A shadow behind a curtain, vaguely feminine in form.

Sharply, the curtain opens, and a knife begins to cut, stab, and hack at the woman in the shower. Screams. Slashes. Screams. Then,
as quickly as it had entered, the shadow departs.

The body slumps
down the linoleum,
smearing blood.
A hand reaches out and,
one by one, pulls the screen off its hooks. The body falls forward, eyes wide open. Our own vision follows
the swirl of blood down
the drain, then continues
its spiral out her unseeing eyes – withdrawing, as if
to regard its handiwork.

The first time I saw Psycho III, the second sequel to reprise the famous sequence above from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 original, I was flummoxed similarly to those witnesses of the original scene, whose occurrence only partway through its narrative had signaled a rupture many audience members would spend the entire rest of the movie trying to digest. What I thought, in the sequel, had been a new story aimed squarely at redeeming the assassin of Marion Crane – the serial killer, Norman Bates – had suddenly done a 360 and thrown such an unfair surprise ending at us that I was outraged and dismayed as I had not been

since, well, the contemporary reissue of another Hitchcock masterpiece, Vertigo.

Gradually, however, I began talking myself through it, asking: Where else could a movie that began in darkness with a suicidal nun crying "There is no God" end up, anyway – especially when most of what had unraveled in between had been some of the seamiest, most perverse and discomforting action and imagery to appear in a mainstream Hollywood feature in a long time? In retrospect, perhaps only an ending at least as nihilistic and despairing would have been at all honest, or even tenable. For, from the winding staircase that took said nun Maureen Coyle to her Vertigo Rubicon to her climactic fall down a flight of stairs, the film was an exercise in inexorable

fate. Considering, also, the oftentimes unfortunate career of the actor who had ushered Norman through all three of his theatrical incarnations, Anthony Perkins, a closeted gay with this picture making his screen directing debut trying to play within the studio system and to deliver the kind of entertainment contemporary audiences demanded, you have to wonder who the filmmakers could have thought they were kidding by heading in any other direction in the first place. This was, I reasoned, the only way Psycho III could have ended.

Then I found out that the studio had, in fact, imposed the ending on the film to ensure further sequels, and my confusion was complete. A second viewing didn’t reveal anything, either, except that maybe I was a fool. But a third – as confirmed by the numeral affixed to the film’s title – told me that maybe the answer was somewhere there in that famous murder sequence, as in Marion Crane’s dead eye. For, with this celebrated montage, the presence of a woman whose unifying perspective had carried the narrative till then had been abbreviated, though not nullified: still it hung over the rest of the drama, like the character of Norman’s mother over his own personality, her open, dead, seemingly unwatchful eye never disengaging from ours, so we can’t disengage from it.

The effect of this sundering of Marion’s perspective divides her story into the separate spheres of hypothesis and investigation in the isolated environment of the Bates Motel. In pursuit of this latter object, then, the film’s viewpoint itself splits between the new investigators Sam Loomis, her sister Lila and private

Norman, dear boy, you were screwed right from the start, when "they moved the main road" from your humble establishment.

What, then, could have caused this schism, rendered in the arcs of Norman’s dividing knife strikes? What originating act could he be rehearsing or reiterating with the ritual of, as we learn later, the donning of his mother’s clothing and the letting of the blood? Who is Norman Bates, and what does he mean to the characters who meet him?

Again we turn to the image of Marion’s open eye, unusual for its era and still not standard in film today. It is as if she had been killed not by anything she had seen, per se, but by the very vision itself, her eyes frozen open now in recognition of something so incontrovertible

This sagelike quality is further suggested by Hitchcock’s situation of every other major character but Norman in front of a mirror, he reflected in a window. While the others reflect the malaise – our loss of Psyche in the world – Norman provides a window onto it, an orphic lens by which we may enter another realm – a realm of meaning divorced from the world of towering façades in which his film begins. His murderous hand "opens" Marion’s astonished eye at the transient, netherworld motel he oversees, symbol of dreaming and sleep, where he performs the function of spirit-guide down the vortices of toilet, drain,

Of course, we all know by now that it isn’t precisely Norman Marion sees in that reductive moment, but his "Mother" (i.e., him, in drag), or the confusion of identities embodied in his figure – the collision of masculine and feminine in one, shadowed, form. What drives Marion to this encounter is her despair, her inability to unite her own masculine and feminine qualities, just as she and Sam

are equally unable to connect in any meaningful fashion or in any but the seediest of locations – a hotel, indicating the action to be played out later in the isolation of the motel as a dream-recreation and working out of the archetypal dilemma experienced before, In the Beginning.

The reasons the couple voice for their failure to commingle publicly are so indistinct as to be immediately suspect. Sam can’t be seen with Marion under normal dating circumstances because he’s divorced and lives in the back of the hardware store he apparently operates; only when she’s gone does he admit in a letter that "there’s room enough in this cramped backroom for two." It’s such a flimsy argument, even given the social pressures of the time, it can only be taken figuratively: He is the victim of a schism in his sexual identity. Now relegated to the confining social role of he-man, the room he is opening

Marion never gets to be reunited with her lover, as does Psyche. Rather, she becomes instead Persephone (a figure common in Hitchcock, according to Lesley Brill in THE HITCHCOCK ROMANCE; 1988 Princeton University Press) in the related myth of Persephone and Demeter, abducted into the underworld for plucking a flower. (Marion’s course is set by the theft of $40,000 from her employer.) Persephone’s loss created a famine in the world reflected in the movie by the triplicate aspects of the lovers’ despair, the vulgarity of the money-owner’s greed, and the lack of business at the Bates Motel. Marion’s death comes so suddenly as if to prove a larger, more incontrovertible point: that she was already gone, herself barely a ghost in her own life (as was her cousin in the 1962 independent feature, Carnival of Souls).

Certainly Norman’s mother’s fate proves this connection to antiquity, her story playing out as the predisposing myth the rest of the characters are fated to reenact through the course of their lives. For, in silvery childhood, she and Norman’s father embodied the stability and divinity on which a personality is supposedly constructed; then his father died, and that model went kaput. (This was also, remarkably, the outline for Perkins’ life, his celebrated actor-father Osgood dying when Anthony was Norman’s age.) The mother – or feminine aspect in general – then represents a certain angelic nature we all feel disconnected from, the chronology of his dad dying roughly during the Depression and her matricide occurring around the end of the Second World War indicating him as a symbol for all of traumatized America during this century, Norman’s attempt to integrate her into his own personality reflecting Marion’s desire for spiritual wholeness and unity. We are all wanderers, like Marion, fated to walk the earth with this memory, forever looking to rediscover it in the lovers, friends, and other images we come to know and hold dear. We are all, also, like Norman, driven crazy by our knowledge of what is beautiful, and knowing that This Isn’t It.

When Mrs. Bates took a lover, it signified an ability to trade down that the idealizing boy, five years old at the time, could not similarly effect, her agreement to buy the motel Persephone’s decision to stay in the underworld (as the hellish location finally proves to be) and to rule there as Queen. Norman embodies that eternal-childlike part of ourselves that refuses to accept so gracefully the death of the gods, either personal or universal, his mother’s jealousy of all other women his own stubborn inability to exchange the earthly for the divine. This loss of the ideal, however, means that we now have to find our own divinity within ourselves, the matter-of-factness with which he acknowledges the cause of his business’s failure – "They moved the main road" – indicating the simple nature of our endeavor: to either adapt, or die. Coming at the end of the ’50s (and seemingly intended to blow them away), Psycho indicates the similarly impending project for all postwar Americans, to abandon our ideal of the nuclear family and confront the possibility of a new image of femininity and masculinity in an environment that was not like our ancestors’ anymore. Our psyches depended on it.

headstrong Lila in any romance, contra that other ’50s stereotype of the hero embracing the heroine at the conclusion of the drama, ensuring that eros has been restored to the world. All we do get is a knowitall psychiatrist who yet doesn’t have a clue as to what it all means underneath, which was the whole problem in the first place. Psyche hasn’t returned to the world, only science. A movie that at least started in the heavens has only ended in jail, reversing the goddess’s progress.

By opening with the shower sequence, transplanted verbatim from its source, Psycho II performs for us a ritual of invocation meant to reinstate a lost or forgotten moment, image, or occurrence by acknowledging the sacred function of repetition. The swirl of the bath drain and the circle of Marion’s eye suggest the turning back of time, as in the original, her death again a blood sacrifice calling forth, this time, the enshrined images of both Mother and Norman Bates. Their collision in the latter’s transvestitism before killing – ritually donning the headgear and

In the intervening years, however, the shower scene had already been reimagined in Brian DePalma’s Carrie to make the motif of women’s emergent power more central and explicit, so that by now the retiring figure of Marion Crane has been replaced in the world by her

more aggressive sister, Lila. Now at a menopausal age, the ritual bleeding which 20 years previously had helped produce a daughter, Mary, unfortunately gives way this time to a less positive, extroverted form of bloodletting as the masculinized self revealed to her back in that fruit cellar is released from prison, having been cleansed of his own feminine influence. By weighting its lead-character scales three-women-to-one-man, however, II suggests a reaction against the feminism which had become, so went the conventional wisdom, as overbearing as the shrill and self-protective Lila herself – so much so that she and it would finally pose a threat to "real," mother-cleansed masculinity. The world, no longer ruled by accidental death or human misunderstanding, is now at the mercy of the machinations of a bunch of scheming wimmins.

Lila, whose revelation the whole Hitchcock seemed to be leading up to – Sam’s restraining of Norman at that moment as much to subdue him as to force her into a confrontation with his confused image – has by now, improbably, become Lila Loomis, Sam’s widow. Mary, her equally unlikely offspring, born into a world not of returning life but only tragic confirmation, then, is Norman’s appointed redemptress, being uniquely imbued with the ability to see him for the troubled yet vital and salvageable figure he represents. Unfortunately, she’s caught in her mother’s plot to drive him back into repression, a scheme that turns unexpectedly murderous as she comes to realize the terrifying potential of her own gender. What happens, the film seems to be positing, when Beauty is no longer pure, and can no longer cure the Beast?

Norman’s splitting off from his "Mother" precipitates Mary’s appearance, just as his reemergence from the asylum coincides with Sam’s eviction from the world. The effect is as of a roundelay of needs or fears summoning forth their reciprocal antidotes, Norman’s recovery lying in a detachment from the oedipal Mother and an association with the younger, potential lover. The film’s exchange, however, of its originating pagan myth for a Christian one in the selection of Mary for a name suggests that Norman, whose release from institutionalization is a resurrection that can’t yet restore our unity with a God who was a pale replacement for the original’s Eros,

anyway, hasn’t completed his own romantic transference, this intended lover only a botched New Mother who finally renders the stigmata herself in her climactic stabbing of his palms and side. And though the viewer recognizes the inevitability of the situation, one also gets the feeling that the outcome has been orchestrated a little too unfairly: concurrent with the disclosure of Lila’s homicidal handiwork (she the second of the "II" psychos indicated in the title) is the wildcard introduction of a "real" mother, the practically out-of-the-blue Mrs. Spool. It isn’t so much the universe, one senses, that is constructed like a steel trap, but the movie itself.

It’s tempting, given such a title, to read its Roman numerals as indicating not only the reiterative nature of the film as a whole but as twin personal pronouns as well, which the inclusion of hambone Dennis Franz as interim motel manager Toomey/TwoMe points up. What it also implies, however, is a movie similarly divided against itself, which even the makers seem

Where Psycho had been an independent production privately financed by a committed film artist and only distributed by a major studio (to add a further spin on it, the film is now owned by a second studio, Universal/MCA), Psycho II feels more like a reverent but opportunistic exercise by two earnest but little more than competent fans in the service of an investor (MCA, again) looking to secure its own franchise in the age of Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers. In the end, the Two Me’s are the filmmakers themselves – Richard Franklin, director of the earnestly Hitchcockian Road Games back home in Australia, and Tom Holland, author of the similarly in-jokey Fright Night and Child’s Play, the Beast Within (his previous studio sale), ultimately, their own consciences. Their employment of the women then makes this enterprise all the more suspect, attempting to dump all the blame on them (another biblical trope having little precedent in the classics) for what is in essence their own intention, to simultaneously bury and exhume Norman in all his danger and potential.

In its mission to revisit and reexamine the deep and culturally loaded environs of the Bates Motel on little more than a fannish, touristy

level, II finally proves a disavowal of the elements that made the original worthy of the closer, topical review a sequel may provide, and, in seeking to extend the mythos, actually negates the first film’s entire psychology. For if Mrs. Spool is indeed Norman’s real mother (conceived out of wedlock – the virgin birth, again – he had been handed off to sister Mrs. Bates for bringing up), then his whole pathology had been unfounded all along, his movie’s along with it. If the great subject of the Hitchcock had been the sorrow of the world in the face of unchangeable history, then the ultimate topic of II is, finally, the inability of the film itself to look this sorrow in the face, just as when Lila delivers her opening rant on the "rights of the victim" she speaks not to Norman, the source of her misery, but to the judge and Norman’s therapist, those who would endeavor to "release" this "psycho." The film’s fudging of Hitchcock’s theme for its own convenience is reflective of the attitudes of ’80s America itself, vainly make-believing that all the social ills welling to the surface in the ’50s original had been miraculously cured. (II offers, tellingly, no clue as to what constituted Norman’s recovery.)

The "eye" through which the film was trying to see is still open, but it’s dead; it sees nothing now that it didn’t see before.

Perhaps Holland and Franklin had the same idea as Mary and Norman, to rehabilitate the Bates Motel that is Hollywood, her decision to withdraw from her mother’s scheme at one point suggestive of the filmmakers’ own second thoughts about their endeavor. But if their film makes any didactic point along the way, it would have to be that you can’t redeem an archetype; its function is to make itself known to us, not to change or adapt to suit our own perhaps warped ideals. Which is why a Mrs. Spool can only come from out of left field in such a coldly calculated entertainment, to put things back to their original (dis)order; for that’s how the world in fact began – not in harmony or union, but in schism itself, in the disjointed potential in each our mother’s and father’s genetics. Norman, conceived out of wedlock – his father (or masculine self-image) an unknown quantity – finding Mary, whose father is also gone, is an inevitability as random as conception itself, and as doomed as any potential regeneration in what is essentially a Psycho universe. By the time he kerrangs his "new" mother over the head in the conclusion, he’s not necessarily bats again, merely simplifying things. Too many have had a say in his fortunes, already. It was time for him to take matters into his own hands.

SPLIT IMAGE: Or, I Fought the Law and the Law Won

connection than the last essayists could convey, the flashbacks now the workings of an associative intelligence drawing on a personal and professional collection from its own disturbing history. By the time Perkins later invokes Hitchcock’s original shower scene, then, we understand his ability – and desire – to not only slavishly reiterate the Master’s achievement but to now transform it; for when the camera again retreats from that unseeing eye it reveals it to be not Marion’s, but the nun Maureen’s, and we are enveloped in the drama once again. The circling like a Vertigo spiral encompasses both he and us in its dilemma of a Sister whose spiritual eye can no longer see the God she had disavowed in her opening declaration, and the process of film viewing and film making are thus united. Our vision has been transformed, as well.

From what one can glean from Charles Winecoff’s lurid and sensational

Some of this behavior was the expected product of a phobic and repressive environment and culture, but much of it Perkins laid squarely at the feet of his own mother, whom Winecoff characterized as a punitive and possessive closeted lesbian, herself. Perkins died in 1992, maintaining that he had "learned more about love, selflessness, and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life." So when Norman is found in the diner shortly after his opening hallucination, talking to an intrusive reporter about how "The past is never really past" while Maureen – the specter of a repressed sexuality rooted in the overattentiveness of a mother Perkins himself had said "turned [him] off all women" – enters from just behind, as from his own subconscious, we take it to be the convergence also of persona and material, the film’s reaching for redemption in the person of Maureen similar to Perkins’ own intentions on marrying Berry Berenson. The studio’s thwarting of his film ambitions may have been one of the rare instances of the System being right and teaching us something about ourselves in the process.

From her status as this very reporter – by virtue also of her initials – Tracy Venable stands as not only the "liberal" media but as the

"medium" as well by which Perkins would see resurrected his own ghosts, just as in many shots this TV plays out as a thought balloon for his character’s mostly infantile aggressions broadcast into the world. It’s a monitor in the most literal sense of the term, not only as something by which to see but also as the thing which sees, like the monster/voyeur Norman, himself; finally, in its original Latin sense, as "one that warns." For those of us raised in its maternal glow, it, as Tracy, is the "mother" herself – vicious, cold, impervious and skewering, she a crypto-lesbian with a program to nail Norman at all costs, as the elder Mrs. Perkins was said to speak nothing but criticism of her son’s work and career. She sets out to finish the job begun by her equally butch counterpart, Lila, but ends up accomplishing almost the opposite, transforming from vindictive to vindicating the more she discovers about his past. As the agent of his very unconscious, she knows what he was and ever will be, and

why. Similarly, the invasions of Norman’s house by her and by the cops also carry the visceral threat, conveyed in Perkins’ convincing horror and offense, of a man who truly has something to hide.

Her TV eye then contrasts naturally with that of Ms. Coyle, one showing him for what he is, the other seeing him for what he could be. When Norman enters the latter’s bathroom to reenact the shower scene that had flashed before his eyes in the diner, the tables are suddenly and miraculously turned, for he finds that Maureen has beaten him to the punch: she has slashed her wrists, and in her

delirium sees not the knife-wielding figure of Mrs. Bates but the vision of a cross-bearing Virgin Mary come to proffer on her new life. Her trip across the desert is thus recast as the wilderness-walk of Jesus – to whom Norman had been compared in the last movie – and together they occupy the opposite roles to those forced on him and Mary in the previous feature, Norman’s femininity finally recognized as a redemptive agent in a world bereft now of the image of a loving and protective masculinity.

The death of God, however, also means that neither man nor woman need be diminished by the specter of an unreachable male divinity, one which can only make man feel more bestial and woman unaware of her divine dimension. Reversing the climactic moment of recognition in the Hitchcock, Norman’s salvation in this moment comes in his ability to fulfill the narcissistic project of love by finally seeing himself in the world through the eyes and in the person of a victim, rather than the

predator – the animal – which his fall from heaven had convinced him he was. The transfiguration of the knife into cross is a redemption of the degenerated image of the phallus as weapon into the more loving and mature picture of, instead, instrument and symbol of both transformation and male regenerative power. Maureen, in turn, sees the phallusized woman as a revelation of the beauty of her own power rather than the ’50s symbol of menace and terror to be restrained by a beefy leading man like Sam (as by her New Father, the Church). It is, indeed, a beautiful image.

Unfortunately, both Norman and Maureen have to contend with the real presence of another, more mundane psychopath, Duane Duke, the smooth would-be singer who picks up Maureen in the desert – the kind of menace who can function in the social world as Norman cannot. He’s the embodiment of the same kind of conquering, macho Americana as signaled by his name, equally likely

a tribute to John "Duke" Wayne as to Big Ten football commissioner Wayne Duke, the game itself figuring in in the drama not much farther in. In two separate scenes, he’s shown brandishing a phallus – in the first case, a pen-light, which he uses to intrude on the sleeping woman in his car. It’s echoed in the scene in which he commandeers a pair of lamps at his crotch to intimidate his next pickup, both scenes suggesting the sexuality and danger of knowledge in the farthest-back cabin he comes to occupy at the Bates Motel, as in Norman’s mind. For the director, the convergence of light and threat also reflects a fear of being "found out" – by the press as well as by his own marrying ego, which would prefer to keep certain darker areas of his mind unlit.

When Duane assists in Maureen’s delivery to the Bates Motel, he serves as a

The competitive masculine world set up by Duane and Norman contrasts with the feminine support system evoked by Tracy, who calls a bartender "sister," as a nun, and only takes Maureen away when it looks like Norman is up to his old tricks again. Both worlds converge, however, in the football-rally scene, after a painful sequence in which Norman, on the verge of union with Maureen during their first date, abandons her as a gang of thirtyish partiers in for a homecoming game carry on elsewhere in the booked-solid motel. These revelers’ antics are a celebration of the masculine libido on the Animal House level of arrested development, the event they’re in for itself the epitome of male principles of competition and aggression. They also contrast the putatively serene "sorority" of the convent

(though Maureen’s disillusion and another nun’s accusatory manner suggest that this situation might not be entirely pure, either). On finding Maureen alone in her room with the door open, one of the woman partiers wakes her up in warning and suggests she be wary of the "drunken, horny bastards" – her friends – out there. When even her lover has deserted her, another "sister" steps in to look after her.

With its tone of abandon, this sequence also indicates the eruption of the film’s most repressed material to its surface even as it contrasts the courtly grace of Norman and Maureen’s date, the two events’ simultaneous occurrence indicating the futility of his efforts to suppress his raging desires. (Though all activities depicted are heterosexual, they are drawn so grotesquely as to indicate a discomfort with any form of sexuality, no matter the persuasion.) Norman’s

Like most conservative gestures, however – and Norman is full of them, his lopsided grin an eerie paraphrasing of then-president Ronald Reagan’s similar – this proves to be a false one, as Norman’s slashing of the throat of Maureen’s benefactress soon after (as unfairly as his murder of Duane’s unfortunate pickup) demonstrates. That both victims meet their fates in a "closeted" space – the former in a bathroom, the latter in a phone booth while putting her shirt on "straight" – suggests a desire on Norman’s part to finally eliminate that repressed feminine self which has caused him so much trouble all these years, yet for which Maureen also loves him. For married, gay Perkins, it was the fantasy enactment of a similar imperative he was as unable to resolve.

Maureen later colludes with Norman when claiming to have spent the entire night with him as a trusting sheriff munches bloody ice cubes from the chest in which he has stashed his latest victim’s body, helping him to keep this secreted identity "on ice" a little longer. It is the same action, however, which loses her to him, as she knows in her heart Tracy might be right about him and he may in fact be a danger to her as well as to others. The two women leave together the same day.

Maureen’s absence then leaves room for Duke to reemerge, their original meeting in the psychological hinterlands and simultaneous arrival in town suggesting a relation as well as polarity, their exchange throughout the story an oscillation within the same governing

personality. If she is the savior Norman has called up out of himself for redemption, then Duke is the always-attendant demon already on its way. As Duke’s singing and guitar playing recall Perkins’ own sideline in same (having released a handful of records throughout the ’50s and ’60s), he might even represent the director/star’s past, the blackmail he threatens that of Norman/Perkins’ own tenuously repressed desires, whose final sublimation is not enough, in the end, to make his reunion with Maureen a success. Even the vindication of Tracy and the destruction of his mother-fetish cannot stop the madness or heal the schism: it is fundamental; it is inherent.

Duane’s dual initials heighten the sense of division and make of him a resurrection of his predecessor "Toomey," especially as he quickly takes over the managerial position vacated by the latter. His cabin is a sort of catalog of his

Tracy’s playing psychoanalyst to Norman, then, dredges up his past and causes him to recognize it for what it is. It is perhaps Norman’s folly that he expects it to redeem him in any way, when that is not the function of analysis. All our personal history is an unconscious programming; the purpose, then, is to bring it – as our parents – as the operation of the "gods" themselves in our lives – to consciousness, thus to proceed with a context that may help us moderate our drives and obsessions, our ideals and ambitions. None of us is ever really "free," as he claims to be in the end to the disappointed sheriff who ushers him off to the slammer, in a voice that suggests that Perkins, at least, must have wanted to believe it; we all carry the weight of our own history, struggling to balance, not expiate, the beast with the beauty in our lives.

Perkins himself subscribed to a form of therapy under the tutelage of HOW TO BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND co-author Mildred Newman designed to escape his own nature while encouraging him to plant the blame on a similarly messed-up and controlling mother, though

the effect, by Winecoff’s account, was to merely make him more divided. So when Norman produces Mother’s dismembered hand in the back of the squad car while the darkness at dawn enfolds him, it’s a truthful moment between him and us, an admission, on the way to justice, that, as he himself had acknowledged, "The past is never really past." His signature half-smile at this point signals something more, however, for this very hand, as suggested earlier, also represents the film itself, which, through all the obstacles and in spite of any studio interference, Perkins may still claim – a fragment of its original vision, perhaps, but something to hold on to as the darkness approaches.

Watching Psycho III more than once, one gets the impression that if the studio did tamper with the production it must have done so at a very early stage. The

rhyming scenes of the falling Sisters at the beginning and toward the end, the similar consonance of opening with a virginal woman – whose own name evokes the tightening of inevitability, like clockwork – separating herself from the Father and closing with a similar man reuniting with his mother (Norman now returning to the prison from which Maureen had emerged with the hand which itself "sews up" his own part of the drama) all combine to reinforce, finally, the Master’s thesis, that the gods are gone now from our lives, and we, having little knowledge but just enough memory of them and their function to keep screwing things up, cannot keep from reiterating their actions, only to eternally – tragically – comically – get it wrong in the end. Stretching from Marion Crane’s moral lapse to Maureen Coyle’s spiritual starvation, this estrangement indicates not so much a loss as a forgetting, which a careful re-viewing of Perkins’ handiwork can reconcile. More than just our past wrongs, our past glories also live with us, and it is these combined which make us neither Psyche nor Psycho, but human.

For myself, I can pinpoint the moment at which my life turned from ascent to retrogression: when the woman who hired and mentored me at the corporation for which I still work quit after her own brilliant rise there, explaining what sharks were most of those in power. Soon after, my second mentor was promoted out of my area and I fell out of love with my duties and out of place in my job. My grandmother’s death then only heralded the flurry of losses, divorces, madness, tensions, layoffs and disappointments that would follow and continue unabated to this day for me and most of my friends. And we don’t seem to be apart in this condition: as statistics on crime and the economy continue to conflict with people’s sense of security in America, there seems to be a cast about the times that would signal a deeper malaise unconnected with the real world or the way things are. Perhaps it has to do with the middle-aging of the Baby Boom and a generally encroaching sense of worldwide personal reckoning, but there is nevertheless the inescapable impression that things will never again be as good as we remember them to have been Once Upon a Time. Something’s missing; something’s changed forever.

Maybe that’s one reason Norman Bates stirs up such perhaps paternal or maternal responses in people: we want to take him under our wing and lead him to society – or to see him otherwise rehabilitated – because we recognize in him the motherless son in ourselves, the Cupid who will never know his Psyche because she is as messed up as he is. William Barrett, in THE DEATH OF THE SOUL (1986 Anchor Books), traces this alienation back to the 17th Century, when a rift in humanity’s spiritual connection to the cosmos began evidencing itself in Western philosophy, but James Hillman, ever the conspirator with the dark forces, alleges the schism itself to be primary, its intended function to "destroy the illusion of unity" (LOOSE ENDS; 1975 Spring Publications, p.96) that itself drives us crazy. The estrangement, then, is in fact a growth of the intellect, the expanding of our consciousness out of the darkness of ignorance. Once we meet Norman – the "vision" in the "division," the compulsive agent of illumination – compulsive because driven by forces outside of himself: mythological forces; the very structure of our lives – we can never return to the illusion, for he impresses on us all Psyche’s true lesson of love.

Having never had delusions of divinity to begin with, Psyche sensed no natural state of grace from which to feel exiled (it probably helped that she was the most exalted beauty in all of Greece), just as Cupid never saw his attraction to her as a pull toward decadence or degradation. Each was simply following their own call according to the dictates of a myth they themselves were creating via their actions. Maureen, then, having already confronted the absence of the One God, was ready to meet and fall in love with Darkness and to

finally accept it on its own terms. Unfortunately, that meant that she could never return to the world of light. When Norman found out near the end of Psycho III that Mrs. Spool was not, in fact, his mother (finally, mercifully, nullifying the entire intrusive second chapter and revealing it as the result of the similarly covetous motives of its own creators – she having kidnapped the young Norman out of jealousy), it returned him to his own authentic nature, though that nature was still one of alienation and remove. His return to the institution – to the Pantheon – could only mean his return to Mother. He had redeemed himself of his crimes, perhaps, but he could never be redeemed of himself. That would be impossible. The movement toward a dominant masculine personality, welcome though it might also have been for certain heterosexual viewers of the time ourselves wrestling with issues of gender and sexuality, was inimical to his nature, as to our own, and so the reunion with the interior

feminine inevitable. By enforcing this ending on the narrative, the studio was doing the work Perkins, for his own appreciable reasons, couldn’t follow through on, to bring the two together in what may seem a troubling alignment but which is nonetheless the direction the myth of our times is intent on pursuing today.

Though it may be frustrating to acknowledge – or, once acknowledged, to live with – our present condition may indeed be the closest to a true universal balance as we’re likely to get anytime soon, with the competition between the sexes – and all that serves to imply concerning masculinity and femininity, consciousness and the unconscious, reality and myth – yielding just about every permutation of image one culture can project. From the macho Men Are Back portraits of Brut cologne ads to the girly-girl runway models on every glamourzine (with stops along the way to crossdressing men and women, cute male domestics and fierce female action figures), we appear to be at a period unique in history when it can support both these extremes and a rock-solid ambiguous middle ground as well, at least in terms of such archetypal images as these. It’s frustrating because, much as we might desire the change – or not – we’re used to cruising, satisfied with the polarization that may keep our conscious minds on somewhat of an even keel; like Perkins, we may desire a certain outcome to the larger spectacle, but only by capitulation sometimes to an order which may feel negative yet which is ultimately in tune with both ourselves and the inevitable can we get the picture made at all and participate in the motives of the universal will.

Marion Crane saw this nearly forty years ago, but only the shadow, only the outline; it was for her sister to see more clearly later, and for us to fill in the details now. As was often the case with Hitchcock, on the discovery of this figure or element her character was "resolved," eliminated: she had done her duty. But though her eye remains open, it is for us to continue to see, to make ourselves aware of the symbolic meaning to our lives and to walk with not only the beauty, but the beast, in the modern fairy tale. It took a similarly conflicted filmmaker and his studio to show us that Psyche could not, in fact, redeem the Psycho, for that was not the point. For me and all my anguished, troubled, or even simply neurotic friends, the message seems to be that we’re all staying at the Bates Motel, but that’s not so bad: It’s only a motel – one stop along the way to each our destinations.

It’s nothing like moving the main road back, Norman, but it’s a shot. I hope it’s enough to keep us from killing each other in the meantime.