Ebert nuts? (He was wrong like that a lot of the time, sadly. I don't think he always thought his reviews through.) We did NOT know that Norman was the killer of the mother and boyfriend; we did NOT know that he stuffed the corpse; we did NOT know that he killed two other women(which means he was quite used to doing this, KNEW that Marion was in danger from Mother, checked her in anyway.)
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Five minutes is a very short amount of time to get all that information.
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Yep. And I think we got proof of this when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho and cut the dialogue from the psychiatrist scene roughly in half. Robert Forster played the psychiatrist, but wasn't allowed to much MOVE, or use his hands. Forster just mumbled out with some monotony the minimal facts of the case. It became a lightweight scene, with no gravitas, in the Van Sant version. (References to transvestitism and the earlier two murders were among the things deleted.)
Since the topic of the psychiatrist scene is "on the table," I return to remind a bit about Hitchcock's own approach to filmmaking and storytelling around this time.
Hitchcock said he liked "pure cinema"(the pictures, not the dialogue, tell the story) and that other people's movies were "photographs of people talking."
But Hitchcock's critical adversary, Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic, noted..."how can pure cinema work in plotty suspense pictures?" As an example, Kauffman noted that at critics' screening of Frenzy in 1972, the sound was off for the first 20 minutes and he couldn't tell what was going on without the dialogue.
What Hitchcock did, I think -- in Psycho and other pictures -- was to put some key exposition and dialogue into the story -- often at the beginning(to set things up) or at the end(to explain things that happened), though in three films, he put key exposition "in the middle." Here are the examples:
Vertigo:
After an opening "pure cinema" scene of chase, cliffhanger, and death, Hitchcock serves up two great big expository scenes to give us backstory on Scottie Ferguson(James Stewart) and to set up the job given to him by Gavin Elster(Tom Helmore.) These two scenes are (1) Scottie at Midge's apartment; and (2) Scottie at Elster's office. Once this heavy exposition is ladled out, Hitchcock can move on confidently to the long near-silent "pure cinema" of Scottie tracking Madeleine all around San Francisco.
The "exposition in the middle"(well, late middle) is Judy's narration of her letter to Scottie in which she explains the whole murder plan of Elster, and her role in it. This is "the psychiatrist scene" of Vertigo, but a bit shorter and earlier on (and, of course, Judy throws the letter away, never sends it to Scottie.)
But wait -- there is an ACTUAL "Psychiatrist scene" in Vertigo, and it is when the psychiatrist(played by Mr. Drysdale of the Beverly Hillbillies) explains to Midge how Scottie is in a state of catatonia brought on by Madeleine's fall and guilt over the cops fall at the beginning of the movie.
THAT psychiatrist scene is actually a revamp of ANOTHER, earlier psychiatrist scene one film earlier, in Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man" and it is when the psychiatrist (played by Colonel Klink of Hogan's Heroes) explains to Henry Fonda why his wife Vera Miles has had a nervous breakdown and is in a state of depression and near-catatonia.
So, indeed, Hitchcock really DUG his psychiatrist scenes around this time -- The Wrong Man, Vertigo, AND Psycho each have one. Its just that the Psycho one is at the end, and longer than the earlier two(and more interesting, because it is also a tale of horrible deeds done.)
But meanwhile, back at the exposition:
Two Hitchcock spy films -- North by Northwest and Torn Curtain -- save their big dollop of exposition (and revelation) for the middle. In NXNW, its where we go to DC and "Professor" Leo G. Carroll explains to his colleagues (and us) how Cary Grant has been mistaken for a man who doesn't exist -- "George Kaplan," a decoy created on paper by the CIA.
In Torn Curtain, its the scene where Paul Newman boards a tractor with a farmer(Mort Mills, the highway cop from Psycho) and we learn what we suspected all along: Newman is not REALLY defecting to the East Germans; its an undercover mission to retrieve a nuclear formula.
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I mention all of these exposition scenes -- and psychiatrist scenes -- to suggest that Psycho with ITS expository/explanatory psychiatrist scene at the end -- is very much aligned with how OTHER Hitchcock movies had PLENTY of exposition, and plenty of psychological analysis. The bulk of his movies could be silent or near silent(in Psycho, the nine minutes between Marion's murder and burial at swamp) as long as someplace in the movie, things were explained to the audience's satisfaction.
A couple of more thoughts about the psychiatrist scene in Psycho:
ONE: One key piece of information HAD to be imparted, in some scene, somehow: that Norman murder his mother and her lover. Perhaps we could have lived without learning that he stuffed the corpse(but that is the essence of horror, and ties into the character's penchant for taxidermy); perhaps we could have lived without learning that Norman killed two women before Marion(but that establishes him as a SERIAL killer -- Marion Crane was not a one-time only temptation to murder.)
But we HAD to learn that Norman, and not Mother, took the lives of Mother and her boyfriend. If not in this scene...somewhere.
TWO: The psychiatrist scene is in Robert Bloch's novel, and it is longer. But in the book: Sam tells Lila what the psychiatrist told him on a visit to the mental institution. Hitchcock and Stefano "eliminated the middleman"(Sam) and the need for the scene to happen days later, and moved it right up to the day of Norman's capture.
THREE: The psychiatrist coming in to explain things at the end tracked with the "tag" scene that ended many a TV episode in the 50's and 60s. Perry Mason, for instance, or Peter Gunn. Audiences were conditioned for an explanation.
FOUR: Speaking of which, if Psycho is "the scariest Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode ever made," the psychiatrist is here standing in FOR HITCHCOCK, who came on at the beginning to introduce his stories, but at the end to "wrap things up"(usually to tell us that a bad guy who got away with murder in the episode was later caught.)
Ah, the Psycho psychiatrist scene. Long may it inspire debate and discussion.
The weird thing about that scene for me personally is that when it starts, I feel a bit of sadness knowing that my favorite movie is about to come to an end. The shrink is like an old friend, returning once more to tell his story, and when he wraps up his speech(with the great line about who got the money: "The swamp. These were crimes of passion, not profit"), and we move on to Norman, I know I'm about to leave that weird, weird Psycho world yet again.
I agree with ecarle, the scene is not only necessary, but extremely well-written, directed,
and acted.
I have never understood the complaint about this scene, and I do not feel the film would've
been as complete without it.
I think the whole truncated psychiatrist scene by Forster was specifically because Van Sant knew it had always been a hat grabber and many found it boring.
So he figured he'd spit out a few facts, quickly rush by it, and get it over with. Audiences, even in 1998 were not known for their patience.
Of course I don't know, but that's the way the scene always came across to me.
I think the whole truncated psychiatrist scene by Forster was specifically because Van Sant knew it had always been a hat grabber and many found it boring.
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But, ironically, the entire Marion Crane opening sequence could be found a "hat grabber," too -- for 1998 slasher fans. I always felt that Van Sant should have shipped his Psycho to indie/art theaters first, with advertising specifying it as "an experiment in film reproduction," rather than trying to sell the story again.
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So he figured he'd spit out a few facts, quickly rush by it, and get it over with. Audiences, even in 1998 were not known for their patience.
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And that's kind of the point. The truncated Forster version doesn't FEEL right. Lila, Sam and the authorities have waited a long time to get ALL The information about what happened to Marion (and Arbogast) and what's the story with Norman Bates. They wouldn't care how long the shrink went on. And, "conversationally," you HAVE to open a briefing with an introduction and ease into your facts.
Note also that Hitchcock allows Simon Oakland to move around the room and wave his hands and point his fingers -- he's a "man in motion" which gives the static scene motion, too. Forster pretty much has to stand in position and recite his lines as if under a stopwatch.
I think this is the case in both versions of the scene, but note that even while the psychiatrist is spinning a long monologue, the other characters -- Lila, Sam, the sheriff, the DA -- get to ask questions and make brief points. They "punctuate" the psychiatrist's long speech, break it up a bit. It feels like a "group discussion" in certain ways. I don't recall the Forster version feeling the same way.
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Of course I don't know, but that's the way the scene always came across to me.
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Me, too -- and that's why I think it reveals how good the original, longer scene really is.
Note in passing about the psychiatrist scene:
I found the entire scene on YouTube...it held up for me.
But, funny: there are comments there, too -- and the battle rages on.
Some commenters hate it. Some like it. Some love it.
One wrote: "this is the greatest scene in movies."
Others wrote that it is the best scene in Psycho, or one of two, along with the shower scene.
The question is: are they SERIOUS? Or kidding around?
Well, I think it is fine.
And you can see it on YouTube....
All the information the psychiatrist explains is given throughout the movie.
I honestly think Hitchcock was like :" We need an explanation for them dumdums, they won´t get it otherwise"