Psycho ends with the grinning face of Norman, his mother skull superimposed.
No previous film had ended with such a griming question mark.
There is no rational lancer.
Psycho ends with smug psychiatrist in the cop house, a seeming place of order that can impose order on nothing. The security of the police station is challenged.
The psychiatrist’s “rational” explanation is cold and in deliberate tone. But explanation does not end the take comfortably. After the explanation, which is tidy and titillating, the gaze is redirected at Norman, draped in a white sheet, and his mother explains how she would not hurt a fly.
The camera tracks to Norman’s face, and Hitch dissolves with the mother’s grinning skull.
The 2 images punctuated by the car in which Norman had buried Marion pulled from the swamp.
Last image: tick chain pulls the car that contains Marion’s corpse of the swamp. The film’s world is closed with the shot (Kolker, p. 25)
Dissolve: Dredging up of a car from a swamp. Three images are dissolved.
A shot if a catatonic Nirman looking directly at the audience.
A duplicate shot of his mother skeleton, whose skull flickers beneath her son’s features and whose personality he has now assumed.
A heavy chain which seems anchored to his/her heart, hauling up Marion’s Car which contains her corpse (Giannetti, p. 398)
The devouring swamp is sexualized: sort if feminine symbol of imaginative horror.
It violates the predominant visual principle of Horizonal/vertical by being diagonal. We are left without a visual pattern,
We are left without a narrator, an anchor, an answer, left only to face our fears of madness and the unkniwn (Kolker, p. 26)
It could be interpretated as a new restoration to sanity, bringing the psyche to light from the lower depth.
Sort of the sum total and the final meaning f what we have seen, drawing out all the hidden propensities for destruction: voyeurism, theft, exploitation, and murder.
After signaling downward into the hidden and unknown (swamp), he viewers are made aware of dark impulses and potential for evil in all of us.
Food
Motel, lunch, half a sandwich
She talks about dinner, big steak for 3, with mother and sister
Marion Crane, a bird, fair game to be stuffed (killed as a form of being raped) by Nirman, the deranged taxidermist
(Intertex, Man Who Knew, 1956)
Phoenix is the name of the mythic bird that rises from its own ashes.
Mr. Cassidy is intoxicated
Contrast and competition between sex and food thorough the film.
A meal of milk of sandwiches precedes Norman’s murder of Marion.
She eats like a bird.
Norman’s mother by candlelight in cheap, erotic
Norman says: “She’s hungry.”
Mother: “Tell her she will not be appeasing her appetite with my food, or my son!…You have this guts, boy?”
The very first words in film are about food, when Sam says: “You never did eat your lunch, did you?”
The camera cuts to a shot of Marion’s untouched sandwich.
She says she would lick the stamps for alimony
Marion says these lunches give her boss “excess acid.”
This is just the first of aborted and defective meals.
Marion’s appetite for sex was stronger.
Eating is the first step in a process that ends with defecation.
Feminine appetite (opening scene)
Women’s hunger is confirmed by Mrs. Bates tirade at Nirman upon learning that he’s bringing dinner to a stranger woman.
Norman confirms his version of women as devouring when he tells Marion that “she eats like a bird,” only to say it’s false because “birds eat a tremendous lot.”
N tells M this, sitting beneath the owl, which is poised and stuffed im a position of attack.
Only after the discussion Marion reveals that her real name is Miss Crane, conforming the appropriateness’ of his comparison.
Marion says she “does not have much of appetite” niether on this nght nor on tryst with Sam Loomis, who remarked “you never did eat
No reveals his fear of femininity in psycho terms, N is afraid f his own femininity devouring his manliness, and so he projects that appetite onto actual women, against whom he must defend himself.
Sterritt
Robin Wood
The ironic significance that Norman’s mummified mother is kept in a fruit cellar. The fruit is insisted upon in the mother’s macabre joke about being fruity.
The source of fruition and fertility becomes rotten.
Fruit, fruity, fruition
Intertex: “Frenzy”
Home
There is no home for any of the characters; only longing and yearning
None of the characts has a real safehome
Marion i seen brieflt in her room packing suitcase, in black bra, partial undess. She begins to yield to temptation to steal
Black underwear; gray dress
Close-up of money, as if money looks at her, begging to be stolen
Even when Marion is alone she has no privacy, no peace of mind
When she drives, she is not alone, there are voices
In the motel, she is being watched secretly, then openly
Sam’s home is never seen; only his store, with ne clerk and a female customer talking about pest
Norman’s house is next to the motel; he’s seen in the kitchen, then at end end look of his room
Lila,. no hime shiwn
Sheriff and wife’s home, in living room (phone scene).
Church scene follows
Sam and Marion meet in a cheap motel
Sam suggests to Norman “to unload this place.”
Marion proposes to Norman to put his mother “someplace.”
Angered, N replies, “People always call a mad house ‘someplace.'”
Toles
Hitch gradually depraves the viewers of our sense of what a “secure place” looks like or feels like.
Austere insulating wit. Wit is H’s means of announcing indifference; persistent presence of wit
Wit is hard and deeply ingrown; it stays below the surface of action; unavailable on first viewing to the characters and audience.
Characters:
Other brief apparitions of otherness, significantly they are later domesticated.
The otherness proves a lure, they are both agencies of the law
Policeman (dark glasses) perceived by Marion as a threat/
Arbogast, first appears as intruder eavesdropping in the conversation between Sam and Lila
His face shot in extreme close-up, which assumes unpleasantly obtrusive dimensions of a stain.
0 Psycho: Notes–Ending, Food and Sex, Home
Psycho: Notes
April 11, 2025–972w
Ending
Psycho ends with the grinning face of Norman, his mother skull superimposed.
No previous film had ended with such a griming question mark.
There is no rational lancer.
Psycho ends with smug psychiatrist in the cop house, a seeming place of order that can impose order on nothing. The security of the police station is challenged.
The psychiatrist’s “rational” explanation is cold and in deliberate tone. But explanation does not end the take comfortably. After the explanation, which is tidy and titillating, the gaze is redirected at Norman, draped in a white sheet, and his mother explains how she would not hurt a fly.
The camera tracks to Norman’s face, and Hitch dissolves with the mother’s grinning skull.
The 2 images punctuated by the car in which Norman had buried Marion pulled from the swamp.
Last image: tick chain pulls the car that contains Marion’s corpse of the swamp. The film’s world is closed with the shot (Kolker, p. 25)
Dissolve: Dredging up of a car from a swamp. Three images are dissolved.
The devouring swamp is sexualized: sort if feminine symbol of imaginative horror.
It violates the predominant visual principle of Horizonal/vertical by being diagonal. We are left without a visual pattern,
We are left without a narrator, an anchor, an answer, left only to face our fears of madness and the unkniwn (Kolker, p. 26)
It could be interpretated as a new restoration to sanity, bringing the psyche to light from the lower depth.
Sort of the sum total and the final meaning f what we have seen, drawing out all the hidden propensities for destruction: voyeurism, theft, exploitation, and murder.
After signaling downward into the hidden and unknown (swamp), he viewers are made aware of dark impulses and potential for evil in all of us.
Food
Motel, lunch, half a sandwich
She talks about dinner, big steak for 3, with mother and sister
Marion Crane, a bird, fair game to be stuffed (killed as a form of being raped) by Nirman, the deranged taxidermist
(Intertex, Man Who Knew, 1956)
Phoenix is the name of the mythic bird that rises from its own ashes.
Mr. Cassidy is intoxicated
Contrast and competition between sex and food thorough the film.
A meal of milk of sandwiches precedes Norman’s murder of Marion.
She eats like a bird.
Norman’s mother by candlelight in cheap, erotic
Norman says: “She’s hungry.”
Mother: “Tell her she will not be appeasing her appetite with my food, or my son!…You have this guts, boy?”
The very first words in film are about food, when Sam says: “You never did eat your lunch, did you?”
The camera cuts to a shot of Marion’s untouched sandwich.
She says she would lick the stamps for alimony
Marion says these lunches give her boss “excess acid.”
This is just the first of aborted and defective meals.
Marion’s appetite for sex was stronger.
Eating is the first step in a process that ends with defecation.
Feminine appetite (opening scene)
Women’s hunger is confirmed by Mrs. Bates tirade at Nirman upon learning that he’s bringing dinner to a stranger woman.
Norman confirms his version of women as devouring when he tells Marion that “she eats like a bird,” only to say it’s false because “birds eat a tremendous lot.”
N tells M this, sitting beneath the owl, which is poised and stuffed im a position of attack.
Only after the discussion Marion reveals that her real name is Miss Crane, conforming the appropriateness’ of his comparison.
Marion says she “does not have much of appetite” niether on this nght nor on tryst with Sam Loomis, who remarked “you never did eat
No reveals his fear of femininity in psycho terms, N is afraid f his own femininity devouring his manliness, and so he projects that appetite onto actual women, against whom he must defend himself.
Sterritt
Robin Wood
The ironic significance that Norman’s mummified mother is kept in a fruit cellar. The fruit is insisted upon in the mother’s macabre joke about being fruity.
The source of fruition and fertility becomes rotten.
Fruit, fruity, fruition
Intertex: “Frenzy”
Home
There is no home for any of the characters; only longing and yearning
None of the characts has a real safehome
Marion i seen brieflt in her room packing suitcase, in black bra, partial undess. She begins to yield to temptation to steal
Black underwear; gray dress
Close-up of money, as if money looks at her, begging to be stolen
Even when Marion is alone she has no privacy, no peace of mind
When she drives, she is not alone, there are voices
In the motel, she is being watched secretly, then openly
Sam’s home is never seen; only his store, with ne clerk and a female customer talking about pest
Norman’s house is next to the motel; he’s seen in the kitchen, then at end end look of his room
Lila,. no hime shiwn
Sheriff and wife’s home, in living room (phone scene).
Church scene follows
Sam and Marion meet in a cheap motel
Sam suggests to Norman “to unload this place.”
Marion proposes to Norman to put his mother “someplace.”
Angered, N replies, “People always call a mad house ‘someplace.'”
Toles
Hitch gradually depraves the viewers of our sense of what a “secure place” looks like or feels like.
Austere insulating wit. Wit is H’s means of announcing indifference; persistent presence of wit
Wit is hard and deeply ingrown; it stays below the surface of action; unavailable on first viewing to the characters and audience.
Characters:
Other brief apparitions of otherness, significantly they are later domesticated.
The otherness proves a lure, they are both agencies of the law
Policeman (dark glasses) perceived by Marion as a threat/
Arbogast, first appears as intruder eavesdropping in the conversation between Sam and Lila
His face shot in extreme close-up, which assumes unpleasantly obtrusive dimensions of a stain.
(Slavij Sizek, p. 269, note 44)