Master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960’s best seller Psycho is a story of a young employer who stole a hefty amount of money and then running away in order to be with the man she loves, gets lost and decides to stay at a motel for the night, shortly regretting what she’s done. This film, featuring Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates and Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, breaks cinematic history. With Hitchcock’s great eye for detail, he engrosses audiences in this ground breaking psychological thriller/horror film to the very end. Hitchcock makes use of motifs and mise-en-scene to explore the key themes and ideas such as duality, voyeurism and isolation, to show how the audience is positioned to see the true nature of the carefully constructed
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An extremely important example of voyeurism in Psycho is shown after Norman and Marion converse over dinner. After Marion returns to her cabin next door, Norman is seen to remove a painting, “Susannah and the Elders” a tale of two older voyeurs who spy on a young woman in a bath to which she is then sexually assaulted. This essentially a story of male sexual aggression and the evil that exists in everyone – even elders, or Norman Bates. Hitchcock identified this piece as important to the plot during his famous trailer where he leads the camera around the set to create suspense. When he is inside the parlor, he turns towards the painting and says “By the way, this painting has great …show more content…
When Marion Crane arrives at the Bates Motel standing at the entrance of the office, before her physical body enters the frame, the camera captures Marion in a mirror that is conspicuously placed on the opposite wall to the camera lens. Norman Bates quickly enters behind her but for a split second he is seen sharing the space in the mirror with her. The mirror reflects that Marion has already been recognised, in earlier shots, to represent the guilty, shadowed half of herself. When she walks into the office, the mirror captures this half of her, trapped in Norman’s murderous world. But Norman’s presence in the mirror alongside Marion not only suggests that Norman also has a guilty half, but now both Marion and Norman’s immoral side are linked together – “we are all in our own private traps and none of us can get out” (Norman Bates). If Hitchcock never included the motifs and mise-en-scene to show the duality of these characters, it would not cause the audience to feel emotions such as sympathy to the developing
An extremely important example of voyeurism in Psycho is shown after Norman and Marion converse over dinner. After Marion returns to her cabin next door, Norman is seen to remove a painting, “Susannah and the Elders” a tale of two older voyeurs who spy on a young woman in a bath to which she is then sexually assaulted. This essentially a story of male sexual aggression and the evil that exists in everyone – even elders, or Norman Bates. Hitchcock identified this piece as important to the plot during his famous trailer where he leads the camera around the set to create suspense. When he is inside the parlor, he turns towards the painting and says “By the way, this painting has great …show more content…
When Marion Crane arrives at the Bates Motel standing at the entrance of the office, before her physical body enters the frame, the camera captures Marion in a mirror that is conspicuously placed on the opposite wall to the camera lens. Norman Bates quickly enters behind her but for a split second he is seen sharing the space in the mirror with her. The mirror reflects that Marion has already been recognised, in earlier shots, to represent the guilty, shadowed half of herself. When she walks into the office, the mirror captures this half of her, trapped in Norman’s murderous world. But Norman’s presence in the mirror alongside Marion not only suggests that Norman also has a guilty half, but now both Marion and Norman’s immoral side are linked together – “we are all in our own private traps and none of us can get out” (Norman Bates). If Hitchcock never included the motifs and mise-en-scene to show the duality of these characters, it would not cause the audience to feel emotions such as sympathy to the developing