Psycho

Psycho

by Robert Bloch

The story of Norman Bates is probably familiar to most readers. Psycho is about a man with what would now be called disassociative identity disorder, more familiarly called multiple personalities. While acting under the delusion that he is his dead mother, Norman kills a young woman, and later a private investigator. The character was inspired by real-life killer Ed Gein. In some ways, the novel fails. Almost two thirds of the penultimate chapter is a block of exposition, painfully delivered through once-removed dialogue. The majority of the characters are pretty flat. The portrayal of women is less than enlightened. But it works as a compelling story, and that's mainly due to the central character and antagonist.

Norman Bates is an unassuming man who, by all appearances, is perfectly normal. His appearance (an overweight, balding man in his forties -- it's interesting to speculate about why a much younger man was cast for the part in the film) is consistently contrasted with his inner mind -- something the author was intentionally playing with throughout the narrative. The same theme crops up with Mary. Her thievery reveals her inner self and conflicts with her outer veneer of normalcy.

Norman has a host of neurosis, many concerning sex and women in general, but his mother specifically. These are revealed gradually throughout the narrative -- for example, in chapter 5, he is drawn to looking at his mother’s thighs and breasts, but also recognizes that he should not do so. He owns pornography, but chastises himself for spying on Mary in the bathroom. This conflict was explored more fully in some of the film sequels, in which Norman’s character lashes out against any woman he feels attracted to.

One of the interesting things about re-reading Psycho was to catalog some of the things about Norman that were meant to imply or show that he was crazy. First time readers of the book (who somehow managed to avoid the cultural touchstones of the film) weren’t supposed to know just how far gone Norman was until the reveal in chapter fifteen. Some of the clues were obvious -- his behavior is certainly abnormal, particularly when drinking and spying on Mary in the bathroom. There are also strong hints in his conversations with Mother. At one point she even says that if she were to be committed to an institution, she wouldn’t go alone. But his hobbies also hint at madness. His taste in books and interest in the occult is seen as damning evidence. Similarly, his interest in taxidermy is considered odd, although more was made of this in the film than in the book. The fact that Norman lives alone and was a life-long bachelor is also cited.

Another interesting element is how Norman has ended up in the collective unconscious as a serial killer. In the book he is only responsible for four murders -- his mother and her lover, Mary, and Arbogast. There was no direct indication that he had killed other guests at the motel. But somehow it's easy to believe that he's been doing it for years. The neighbors and locals in the book soon suggest Norman is responsible for other murders, and in the film the psychiatrist suggests that Norman is responsible for a series of unsolved missing persons cases in the area. It's certainly more disturbing to think that this episode was simply the most recent one, and that Mary's theft is the only reason Norman got caught at all.

Norman is, in many ways, a sympathetic character. Even his almost-victim Lila feels sorry for him, and admits that he has probably suffered as much or more than his victims. He seems to have been molded into a psychopath instead of choosing to be one. The portrait of Norman that comes out casts his Mother as the villain. She is thought to be the one who drove him to the madness that eventually led to her death, and to his own insanity. But it’s too difficult to separate Norman from his Mother -- everything the reader knows about Mother comes through the filter of Norman. He blames her, but is she really responsible? After all, the Mother character is just his beliefs about what she was actually like.

In the end, it’s all him.