Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Z Rogers Psycho


The movie Psycho got me so mad in  the confusing nature of the story being told. The movie’s protagonist  Marion Crane finishes sleeping with Sam claiming that this would be the last time this would happen unless the relationship was official because sneaking to met him  during her break at work felt demeaning to her which Sam goes out of his way to provide exposition to the audience and let her know again it will be the second he gets out of his debt. This small detail leads the movie into something I couldn't have predicted,but if you tell me the whole plot it actually makes sense between point A to point B. Anyways Marion goes back to work and very conveniently someone of incredible wealth comes  in and closes a deal of sort in real estate and her boss wants the money in the bank for safekeeping, but that doesn’t happen Marion actually steals the money. Shortly after she becomes very paranoid since a cop car started following her, so she switches cars and begins to imagine a handful of scenarios that could happen. With this information I had reason to believe she was going to go “Psycho” and start killing people who might turn her in or change her mind, so the police officer who was following her was supposed to be dead in his cop car in my mind and the same with the car dealer who kept asking all those questions about her being sure of Marion’s decision.

It is  later revealed that Marion stole the money to pay off her boyfriend’s debt, which is a completely selfless act in my opinion, so she is established as a person with zero ill intentions which annoyed me since I thought she was going to be a serial killer, but the alternative was just as good. Marion was on her way to a small motel to avoid the cop that she was being paranoid about. Even the day turns to night and starts to rain as she arrive to the the motel dubbed the Bates Motel. This created an atmosphere where I as the  viewer felt more claustrophobic in the motel since when it rains in a movie people stay in a single location until the rain stops. The inside of the motel was very small and the decorations on the walls themselves were pressed extremely closed together as if to make everything seem so much smaller on the inside than the outside. When Marion first met Norman I was convinced Norman was going to find the money in her room when she was trying to leave and Norman was going to die. However Marion has a conversation with Norman about his hobbies and the mistakes that Norman made previously and the mistake that Marion is currently making.  I found the conversation taking place was very human or genuine considering the conversation was very fast and fluid when the conversation was talking about Norman love of stuffing animals and his feelings of them being helpless and how that wasn’t really his fault and Marion seemed interested in his ideals on the topic, however when said topic changes to the types of mistakes the two has made then everything becomes more slow and even the camera recognizes this when it spends an increasingly long time for it to change from person to person. In this long scene many ideas are given and it all ends when Marion finally comes under the conclusion that what she does is wrong and decides to return the money before anyone  notice that it’s gone.


I thought the movie was over with a person having psychotic thoughts and mannerisms, but that wasn’t at all what happens, but instead Norman leaves her company and Marion decides to take a shower, which is symbolic of Marion washing away her pass “sins”, and at this moment the music starts to actually becomes a factor in creating tension instead of being background noise and while the music starts to pick up we see Marion get stabbed and the music  dies down with Norman discovering the body and claiming there’s a lot of blood to his mother in a disappointing manner, which immediately meant to me that the mother did it. Norman hesitantly cleans the blood takes Marion’s body into her car with all her luggage and the money that was stolen from the real estate agency, it all goes into a nearby swamp and we wait with Norman to watch everything sink. This was extremely surprising because the movie felt incomplete with the death of the assumed main character. I have never seen the character the camera followed the most die off halfway through because the question that follows afterwards is “Who are we going to follow in the story now?” and “Why should we care about the movie now?” Five seconds later and we see the answer to those exact two questions and the answers are Marion’s sister and boyfriend and to discover to find the evidence to put Ms.Bates into jail for murdering Marion. A private detective is hired to investigate Marion’s disappearance, but not on the murder like I  thought ,but on the money she stole during the opening scenes of the movie. The detective questions Sam,the boyfriend, and Lyla, the sister, and they both don’t where she is because she’s dead. The detective finds out she was at the Bates Motel and after questioning Norman, who is more than okay with that, but refuses to actually identify her as being there for dramatic irony since we know there is no evidence of her being there and the detective would stay for longer if Norman let that information slip which he doesn’t, but he does let it slip that he lives with his mother who could have saw Marion leave with the cash. Norman is incredibly protective of her mother and forces the detective to come back with a warrant.
The detective Notifies Lyla of the information and then walks up into the house and he walks up a flight of stairs and is stabbed by a figure that Norman later identifies as his mother.  When the detective doesn’t show up the next morning Lyla and Sam got very worried and decided to check the motel out themselves. After various distractions, lies, and schemes Lyla concludes the detective has to be in the house and that’s where she goes, but Norman is in pursuit releasing they were lying about their intentions on just staying the night. Lyla feels unsafe so she hides in the fruit cellar and coincidentally the mother was hidden there too ,so no one can find her, however she is shown to be a skeleton and Lyla screams , and Norman appears behind her wearing the same gown as his mother, the skeleton. After this tense scene follows a  lengthy exposition that devolves into Norman killing his mother and her boyfriend, steals her skeleton and finally assumes her identity whenever he’s alone. The reason why he killed Marion was because he felt a similar type of jealousy and assumed his mother would do the same, even though previous evidence suggests Ms.Bates doesn’t like Norman anywhere as much as Norman loves Ms.Bates.                 

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