Psycho - the Role of the Director, Alfred Hitchcock
PSYCHO
In the film Psycho director Alfred Hitchcock successfully uses a variety of different film techniques that enhance the understanding of significant themes that engage the audience. The major themes in Psycho are the notion of a dual personality, women’s role in the 1960’s and the idea of voyeurism and how that joins into the concept of the gaze. All of these underlying themes link into the central theme of Psycho, which is identity.
Psycho is set in the year 1960. The dominant ideology of that time was that there was an unspoken code that dictated the way that women were expected to fit into society. Representations of women in films usually worked with this code, if a character went against the dominant ideologies it would generally mean some kind of punishment for them. In Psycho Marion Crane is the character that breaks the code in more than one way and is punished as a result. Hitchcock begins his film with a wide panning shot of a city. The city is identified as “Phoenix, Arizona”, the camera then seemingly at random chooses first one of the many buildings and then one of the many windows to zoom in on and take the audience into the lives of Sam and Marion. The two are lying on a bed in a loving embrace; they talk of respectability and of being secretive. Through the dialogue the audience can obtain that Marion and Sam are not a married couple and are meeting secretly in Marion’s lunch break. In 1960 this would be considered a far less than respectable thing to be doing. Marion knows this and she wants more than anything to marry Sam, Sam rejects the idea, he talks of money and how he is in no position financially to support Marion. His sense of pride doesn’t allow him to think of marrying Marion, as an aspect of the dominant ideologies of the time was that men were the main bread winners in the relationship and it was their duty to support their wife. This gives Marion the cause for the theft of forty thousand dollars, when the chance arises.
In the film Psycho director Alfred Hitchcock successfully uses a variety of different film techniques that enhance the understanding of significant themes that engage the audience. The major themes in Psycho are the notion of a dual personality, women’s role in the 1960’s and the idea of voyeurism and how that joins into the concept of the gaze. All of these underlying themes link into the central theme of Psycho, which is identity.
Psycho is set in the year 1960. The dominant ideology of that time was that there was an unspoken code that dictated the way that women were expected to fit into society. Representations of women in films usually worked with this code, if a character went against the dominant ideologies it would generally mean some kind of punishment for them. In Psycho Marion Crane is the character that breaks the code in more than one way and is punished as a result. Hitchcock begins his film with a wide panning shot of a city. The city is identified as “Phoenix, Arizona”, the camera then seemingly at random chooses first one of the many buildings and then one of the many windows to zoom in on and take the audience into the lives of Sam and Marion. The two are lying on a bed in a loving embrace; they talk of respectability and of being secretive. Through the dialogue the audience can obtain that Marion and Sam are not a married couple and are meeting secretly in Marion’s lunch break. In 1960 this would be considered a far less than respectable thing to be doing. Marion knows this and she wants more than anything to marry Sam, Sam rejects the idea, he talks of money and how he is in no position financially to support Marion. His sense of pride doesn’t allow him to think of marrying Marion, as an aspect of the dominant ideologies of the time was that men were the main bread winners in the relationship and it was their duty to support their wife. This gives Marion the cause for the theft of forty thousand dollars, when the chance arises.