In Psycho, Hitchcock allows the audience to become a subjective character within the plot to enhance the film's psychological effects for an audience that is forced to recognize its own neurosis and psychological inadequacies as it is compelled to identify, for varying lengths of time, with the contrasting personalities of the film's main characters. Hitchcock conveys an intensifying theme in Psycho, that bases itself on the unending subconscious battle between good and evil that exists in everyone through the audience's subjective participation and implicit character parallels. Psycho begins with a view of a city that is arbitrarily identified along with an exact date and time. The camera, seemingly at random, chooses first one of the many buildings and then one of the many windows to explore before the audience is introduced to Marion and Sam. Hitchcock's use of random selection creates a sense of normalcy for the audience. In other words, the suspicion has not come too strong too soon. The fact that the city and room were arbitrarily identified impresses upon the audience that their own lives could be applied to the events that are about to follow. It’s, very much, realistic. In the opening sequence of Psycho, Hitchcock succeeds in capturing the audience's initial senses of awareness and suspicion while allowing it to identify with Marion's helpless situation. The audience's sympathy toward Marion is heightened with the introduction of Cassidy whose crude boasting encourages the audience's dislike of his character. Cassidy's blatant statement that all unhappiness can be bought away with money, provokes the audience to form a justification for Marion's theft of his forty thousand dollars. As Marion begins her journey, the audience is drawn farther into the depths of what is disturbingly abnormal behavior although they are compelled to identify and sympathize with her actions. It is with Marion's character that Hitchcock first introduces the notion of a split personality to the audience. In the first part of the film, Marion has many interactions with windows and mirrors, symbolically telling us as viewers that we can see the effects of certain situations on her conscious mind. For example, Marion enters the secluded bathroom in order to have privacy while counting her money. The split personality motif reaches the height of its foreshadowing power as Marion battles both sides of her conscience while driving on an ominous and seemingly endless road toward the Bates Motel. Marion wrestles with the voices of those that her crime and disappearance has affected while the audience is compelled to recognize as to why they can so easily identify with Marion despite her wrongful actions.
While Norman Bates is our person that comes out to be our explicit psycho in the end of the story because of past psychological trauma, he isn’t the only being struggling with split personalities. Marion struggles, too, with different people in her mind, or personal demons, if you will. Just as Marion and Norman discuss of personal traps we put ourselves in, we also all struggle with personal demons, those voices that tell and sometimes convince us to do things we “normally” wouldn’t do. Or maybe those “bad things” are apart of our nature to start? Because of these questions, I recommend “Psycho” to everyone. The audience, although they had received a valid explanation for Norman's actions, is left terrified and confused by the last scene of Norman and the manifestation of his split personality. Faced with this spectacle, Hitchcock forces the audience to examine their conscious self in relation to the events that they had just subjectively played a role in. The fear that Psycho creates for the audience does not arise from the brutality of the murders but from the subconscious identification with the film's characters, all of whom reflect one side of a collective character. Hitchcock enforces the idea that all the basic emotions and sentiments derived from the film can be felt by anyone as the unending battle between good and evil exists in all aspects of life. The effective use of character parallels and the creation of the audience's subjective role in the plot allows Hitchcock to entice terror and convey a lingering sense of anxiety within the audience through a progressively intensifying theme. Hitchcock's brilliance as a director has put Psycho's place among the most reputable and profound [horror] films ever made.
No comments:
Post a Comment