Narrative Devices in Hitchcock's: Psycho

In the movie Psycho, we see the character Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) plan to run away with her boyfriend Sam Loomis (John Gavin) and get married, but her John is in debt, due to a divorce, and his fathers death has left him with a large amount of debt. Later on we then see Marion steal $40,000, so her and her boyfriend can get married; this is an action code as it sets the story in motion, it also helps the audience identify with her because , in typical movies the man would have been the hero and stole the money for the binary code, love conquers all, however this is not the case, this time it is a female.

Later on see Marion in every frame, she never leaves, this helps us identify with her even more. we also see her at a medium close up, center frame, every time she is driving. this is so we can see her panic, and the use of the fast pace high pitched music helps reinforce the fact that she is panicked.

After all this identification, we are suddenly cut loose from Marion, as she is murdered and leaves the audience in a state of disbelief. The murder itself disorientates the audience, as every shot is random and fast cut. there are actually 52 shots in a sequence that only lasts 3 minutes. every shot makes the audience confused as they don't know what is happening, and when we find that Marion is dead, the audience finds it quite hard to comprehend and needs a new character to identify with. So after this we desperately need a character to identify with, so Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) comes into the scene, and we see him disposing of a body for quite a long time, and we begin to feel sorry for him. But he is not the character we identify with. The whole shower scene is an enigma code, as we don't really know who murdered Marion; we are led to believe that it is Normans Mother.

So this scene is an action code, as it pushes he story forward to find out who the murderer is. up until this point the narrative has been restricted to Marion, as we only see what Marion is doing, after she is killed, it is omniscient as we see a detective try to solve the case, as he thinks that Marion has ran away and doesn't know about her death, but the audience do as well as Norman.

After the disposing of the boy, we begin to identify with the special detective Milton Arborgast (Martin Balsam) as he attempts to solve the case of Marion's disappearance. but once again our identification is cut short, which disorientates the audience even more, because every one the audience identifies with gets murdered. which once again is an action code, because we see Sam and Marion's sister Lila Crane (Vera Miles) try to find out what happened to Arborgast. We are finally shown the murderer to be Norman, dressed us as his mother. which doesn't meet our expectations, in fact this challenges our expectations with a red herring, as we thought it was either Norman or Normans mother, not both.

Hitchcock chose to shoot the movie in black and white, to easily show the difference between the good and the bad characters, and to darken the face of the killer in the shower scene, to resemble the enigma code, who is the Killer?

The shower scene is actually part of Todorov's five stages of narrative. The equilibrium being Marion taking the money, disruption of equilibrium being the shower scene, recognition of disruption being people noticing that Marion has disappeared, the attempt to repair the damage is Arborgast tying to find her and the new equilibrium being his death.

The main Binary opposition of the movie is predator vs prey. Norman's hobby is taxidermy, and he only does this with birds, Marion's last name is crane, and he only ever stuffs birds. "I don't stuff beasts, only, birds look better stuffed," doesn't kill men only women. The camera is also used to position an eagle, bird of prey behind him, to resemble him as the predator, the lighting in the parlor scene also show him in the darkness and Marion in the light, to resemble a Binary code of good vs evil.