"To what extent are gender roles in horror remakes like 'Bates Motel' adapted for contemporary audiences?" (exploited to create narrative)

Bates Motel (primary text 2013)

“Do anything you have a mind to. Being a woman, you will.”
A boy's best friend is his mother.
We all go a little mad sometimes.
We're always quickest to doubt people who have a reputation for being honest.

Alfred Hitchcock - direct quotes

Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
“I’ve never been very keen on women who hang their sex round their neck like baubles. I think it should be discovered. It’s more interesting to discover the sex in a woman than it is to have it thrown at you, like a Marilyn Monroe or those types. To me they are rather vulgar and obvious.”
“Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect ‘woman of mystery’ is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find.”

Books:

Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho

Laura Mulvey visual pleasure and narrative cinema

The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder

David Thomson, America’s pre-eminent film historian, says it opened the floodgates. “Sex and violence were ready to break out,” he writes, “and censorship crumpled like an old lady’s parasol. The orgy had arrived.”

Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick

The controversial director also gives credence to the catharsis theory: “There may even be an argument in support of saying that any kind of violence in films, in fact, serves a useful social purpose by allowing people a means of vicariously freeing themselves from the pent up, aggressive emotions which are better expressed in dreams, or in the dreamlike state of watching a film, than in any form of reality or sublimation.”

Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin

"One could call all forms of sexuality in Psycho blank, the work of rigid forms against blank screens to evoke George E. Toles's superb essay on the film, 'If Thine Eye Offend Thee ..' Linking Hitchcock's film to works by Bastille and Poe, Roles observes that they achieve their "respective forms of pornographic intensity by impersonally rendered shocks" organised around "the same obsessive significance" of the eye as a metaphor. Open mouths and gaping toilet further alegorize the eye. Rabidly potent and just as rabidly lifeless, the monster of Psycho is this all-seeing, all-nosing, utterly and unfeeling eye. While I concur with Toles, I believe that a specific set of concerns informs and perhaps even produces the blankness of Psycho. The incident and intensifying pornographic awareness that comes to define male sexuality is enmeshed, inescapably, with the growing visibility of homosexuality. In a way, it is precisely homosexuality coming into ever more explicit, enunciated focus - both culturally and in Hitchcock films - that produces what is perhaps the most striking bank in Psycho, male sexuality itself. Indeed, as if implying that the homosexual male's fraught bid for representation was becoming increasingly undeniable."
The coldness that characterizes sexuality generally in Psycho has its underpinning, in my view, in a growing contemporary understanding of sexuality as a commodity that one could purchase like a deluxe new luxury item. If there was a stifling, indeed suffocating, dimension to 1950s suburban-family-orientated constructions of sexuality, the incident sexual revolution, with its promise of sex without such constraints, also had its dangers, especially when this resolution became tethered, along with everything else, to the market. These patterns had already been established by the time psycho was made. As James Gilbert astutely observes.

The Cinema Book (2nd edition)

He distinguishes first, 'the horror of personality,' inaugurated by Psycho, where the horror, rather than the projected in a monster and so distanced and externalised, is now seen to be 'man' himself.
W.H. Rockett (1982) argues that the horror film has to manoeuvre delicately between the contradictory needs of the aesthetic territory it inhabits.
W.H. Rockett (1982) terror relies on convincing the audience of the fallibility of the logic we assume governs the world.
The significance of the horror film is not so much in the content released through its symbolic imagery - primitive fears, repressed energies, etc. - but the way it plays on insecurities as to the basis and adequacy of rational explanation.
while by definition the monster is related to evil horror films are progressive precisely to the degree that they refuse to be satisfied with this simply designation - to the degree that, whether explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously, they modify, question, challenge, seek to invert it (Wood 1979)
'central to the effect and fascination of horror films is their fulfilment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us' (Wood 1979)
'heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support them and is often defined in terms of dominant American stereotypes, even when the action takes place in Europe
simultaneously representing and disavowing the problems of sexual difference at stake. (Neale 1980)
Functions to disturb the boundaries of sexual identity and difference (Neale 1980)
Nevertheless, Neale goes on to speculate, since the monster is frequently given male gender and women is his victim , his desire the woman - whether lustful or homicidal could be understood as representing the horror that female sexuality produces for the male subject in the castration scenario
dressed to kill (Brian De Palma) 'woman is responsible for the horror that destroys her'
Several commentators on the horror film have pointed out the role of woman as victim - a role treated with increasing viciousness as the sexual violence of recent cycles increases.

Alfred Hitchcock (Critical Evaluations of Leading Film-makers)

Doane remarks: [N]ot only is the object of [the woman's] look concealed from the spectator, her gaze is encased by the two poles defining the masculine acts of vision . . . On the other hand, the object of the male gaze is fully present, there for the spectator. The festishistic representation of the nude female body, full in view, insures a masculinisation of the spectatorial position. The Woman's look is literally outside the triangle which traces complicity between the man, the nude and the spectator.

The monstrous-feminine (Barbara Creed)

from a feminine locus nothing can be articulated without a questioning of the symbolic itself.
Wife, mother, daughter, virgin wore, career woman, femme fatale - these are the most popular stereotypes of woman that have been addressed by feminist theorists in their writing on popular cinema. Very little has been written on woman as monster. As with the more critically popular images of woman, those which present woman as monstrous also define her primarily in relation to her sexuality, specifically the abject nature of her maternal and reproductive functions.
All human societies have a conception of the monstrous feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject. Freud linked man's far of woman to his infantile belief that the mother is castrated. 'Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital', Frued wrote in his paper, 'Fetishism' in 1927 (p. 154). Joseph Campbell, in The Masks of God: Primitive mythology, drew attention to woman as castrator and witch.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (Slavoj Zizek)

The essence of Hitchcockian suspense is eroticism, and Hitchcockian editing is an erotic editing.
Hitchcock often represented sex on the screen, by employing such procedures as metaphor or fragmentation (the shower-murder in Psycho), and so on.
Sex is indeed the object of suspense
The auteur theory of Hitchcock has taught us to pay attention to this continuum of motifs, visual and others, which persist from one film to another irrespective of the changed narrative context - 'the woman who knows too much'; 'the person who is suspended from another's hand'; 'the glass full of white drink', etc. The first motif - that of an intellectually superior, but sexually unattractive bespectacled woman who has insight into what remains hidden to others - runs through a series of Hitchcock's film from Spellbound to Psycho.
Heroes don't die fortuitously; the victims must either have committed errors or sinned in some way, or they have some mark that prevents full identification with them, or they are marginal enough not to enjoy a great deal of sympathy, or they hinder the happy ending, and so on (to say nothing of negative characters). The murder of Janet Leigh in Psycho - practically the only murder of a star in Hitchcock's films - obeys those rules in an oblique way, since she has herself committed a crime: she stole the money, although the thing gets out of all proportion. A positive hero can die if his death is presented as a sacrifice on the victorious path of an 'idea': his death can always be 'economised', it brings a reward of a 'higher' level, it hasn't been in vain. Apart from this salutary effect, it has to be prepared beforehand by some kind of forewarning.

Ultimate Film Guides: Psycho

Psycho is one of the key works of our age (Robin Wood)
Memory, notorious liar that it is, led me to believe that Psycho was a fairly ordinary film enlivened by three delicious moments of horror. Quite wrong, of course. In fact it's one of Alfred Hitchcock's best, fascinating all the way through. Even on second viewing the moments of horror lose none of their impact. (Barry Norman)
I don't know if a contemporary audience can understand how terrifying the film was to our generation. No mainstream film had dealt with violence so directly. At the time I thought it was a shabby little shocker that I enjoyed enormously, but it's extraordinary how after all these years it haunts you because of the power of Bates. Once you've seen Norman Bates you have to live with him for ever, and that is a heavy burden. (Howard Schuman, The Guardian)
A source of iconography and a virtuoso display of manipulative moviemaking, Psycho is - for better and worse - one of the most influential pictures ever made. (Phillip French, The Observer)
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Psycho was regarded by critics as a sensationalist slasher movie
every frame is magnificent and it is probably considered the most influential film made after Welles' Citizen Kane (Nick James, The Independent)
Birds recur as a symbol throughout the film. Marion's surname is Crane and she comes from the town of Phoenix. The bedroom of cabin number one has pictures of birds on the wall, one of which Norman knocks off when he is cleaning up after the murder. And when Lila stands outside Sam's hardware store, as he drives off to the Bates Motel to look for Norman, the shadow of garden rakes forms of he menacing shape of bird-like talons behind her.
Psycho opened in a boom time for America. Employment was high and the average person's standard of living was improving as modern domestic appliances, television sets and cars became more commonplace. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was running for president; Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Tayor and Debbie Reynolds were the box-office favourites and families enjoyed watch I Love Lucy and The Flintstones on television. However, a great deal of social unrest bubbled beneath America's preferred 'Mom and apple pie' image of domestic harmony. Racial segregation of blacks and whites was still rife in the South and the Civil rights movement, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, was gaining momentum. On an international level, the Cold War was escalating. The 1950s had seen American involvement in the korean war and the McCarthy witch hunts which attempted to unmask communist sympathisers, in the early 1960s, just after Psycho's release, things only to worse, with the Cuban missiles crisis of the 1962 and the dispatch of American troops to Vietnam in 1963. However, it wasn't just the politics of race and communism that were causing concern for American society. Social morality was also changing. The 1950s saw the rise of the teenager, rock and roll music and changing attitudes to sex outside marriage. As ridiculous as it might seem now, the fact that one American TV station would film the young Elvis Presley only from the waist up because it disapproved of his gyrating pelvis, shows just how much of a social threat youthful sexuality was perceived to be. Alfred Hitchcock was well aware of the way in which his audiences was changing. In cinema's heyday of the 1940s the audiences was made up of a wide range of age groups. However, by the late 1950s families were staying at home to watch television more and more and therefore the demographic of cinema audiences was becoming predominantly younger. Describing his reasons for the opening Psycho with the scene showing Marion in a brassiere after she has obviously just had sex with Sam, Alfred Hitchcock said: one of the reasons for which I wanted to do the scene in that way was that the audiences are changing. It seems to me that the straightforward kissing scene would be looked down at but the younger viewers; they'd feel it was silly. I know that they themselves behave as John Gavin and Janet Leigh did. I think that nowadays you have to show them the way they themselves behave most of the time.
Alfred Hitchcock certainly took risks with his portrayal of sex, nudity and violence, and he knew that he would have to do battle with the censors to achieve the shocking results he had planned.
Alfred Hitchcock was warned that it might be 'impossible to issue a certificate on a finished film based on this script'
Psycho's challenge to the censors certainly helped to push back the boundaries of what was acceptable in the cinema at the start of the more liberal era of the 1960s. However, from a film studies point of view, it is interesting to note that it is not just the social attitudes towards sex and violence that have changed over the years. An analysis of Psycho also reveals key facets of the ideology (i.e. the social idea of American society at the end of the 1950s and beginning of 1960s.
Much has been written about the represented of gender and sexuality in Psycho.
Marion's sexual behaviour is drawn attention to from the very beginning of the film.
The attitude towards unmarried sex in Psycho can be related to the prevalent social ideology of the day. As new contraceptive methods such as the pill were being introduced, young people's attitudes towards sex were changing and promiscuity was increasing
It threatened the basis of the family, where sex traditionally served the procreative process. Women who were sexually active outside marriage were seen asa particular threat because they might end up as unmarried mothered and thus they were labelled by society as lose and morally reprehensible. Psycho reinforces this ideology because it is Marion who wants to have a 'respectable' family dinner and get married, whereas Sam seems more at ease with their situation.
Many critics have read the murder as a sign of Marion's punishment for her overt sexuality. Not only is she engaged in a sexual relationship outside of marriage, but her visual appearance is coded as extremely sexual.
Norman's comment to Marion that she eats like a bird can also be read as an aspersion about her sexuality. Norman implies that although Marion may try and appear dainty just like a bird she must really have a tremendous appetite and therefore, underneath the surface be a voracious man-eater.
When Marion takes a shower at the bates Motel she is metaphorically cleansing away her sins because she has already decided to return home with the money. However, some critics have noted that as the camera cuts between shots of the gushing water and marion's ecstatic face, the connotations are also of sexual enjoyment. The stabbing that follows can e read as severe punishment for her sexual transgressions.
It has also been read as a symbolic rape by the penetrative knife, which takes on the form of the phallus for the sexually deviant Norman.
Feminist critics who have also analysed Psycho see this as evidence both of Alfred Hitchcock's misogyny (because so many of his female characters die violent deaths) and of the more pervasive patriarchal ideology of Hollywood.
Feminist criticism, based on the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and starting with he work of Laura Mulvey in the 1970s, analysed how Hollywood fils - made almost exclusively by men - coded female stars as passive objects to be looked at as spectacle (coded through the choice of actresses, lighting techniques, costume and make-up which all worked to accentuate an actress's beauty).
Marion's violent death can be read as the patriarchal holly system's extreme reaction to the threat of feminist at a time when women were being freed from the constraints of childbirth by new methods of contraception, and were thus taking on a more active role - both sexually and in terms of employment - within society.
Tania Modleski has considered the complexity of the representation of women in Alfred Hitchcock's films, which are 'always in danger of being subverted by females whose power is both fascinating and seeming limitless'.
'[feminist] critics implicitly challenge and decanter directional authority by considering Hitchcock's work as the expression of cultural attitudes and practices existing to some extent outside of the the artist's control' (Modleski)
The fact that multiple readings can sit alongside each other demonstrates that every film contains many textual levels and that the reading of a film resides as such with the person doing the reading as it does with the way in which the film was created.
It also contains, within its form, many of the ideas about gender and sexuality that were prevalent in society at the time it was produced.
The recurrence of the theme of voyeurism
An analytical reading of psycho as a Hitchcock film using the auteur approach is extremely fruitful because of the many obvious stylistic and thematic links to ther Hitchcock films that can be made
Psycho was not an average horror movie
Alfred Hitchcock's psycho has been hailed as the first 'modern' horror film. The reason given in support of this claim are unusually thematic - in Psycho, the 'monster' is not some unnatural unholy creation, as 'other' who stands utterly outside our existing conceptual scheme. Rather, the monster here is human, all too human, and besides that, all too real.
Not only is psycho credited with being the first modern horror film, it is also defined as the mother of the 'slasher' sub-genre within the genre of horror.
The appointed ancestor of the slasher film is Hitchcock's psycho (Clover)

The Society of the Spectacle

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
“As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.”

A long hard look at psycho Raymond Durgnat

Psycho works through suggestion, through atmosphere, not taking ideas, but generating them, in the minds of the audience.
A Thorold Dickinson, another formidable 'audience-buster', observed, 'Not film ever frightens an audience. The audience frightens itself'.
Psycho upfront many unresolved problems, right across film theory, media studies and aesthetics.
In discussing psycho's motifs, we make much of eyes, mirrors, looks direct tot camera, POVs and other 'optical' matters. This interest entails no acquiescence in all those academic theories which relate film to a scopic/scoptic drive, or voyeurism, or a deplorably obsessive male gaze.

Moviegoers' testimony in Psycho - the first time

'It was the first film where you could not just walk into the theatre ... which was very novel, because moviegoing was a very casual experience in those days..'

I'd seen other Hitchcock movies, I was expecting a, a good scare, and some really good film-making'

'I do remember turning to my wide and saying "It's okay, but there's not very much happening", and then the shower murder came and the rest of the movie to me was pandemonium'

'The screaming of the audience, and the shrieking of the music, sort of combined itself into the howl, that just kind of rose up and bounced off the walls...'

'I was a bathtub person from that film forward'

'we were really in shock from that, I mean there was absolute silence in the rest of the film, people were in total mourning for the loss..'

'I think Hitchcock broke probably every rule that the Hollywood film industry had been going along with.'

but the most chilling was at the end, with no murder, with just Perkins in the blanket...and...that's what struck with us even as we were filing out, and that's why we were so silent'

Spectators of all sexes and genres would, I think, take Marion as their principal identification figure. Compared to the only alternative, Sam, she's more straightforward, positive and desperate; sh makes the stronger moves more dramatically, and the stronger moves visually; and as the scene proceeds, she's steadily more favoured by the camera.

She's the protagonist and our primary dramatic concern.

her fate is tragic

Hitchcock treats Marion's story n an opposite style to the many 1950s women's films. Their slow, 'plush' style generally preferred luxurious-loping setting, glossy faces, ponderous dialogue and long 'chains' of close shots which glorified the feminine face, especially in full-face or three-quarters-front views, which best display those reservoirs of emotion, the mouth and eyes.

Marion relaxes in the shower. Then its plastic curtain is pulled aside by the silhouetted figure of a tall, old woman, in whose uplifted arm is a large knife. Marion, turning, sees it and screams; the knife's downward stoke enters her stomach. Briefly, she holds off the sticking arm, but as she weakens, further blows stab her body, and her blood mixes with the water from the shower. Her assailant brings it down with her. She lies with her face beside the toilet pedestal, her eyes stare across the floor.

the charming, well-mannered villain with just enough humanity to elicit odd pangs of concern'

The shower scene blasphemes against a modern American religion

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film

The immediate ancestor of the slasher film is Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Its elements are familiar: the killer is the psychotic product of a sick family but still recognisably human; the victim is a beautiful, sexually active woman;
male aggressor
In the more recent psychopathic horror films, however, the identification between woman and monster becomes greater, the nature of the identification is more negatively charged, and women are increasingly punished for the threatening nature of their sexuality. Peeping Tom is both expectation and rule to this in its self-conscious exploration of the male monster's need to shift responsibility for her victimization to the woman. For Peeping Tom exposes the male aggressor's need to believe that his female victims are terrified by their own distorted image. It thus reveals the process by which films themselves ask women to believe that they have asked for it. Much more typical are Psycho, Dressed to Kill, and a host of vastly inferior exploitation films - what Roger Ebert calls the brand of 'Women-in-danger' films - including He Knows You're Alone (1980), Prom Night (1980), Terror Train (1979) and Friday the 13th (1980).
The positioning of woman as victim in the classic monster film
Both Neale and Mulvey perceive the threat of horror monster and of female sexuality to the male sin terms of its evocation of a weak, castrated female form. For them, the image of the woman and of the monster recalls for the male spectator his childhood oedipal trauma during which he came to regard his mother as rendered weak and helpless by castration.
For the classic male horror monster, as a symbol of male.
That the slasher film speaks deeply and obsessively to male anxieties and desires seems clear
social critics make much of the fact that male audience members cheer on the misogynous misfits in these movies as they rape, plunder and murder their screaming, writhing female victims.
All of these men are said to be identifying with maniac, but enjoy his death throes the most of all, and applaud the heroine with admiration.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

If Psycho, like other classic horror films, solves the feminist problem by obliterating the female and replacing her with representatives of the masculine order (mostly but not inevitably males), the modern slasher solves it by regendering the woman. We are, as an audience, in the end "masculinzed" by and through the very figure by and though whom we were earlier "feminized". The same body does for both, and that body is female.
Boys die, but not because they are boys, but because they make mistakes.
Some girls die for the same mistakes. Others, However, and always the main ones, die because they are female.

Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema's Most Famous Scene

but the truth is, there's something about the total helplessness of this woman. (Joseph Stefano
Yet, she is never really out of the gaze of the power of men including the director himself, the enunciator

Ways of Seeing, John Berger

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.
Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not 'permissible' within her presence. Every one of her actions - whatever its direct purpose or motivation - is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake.
“A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her.”

Psycho - Robert Bloch

“Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher's knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.”
She sat there for quite a long time, and then a fly came buzzing through the bars. It lighted on her hand. If she wanted to, she could reach out and swat the fly. But she didn't swat it. She didn't swat it, and she hoped they were watching, because that proved what sort of a person she really was. Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly...”
“That's the way girls were--they always laughed. Because they were bitches.”
“The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.”

Magazines:

Media Magazine 46: Gothic

Throughout history, horror films have reflected both the times in which they were made and the anxieties of contemporary audiences.
Psycho (Hitchcock 1960 USA). This film prompted a group of films known as the ‘mini-Hitchcocks’
A Feminist reading of such roles may interpret them as a reflection of the fact that women within society are still perceived (or preferred) to be oppressed, weak and in need of a man to protect or validate them.This suggests that little has changed over the centuries; in a male dominated world, where directors are conventionally and overwhelmingly male, women are supporting characters or victims.

Media Magazine 34: The Change Issue

In the early 1970s the cultural critic John Berger summarised the way in which gender was represented in the media through visual images:Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Berger 1972
Keith's presence is similar to that of Marion Crane in Psycho. He is an antagonist but like Marion in the film he does not stay around for long.

Online texts:

http://web.tiscali.it/andrebalza/essay.html

Hitchcock (again, if his interviews are to be trusted) is a much greater artist than he knows.
Psycho is one of the key works of our age.
Its themes are of course not new-obvious forerunners include Macbeth and Conrad's Heart of Darkness-but the intensity and horror of their treatment and the fact that they are here grounded in sex belong to the age that has witnessed on the one hand the discoveries of Freudian psychology and on the other the Nazi concentration camps.
"Mother" is innocent: "she" spares the fly crawling on Norman's hand: it is Norman who was the savage butcher. Thus we witness the irretrievable annihilation of a human being. The fly reminds us of Marion, who wasn't spared: the act constitutes a pathetic attempt at expiation before the pitiless eyes of a cruel and uncomprehending society. For a split second, almost subliminally, the features of the mother's ten-year-dead face are superimposed on Norman's as it fixes in a skull-like grimace. The sense of finality is intolerable, yet it is this that makes our release possible: we have been made to see the dark potentialities within all of us, to face the worst thing in the world: eternal damnation. We can now he set free, be saved for life. The last image, of the car withdrawing from the dark depths of the bog, returns us to Marion, to ourselves, and to the idea of psychological liberty.
it could be us.
sex, not money, is the root of all evil.

http://batesmotel.wikia.com/wiki/Keith_Summers

they are incapable of running the motel by themselves, for knowing nothing about the town and being inexperienced about motels. He says that the Seafairer Motel, along with the house where Norma and Norman are residing, had been in his family for generations. Norma threatens to call the police, and Keith backs off, and exclaims that he is friends with almost every policeman in town.

https://www.quora.com/Psychology-Why-is-the-current-generation-so-sensitive

Basically, we're all more vain and narcissistic than we've ever been. In 1967, a chap called Guy Debord wrote a book called The Society of the Spectacle in which he commented on a trend in Western society, that began in the late 1920s, where we are increasingly driven by image rather than actuality. Debord commented that the emergence of advertising and mass media affected people in such a way that finely crafted images of wealth or success began to take precedence in our collective consciousness over the actual, living reality of such things. In other words, we place how it appears above how it really is. This trend has increased exponentially over the past few decades such that today people spend a massive amount of time and money making sure a certain ideal image of themselves, whether than be a Facebook profile or a presidential campaign, is upheld, regardless of how accurately this image portrays the actual circumstances of their lives.
What this means is that many people today are far more sensitive to an attack on their self-image than they were, say, 50 years ago, because the image is more socially and economically salient. The more a society deals in appearances rather than actualities, the more valuable appearances become.

http://www.cultureontheoffensive.com/psycho-feminism/

The reason why contemporary Feminism has had such an easy time vilifying heterosexual men is because the vilification of heterosexual male desire predates Feminism. In fact, much of 20th century Feminism was a social force that opposed this vilification.
This is because the vilification of male heterosexual desire is a by-product of gender roles. Gender roles were one of the main targets of 20th century Feminism.8 21st century Feminism is distinct from it’s predecessor in that it almost uniformly relies on gender role based assumptions that are useful in painting a picture of heterosexual men as a public health threat to women. Such assumptions include the idea that any sexual desire expressed by men that isn’t at the behest of women violates women. They also include the assumption that insofar as any man celebrates, jokes about, or even describes his attraction to the purely physical features of a woman’s body, he is reducing her to that body. It is true that many of these assumptions have always been a huge part of feminist theory.9 However, in practice, the 20th century feminist movement changed society by provoking ordinary women and men to question these assumptions.
This is because of the role that Feminism played in the larger sexual liberation movement of the 1960s. That sexual liberation movement challenged the assumption that the only way a woman could not be violated by male heterosexual desire was for that desire to be expressed in romantic, post-marital sex. The sexual liberation movement understood that this assumption was an obstacle towards sexual freedom and equality for women. As a by product of this stance, sexual liberation wound up liberating male heterosexual desire as much as it did female heterosexual desire.
The sexual liberation movement was largely an affront to this picture of male and female sexuality. 60s Feminism aligned itself with this movement by engaging in activism that attempted to replace these gender roles with an egalitarian picture of men and women. On this egalitarian picture, women had agency in how they expressed their sexuality. This meant one couldn’t simply reduce the choice of any woman to have carnal, lust driven sex with a man to her being taken advantage of by that man. One also couldn’t reduce any male desire to have carnal, lust driven sex with a woman to him violating her. In order to facilitate female sexual empowerment, the casual expression of heterosexual male desire became much more socially acceptable.
Norman initially seems very polite and friendly towards Marion but senses that she is running away from something. Norman kindly asks Marion if she would like to have dinner with him after she puts away her belongings in her hotel room. She says “yes”, not noticing that Norman’s sweet invitation is motivated by his sexual attraction to her. While Marion is putting away her belongings, she overhears Norman having a conversation with his elderly mother in an adjacent house. His mother castigates Norman for trying to sexually take advantage of Marion by convincing her to have dinner with him. Marion herself sides with Norman, believing his mother is impugning bad intentions to Norman and doing so in a cruel and abusive manner.
What’s interesting about the story of Psycho is it depicts two individuals who initiate disastrous consequences when they obey female gender role norms. Marion feels ashamed at having sexual liaisons in a hotel room with a man she isn’t married to and winds up stealing money and being the victim of a homicide. Norman is ashamed of the fact that he is a heterosexual male who has non-romantic sexual desires. Norman has to both engage in a form of dissociative identity disorder and commit murders in order to feel like his heterosexual desires can be punished and prohibited. We can hear Norman parroting the voice of female gender role norms when he speaks in the voice of his mother. This is particularly true in the scene where Marion overhears Norman speaking to himself about their impending dinner in Norman’s parlour.
The sexual liberation movement of the 60s would explain Norman’s desire in a very different way. Norman’s desire to fuck Marion, on this view, is a normal, natural, and benevolent urge which is not unique to men. Because Marion is Norman’s equal, her potential consent to Norman’s sexual advances can’t simply be explained as her being manipulated by Norman. Her autonomy means that she is the author of her actions. If she decides to sleep with Norman, this will be an expression of the mutual desires of the two of them. The fact that it happens outside the context of a romantic relationship is not itself evidence that it is harmful. There may be moral difficulties with the fact that such a sexual encounter involves cheating on Sam. However, the fact that a consensual sexual encounter happens outside the context of romance and marriage is thoroughly unproblematic.
The impulse to punish the spontaneous eroticising of women by men is given a powerful deconstruction in Psycho. During the film’s first forty five minutes, Hitchcock tells us the story of Marion Crane by visualising this story in a way that mirrors the phenomenology of male heterosexual desire. More precisely, Hitchcock manipulates the audience to see Marion the way Norman Bates sees her. This isn’t as simple as Hitchcock filming Marion in ways that make the audience aroused by her. This would be pointless since the Psycho audience includes people who are not sexually attracted to Marion. Rather, Hitchcock visually realises Marion in a way that gets the audience to see her as interesting and worthy of rooting for primarily because of her sexuality and her deviousness. Marion is interesting to the audience because of the extreme things she is willing to do to have sex the way she wants. Marion the person is far less interesting than the attractive woman we see having pre-marital sex, lying, and stealing. The interest in Marion that Hitchcock cultivates is a prurient interest, an interest in watching an attractive and brave bad girl get away with something naughty.
The audience roots for Marion for reasons that are more mesmeric than rational; Marion is an attractive woman whose persona contains an erotic power. It’s a power that may or may not cause arousal. It is, however, a power that causes interest and fascination.13 The power stems from the fact that Marion’s story is visually depicted as the brave and dangerous quest of an attractive (but vulnerable) woman who has an intense erotic life, an intense erotic life she wouldn’t want the audience to see. Yet at every turn, Hitchcock goes against Marion’s wishes, teasing the audience with glimpses of that erotic life. This technique parallels the unruly nature of how men eroticise women. Men instinctively eroticise women without regard to whether the women they eroticise have a say in it. This is why Hitchcock, through the camera’s gaze, eroticises Marion without her permission.
When we first meet Norman Bates, he seems (in the first few minutes of his screen time) much friendlier than Sam and much more considerate. Because Norman is the most relatable, kind, put upon male in the film during the initial minutes of his screen time, he is the male figure who the audience initially sees as a potential romantic interest for Marion. When the audience hears Norman’s mother screaming at him, Hitchcock has (in a very subtle way) put the audience in Norman’s position. She is yelling at him, among other reasons, for looking at Marion in a way that’s similar to how the audience has been looking at Marion. The audience immediately dislike Normans’s mother, in part, because Hitchcock has manipulated the audience into having benevolent feelings towards Norman’s attraction to Marion. The audience wants Norman to be able to enjoy Marion’s erotic power, regardless of whether that enjoyment becomes literal or simply exists in Norman’s mind. After all, it is because of that erotic power that the audience has accepted Marion as the film’s protagonist.
He also constructs Marion as the sort of attractive woman of the post-cold war era who would be horrified by this very teasing. Marion’s entire quest is a quest to rid her erotic life of the very things that draw the audience to it; the fact that it is breaking established social conventions, the fact that she is willing to lie and steal in order to keep it secret. Hitchcock makes the audience want to see Marion get undressed, have pre-marital sex, and steal money precisely because that’s exactly what Marion doesn’t want anyone to see. The audience roots for her without realising it is rooting for her to cancel out the very reasons it roots for her. The audience, in a dizzying feat of cognitive dissonance, roots for Marion because the erotic power of her persona makes it want to see what it also is rooting for her to hide.
When Norman reveals his menacing side during the dinner with Marion in his parlour, he stops having so much of the audience’s sympathy. Instead, he becomes an unnerving but pitiable figure. He becomes this because of how he protects and enables his abusive mother. The audience at this point, does not know that Norman’s mother is actually an elaborate performance by Norman. When Marion suggests that Norman put his mother in assisted care, Norman replies, “An Institution? A madhouse? People always call a madhouse someplace. Put her in someplace.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201744

This article attempts to read Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as a film that belongs to the genre of the corporeal Gothic. It attempts to study the fluidity of human anatomy, as shown in Psycho, through the lens of taxidermy.
In Psycho, Norman Bates practises taxidermy to “fill” his “empty” time. But taxidermy is not used in the film merely as a marginal art practised by a marginalized character. It is a major motif that contributes significantly in adding to the Gothic atmosphere of the film. Highlighting the materiality of the human body through “grotesque preservation” and thereby creating a discourse on the preservation/destruction duality, that is central to taxidermy, is the point through which the paper seeks entry into the zone of the Gothic and into the world of Psycho. The decaying body of Mrs Bates, the deranged body of Norman Bates, and the tortured body of Marion Crane are studied as “taxidermic recreations” that not only reflect a taxidermist’s urge to construct compliant bodies but become sites of the creator’s and the viewer’s desire, much in the vein of a Gothic creation.

https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/horror-genre-codes-conventions/

Split into sub genres (see below), often hybridised
Primary target audience – male, 16-24, Mainstreamers
15 or 18 Certification (promises of pleasure) – debates on passive consumption
Uses and Gratifications (active audiences) theory can apply
Extensive use of Narrative enigmas
Exploration of Narrative Themes
Slow pace of Editing, builds tension. Long takes
Three act narrative structure
Predictable narrative content (follows format)
Clear binary oppositions e.g. good v evil
Use of low key lighting
Use of CGI, FX
High production values but many low budget horror films
Dominant, hegemomic representation of gender: The Female Victim
Extensive use of close up
Incidental non-diegetic sound
Distorted diegetic sound
Extensive use of narrative off-screen space
Young/teenage characters
Use of hand-held camera: audience identification/realism
Point of view shots
Low angle shots

Horror can be split into sub genres:

The Monster Scare

Psychological Thrillers

Slasher Pics

Zombie Films

https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/media-and-collective-identity-representation-of-young-women-exemplar/

It is important to remember exactly this – that representations change

In 2014, audiences could and should expect to see distinct moves away from old fashioned, traditional patriarchal culture and the embracing of a much more pluralistic understanding of gender representation but as David Gauntlett states: “identity is complicated, everyone’s got one”. Young women are sometimes empowered but often subject to stereotyping which I hope to illustrate using two primary media – Television and in Women’s Lifestyle Magazines but also cross referencing my points with other media.

Gender representation is affected by genre, cultural factors and in terms of media representations on audience and up to a point, audience expectations. Media producers encode dominant preferred meanings into texts but mainstream audiences that consume or decode mass media arguably have as much responsibility in terms of the representation of how women are represented – this means that meaning is put in but also taken out whether on television, looking at gender in advertising, sports journalism, gender in situation comedy, video games and one of my case studies, Women’s Lifestyle Magazines for example.

Both producers and audiences dictate representations but using Stuart Hall as a framework, audiences also decode dominant and oppositional readings – in Hollyoaks, a long running British soap opera broadcast on E4 the programme is known for its sexualised narratives and young male and female characters who are framed for the female and male gaze; women are obsessed with their interpersonal relationships are seen to be so. Hollyoaks reflects an evolution in the soap opera genre to deliberately attract, and maintain young audiences through upbeat....

https://media.edusites.co.uk/article/understanding-regulation-and-censorship/

The Media Effects theory has achieved widespread acceptance by society. This theory suggests that those who are exposed to violence in the media are influenced to behave in a violent manner. Although it is extremely difficult to “prove” this theory, a number of high-profile cases have been used to support the theoretical link between media and actual violence.
Moral panics, (first identified by Cohen in the 1960s), where the repetitive reporting of incidents in the media creates a (possibly inflated) fear.

Wikipedia sources:

It was developed by Carlton Cuse, Kerry Ehrin, and Anthony Cipriano, and is produced by Universal Television and American Genre for the cable network A&E.

'Bates Motel' Bosses Explain That Bloody 'Psycho' Twist

during Monday's episode, putting a fresh twist on one of Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved features and the movie's most famed scene. Monday's "Marion" was the second of a two-part arc that featured Rihanna stepping into Janet Leigh's role of Marion Crane as the character entered the show's prequel world of Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore). While there were plenty of showers to go around, creators and showrunners Kerry Ehrin and Carlton Cuse — who also penned the episode — decided to rewrite the character’s fate.
The hour flipped the camera around and concentrated on what Norman’s side of the story could have been when Marion arrived at the infamous Bates Motel, all while including classic elements and large chunks of dialogue from the movie itself.
As Norman fought off his dead mother (Vera Farmiga) and her killer influence, he became increasingly self-aware and determined to do the right thing. After an intense, red-herring shower scene in which it looked as though Rihanna's Marion would suffer the same fate as her Psycho predecessor, Marion and Madeline wised up and confronted Sam.
By the end of the episode, it was Norman — fearful of “Mother” taking over — who convinced Marion to leave and never look back. She then drove off, safely, ditching her phone along the way. It was a happy, hopeful ending for Marion, though not everyone else escaped alive.
Sam wound up arriving at Marion's motel room in a bid to make things right just as Mother was making a deal with Norman. Farmiga's Norma revealed all the ways she has protected her son over the years by blocking him from the bad stuff — starting with his abusive father. At the same time, Sam hopped in the shower to rinse off the wine Madeline had thrown on him. That provoked Norman to make his actual first kill — as himself and not Mother — in a reverse-gender shower scene that had been expected since the episode was announced.
Could you have done this episode without having a shower scene with an actual murder? Cuse: Had we not done a shower scene, people would have been really pissed. It’s a little bit like if you go to see The Knack and they don’t play “My Sharona.” I know that’s a weird example. We felt like we had to do it, but we were also determined we were not going to make it be the same thing that was in the movie.
So you doubled down? Cuse: (Laughs) We were like, "We’re going to do this scene, and we’re going to cut expectations by doing the scene."
Why the gender role reversal? Ehrin: We discussed this episode for a long time in the writers’ room. It was a tall order to bring Psycho in, not let it take over, and deliver a story that was going to have meaning for the arc of our characters. We also wanted our story to be at a peak while doing the episode, so it was almost like a math equation. Eventually it felt like because the story we have been telling in Bates Motel is about how Norman got the way he is, and how a lot of it had to do with growing up in a violent household, that led us back to killing Sam. The idea was that he represented to Norman a version of his father. Norman is really going deep, deep down the rabbit hole of insanity; this makes sense in his head at this moment. It’s both heartbreaking and horrific, which is sort of the cocktail that we like. We like heartbreak in our horror.

Why everyone is talking about Rihanna on ‘Bates Motel’

Rihanna has never been one to adhere to tradition when it comes to her music or fashion. So it’s fitting that the pop singer’s two-episode arc on A&E’s “Bates Motel” would buck convention.
The horror-drama, now in its fifth and final season, has been billed as a contemporary prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic “Psycho.” Rihanna, an avowed fan of the show, played Marion Crane, the role made famous by Janet Leigh. Even if you’ve never seen “Psycho,” you probably know that Marion doesn’t fare well — in the film’s most iconic scene, Marion is brutally stabbed by Norman Bates in the shower.
despite the fact that Rihanna’s Marion did take a steamy shower shortly after checking into the Bates Motel. As in “Psycho” (and the novel that inspired it), Marion arrived at the hotel with a secret: She had stolen a lot of money. The show crafted a suspenseful moment that gave a nod to “Psycho”as Norman — disturbed and imagining his dead mother encouraging him to commit murder — leered at Marion through a hole in the wall of her room. The camera zoomed in on the translucent shower curtain, which Marion pulled back to reveal … nothing.
Ultimately, it was Sam who was stabbed while taking a shower at the motel, where he had hoped to find Marion. “Mother” urged Norman to kill Sam for treating women the way his father had treated her and Norman carried out her orders in unsparing detail.
“Fundamentally, it was not going to be possible to make Marion Crane an empowered woman of 2017 if she just died in the shower,” co-creator Carlton Cuse told Vulture. “Rihanna really embraced our idea of redefining the character. That was the moment in which she said I’m all-in.”

Bates Motel EPs Talk 'Empowering' Shower-Scene Twist: 'We Were Not Throwing Shade at Psycho'

In what marks Bates Motel‘s latest and boldest source-material detour to date, Monday’s installment — which served as the conclusion of Rihanna’s two-episode arc as Psycho‘s ill-fated heroine Marion Crane — put a progressive, gender-swapping spin on the film’s legendary shower scene. [SPOILER ALERT] Instead of Marion getting hacked to death in the bathtub, it was her philandering beau Sam Loomis (Austin Nichols) who had a fatal run-in with Norman’s knife. And as an added twist, Norman committed the brutal murder in his street clothes!
TVLINE | Why wasn’t Norman in drag when he killed Sam?
EHRIN | It was a very specific choice to make that killing about his clarity of who he is as opposed to being lost inside of Mother. The whole buildup of the two episodes is about him gaining to an understanding of what’s going on inside of him. In the most basic terms of therapy, when you [begin] to understand what’s going on inside of you, you can start to have the power to change certain behaviors. Norman trying to get Marion to leave the hotel is part of that. It’s part of him trying to overcome that. But when Mother lays that information on him in the office [about his father] it’s so overwhelming and it pushes him so far back into his own brain and his own craziness that he becomes a child again. And Sam represents his father.
CUSE | We have been very conscious of Norman’s culpability for all the acts of violence that he committed over the five seasons. This turn represented a significant advancement. He was not in drag [because] he’s conscious of his act of violence. And even though Sam is a [jerk] he doesn’t deserve to be murdered. And Norman’s conscious awareness of that is a hugely catalytic event that leads into how we plan to end the series.
EHRIN | It’s like a birth for Norman because it’s him trying to kill the source of his illness.
TVLINE | Were you throwing a little shade at the original Psycho in terms of its portrayal of Marion?
CUSE | We were definitely not throwing shade at it. That movie was light years ahead of its time in 1960. That type of portrayal was appropriate for 1960, but not for 2017. The movie has to be judged in the context of the time in which it was made. And when it was made it was radical [in how it broke] the narrative rules. To have this character who appears to be the lead [of the film] die in the first act was just an amazing idea.
EHRIN | But it was a portrayal of a woman created in a world of men.
TVLINE | How many different scenarios were you batting around for the shower scene? KERRY EHRIN | [Laughs] We talked about that episode for a long time in the writers room. That [represented] a major chunk of time out of our six months together. It was a big responsibility to take an iconic film and use [that sequence] in a way that both honored it but also integrated it into the story we were telling. And the idea of the person in the shower being Sam and being a type of a metaphor for Norman’s own father who was violent and who had really started all of Norman’s problems seemed so fitting to the story we were telling. CARLTON CUSE | We did not want to just do what the movie did. And we didn’t feel like Marion would come across as a particularly empowered character if she was murdered in the shower. We wanted her to be a fundamentally stronger, more decisive character.

https://www.fuse.tv/2017/03/rihanna-bates-motel-shower-scene-psycho

Rihanna's two-episode Bates Motel stint as the iconic shower-stabbing victim Marion Crane came to a close on Monday night—and the Psycho prequel series totally rewrote Hitchcock history.
"We did not want to just do what the movie did," said executive producer Carlton Cuse. "And we didn’t feel like Marion would come across as a particularly empowered character if she was murdered in the shower. We wanted her to be a fundamentally stronger, more decisive character."

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/03/bates-motel-psycho-episode-6-recap-rihanna-shower-spoilers-1201797019/

editors note:

It all seemed so familiar: Marion Crane checked into the Bates Motel. Norman brought her some food. She ate. They talked. Soon after, she climbed into the shower. Water poured from the faucet above. Tension slowly built. Then, suddenly, the curtain was yanked back, and…“Screw this shit.” With those words, Marion Crane stepped out of the shower and “Bates Motel” took its “Psycho” plot in a whole new direction. Rather than killing off the woman who stole from her employer in the hopes of starting a new life with her boyfriend — like in Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic film that inspired the series — showrunner Kerry Ehrin orchestrated a story that ended with Marion’s cheating beau, Sam Loomis, stabbed to death instead.
“He was excited,” Ehrin said. “We talked a lot in the writers’ room about how to make bringing ‘Psycho’ into ‘Bates Motel’ meaningful, instead of just being like, ‘Hey, we’re doing “Psycho.”‘ [We wanted] to tell a different story than the woman being the victim.”
While the shower scenes featured a number of direct references to “Psycho” — including the water pouring directly into camera, Norman ripping back the curtain, and Loomis skillfully recreating Janet Leigh’s iconic face-first fall out of the tub — Ehrin and director Phil Abraham didn’t want to let the homages overwhelm the show’s ongoing narrative.
“We’re gonna have a little bit of ‘Psycho’ in here so it’s recognizable, but we’re also going to make it our own,” Ehrin said. “We’re going to put things in that you’re not expecting, so it doesn’t just become a frame-by-frame [remake.]”
Thematically, Ehrin was also very conscious not to reinforce a transphobic narrative — an accusation attached to “Psycho” because of how it demonizes a man when he identifies as a woman. In the film, Norman is dressed as his mother when he kills people, including Marion. Because Norman himself is innocent when identifying as a cisgender male and murderous when he identifies as a woman, one could argue “Psycho” propagates fear of trans individuals and supports a heteronormative viewpoint.
“We wanted to be very careful about it,” Ehrin said. “In none of our minds is that what the story is about. It’s about a kid who very specifically thinks he’s his mother, as opposed to anything else. It really became about protecting that and not letting it slip or slide into anything transphobic.

comments from the article:

had no problem with the “twist”, as I thought it was rather cleverly done. What audiences thought was going to be an updated version of the iconic shower scene built up the suspense perfectly, right to that moment Marion stepped out of the shower. The problem I have is apparently with their reasoning for the change. Because of a woman as the victim for one, and then not having Norman kill Sam as Norma because that would be transphobic?? Seriously? Norman does NOT have gender dysphoria. He is not just a man who identifies as a woman. He is a frickin’ psychopath with dual personality, who believes he IS his mother when he kills. Also, he had a love/hate relationship with his mother anyway. Nothing to do with being transphobic. Switching Sam for Marion as the victim is fine, but it still should have been Norman as Norma, doing the killing. Remember, “Norman” was going to let Caleb go, but it was as “Norma”, that he followed after Caleb to kill him. This part just seems out of character, as Norman has done all the killing up to this point as Norma.
I just can’t help but believe it’d be quite a stretch for any reasonable & thinking person to associate Norman’s “mommy issues” as otherwise taking this huge leap that would somehow be perceived as demonizing transgender people. The simple plot changes such as Marion being a women of color, or having Norman rush Marion out of the motel before “Mother” kills her out of jealousy, then attack & kill Sam the cheating partner instead, is all part of an interesting and acceptable twist. But, these things are not in any way transphobic nor are they specifically characterizing women as victims. Norman’s particular psychosis was being simultaneously in love with and repulsed by his mother and his feelings for her, all to the point of using “her” to eliminate anyone who made him feel uncomfortable and forced to deal with those hidden desires and feelings.
Transphobic? ‘Woke’? You’re aware this story is based on a real serial killer who was more than into ‘pretending to be a woman’ right? Jesus fucking Christ, THIS is what the horror genre is becoming? Norman Bates is a freak who dresses up in his mother’s clothing and murders people. That’s it. If you feel like being offended by it, why even investigate the Psycho universe at all? The reason they changed it is because it’s an entirely different take. I doubt ‘transphobia’ played into it at all.
I am fine with whatever changes they wanted to make to the story from the original film that this series is based on, however, it’s their reasoning for the changes that is just bizarre to me. No matter what your political leanings, I can’t see most people connecting the dots they speak of above to somehow make this about demonizing transgender individuals. Again, Norman is not a man who self identifies as a woman, he does not have gender dysphoria, he is a frickin’ psychopath, and actually believes he IS his mother, when circumstances trigger this change before he kills or now this other personally is taking over during uncontrolled blackouts and exhibits wild behavior. Norman’s love/hate relationship with Norma carries over into his innermost feelings about women in general. In no conscious way does he identify as a woman. The idea that’s there is a transphobic element here somewhere was just too much of a reach in my opinion.
I’d considered watching this series but this article finally convinced me–I will not step anywhere near it. The man in charge of the series thinks Psycho is sexist because a woman gets murdered and transphobic because the murderer wears a wig.

If that’s your attitude towards your source material, you should not be making an adaptation. You are adding nothing. You are reinterpreting nothing. You are a modern Puritan, cleansing art of its “immoral” content so that it might not corrupt the impressionable masses.

First look at Rihanna as Marion Crane in new Bates Motel trailer

The character was originally played by Janet Leigh in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
The character’s background will remain similar, stealing money from her boss so she can be with her boyfriend, but her story will be more fleshed out.
Rihanna takes on the role of Marion Crane in the new series of Bates Motel
“We’re taking threads of that story and definitely using them so it’s recognisable, it’s just where we go with it is very different,” executive producer Kerry Ehrin said
“It’s tough to be in a situation where you’re in love with a guy, and for whatever reason, he keeps stalling. You still have all this hot sex with him, and he’s saying he loves you, but he’s stalling. The internal story of that, for a woman, is a really interesting one.” (Kerry Ehrin)

Live and let dye: blondes on film

'Blondes make the best victims,' Alfred Hitchcock once said. 'They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints
Professor Laura Mulvey recounted to a new generation her thoughts about Hitchcock's blonde-directed sadism; the subject of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In that essay she argues that Hollywood narratives themselves, as well as the way they are shot, strip women of all but one thing: sexuality. Women on screen exist therefore only as objects of male desire. And, because the plots are so pervasive, their effects away from the cinema are dangerously far-reaching
His casting choices have influenced modern directors keen on blonde muses.
So iconic are Hitchcock's icy blondes – less flesh and blood than lipstick and bleach – that their imprint lingers on today.
It is interesting to see if the potency of blondeness will endure. Is it intrinsically tied to Mulvey's idea of women on screen as sex objects, and if so, will dye cease to matter if Mulvey's ideal of a cinema not seen through the prism of the male gaze comes to pass.

Vera Farmiga in Bates Motel

Today, Farmiga has the same blond hair she sports in the gripping new TV series Bates Motel, in which she plays the still-living, as-yet-unstuffed mother of Freddie Highmore's Norman Bates.
Her parents were first-generation immigrants, born postwar, but her grandparents "went through hell, saw unimaginable things, stuff you shouldn't have to bear. "
"Thematically you can look at my choices and there's always some kind of heavy-duty maternal issue at hand"

Bates Motel: how the Psycho prequel went from good to great

Over the past few years a quirky, violent, blackly comedic and very clever television series has challenged the notions of exactly what a reboot can be. Adapting an iconic horror property invited cynicism from the first announcement and while early episodes didn’t exactly blow people away, the show gradually came into its own, subverting everything that was expected from it in terms of both quality and its approach to the original work it was reinventing. In the process it gained critical and cult adoration, and continued the legacy of a beloved classic of the macabre with impressive aplomb.
Over the course of its run it has been intermittently great, offering compelling moments, brilliant performances and a very clever twist on the Norman Bates mythos
Season Four was a show reinvigorated
While Hannibal remains by far the greatest horror reboot, Bates Motel has managed to enrich its source material while carving its own path and forging an identity that is entirely unique.
It has also been full of meandering and laughable subplots, weird dialogue and an inconsistent focus on the elements that made it good. As reboots of classic horror properties that debuted within weeks of each other.
But here’s the thing; Bates Motel always had one major trump card working in its favour, and that was its take on the central relationship between mother and son. In the original films, Norma Bates was described initially as a ‘clinging, demanding woman’ and depicted only through Norman’s warped version of her, then eventually in flashbacks that showed her to be just as violently insane as the murderous alter ego her son eventually created in her honour.
For all its flaws, it was always a beating human heart that kept Bates Motel compelling, and by honing right in on that this season and eschewing the filler and absurdities that weakened the show in the past, Bates Motel went from “good with caveats” to great, crafting that rarest of television beasts; a wholly satisfying season that leaves you desperate to see what happens next. Bates Motel’s masterstroke was making us care about these damaged, dangerous characters in a way that turned their inevitable fates from morbidly fascinating to something upsetting.

Gender and Power in Psycho (Matthew Cohen)

At the outset of the film, the protagonist Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and the villain Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) are both "trapped" (to use Norman's phrasing) as subordinate partners in their respective male-female relationships.
The themes of gender and power are clearly palpable right at the outset of the film.
We are immediately aware of the conventional gender-power structure.
The very fact that the first scene in the film takes place in a hotel bedroom -- a location where gender roles are maximally exaggerated by the very implication of sex - is indicative of the larger gender themes which Hitchcock plays with throughout the rest of the film.
Sam's bare-chestedness emphasizes his masculinity, while Marion's lacy lingerie draws our attention to her femininity.
Marion's typical female desire to marry stands in conflict with Sam's male tendency to avoid commitment.
The traditional gender hierarchy continues to be emphasized in the next scene at Marion's place of work. Aside from the fact that Marion and her co-worker Caroline work under a male boss, this scene also features an aggressive male, Mr. Cassidy, attempting to flirt with Marion in a rather patronizing way. Mr. Cassidy's flirtation is significant in that rather than complimenting Marion, he attempts to woo her by demonstrating his financial superiority and power. Marion plays her predetermined female part well, acting shy and demure.

The Parlor Scene: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in Psycho

the parlor scene serves as a window into Norman’s deranged mind; more specifically, it encapsulates the internal struggle between Norman’s misogynistic beliefs about women and his latent sexual desires for his mother, Norma.
the parlor scene arguably epitomizes Psycho’s general themes; analyzing the scene’s mise-en-scène and editing uncovers the extent of sexist attitudes towards women and sexual deviancy concealed within Norman’s language.
Ultimately, Psycho revolves around a man – rather, a boy – whose sexuality and gender identity have been warped by his mother’s influence.

Hitchcock’s Gender Roles: Psycho by Ben Elliott

One doesn’t have to dig very deep into Hitchcock’s work to see the director’s views of men and women.
Psycho (1960) may be known for its suspense, mystery, and famous shower murder scene, but it also is full of male and female role commentary.
Men are shown as damaged and needing help, while women are shown as care-givers. Men think women are interested in money or status or success, while women are only interested in love. And men are always reluctant to take action, until the desire of the women to solve the mystery presses them into confrontation.
Hitchcock is never content to let the audience draw their own conclusions about men and women in his films; instead he comes out and has the characters say statements outright about men and women.
Once more we find that from the very beginning Hitchcock wants us to see that women are objects of sexual desire that are to be sought after. Marion is shirtless twice within the first eleven minutes of the film.
As in the other films highlighted in the exhibit, women are portrayed as conniving, manipulative liars who can’t be trusted. Marion steals $40,000 on a whim.
Hitchcock’s commentary on the reckless logic-ignoring idea of women may be summed up with Marion’s line, “sometimes a girl deliberately steps into traps.”

What's wrong with Hitchcock's women?

Alfred Hitchcock, what a ladykiller
Hitchcock's women are outwardly immaculate, but full of treachery and weakness.
The shower killing scene that everyone remembers – the one with the cheap plastic curtain – is just Hitchcock enjoying his favourite game of punishing a female thief and liar
He has never grown out of his childlike Oedipal rage and his bedroom is a creepy preserved little kid's room, but as he grows older his feelings are overlaid by a very adult and pretty commonplace misogyny.

The Psycho Effect

Censors didn’t know what to make of the shower scene. No one had seen anything like it. The shock of the curtain being ripped open. Janet Leigh’s scream as the knife comes down. The flashes of nudity, a cubist montage, cut to the shriek of that stabbing violin. Leigh’s hand clutching the shower curtain. Her body sliding down the white tile, slumping to the floor, as the curtain is torn from its hooks. The lazy swirl of blood being washed away. Then the drain dissolving into a full-screen close-up of the victim’s cold, dead eye.
Psycho ushered in a new age of erotic horror. And cinema has not been the same since.

How Hitchcock's 'Psycho' Changed Cinema and Society

It Shattered 1950s Conformity
Pioneered 'Quick Cutting

The Death-Mother in Psycho: Hitchcock, Femininity, and Queer Desire

A crucial aspect of Psycho’s design, one that relates to Hitchcock films as a whole, is its thematization of a concept that I call the “death-mother.” A distinction between Mrs. Bates/“Mother,” on the one hand, and the death-mother, on the other hand, impels this discussion. The death-mother—which relates to the varieties of femininity on display but exceeds their specific aspects and implications—is an effect produced by the film text and can only be understood through an analysis of the work as a whole. Exceeding the specifications of the Mrs. Bates character, the death-mother maps onto tropes and preoccupations in Hitchcock’s oeuvre but, more importantly, indicates the aesthetic implications, for the male artist most commonly, of the dread of femininity.

GENDER VARIANCE IN THE ARTS

Psycho was effectively the first slasher film, a genre that generally retained gender ambiguity
Psycho joins a puritanical view of sex with psychopathology.
We can admire Psycho as a film, but the gates that it opened, not just the murderous Dame characters, but also the psychotic transy killers who came afterwards, added an undesirable colour to the public perception of trans persons.

Psycho: The Sociology of Gender and Psychology of Abuse

It is interesting to see that it is the women in this story who act and men who “wait-and-see.”
At the same time, through Ms. Bates, we see how very damaging a mother can be to her offspring’s psychology.

Psycho: Queering Hitchcock’s Classic

Society, including public schooling, emphasized traditional masculine and feminine roles with men being the family breadwinners and women, even if they worked, being expected to keep their place in the home. Media at the time did not explore alternative sexualities, and even heterosexual married couples were not portrayed as acting sexually.

The Male Gaze in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

a concept introduced by Laura Mulvey (“Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema,” 1975) to characterize cinema as an instrument of male spectatorship. Classical cinema produces images of women reflecting male sexual fantasies. Mulvey went so far as to suggest that the cinematic apparatus (the camera, as well as darkened theaters and other viewing practices) is coded as male
Simply put, the Male Gaze refers to the idea that the point of view in Hollywood films is male, and that women are usually presented on screen for the sexual pleasure of men.
in Film Studies, Hitchcock is often viewed as the archetypal misogynist, who invites his audience to indulge their most sadistic fantasies against the female. Some critics have even argued that Hitchcock’s work is prototypical of the extremely violent assaults on women that make up so much of our entertainment today

Psycho Feminism: from Hitchcock to Hollaback and Back Again

This view of male heterosexuality disadvantaged both men and women. However, it was the norm of Western civilisation prior to the 1960s. Before the 1960s, most Hollywood films simply presupposed it. One of the first films to actively critique it was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)
It popularised both the idea of the psychotic killer and is currently seen as the grandfather of the “slasher film.” What often gets unnoticed is it is also a critique of the attitudes towards male sexuality that were part of the female gender role in post-war America.
What’s interesting about the story of Psycho is it depicts two individuals who initiate disastrous consequences when they obey female gender role norms.
The audience roots for Marion for reasons that are more mesmeric than rational; Marion is an attractive woman whose persona contains an erotic power.
at every turn, Hitchcock goes against Marion’s wishes, teasing the audience with glimpses of that erotic life. This technique parallels the unruly nature of how men eroticise women. Men instinctively eroticise women without regard to whether the women they eroticise have a say in it. This is why Hitchcock, through the camera’s gaze, eroticises Marion without her permission
By mimicking both non-romantic male heterosexual desire and the horrible experience of being punished for it, Psycho powerfully critiques the female gender role. Yet this critique simultaneously takes seriously the difficulties of non-romantic male heterosexuality that the female gender role reacts to.

Sexism in horror novels: the real monsters aren't the ones you think

In a typical horror novel, you might expect to find, say, women shrieking as they are about to be raped, mutilated, murdered or otherwise menaced by monsters far beyond human taste and decency.
Perhaps this sexism, intentional or not, is fed by the horror sub-genre that has come to be known as paranormal romance.
To anyone who regularly reads horror fiction, it seems an astonishing omission. It hardly needs saying that the modern horror genre was kick-started by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Are horror films inherently sexist?

Horror films, particularly those about masked men wielding blades and taking out unsuspecting innocents one by one, often have a roster of stereotypical female victims.
“The bimbo, the party girl… who is one of the characters who’s going to get slashed and killed right away” is one such type, says film-maker Jenn Wexler. “And then one that’s reading a book so she’s going to be the final girl who survives to the end.”
Women often don’t fare well in horror movies, with those who are sexually active implicitly shamed by being killed off quickly.
The genre turns women into victims and can offer a judgemental depiction of sexuality. But several women film-makers say there are ways to have feminism and frights, reports Nada Tawfik.

The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder (2010) by David Thomson

Nothing like Psycho had existed before; the movie industry - even America itself-would never be the same.
It was made like a television film, shot with a tight budget and completed in less than three months. It killed its star off after forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film.
. Thomson shows how in 1959, Hitchcock, then 60 years old, made "Psycho" as an attempt to break personally with the dullness of his own settled domesticity - a struggle which then mirrored the sexual, creative, and political ferment which would soon overtake the nation. Suddenly sex, violence and horror took on new life. Censorship fell away, and Janet Leigh screaming naked in the shower was its patron saint. "Psycho", all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a film - and, as "The Moment of Psycho" demonstrates, it still does.

Psycho Quotes and Analysis

When Dr. Richman describes Norman's condition at the end of Psycho, he says that Norman does not remember any of the crimes that "his mother" committed. In this moment, right after the crime, we hear Norman transitioning from his "mother" personality back into Norman Bates. Hitchcock had Anthony Perkins say this line in a high-pitched voice, which makes Norman sound childlike. At this point in the film, it appears as though Norman is a selfless man who is saddled with the burden of caring for his elderly mother. However, the truth is that Norman has never learned how to confront his adult sexuality; he is more comfortable in the role of a dutiful young son, which is what he reverts to here.
"You're alone here, aren't you? It'd drive me crazy." "I think that would be a rather extreme reaction, don't you?"- Sam Loomis/Norman Bates, 01:37:11 This line is an example of Hitchcock's dark, macabre sense of humor; the audience is not yet prepared for how extreme Norman's craziness truly is. In this conversation with Sam, Norman is trying desperately to cling onto the reality he has carefully constructed for himself. This statement, then, is his attempt to deflect Sam's suspicion. The exchange also solidifies the parallels between Norman and Marion because it recalls when Norman said to Marion, "we all go a little mad sometimes," and Marion replied, "sometimes just once is enough."
"They know I can't even move a finger. And I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me. They're probably watching me - well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I'm not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They'll see. They'll see and they'll know and they'll say, 'why she wouldn't even harm a fly.'" "Mrs. Bates"'s final monologue concludes the thematic arc of voyeurism in Psycho. She believes that she is putting on an innocent act for the policemen, who will never suspect an innocent old woman of slaughtering so many people when she can't even hurt a fly. Similarly, Marion does her very best to maintain an innocent image while running off with Mr. Cassidy's $40,000. While both these characters might appear one way to the world around them - Marion, the nice girl who just wants to have an honest relationship, and Norman, the dutiful son who wants to protect his mother - Hitchcock makes us privy to their inner monologues, which reveal their true motivations.

todo:
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).”

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, Norton, 2001, pp. 1483-

509. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation.#

U of Michigan P, 1994. Benshoff, Harry M. “Gay, Lesbian and Queer Cinema.”

Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film: Criticism—Ideology, edited by Barry Keith Grant, vol. 2,

Thomson Gale, 2007, pp. 277-86. ---. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film.

Manchester UP, 1997. aspeers 10 (2017)

Bishop, Kyle William. “The Threat of the Gothic Patriarchy in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds.’”

Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 65, no. 2, 2011, pp. 135-47.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23073188.

Bloch, Robert. Psycho: A Novel. 1959. The Overlook Press, 2010.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”

Routledge, 1993. ---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Routledge, 1999. Taylor and Francis eBooks, doi:10.4324/9780203902752.

D-J, director. ‘Psycho’ Path. Universal Studios Home Video, 1999.

Doty, Alexander. “Film: New Queer Cinema.” Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, edited by George E. Haggerty, vol. 2, Garland, 2000, pp. 497-500. ---.

Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. Routledge, 2000. ---. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Greven, David. “The Death-Mother in Psycho: Hitchcock, Femininity, and Queer Desire.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, vol. 15, no. 3, 2014, pp. 167-81.

Taylor and Francis Online, doi:10.1080/15240657.2014.939005. ---. Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin. U of Texas P, 2013.

Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Psycho. Shamley Productions, 1960.

Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York UP, 1996.#

LoBrutto, Vincent. Gus Van Sant: His Own Private Cinema. Praeger, 2010.

Miller, Jeremy Russell. Crossdressing Cinema: An Analysis of Transgender Representation in Film. 2012.

Texas A&M U, PhD dissertation. OAKTrust, doi:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2012-08-11672

. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 1975. Visual and Other Pleasures, Indiana UP, 1989, pp. 14-26.

Pinedo, Isabel. “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1-2, 1996, pp. 17-31.

Skodbo, Thomas. Nan Goldin: The Other Side: Photography and Gender Identity

(PDF):

Psycho and the Postmodern Rise of Gender Queerness

Film historians consider Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) a pivotal point in the rupture from classic forms of horror film and the introduction of a shift in sensibilities. Simultaneously, Psycho represents a landmark achievement in terms of queer depictions on screen.
It reinvented the horror genre and inspired a new wave of horror filmmaking
One of Psycho’s greatest innovations lies in the movie’s subversion of conventional gender identities. At its center stands the gender-nonconforming Norman Bates, whose gender identity is portrayed as lying somewhere between male- and female identifying due to his schizophrenic tendencies. Furthermore, the film features multiple layers of non-hetero-conforming and gender-nonconforming qualities that will be closely explored throughout this chapter.
The post-sixties horror genre has become increasingly postmodern by concentrating on “the blurring of boundaries” (Pinedo 17) of classic horror films. Gore and “high levels of explicit, sexualized violence” (20) have become an integral part of the genre, and the postmodern world of horror is also defined by the unraveling of certainties.
In terms of its narrative structure, the film defied audience’s expectations by introducing the female lead Marion Crane and then making her the victim of a murder halfway through the plot.
Looking at Marion and Norman, it becomes clear that neither of them is wholly good or bad. Rather, they are constructed as ambiguous and complex characters, blurring the boundaries between monster archetypes established during the classic horror film period.

Ten films that shook the world

Psycho was a watershed in many ways. As well as making Alfred Hitchcock a multimillionaire, it was to win huge critical acclaim and enshrine him as a master filmmaker. It generated two sequels itself and set down a formula for ‘madman with knife’ films, shamelessly copying its film techniques. It also influenced the makers of many of the most well-known modern horror and suspense films, ranging from Halloween to Fatal Attraction.
It is claimed that the film reflected, or contributed to, a growing permissiveness in society: its violence, sexual content and even the flushing of a toilet on screen, all breaking new ground for mainstream Hollywood film. Its themes struck at many cherished American values; mother love, in particular, would never be quite the same again. Following its release, Psycho was even blamed in court for being the cause of a number of horrible murders, stimulating a debate about the links between screen violence and anti-social behaviour that continues unabated to this day.
‘The point is to draw the audience right inside the situation instead of leaving them to watch it from outside, from a distance. And you can do this only by breaking the action into details and cutting from one to the other, so that each detail is forced in turn on the attention of the audience and reveals its psychological meaning.’ My Own Methods, Hitchcock, 1937.
In his role as both director and producer, Hitchcock was in the privileged position of having a great deal of involvement in the actual planning and filming of Psycho. His originality in this area contributed greatly to the unique nature of the film.
There were actually 78 separate camera set-ups needed for the shower scene and it took seven days to film. Among the technical headaches were the problems of keeping pieces of moleskin glued to Janet Leigh (Marion) to prevent her appearing nude; filming the head-on shots of the water pouring out of the shower (solved by blocking some of the central shower holes and using a long lens to prevent the camera being soaked, although the camera crew were less fortunate) and filming ‘Mother’ from inside the shower. The walls on each side of the shower were detachable to enable the crew to film Marion’s demise from every possible angle.
Hitchcock’s directing career started in 1922. By 1959 he was one of Hollywood’s best-known personalities.
In his role as both director and producer, Hitchcock was in the privileged position of having a great deal of involvement in the actual planning and filming of Psycho. His originality in this area contributed greatly to the unique nature of the film.

Documentaries:

78/52:

78/52 review

-The documentary puts Psycho at the very tipping point of US history, a spasm of fear after the certainties and complacencies of the 1950s and postwar prosperity – but before the Kennedy assassination, civil rights and Vietnam. Bogdanovich talks interestingly about billing in the 1920s and 30s: how women were routinely above the title before the second world war, but male stars progressively muscled them out of the way, and how the murder of Marion Crane in its way set the seal on this tendency.-Bogdanovich talks interestingly about billing in the 1920s and 30s: how women were routinely above the title before the second world war, but male stars progressively muscled them out of the way, and how the murder of Marion Crane in its way set the seal on this tendency.

In 78/52, Alexandre Philippe Has Gone Psycho for Hitchcock

-Hitchcock clearly tapped into something primal in the shower scene, which still resonates with audiences roughly five decades after its initial release.

“78/52” LOOKS AT “PSYCHO” AND ITS UNFORGETTABLE SHOWER SCENE

- expanding the scope of the narrative to encompass details that inform our understanding and fascination with what could certainly be considered a sui generis milestone in both the career of the Master of Suspense and the history of American film.

The Making of Psycho (1997):

It's a much more violent book than it is a movie. The girl gets beheaded in the shower, as opposed to simply stabbed to death. But the book is mild by comparison with the facts of Ed Gein. This is one of those series of murders that so shocked the nation that it became part of American mythology. (Clive Barker)

What I think the movie does spectacularly well and perversely is bring a curious glamour to the character of Norman Bates. In the book, he's this pudgy, rather nondescript, short, balding man. Of course, in the movie, it's one of the great performances of cinema and the defining performance of Anthony Perkins' career: one of those performances everybody knows, even if you've never seen the movie. Everybody knows Norman Bates. (Clive Barker)

I had a meeting with some people from the Production Code. You won't believe what upset them more than anything else: the word "transvestite." They said, "You cannot use that word." And I said, "Why? It's a scientific word." And they, apparently, had some preconceived notion that this was very dirty, and that I was trying to put one over on them. So we got a dictionary, and it's a man who likes to wear women's clothes. I think they were a little embarrassed. I was shocked that they were ready to put their foot down on that. (Joseph Stefano)

I think the wonderful thing about Mr. Hitchcock's approach to movies… and his movies obviously exemplify that… is the bait that he, he gives us and certain themes that he carries through in his movies. There was always a connection between food and death... and food and sex, and it was always put out there. (Janet Leigh)

MEST4 Coursework Blog

Tuesday, 31 October 2017

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Alfred Hitchcock (Critical Evaluations of Leading Film-makers)

Ultimate Film Guides: Psycho

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