Psycho image analysis (3)

This picture from Psycho is after Marion was attacked by Norma/Norman. This scene exhibits the ideology of misogyny as it’s an archetypal female victim, which is attacked brutally in a shower and being portrayed as a sexual object. Marion is blonde as the Auteur (Hitchcock) was obsessed with blonde women and he enjoyed torturing them with practical jokes e.g. he purposely made the water of the shower freezing cold. This was evident in a lot of Hitchcock’s films, for instance in The 39 Steps where he handcuffed a blonde women to his male co-star and made out he had lost the key, although he had it the whole time. He is also known for using a lot of collision cutting, for example, how it falls quiet just before the attack. The use of a close-up is a horror convention used within the cinematography of film making. It is used in this scene to show emotion and the distress in the shot. The tear coming from Marion's eye shows the sadness and symbolises her last act alive was an uncomfortable and horrible situation. It is also used to make the audience feel empathetic of Marion’s pain. This shot is shown after an image of the shower plug hole where the water and blood are spiralling down. This connotes Marion’s life being drained from her body; this is another element to achieve an emotional effect. Marion is stabbed a multiple of times with a phallic weapon to signify Norman's masculinity inside of his mother’s actions. I feel that the use of the knife has connections to Norman’s sexual fantasies and that he is very sexually frustrated; he uses the knife as an act of penetration as a substitute. This scene spoke to the audiences of the 1960’s as it was one of the first horror films (along with Peeping Tom in 1959) to feature a human ‘monster’. All other horrors were about fantasy creatures like Dracula or Frankenstein.