The Deception of Sound in Psycho

PSYCHO

dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is a film that is remarkable for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because it was a horror movie that achieved both box office and critical success—a rare blend, as many horror scholars point out, because horror tended to be culturally popular yet critically ignored or denigrated. Robin Wood describes the horror film as “one of the most popular and, at the same time, the most disreputable of Hollywood genres” (82). Yet Psycho was nominated for a handful of Oscars, including Best Supporting Actress for Janet Leigh, Best Cinematography for John Russell, and Best Director for Hitchcock, bucking the tradition of the critically-panned horror film. 

The film also offers a rich text for what was, at its release, the dominant mode of critical engagement—psychoanalysis. (The title itself even suggests it.) Unlike the horror films that dominated the 1940s and 50s, the threat wasn’t located within science gone awry or foreign dangers or uncontrolled nature—the threat was located in the broken mind of the seemingly-normal Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), whose bland appearance hid the monstrous urges lurking within him. (Again, consider the on-the-nose nature of the name Norman, only one letter away from normal. Hitchcock was not always subtle.)

What Psycho does so well, though—really, created the blueprint for subsequent imitators—is expertly subvert our expectations; Norman seems to be our protagonist, and we are led to believe his monstrous Mother is the one who stalks the Bates Motel. When Lila (Vera Miles) discovers Mother’s desiccated body in the basement and Norman appears dressed in his matronly drag, we are confronted with the violent rupture of Norman’s psyche and almost immediately understand this as the way he sublimated his repression through a kind of split embodiment of Mother, whose castigations haunt him even after she has perished.

As an audience, we understand in that moment that when Normal was aroused by spying on Marion in the shower, he had to manifest Mother in order to eliminate that which is sexual, with is deviant and perverse, and, of course, eliminate the woman who might come between Norman and “Mother,” even her displaced embodiment in Norman’s psyche. Although it may no longer universally apply, Wood notes in his 1978 “Introduction to the American Horror Film” that “the release of sexuality in the horror film is always presented as perverted, monstrous, and excessive” (98). Norma Bates is here—in one sense or another—to put an end to such transgressive urges.

How dare you tempt my son!

The mechanism of how we are tricked into believing Norma Bates is the monster (in an actual, physical sense) is achieved largely through how the film locates sound. We, along with Marion, hear Mother arguing with Norman in the house in what Mary Ann Doane describes as “voice-off”—we hear Mother as Marion looks out at the house atop the hill from the motel window, and we hear her in contrast to Norman’s voice, who is arguing with her. Given the visual of the house rather than the conversants, we, like Marion, naturally assume there are two people talking. Doane argues that one of “the dangers of post-synchronization and looping stem from the fact that the voice is disengaged from its ‘proper’ space (the space conveyed by the visual image” (37).

Yet this is the very way that Hitchcock dupes us—we make an assumption based on the association of sound and image, but by never showing Mother speaking, he is able to shock the audience when we learn that Mother’s voice emanates from Norman’s mouth/ psyche. “The voice-off is always ‘submitted to the destiny of the body’ because it belongs to a character who is confined to the space of the diegesis,” Done suggests, but this is exactly how Psycho pulls off its twist—Mother’s voice, which we take as evidence of her presence in the diegesis, instead functions as what Doane describes as the “disembodied voice” employed in documentary voice over (41-2). The dislocation of sound from an actual character (rather than a corpse or a fractured subjectivity) is how Hitchcock pulls off the reveal.

Works Cited

Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Yale French Studies, vol. 60, 1980, pp. 33-50.

Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Psycho. Performances by Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and Vera Miles, Shamley Productions, 1960.

Wood, Robin. “Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Wayne State UP, 2018.