Why mansplain­ing ruins Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho is right­ly regard­ed as one of the most impor­tant works in cin­e­ma his­to­ry. Com­bined with Bernard Herrmann’s shriek­ing score and Saul Bass’ title design, the pac­ing, edit­ing and com­po­si­tion of each scene makes it a deeply unset­tling view­ing expe­ri­ence. But watch­ing the film ahead of its 60^th anniver­sary, I couldn’t help feel­ing deflat­ed and patro­n­ised by the ending.

Hitchcock’s abil­i­ty to manip­u­late his audi­ence is what made him the mas­ter of sus­pense. The first 35 min­utes place us in melo­dra­ma ter­ri­to­ry, with Janet Leigh dri­ving the plot – only for the direc­tor to have her killed off. The first half of the film becomes a ten­sion-filled build-up to Mar­i­on Crane’s mur­der; how­ev­er, all that sus­pense is ruined by the psychologist’s expla­na­tion at the end, which strips the film of the mys­tery and fear that Hitch­cock so impres­sive­ly builds.

The Freudi­an expla­na­tion by a char­ac­ter oth­er­wise irrel­e­vant to the plot is the clear­est exam­ple of mansplain­ing to any female view­er out there. The shock that Antho­ny Perkins’ boy-next-door turned out to be a cross-dress­ing ser­i­al mur­der­er is com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed, mak­ing the final attempt­ed mur­der of Marion’s sis­ter, Lila, still more ter­ri­fy­ing. We are giv­en a peek into the mys­ter­ies of Norman’s life and his rela­tion­ship with his moth­er as he attempts to mur­der Lila dressed in his mother’s clothes.

Instead of leav­ing us to con­tem­plate the com­plex­i­ties of Norman’s char­ac­ter and his mater­nal com­plex, Hitch­cock opts to have a smug psy­chi­a­trist explain it all away. The the­o­ry so brazen­ly pre­sent­ed by Dr Rich­mond (Simon Oak­land), who is only intro­duced at the end of the film, tells us pre­cise­ly why Norman’s unhealthy rela­tion­ship with his moth­er led him to mur­der. Bates’ clos­ing inter­nal mono­logue then becomes not fright­en­ing or cli­mac­tic, but sim­ply an image of some­one suf­fer­ing from men­tal illness.

Accord­ing to pro­fes­sor Ian Banks, ​“The way the lega­cy of par­ents ensnares and entraps chil­dren is one of the recur­rent themes in the film.” There are tid­bits of infor­ma­tion which demon­strate the Freudi­an com­plex­es that the film will go on to explore, such as Mar­i­on want­i­ng to turn her mother’s pic­ture to the wall while hav­ing sex with Sam, or Mr Cassidy’s talk of his daugh­ter (whom he refers to as his ​‘baby’). These sub­tleties help the view­er pick up clues of Bates’ oedi­pal rela­tion­ship with his moth­er in a way that is nei­ther patro­n­is­ing nor over-explained.

There was an increas­ing inter­est in Freud in Amer­i­can Cin­e­ma in the late 1940s and ear­ly ​’50s, and many of Hitchcock’s films, such as Spell­bound, Ver­ti­go and Rear Win­dow, are filled with Freudi­an the­o­ries. Although mod­ern view­ers are more used to these com­plex the­o­ries appear­ing on screen, even a con­tem­po­rary audi­ence does not require a detailed expla­na­tion behind Bates’ motivation.

This makes the super­im­posed image of Bates’ mother’s skull on his face not mys­te­ri­ous or scary but instead some­what obvi­ous, as the psy­chi­a­trist has just explained: ​“In Norman’s case, the bat­tle is over… and the dom­i­nant per­son­al­i­ty has won.”