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Psycho and the Modern American Gothic
Markku Koski
Abstract: Grant Wood´s painting American Gothic is one of the most familiar images in 20th century
American art. The name of Wood has not often mentioned in the connection of Psycho. The most obvious
influence to Hitchcock has been Edward Hopper and his famous painting House by the Railroad. The houses
in Hopper and Hitchcock look the same, and the theme of both works is modernity. The connection between
both artists does not necessarily end here, because Hopper is also known about his paintings about the lonely
urban landscapes and it´s “lonely crowd”. Psycho also starts from a big city with its´ office-buildings and
small hotels. The scenes along the highway also remind very much Hopper´s other paintings. Those visions
are an example about modern gothic, where terror is always hiding behind the streamlined architecture and
money-economy. But the rustic couple of Wood´s painting can also be found in Psycho. In the later scenes
of Psycho Hitchcock paints cinematically rich portrait of a nearby small countryside town. There is a short
but meaningful scene where the town´s sheriff and his wife stand outside the church of the town and listen
to what Marion Crane´s lover and sister have to tell them. The earnest-looking sheriff can be compared to
Wood´s laborer and his wife is as quintessentially domestic as the woman in Wood´s painting. Both Wood´s
and Hitchcock´s couple are helplessly looking at the modern world, which has invaded their so seemingly
safe homeland.
Key words: American gothic, Grant Wood, Psycho, Edward Hopper, modernity.
*****
Grant Wood´s painting American Gothic is one of the most familiar images in 20th century American art.
Wood's inspiration came from a cottage designed in the Gothic Revival style with its’ distinctive upper
window. He decided to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house” 1
The painting shows a farmer standing beside his spinster daughter. The woman is dressed in a colonial print
apron mimicking 19th century Americana and the couple is in the traditional roles of men and women. The
man's pitchfork symbolizes hard labor, and the flowers over the woman's right shoulder suggest domesticity.
But at the same time there is something terrifying in that rigid setting.
Wood´s painting has been interpreted, imitated, appropriated and parodied in many ways. It came
suddenly to my mind when I was writing last year a piece about Alfred Hitchcock´s Psycho, which had its
premiere fifty years ago. Hitchcock´s film is one of the best examples of a style or genre which can be called
American gothic. Everyone who has seen it can remember the sinister-looking house on the hill, where
Norman Bates´ mother is supposed to live.
1
Wood, Grant: A Letter. http://www.campsilos.org/mod2/students/wood_letter.htm, 1941
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I have not seen Wood´s painting mentioned in the connection of Psycho. The most obvious influence to
Hitchcock has been Edward Hopper and his famous painting called House by the Railroad (1925). The
houses in Hopper and Hitchcock look the same, and the theme of both works is modernity and something
which could be called modern American gothic.
Hopper is one of the greatest auteurs of American cinema, although he did not make movies. The world
and the style of his paintings are strongly present in many American films. Hopper was also very much
impressed about Hitchcock´s loan, because he in his part had been influenced by movies. In 1959 he even
made a painting called New York Movie, where we can see a lonely woman in a movie theatre. His paintings
are mostly horizontal, like frames or stills of a film. In them you can clearly sense a beginning of a story.
The connection between these artists does not necessarily end to those houses, because Hopper is also
known about his paintings about lonely urban landscapes. Psycho also starts from a big city with its´ officebuildings and small hotels. The scenes along the highway also remind very much Hopper´s other paintings.
Those visions are an example about modern American gothic, where terror is hiding behind the streamlined
architecture, consumption and money-economy.
In the beginning of Psycho we can see the camera gliding across the urban landscape. We are moving
along with the camera, but it is not our vision or a photographer´s view from a window, but a bird´s, God´s
or a master-sociologist´s point of view. Maybe a bird is seeking a nest, God is looking at modern Sodom and
Gomorrah or an urban sociologist is making random observations. In the end the camera picks one window
and goes into a hotel-room. Hopper did not paint love-scenes, but there is still a clear connection between his
lonely figures and Hitchcock´s anonymous couple in that room.
The modernity in Psycho and Hopper´s paintings is not restricted to the city. Modernity has also
penetrated the countryside and its small towns. In Hopper´s painting we can also see a railroad, which seems
to have taken over that old-time house. But at the same time that railroad also looks abandoned.
In Psycho we can see the same modern progress, but now in its later stages. Psycho is not only known
about that gingerbread house, but also by that motel under that hill. The box-like, functional motel has taken
over the house, but it has on its turn been left desolate by the new Interstate Highway built in the fifties.
“They uh--they moved away the highway”, Norman Bates tells Marion Crane. “Oh. I thought I'd gotten off
the main road”, she says. “I knew you must have”, Norman replies. “Nobody ever stops here anymore unless
they've done that. But there's no sense dwelling on our losses. We just keep on lighting the lights and
following the formalities.”
The main attraction of Psycho is that it combines in those buildings both the old and new gothic. If we
think gothic only as an architectural style, the motel appears to be far from it, but if we understand gothic as
a more general way of seeing things, the motel is a perfect example of modern gothic. There is always
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something sinful in motels.
So those houses in Psycho are not simple sets or surroundings, where the story unfolds, but as important
and meaningful as film´s main characters. It is also interesting how the famous interplay of horizontal and
vertical lines in the main titles is repeated concretely in those buildings. Psycho is at the same time a very
concrete and abstract film. It is almost avant-garde in a disguise of a B-film.
Hitchcock has not often mentioned his debt to Hopper, but his script-writer Joseph Stefano2 has
remarked that “I told [Anthony Perkins] that I felt that Norman Bates, if he were a painting, would be
painted by Hopper, and he agreed. So we had that kind of discussion, writer and actor, about the character.
He had an incredible grasp on Norman Bates and the situation that he was in. I think Tony Perkins must have
known what it was like to be trapped.”
Norman Bates clearly belongs to David Riesman´s famous ”lonely crowd”. He is not only a
psychological, but also a sociological case. Joel Gunz3 has written that both Hopper and Hitchcock never
pronounce absolute judgment on their characters. We, the viewers, are left to decide. The artists simply show
and the characters just are. We never know what they are thinking and we are not told how to think about
them. This creates a kind of uneasiness on our part.
It came to my mind, that if someone still dares to do another sequel to Psycho, he should situate it to
those many abandoned shopping-malls in the American landscape. It could be a postmodern Psycho, where
Norman Bates in tending the rotting meat disk of that shopping-mall.
Joel Gunz has found even more similarities in Hopper and Psycho. In 1932 Hopper made a painting
Room in Brooklyn, where we can see a woman by the window:
Could this painting be read as Norman-as-mother? The ennui of the scene could evoke Norman's
own boredom, as one isolated, solitary and trapped in a world not of his choosing, looking out on a
maddeningly unchanging landscape. Other scenes in Psycho strike me as Hopperesque. Our eyes are
drawn to the letter the woman holds in New York Office (1962). Could Hopper have been inspired by
scenes in which Marion contemplates the $40,000? 4
Hitchcock and Hopper are also professional voyeurs. The director told Francois Truffaut about the opening
scene of Psycho, that it also “allows the viewer to become a Peeping Tom.”5 Any viewer who stops to gaze
at a Hopper is also a Peeping Tom. We share secrets with those artists, who provide us images for our mutual
2
Stefano, Joseph in Gunz, Joel: Hitchcock's Most Hopperesque Film: Psycho. http://
www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com/2009/11/hitchcocks-most- psycho.html, 2009
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Truffaut, François: Hitchcock. Love kirjat. Helsinki 1983, p. 236
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satisfaction.
According to Gunz6 , another aspect of Hopper’s paintings, not often talked about, is the air of
expectancy. “His figures aren’t as much posed, as they are poised. He captures them in the moment between
ennui and action. This, I feel, is what makes them so compelling and dramatic. We are drawn in because his
paintings are so full of potential energy.”
Psycho is a film, not a painting, but it is interesting that its many best scenes are silent or without
dialogue. Psycho is well-known about its sound and music, but few critics have written about its silences.
Maybe Hitchcock wanted to return to his beginnings in silent cinema? Anyway, those silent scenes are
wonderful and also a good example of old-time gothic terror. It is also interesting that even the bathroom
murder sequence was first in the script silent, but the composer Bernard Herrmann talked the director over,
or maybe we can say ´orchestrated´ him over, and luckily so.
Psycho could also be seen in the light of what we could call ´the metaphysics of hotels´. The house in the
hill could also be an old-time hotel, and the film even starts in a hotel–room. A newer example of this hotelmetaphysics is of course Stanley Kubrick´s The Shining (1980), which is in many ways a companion-piece
to Psycho. Maybe we can say that “no work and no play has made Norman a dull boy.” Or to speculate
more, maybe Norman has got well and married, became a writer and is now tending the Overlook Hotel?
There is always something sinister in hotels. Maybe the German word ”unheimlich”, in
English ”uncanny”, is the right expression. The term comes of course from Sigmund Freud and means
something which is familiar, but at the same time strange or frightening. In Finland we often talk
about ”hotel-deaths”, which does not mean death itself, but that lonely and desperate feeling which looms in
hotels. A hotel-room is at same time something public and private.
One of the main features of modern gothic is that it is not necessarily all the time as deadly serious as the
old gothic. Maybe we can say that Psycho in a way started that development, which has peaked in those not
in any way serious slasher-type thrillers in the later years. Psycho is still very terrifying, but at the same time
it has many playful elements. As Hitchcock7 has said, he is “playing the audience like an organ”, which is
also a very gothic instrument.
When we went to see Psycho for the first time, we were greeted in the cinema-lobby by the cardboardfigure of Hitchcock, who says that “nobody, absolutely nobody, is allowed in the theatre after the film has
started”. That gesture was an example of cunning advertising, but at the same time a very welcome service to
the public, because the most exceptional thing in Psycho was Janet Leigh´s sudden murder after the
beginning of the film. Maybe Hitchcock was afraid that some late-coming watchers could demand their
6
Gunz
7
Truffaut, s. 241
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money back, because they did not see their favourite film-star! David Thomson8 has also suggested that
maybe there was in that order also an implication that you could not leave the theatre after the film had
started. And of course, we could not.
Michael Schmidt9 has stressed how Psycho combines wonderfully the everyday and mysterious. It can
already be seen in its production values. Hitchcock made the film very quickly and cheaply in black and
white with his television-crew. It is no B-film, but sometimes it looks like one. In Hitchcock the suspense
and terror nearly always rises from the everyday or mundane. Even the invading animals in his next film are
no monsters, but everyday birds. We never get in Hitchcock an impression that everything is only built for
the murder-scenes or for a surprise ending. Psycho of course has all of them, but the film in no way does not
lose its fascination after repeated seeings. On the contrary, it grows on you. And by “growing” I also mean
something that is gothic-like.
A good example about that everydayness is the first scene in the hotel-room. It brings to my mind the
episodes of Hitchcock’s television series. A young film-goer was first of course very impressed about Janet´s
Leigh´s breasts and white bra, but today we can see how economically the scene was built. It is also
interesting that Janet Leigh represents a type of a woman, who is very far from Hitchcock´s other famous
ladies. She is a usual office-worker. Or as Janet Leigh10 has said about the character:
She was a unspectacular, simple, frustrated person, getting older, seeing herself becoming an old maid,
afraid that Sam would go off, never having enough money. She was basically a compassionate, honest
woman, not a thief. So her momentous, out-of-character decision to commit robbery showed her passion
and terrible frustration. She was a plain, ordinary person that something extraordinary happened to.
Hitchcock and Leigh did not even use a hairdresser and bought her clothes from a department store.
Interesting situation, Hitch and Leigh shopping clothes!
But behind that ordinariness we can also sense something else. Marion Crane in her ordinariness has the
same glow as Hitchcock´s other heroines. John Gavin who plays her lover was at that time also a kind of
star, but in this film clearly a dull, uninteresting figure. He is certainly no Cary Grant or James Stewart, or
maybe he can compared to Rod Taylor in The Birds. But in Marion Crane our interest quickly moves from
her body to her face and thoughts. As David Thomson11 has remarked, we care about her, we want to help
her. In Psycho we can see how strongly a film is able to bind us to the main character and her thoughts. And
maybe Psycho´s most gothic moment comes when she is suddenly murdered and our identification moves to
8
Thomson, David: The Moment of Psycho. Basic Books. New York 2009, p. 96
9
Schmidt, Michael: The Parlor Scene in Psycho: Images of Duality. http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/features/
psycho.html
10
Leigh in Rebello, Stephen: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Mandarin. London 1990, p. 62
11
Thomson, s. 53
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Norman Bates, who is desperately trying to clean up the mess. That long cleaning sequence is to mind more
interesting than the murder-scene.
Richard Armstrong12 has seen in Janet Leigh a kind of”cinematic modernity”. Louise Brooks, James
Dean and Leigh were not so skillful and outstanding actors as for instance Katherine Hepburn or Laurence
Olivier, but they had presence and mystery. They were products of cinematic plasticity and urban
contingency.
Psycho´s love-scene in the hotel-room is doubled by the scene in Norman´s parlor. Leigh has called it
”their odd little love-scene”. They are strangers to each other, but a kind of intimate and warm feeling is
created between them. The money seems at once unimportant, and Marion Crane clearly decides to take it
back. Leigh was right: this is a strange, modern meeting between two lonely people. So well and delicately
that scene is made that I believe that many watchers thought at first that she takes the money back and
returns to the motel to live with Norman.
According to Richard Armstrong Psycho is modern because it brings two modern urban clichés together,
the office-girl and that strange young misfit in the motel´s office. Psycho connects the daylight of the
Affluent Society to its shadowy past:
Appearing in 1960, the film consciously sets up a dialogue between past and present. Out of the past
comes that which is spooky, musty, fatal. Like that dark gingerbread house on the hill. The present is
all that is bright, sexy, new. As if to satirize gadget-strewn, throwaway America, Hitchcock even has
his wayward heroine trade her car on a whim, without even taking the customary day-and-a-half to
think about it. 13
12
Armstrong, Richard: Modernity and the Maniac: The Fall of Janet Leigh. Images: A Journal of Film and
Popular Culture. http://www.imagesjournal.com/2004/features/janetleigh/default-nf.html, 2004
13
Ibid.
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David Thomson14 calls the film in his book The Moment of Psycho a turning point in cinema history. All you
need is to take a look at American movies after Psycho. The innocent materialism and a belief in progress is
gone.
The psychiatrist´s explanation of in the end of Psycho was originally seen as artistically clumsy. Maybe it
was in those days only a necessity, but today it has changed into a meaningful part of the film´s world.
Psychoanalysis had in those years developed in the United States into a vogue and psychiatrists had become
some kind of cultural heroes, who had a rational explanation to everything. And I really mean “rational”,
because the psychiatrist in Psycho presents his analysis in the same way than American lawyers make their
speeches in courtrooms. The psychiatrist is one of those secondary characters in Psycho, who have through
the years grown not in stature, but in meaning. Someone has remarked jokingly that he seems as crazy as
Norman. Maybe, after all they are both headshrinkers.
There is also a very meaningful dialogue in the end where the sheriff asks: “And the forty thousand
dollars--who got them?” Good question in a crime-film. The psychiatric answers: “The swamp. These were
crimes of passion, not profit.”
The same question was recently made to me in a film class. A student said that there was an error in
Psycho, because the money was never mentioned after beginning of the film. He had clearly read all those
American script-writers´ manuals. I disagreed, because to my mind the money was all the time present, but
not as a story-element, motive or as Hitchcock might say, “McGuffin”. In Marxist terms it is general, everpresent ether of that society. It gothic terms it is a looming, ever-present ghost.
But back to the beginning of my piece. The rustic couple of Grant Wood´s painting can also be found in
14
Thomson, p. 115
Bibliography
Armstrong, Richard: Modernity and the Maniac: The Fall of Janet Leigh. In Images: A Journal of Film and
Popular Culture. http://www.imagesjournal.com/2004/features/janetleigh/default-nf.html, 2004
Gunz, Joel: Hitchcock's Most Hopperesque Film: Psycho. http://www.alfredhitchcockgeek.com/2009/11/
hitchcocks-most- psycho.html, 2009
Rebello, Stephen: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Mandarin. London 1990
Schmidt, Michael: The Parlor Scene in Psycho: Images of Duality. In Images – A Journal of Film and
Popular culture. http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/features/ psycho.htm. 2004
Thomson, David: The Moment of Psycho. Basic Books, New York 2009
Truffaut, François: Hitchcock. Love Kirjat. Helsinki 1983
Wood, Grant: A Letter.http://www.campsilos.org/mod2/students/wood_letter.htm. 1941
Markku Koski is a lecturer and free-lance writer, who has published articles and books about popular
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Psycho. In the later scenes of Psycho Hitchcock paints cinematically rich portrait of a nearby small
countryside town. There is a short but meaningful scene where the town´s sheriff and his wife stand outside
the church of the town and listen to what the Marion Crane´s lover and sister have to tell them. The earnestlooking sheriff can be compared to Wood´s laborer and his wife is as quintessentially domestic as the woman
in Wood´s painting. Both Wood´s and Hitchcock´s couple are helplessly looking at the modern world which
has invaded their so seemingly safe homeland.