In class we will be watching Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock and many questions started to pop up in my mind. I wanted to know, what is wrong with Norman Bates? I’ve seen the movie and it is truly scary and terrifying to see this man suddenly turn into his mother and kill, but what caused his madness? Serious mother issues? We see how in the movie it explains how Norman has been emotionally abused by his overprotective mother and how she hides him from any contact with other women, but does that justify his illness? Does this justify why he murders his mother and her lover, and then kill year later? Did Hitchcock leave a detail out to make the audience think a little more? I know that traumatic situations, such as sexual abuse, sometimes lead to people developing multiple personality disorder, but why does Norman Bates develop this illness to repress the memory of him killing his beloved mother? I think that he knew all along what he was doing and he killed his mother and her lover out of anger, that he knew he had urges to fulfill and in order to not be caught/have an excuse to act on these urges, he used his emotional abuse to kill innocent people. Perhaps I am going out on a limb here, but it is fascinating to develop different theories as to why and what made Norman Bates psycho, because I don’t think he is psycho, I just think he is a cold hearted killer.
I asked myself the same question when watching Psycho. However, I have a different theory. You mentioned that Norman might have been emotionally abused by his overprotective mother as she often hides him from contact with other women. I think the abuse might have been sexual, and Norman and his mother actually had an inappropriate relationship. Maybe he killed his mother and her lover out of jealousy and anger. How could she keep him from other women, but he couldn’t keep her from other men? I might also be going out on a limb, but it’s just my theory of why Norman is the way he is.
I think that Norman’s “illness” definitely stems from his mother. She has a strong influence on him and her opinions about women are engrained in his mind. I’ve heard that Norman Bate’s character was inspired by the murderer Ed Gein, whose relationship with his mother was similar. His mother taught him that all women were products of the devil. After her death, he had a hard time coping. At one point he even considered a sex change. It is said that he would take the bodies of middle aged women who looked like his mother from their graves. When he was discovered their were multiple female body parts found in his home. He admitted to making a skin suit to try to look like a woman, this is similar to Norman having the desire to dress up and become his mother.
“Did Hitchcock leave a detail out to make the audience think a little more?”
In Bret Easton Ellis’ book American Psycho, the main character Patrick Bateman, himself a serial killer, is asked to comment about his own thoughts on women while at lunch with a group of his conversing Wall Street coworkers. He begins answering the question by saying, “You know what Ed Gein said about women?” Only Patrick Bateman goes on to actually paraphrase the following Ed Kemper interview:
INTERVIEwR: What do you think, now, when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?
KEMPER: One side of me says, ‘Wow, what an attractive chick. I’d like to talk to her, date her.’ The other side of me says, ‘I wonder how her head would look on a stick.’
Kemper resembles Bates in many ways, perhaps their origins are most telling as Kemper displayed what has become typical sociopathic behavior from a young age.
According to murderpedia, “Kemper tortured and killed animals, acted out sexual rituals with his sisters’ dolls and once said that, in order to kiss a teacher he had a crush on, he would have to kill her. Worsening the situation was Kemper’s mother, who constantly berated and humiliated her son and often made him sleep in a locked basement due to a fear that he would molest his sisters…. Kemper’s mother Clarnell apparently suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder which resulted in her rages and abuse against her son. He would often go hunting for victims after arguing with his mother… In April 1973, Kemper battered his mother to death with a pick hammer while she slept. He decapitated her, raped her headless body and used her head as a dartboard, after putting her vocal cords in the garbage disposal, but the machine could not break the tough tissue down and regurgitated it back into the sink. “That seemed appropriate,” Ed said after his arrest, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.””
In the transgressive horror-satire novel American Psycho, Patrick Bateman’s name appears to be a not so subtle allusion to Norman Bates. If Ed Gein is Norman Bates’ supposed inspiration, it is even more curious to see author Bret Easton Ellis’ protagonist mistakenly attribute the quote to Ed Gein rather than Ed Kemper. Lastly, what I find most fascinating about Ed Kemper’s origin story, and Bates’ for that matter, is that Kemper was active years after the release of Psycho, yet Bates’ and Kemper’s origins are startlingly similar.