I have a podcast on Psycho, Hitchcock’s movie about going to California—about the Sun Belt, about post-WWII America, & its dark past catching up to it. It’s also a movie which features quite a few artworks & suggests they’re important to understanding the plot.
To begin with, the Bates manor, a stately, old-fashioned, 19th c. piece of architecture, full of neoclassical elements, domesticated, the pride of the bourgeoisie. Hitchcock took this particular design from Ed Hopper’s House by a railroad, which fits neatly with the Bates house by the old highway.
These are both new things, especially in America, but transportation technology is new in a way houses are not, & neoclassical architecture is furthermore a new attempt to return to the past. The more specifically American character of the innovation comes from the isolation. That reminds us that American cities are very new. It’s all made up, you could say! That’s true of Phoenix, where Psycho starts, which was booming in the 1950s. The isolation also suggests the desire for independence, which can be taken too far. Of course, with so much change in America, it’s hard to say which ambitious plans will succeed & which will fail. Perhaps the way to interpret the house, which is vertical, & the tracks, which are horizontal, is as a competition. Transportation is about going somewhere else. The demand of neoclassical architecture is that it be admired from a respectful distance; that doesn’t seem likely in America—people will just move on.
Here’s a screenshot of Anthony Perkins looking at a painting Hitchcock amusingly said “has great importance” in his trailer for the movie. Hitchcock obviously was not very concerned with spoilers or with critics, he treats the entire matter as a trifle. He obviously banked on the effect the movie itself would have, famously insisting that there be no late admissions to the movie. But for the artworks, you need multiple viewings or a remarkable memory of a number of artists.
The painting is apparently by Willem van Mieris, Suzanna and the elders, after the Biblical story in Daniel 13, which has been painted at least an hundred times since the Renaissance… Van Mieris was a less famous family of Dutch painters, Willem a less famous member of that family; why did Hitchcock choose such an obscure version of a famous Biblical scene, when there were better canvasses available, the work of masters? It’s also next to impossible to find an image of it online—the one below is merely a reproduction; apparently, the original painting was stolen from a French museum in 1972.
The painting conceals the peep hole that allows Norman Bates to spy on his guests. He moves it to see; the movie imitates him–we get to see his eye at the peep hole, we get to spy on the very attractive Janet Leigh in various states of undress along with him. As a warning against shamelessly looking upon shameful things, the painting is a very weak obstacle. Perhaps it is instead an aid, since to conceal the peephole is to protect the peeper. It seems, indeed, that the painting is reenacted in the movie, the story of illicit desire—is the painting a warning then, or incitement to crime?
The Biblical story depicted in the painting ends with the lustful old men who attempt to achieve a murder with the forms of law on their side punished themselves with death. Eventually, this becomes a matter of justice, which requires the prophet Daniel’s wit; a certain knowledge of soul is involved, which hinges on the distinction between perception & imagination; that seems to be necessary because the old men are authoritative, unlike the young woman. Perhaps Psycho is similar, since it ends with Norman Bates on trial, but instead of the prophet, we have a psychiatrist, & instead of proving the murderer guilty, he proves him innocent, apparently to universal approbation. Religion replaced by modern science! The warning of the painting seems to be that respectability can become a weapon turned against any innocence left. Weakness turns into corruption that way. The movie is supposed to use the immoral desires that get people to the theater to ward against a worse immorality. This is sensible liberalism: Normality might be more bearable if respectability wasn’t turned into an attack on what’s not respectable. Curiosity is surely a vice, but there is something more dangerous in a situation where normality is defended by ignorance–an uninnocent defense, because it requires a complete blindness to the possibility of evil.
I’ll mention two more paintings in the motel parlor. Here’s a painting by a rather more famous Frenchman, Boucher, a Rococo painter. It hangs in the National Gallery in D.C. & it’s called The bath of Venus. It, too, may fit in the story, by suggesting the corruption of nurturing mother love into a kind of stifling of eroticism; notwithstanding the painter’s intention. The shift between the two kinds of intimacy somehow does great violence to the soul; this is the psychological problem of the story; it becomes thematic only in the conclusion, when the psychiatrist & the insane Norman give two accounts of what’s going on in the soul. The impossibility of the presence of the paintings at first seems to reveal to the attentive viewer ‘what’s wrong with the picture,’ with Norman & his mother. The parlor where these paintings hang is opened right after Marion Crane hears the ‘argument’ between Norma & Norman in the second-floor room of the hilltop house. The paintings seem to replace an entire development of the drama, the turn to horror, specifically.
The other painting I know is a Titian: Venus with a mirror, also in the National Gallery in D.C. What you see in the parlor thus also seems to announce the plot. Psychologically, this would be the self-love of the mother who tyrannizes over the child. You see eros always as a child in these paintings, as in the sculpture which is the first thing you see entering the hilltop house, as revealed for example behind the opening door:
That’s part of the infantilizing iconography of classical & Renaissance art. But Venus, the goddess of beauty, as opposed to eros, is always an adult & dominates the space & the story of the paintings, since love is of the beautiful. The opposition of the old men & the babes conceals the danger beauty always must involve, which however focuses Hitchcock’s story.
Don't miss the trailer! A man who's mastered the cliches used to sell his art...