Page 25 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Alfred Hitchcock 15

also comments on the association between Marion, Norman-mother, and
birds not only in the dialogue but also in the imagery of the film, wherein
Norman visually comes to occupy the position of the stuffed owl with out-
stretched beak and widespread wings while Marion occupies the place of
winged angels in a painting above her head in the parlor scene, a painting
that is "penetrated" by "the menacing shadow of a crow . . . like a knife-
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blade or penis." For Bellour the menacing phallic bird of prey is associ-
ated with Norman as mother, ultimately with the mother, while Marion
is associated with the angel bird that becomes the phallic mother's prey.
If Bellour reads Mrs. Bates as a phallic mother (this is also suggested by
Hitchcock in the preview when he identifies the mother as domineering),
Creed argues that she is not so much phallic as castrating; in fact, Creed
makes a point of distinguishing the phallic from the castrating mother in
order to motivate Normans urge to identify with the mother to castrate
rather than be castrated.
Thinking about Psycho in the context of the cultural transitions play-
ing out from the 1950s to the 1960s, especially in terms of the women's
movement and calls for sexual liberation, it is useful to think of Mrs.
Bates—along with Mrs. Brenner of The Birds and Mrs. Edgar of Marnie—
as representing maternal authority at odds with the supposed paternal
authority of patriarchal culture. In all of these cases maternal authority
challenges paternal authority at the same time that it lays down the law in
relation to the daughters' sexuality. In both Psycho and The Birds this mater-
nal authority is associated with vengeful animality, particularly with birds
of prey that attack daughters who exhibit sexual agency reserved within a
patriarchal economy for men. These mothers, then, become the surrogates
for the punishing paternal superego. In both Psycho and The Birds, mothers
take the place of the father after he is dead and because their sons are not
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man enough (especially Nor-man) to take the paternal position. In Marnie
the paternal position is vacant (Mamie's mother, Bernice Edgar, was im-
pregnated at fifteen by a boy named Billy in exchange for his sweater), and
Mrs. Edgar and Marnie resist any man s attempt to fill it, to the point that
Marnie won't let men touch her (because her mother raised her to be "de-
cent"). But at the same time that these mothers are enforcing patriarchal
prohibitions against women's sexual liberation and sexual agency, they are
themselves displacing paternal authority and assimilating it as their own.
Modleski argues that "fear of the devouring, voracious mother is
central in much of Hitchcock's work" and that in this regard Psycho is not