Historical and Institutional Influences in Psycho

The film Psycho took its influences from numerous sources, more so than most films at that time. Hitchcock himself gives his own personal touch to the film. As said by Michael J. Lewis in The Canonical Hitchcock, “the basic architecture of Hitchcock’s storytelling remained the same, turning on the motifs of guilt, suspicion, and fear”. And it’s true; his many films do share these themes, and Psycho is no different. His experience with policemen in his early life also has an impact in early scenes in Psycho, with the imposing police officers. But it goes deeper than that.

“His later films would often hinge on this precise scenario: a character who bears a crucial object or item whose meaning is withheld from him, but not the audience.” The money, left in Marion’s car when Norman erases the evidence of her murder, inevitably leads the private investigator and Marion’s sister to the scene of the crime, unknowing of what occurred. In addition to all of this, the way in which the film is cut is influenced by his own personal technique. As said in The Canonical Hitchcock, “his most radical contribution was in the depiction of thought...By showing us a sequence of images, he leads us through a careful sequence of thoughts so that we come to the same conclusion as the protagonist”. And this can be shown in one of the first scenes, when the camera pans slowly from Marion in her apartment, to the money she was assigned to keep, to the bags being packed on her bed. From this we can see exactly what is going on in the characters mind.
Moving on to another tack, why is this film so important? And not just as a hallmark of film history, but to the people of the 1960’s who saw the film for the first time? Well, for the time in which it was made, it was revolutionary. Its showing of violence, having the supposed main character killed off midway through the film, and a generally unique plot made quite a stir when it was first showed. And how about what it meant for the studio system? By making his own independent studio Hitchcock was able to work independently of the censors and work freely with Psycho, allowing him to add to it the things that made it such a blockbuster.