House on the Hill by Peter Beynon

Hey, Celia—please don’t delete this message. 

I sent you comments on the outline of your Shakespeare presentation; I hope they’re useful. (I do try.)  

About my Hitchcock presentation: everyone in the group but you has sent notes to me. I’ve run into problems, and there’s some urgency here. (Whittaker, that dick, didn’t give me an extension.) Please listen, let me know what you think? Here goes:

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL: REAPPRAISING PSYCHO 

ENGL 531 / Understanding Narrative Design 

Lucien Voland    

Even casual filmgoers would recognize a key image from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: no, not Marion Crane, screaming in the motel shower; not the Bates Motel itself; but the Bates house perched above it. This gaunt, dour Victorian is practically a character itself. Some scholars, blinkered by complacency or anger, say the house reflects the director’s supposed misogyny. Don’t let emotion cloud your judgment. Together, let’s reappraise something you thought you intimately knew.

Psychoanalytic critics have had a field day with Psycho. In fact, someone—Slavoj Žižek, or maybe Kaja Silverman—famously likened the three levels of the house to the id, ego, and superego. 

(Why “maybe”? Because I’m not sure. Because Google hasn’t scanned the relevant pages, because my sublet has fickle wifi, and because somebody still has my books!) 

Critics have said the house’s thrusting tower is emphatically phallic; so too is its trio of windows—narrow, arched, the tallest in the center. These windows point to the vaginal oculus above, anticipating the penetrative murder of Marion Crane. 

So, the thinking goes, the house’s tower, like the knife, is a giant phallus, Marion’s stabbing is symbolically a sexual assault, and blah blah fuckin’ blah. This line of argument reinforces a mischaracterization of Hitchcock himself (warped product of Catholic schooling, notorious abuser of actresses on set, etc.) that’s ossified into orthodoxy, as if film scholarship were public psychoanalysis. 

(And how presumptuous is that? Imagine, by analogy, somebody unlocking someone else’s phone, immersing themselves in someone else’s messages and voicemails, and scrutinizing photos that have nothing whatsoever to do with her. Could that somebody fairly interpret such material as “evidence,” however paltry and private, of some alleged romantic betrayal? Could that someone put a blameless ex-boyfriend on the couch, as it were, and fairly conclude the worst about him? No—and if she did, she’d be the one to violate a sacred trust.) 

But back to Psycho‘s house on the hill: what does it mean? Consider François Truffaut’s book-length interview where Hitchcock speaks for himself. (Because my books are inaccessible, please indulge me while I coast on the fumes of memory.)  

First, Hitchcock is not coy. He says Marion’s tryst with her lover back in Phoenix would have been more realistic if she, and not just Sam, were naked to the waist. Thus, if the Bates house were sexually symbolic, surely Hitchcock would have said so. 

Second, Hitchcock says the tall Gothic house visually complements the long, low motel. This benign tableau offers the eye a resting point before the plot’s vertiginous descent into violence. In other words, the image of the house is innocent—not everything has to be about sex! Similarly, a scholar analyzing Psycho might very well be not a misogynist or voyeur but, instead, an advocate for its unfairly maligned director. 

(Consider another analogy: a student preparing a talk about, say, Shakespeare’s Othello, a man undone by groundless suspicions about the woman he loves. Would you conflate that student with Othello? Would you assume she is as irrationally, destructively jealous as he is? Surely not.)

Third, look at the tower’s oculus (Latin for “eye”), which offers an elevated view from the top of the house. Think how often Hitchcock’s camera is itself an eye in the sky. Think of the detective, Arbogast, dying in the house’s cavernous stairwell. The camera lingers above: we look down on him, on his assailant, and on the broad staircase itself, the stage for the fatal assault. And think of one last eye: Marion Crane’s, open even in death. As the hissing shower ferries her blood down the drain, the camera pulls discreetly away. 

All these shots encourage us to distance ourselves from horror, not to deny it but to put it in proper context, as if to say, Let reason, not volatile emotion, guide you! Marion, Arbogast, their killer—even you and me: we are, all of us, flawed people vulnerable to forces beyond our control. 

Why not, as Hitchcock’s judicious camerawork emphasizes, regard human folly with understanding and compassion?  If you choose otherwise, if you choose to cut your ties to someone who (save for one forgivable lapse), has done nothing but love you, will you at least let me know when I can return to our house on the hill, and get my goddamned stuff back?

Peter Beynon teaches high school English and lives in Albany, New York. This is his second published story.

20 September 2024