Robert Bloch’s Psycho, the pulp thriller novella that inspired the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name, tells the story of Norman Bates, a mentally unstable young man who has a fairly unconventional relationship with his mother. Over the course of the novel, we see Norman kill and kill again, all in the name of his mother, who it is revealed that he had killed as well. Death is a constant phenomenon in Psycho, as the pulp world in which the characters reside has people dying or being threatened with death at every turn. Death is treated both as a punishment for sins and as a casual act perpetrated by someone who wishes to maintain the status quo; at the same time, death is also seen as a way to preserve someone’s memory forever.
Norman Bates, the main character of the novel, struggles with his fascination with death throughout the novel. At the start of the novel, he is enraptured by the book The Realm of the Incas, in which the cachna victory dance is being performed by its native subjects. Norman is fascinated by the use of an enemy’s body as a drum – he is shocked into incredible curiosity by the fact that the book’s subjects made something so dramatically unique. “Imagine flaying a man – alive, probably – and then stretching his belly to us it as a drum!what kind of a mentality did it take to conceive of such an idea in the first place?” (Bloch). By establishing this morbid interest in death from the beginning, Bloch demonstrates his main character’s psychosis; he is at once horrified and entranced by the concept of taking someone else’s life. This helps to establish the unsettled psychology of the character for the reader. The fact that this daydreaming about killing someone is immediately followed by thoughts of his mother in the other room links this death sense to his mother’s personality, his desire to be his mother and his desire to kill being linked.
The pulp-tinged world of the characters of Psycho provides a dark mirror for American society at the time, reflecting its own obsession with death back at it. The world is amoral, with even ostensibly good characters willing to do terrible things if it will benefit them. The other protagonist of the book, Marion Crane, commits several transgressions; she engages in a secret affair with her lover Sam Loomis, and steals $40,000 in order to allow him to pay off his debts so they may marry each other. While this is done for ostensibly good reasons, the fact that even sweet young women are capable of such crimes speaks to the darkness of the world of Psycho – a world in which Norman’s bloodlust could easily be cultivated. The beginning of the book is ostensibly her character’s journey; Norman is simply a stagnant figure who is stuck in his own personality and anxieties, unchanged even by the deaths he has caused.
Bloch’s book is just as fascinated with death as Norman is; it would be easy to see someone like Norman having a similar reaction reading Psycho as he was his book about the Incans. The novella is effectively a series of slasher killings, with long lead-ups and a sense of budding anticipation before each kill. In the case of Marion Crane, there is a sense of karmic justice, as her death is an extreme punishment by fate for her crime of stealing money from a client. Marion is shown to be flawed moral creature, having stolen money and carried on a secret relationship with her lover Sam Loomis. Even though she had opted to return the money before she was killed, and was doing to make her relationship with Sam right by marrying him, the punishment still occurred – choosing redemption does not absolve you from death. While Norman did not kill her directly because of these crimes, there is a sense in the novel that she is being killed because of these transgressions. Because of that, death happens to those who have committed the most sins in the book, making Norman Bates a fairly unconventional angel of death.
With the murder of Arbogast, the implication of moral transgression is slightly more muddled; he does not do anything overtly immoral in the book. However, in his profession as a private investigator, he is shown to be somewhat sleazy in appearance and personality – with his direct talk, flippant demeanor and predilection for smoking. Nonetheless, he is killed to protect the secret of Marion’s moral murder, thus justifying supplementary murders made to cover up moral murders. Norman justifies it as “the best protection of all,” making Arbogast’s death moral for other reasons (Bloch). With each death, there is a justification – none of them are completely senseless, if only within Norman’s narrative of safety.
Norman’s attitude toward death is as a means of preservation – just as the Incas killed the man to preserve him as a drum, Norma killed his mother Norma in order to preserve her as well. As the psychologist explains at the end of the book, Norman killed both his mother and John Considine because he did not want his mother to lose affection for her and use it on other men, exhibiting an extremely Oedipal codependency on his mother. To that end, he slowly poisoned them both with strychnine until they were dead. At this point, something snapped in Norman Bates, in which the guilt of what he did created a split personality that contained his mother as he remembered her – loving but controlling: “Now that it was all over, he couldn’t stand the loss of his mother. He wanted her back” (Bloch). This is also why he killed Arbogast; he did not want their secret known, both about his mother and about Marion.
Despite Norman’s insanity, the world around him facilitates this morbid interest in death; even with the morally centered Sam and Lila, images of death abound in the nice town of Fairvale. Around the courthouse of the town, there rests statues symbolizing war and death, including “a Civil War veterana Spanish-American War trench mortar, a World War I cannon, and a granite shaft bearing the names of fourteen Fairvale citizens who had died in World War II” (Bloch). Death as a means of preservation is a concept even in sane, civilized society; Norman is merely taking that to its extremes with his preservation of Norma. Death is even compared to beauty, as Sam listens to his own music: “When Sam Loomis reached out and switched on the tiny FM radio, the music welled forth, annihilating space and time and death itself. It was, as far as he understood it, an authentic miracle” (Bloch). In a culture so obsessed with death, it is no surprise that unstable figures like Norman would take their fascinations too far.
Because of the horribleness of the world outside, it is easy to see why Norman would hide himself away in the motel, with only the memories of his mother to interact with. By taking comfort in his quiet retreat, he is able to avoid the world’s influences as much as possible, while also hiding himself away from the world. All he needs is his mother, and by staying in the place where he feels most connected to her, he feels as though he can cheat death by ‘living’ with her. He looks for comfort just as Marion looks for financial security and Arbogast/Sam/Lila look for answers; he simply chooses death as his means of achieving that comfort.
In conclusion, Psycho tells the story of a psychotic man who holds no particular value to human life, with the exception of his mother. Throughout the book, Norman’s death drive is established; he is fascinated and repulsed equally by the idea of death and violence, due to the ebb and flow of his split personality. He kills out of jealousy and protectiveness toward his mother, as well as to obey her wishes. Dealing with the guilt of killing his mother and her lover, he chooses to preserve her in his mind as he remembers her, with all of her violence and control and everything that comes with it. Norman isolates himself in his own little world, to the extent that other people’s deaths are easy to shrug off, like with Marion and Arbogast; as long as his mother is ‘alive’ in his mind, everything is okay: “Forget the past, let the dead bury the dead. Things were working out fine, and that was the only thing he had to remember” (Bloch). To that end, Psycho shows the psychosis of someone who will easily kill to preserve their little dream world they have established.
Works Cited
Bloch, Robert. Psycho. Essex: Penguin, 1999. Print.
