Except I have seen it. I went through a bit of an Alfred Hitchcock phase after a childhood trip to Universal Studies in Florida resulted in watching scenes from The Birds in 3D (to this day, all 3D movie appeal is lost on me because how could you possibly top MILLIONS OF BIRDS FLYING AT YOUR FACE?!). The tour also succeeded in filling my head with random trivia about various Hitchcock movies, like how the "blood" running down the drain in the famous Psycho shower scene is actually chocolate syrup (yum!).
So, why am I watching Psycho again? A couple reasons, both orbiting around the fact that I'm positively obsessed with the show Bates Motel, a televised prequel where a teenaged Norman Bates and his recently widowed mother move to California and buy a crappy motel. If you haven't seen the first season, stop reading this right now and go do it. Seriously. I'll wait.
Now do you see what I'm talking about? And while I remembered quite a bit about the movie, it had been years and I wanted to refresh my brain. There's a scene midway through the season when Norman starts tinkering with taxidermy and I thought to myself, "Adult Norman liked taxidermy, too, didn't he?" These are things I obviously needed to know for real (it's things like this that won't allow me to understand how mortgage rates are determined or how to get a virus off my computer). But the biggest reason to watch the movie was when I discovered that my husband, who had been watching the show with me, had never seen it, and not only that, he didn't know how it ended! Oh boy. Someone was in for a treat.
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For other rock-dwellers, Psycho tells the story of Marian Crane, a young woman who wants to drop everything and move to be with her long-distance boyfriend, Sam. To do this, she goes on a bit of a crime spree, stealing money from her boss, getting chased by the cops, ditching her car for a new one. Along the way, she stays at the rundown Bates Motel as the only guest. The motel operator is a friendly, if awkward, young guy named Norman Bates, who lives in a huge, spooky house out back with his overbearing mother. He and Marian bond while he serves her sandwiches and shows off his dead bird collection. You know, typical first date stuff. Then Marian goes into her room, settles in to take a hot shower, and proceeds to get stabbed to death by Norman's controlling mom.
Since Marian didn't appear from a vacuum, it's not long before people start looking for her - the private investigator hired by her boss, her concerned sister, her boyfriend. While they get closer and closer to the truth, Norman does his darnedest to protect old, unstable mom. After all, a boy's best friend is his mother.
Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with keeping the plot of his movie a secret; when he bought the rights to the book it's based on, he then proceeded to buy as many copies of the book as possible so bookstores wouldn't have any to sell anyone. He also made movie theaters put up signs to warn late-arrivals that they should wait for a later showing so they could see the whole thing. (Of course, he also made an almost seven-minute-long trailer for it, and I'm curious what he could have included without showing any of the important stuff.) In that spirit, despite the fact that I always assumed the end of Psycho was like that of Citizen Kane or The Sixth Sense or the original Star Wars trilogy - you know the twist even if you haven't seen the movie - I'll stop the summary here.
What can I say about Psycho that hasn't already been said in the last 53 years? It's a classic in a lot of different ways and it certainly makes me appreciate Bates Motel even more. If you're a fan of the show, I highly recommend watching (or re-watching) it. If you're not a fan of the show, why on Earth are you reading this blog right now? It's like I don't even know you.
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