Face-Off: Psycho vs. Dressed to Kill

For nearly half of the film we follow Marion Crane, a real estate office secretary who steals $40,000 of a client’s cash in hopes of starting a new life with her debt-burdened boyfriend Sam Loomis. We see every major event that occurs during Marion’s journey from Arizona to Sam’s place in California, including when she catches the attention of a police officer by sleeping on the side of the road and when she switches vehicles at a car lot. We hear her thoughts as she imagines what people might be saying about her and her crime. Stopping at a place called Bates Motel, she has a sandwich and conversation with proprietor Norman Bates – then she gets murdered by a shadowy figure while taking a shower, getting removed from the movie in the most shocking way possible. We may not condone Marion’s act of theft, but we’re invested in the character and expect to continue following her story. This is one of the greatest character twists in history and is usually the reference when filmmakers want to throw viewers a curveball.

Not much investigation is necessary, just some snooping, because Norman Bates is a lousy liar. He does his best to cover up Marion’s murder, but when a private investigator named Arbogast shows up at the motel looking for the thief Bates completely botches their conversation and stirs up a lot of interest in the little old lady who sits in the house behind the business. Norman says it’s his mother, but she’s been dead 10 years. After Arbogast is killed, Sam and Marion’s sister Lila pick up where he left off, convinced the little old lady is the person to talk to.

Hitchcock keeps the killer’s face obscured until the end of the film, but from what we do see of her it is clear that Mrs. Bates does not have a strong sense of style. She does her killing while wearing old lady dresses and a wig that’s pulled back in a bun. While she’s quite adept at murdering people while dressed like this, you wouldn’t want to be caught dead in this outfit.

Mrs. Bates is said to be dead, but we see her killing people, we hear her berating her son Norman. Was there some kind of cover-up? No, the little old lady is revealed to be a rotten corpse, and the killer turns out to be Norman Bates in his mother’s clothes. We need an explanation, and a doctor provides one in a monologue. It’s the story of a young man who murdered his domineering mother then couldn’t live without her, so he kept her corpse around and kept her alive as a second personality within himself. Gradually, the mother personality started to take over… and, out of jealousy, to murder women Norman felt attracted to. Exposition dumps are frowned upon, but this one is fascinating.

Several sequences in PSYCHO play out with no dialogue, driven forward by the iconic music composed by Bernard Herrmann. Many of these occur during Marion’s attempted getaway as we follow the moves she makes on that ill-fated trip, but the most famous wordless sequence comes when Norman cleans up the murder scene, trying his best to wipe out every bit of evidence that Marion was ever at his motel. These sequences take up a lot of minutes, the clean-up alone takes around 10 minutes, but they’re so well shot and cut, we’re so invested in the characters, and Herrmann’s score is so strong that they never seem unnecessary or too long.