Page 24 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

14 Kelly Oliver

Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train
(1951), Vertigo (1958), and even North by Northwest (1959), she dominates
plot motivation in the films from the early 1960s. Perhaps not coinci-
dently, at this same time Hitchcock introduces animals, particularly birds,
and turns from thrillers to horror. The most dramatic invocation of the as-
sociation of the mother with horror is Psycho, where Norman Bates dresses
up as his mother and takes on her persona to murder young women to
whom he is attracted. The film suggests that Normans relationship with
his mother motivates his psychotic homicidal violence, which is triggered
by animal lust and executed in the famous shower scene in the bathroom,
sandwiched between scenes of Marion eating and a toilet flushing that
also evoke animality.
The threat of the animal and attempts to contain it are more obvious
with Normans hobby, taxidermy: his parlor is filled with stuffed birds of
prey; and it is there that he tells Marion that she "eats like a bird" and in-
forms her that "birds eat a tremendous lot." After the shower scene Marion
is again compared to a bird, this time visually, when the picture of a bird
falls off of the hotel-room wall when Norman recoils from Marions dead
body; the bird stares up at Norman from the floor just as Marions lifeless
eye stares into the camera from the bathroom floor after her murder. In
this context it is noteworthy that like a crane, a bird of prey who eats fish,
Marion Crane ends up in the swamp. Several times in the film, Norman
also compares his mother to a bird. He tells Marion that his mother is as
harmless as one of his stuffed birds; and in the final scene Norman-as-
mother tells the audience in voice-over that "she" is as harmless as one of
her sons stuffed birds. Of course, Norman has stuffed her like one of his
birds. And like a bird of prey, "she" preys on the young women to whom
Norman is attracted. This association between mother and the stuffed
birds in Normans parlor adds to the creepiness of the film and of the hor-
rible revelation that he keeps her stuffed corpse in the house.
In her analysis of Psycho', Barbara Creed argues that "woman as mon-
9
strous is associated with bodily appetites, cruel eyes, a pecking beak." She
catalogues the many ways that both Marion and mother are associated
with birds, including the birdlike screeching on the sound track whenever
"mother" enters with a knife and the way that the knife pecks like a beak
at its victims; before Norman tells Marion that she eats like a bird, in
voice-over "mother" reprimands Norman that she won't have women sat-
isfying their "ugly appetites" with her food or her son. Raymond Bellour