A perfect film, absolutely perfect and you wouldn't dare argue otherwise

You are correct, sir.

I'll argue, the last scene is out of place.

I like the remake.

Yep. I was liking it a lot right up until that scene. Totally destroyed the film for me.

It's pretty much the same movie, shot by shot.

Didn't destroy the movie for me but it certainly didn't have to be there. If there's one thing I hate in movies it's a didactic ending.

And the remake sucked.

except for the fact that: Vaughn is nowhere near Perkins as Norman Bates, the new house isn´t nearly as creepy as the original, colour doesn´t add anything to the movie, in fact Hitchcock specified his reasons for the movie to be shot in B&W...and there´s probably a lot more

agreed.

The last scene with Norman staring into the camera while his 'condition' is being discussed?

I love that scene. How is it out of place? If that is what you are talking about.

it crosses the line from showing to telling and as such upsets the illusion of reality the film had, to that point, so successfully perpetuated

I can see your point.

I think the scene is quite chilling, though. The look on Norman's face as the camera pans in on him is so insane. You can just see the lunacy brewing behind those eyes.

i'll need to see the film again to discuss much further than this; it's been probably six or eight years.
As good as this one is, it was never one of my favorite Hitchcocks.

I don't really have a problem with the final shot of Norman. What I DO have a problem with are the five minutes prior to it. After we just watched the movie, this detective goes on and on explaining in detail everything we just saw, destroying any hint of subtlety the film may have had. This is the type of thing that frustrates me so much about Hitchcock. He often throws in one thing (usually at the end) that completely ruins his movies for me.

And don't give me that "He had to explain for his 1960 audience!" crap. I've seen plenty of films from '60 and before that were subtle and didn't feel the need to spoon-feed everything to their viewers.

Here's a paper I just wrote on the film for my theory class. It probably could have been like 3x as long but the maximum was 5 pages (thank god).

Suture and the Implications of Identification in Psycho


The one hundred year history of cinema has been marked with seismic revolutions and subtle revelations. Cinema was conceived as a scientific extension of photography and became an integral aspect of life for generations of people. Most importantly, people went to the movies to have a better understanding of themselves. It is an accurate representation of the human experience that has no equal. Through invention, its technicalities constantly evolve and through filmic construction its possibilities of portraying reality are essentially without limit. Occasionally, a film arrives that is both able to reach audiences on massive levels and push the boundaries of human perception. Examples range from the most artistically aware countercultural conceptions of Godard to mainstream box-office sensations such as Spielberg’s Jaws. Alfred Hitchcock and his creations have an epochal place in film history as well. Hitchcock intentionally distorted the lines of the Classical Hollywood formula and changed an era’s worth of perceptions towards cinema. In his masterpiece Psycho, he intentionally foregrounds the voyeuristic aspects of cinematic viewing and the result was not only a sensation at the theater, but a redefinition of the possibilities of filmic construction.
Despite being parodied and absorbed into pop-culture in the last five decades, the film has lost none of its kinetic energy or sheer terror. Psycho marked a significant break from the content and form of Classical Hollywood cinema. Coming off a potential blockbuster in 1959’s North by Northwest, Hitchcock retreated into darker, more ambiguous territory by making a cheap, Freudian-influenced character study. His technique is unlike his other work. By significantly altering the viewer’s gaze and relation to the fictional characters, the director offers a jarring transition into realms of experience unseen at the time for mainstream movie-goers.
Kaja Silverman’s article, “From the Subject of Semiotics [On Suture]” presents the argument that upon an analysis of Psycho, a disruption of the Classic Hollywood context is present in the director’s presentation of viewer identification and relation. Silverman refers to the use of “sutures,” cinematic bindings specifically used in traditional shot-reverse-shot techniques that lock the viewer into the fictionalized ideologies of a film. “[Alain] Miller defines suture as that moment when the subject inserts itself into the symbolic register in the guise of a signifier and in so doing gains meaning at the expense of being” (Silverman 199). Essentially, the suture theory offers the observer access into the cinematic world through an identification process by the use of opposing camera angles that have been strung together on film. The suture can be applied to subconscious levels in which the viewer is first presented a frame or an image. The meaning is not necessarily hidden, but concealed, within the workings of shot construction. Upon viewing the frame, the viewer identifies with the subject in the composition. However, the camera presents the problem of an unknown spectator whose eyes in which the viewer is observing. In the shot-reverse-shot formula of narrative fiction, the angle has been altered to view the space previously observed from, thus absorbing the viewer into the film’s text. Daniel Dayan states in “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,”
“What happens in systemic terms is this: the absent-one of shot one is an element of the code that is attracted into the message by means of shot two. When shot two replaces shot one, the absent-one is transferred from the level of enunciation to the level of fiction. As a result of this, the code effectively disappears and the ideological effect of the film is thereby secured” (Dayan 115).

Appropriately enough, the viewer of the traditional classical formula is allowed the stability of knowing and relating to the subjects or objects within the frame by the suture process.
Psycho subverts this but does not abandon it entirely. Hitchcock uses the shot-reverse-shot at critical moments in the film to draw the viewer into the scene, but then ruptures the formula throughout the narrative. Silverman states, “Finally, Psycho obliges the viewing subjects to make abrupt shifts in identification. These identifications are in binary opposition to each other; thus the viewing subject finds itself inscribed into the cinematic discourse as victim, and at the next juncture as victimizer” (Silverman 203). Psycho explores the capability of people to commit immoral acts.
Marion, the woman who is Psycho’s initial focus, is entrusted to deposit a large sum of money at the bank but instead flees town so she can marry a man whom she is currently engaged in an affair with. Hitchcock allows the spectator to make an identification with her, as well as with the money she plans on stealing. As she packs in her bedroom, the camera gazes back and forth between the money and Marion, implicating the viewer in the crime about to be committed. At essence, Psycho is a series of immoral explorations. The opening shot moves through a window into a cheap motel where Marion meets her affair; the camera gazes repeatedly on the money-containing envelope; many crucial scenes occur in private bedrooms; and eventually a murder is witnessed from inside a shower. The shot-reverse-shot technique is used to entrap Marion repeatedly in the position of a thief, but also implicates the observer in her behavior despite the desire to remain superior.
Silverman comments on suture on page 205, “The whole operation of suture can be made more rather than less irresistible when the field of the speaking subject is continually implied” (Silverman 205). But Hitchcock actually uses the film’s narrative to cast a much larger suture on the audience, one that involves us with both the role of victim and then again with the sadistic voyeur. First we witness and engage with Marion’s crime; then we identify with her eventual killer Norman Bates. Marion spends the night at the Bates Motel, converses with Norman Bates who reveals himself to be a bird-stuffing taxidermist (not only a hint at Norman’s dead mother’s corpse which the spectator later witnesses, but a perverse chauvinistic sexual reference), decides to return the money, and then is murder by a shadowy figure in the shower. The shower scene remains one of the most intrusive in cinema, as the camera actually places the viewer in an intimate position with a character right before her death which makes the murder doubly as violent. Hitchcock never pulls away, showing every stab made and her eventual fall to the shower floor. He furthers the transition with a shot that moves into the bloody shower drain (which mimics the voyeuristic tendencies of the earlier camera work) and then away from Marion’s open gaze as she lays dead on the floor. Then it moves out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, and onto the table where the money lays, drawing a correlation between the money and her fatal error in judgment. Silverman states, “What sutures us at this juncture is our fear from being cut off from the narrative. Our investment in the fiction is made manifest through the packet of money which provides an imaginary bridge from Marion to the next observer” (Silverman 207). Following the murder in the shower, the observer lacks the ability to identify with a character on the screen.
At roughly one-third of the way through the narrative with the main character dead, we are forced to identify briefly with the murderer, Norman Bates. The camera watches as Bates meticulously cleans Marion’s shower and room then disposes of her body. He places the body in her car and then drives it into a swamp. The camera watches the car sink slowly, then cuts back to Norman as it fails to completely submerge. Since the viewer has now been placed in the position of Norman, we watch and hope for the car to sink as he does. The camera then cuts back to a darkened Norman as he pauses, and then onto the car again as it continues to fall under the surface. Within a matter of minutes, Hitchcock realigned the viewer’s perceptions to the opposite ends of the moralistic spectrum. More than anything he wanted the average American film viewer to realize that they are capable of directly participating in atrocious acts.
Essentially, Silverman makes the argument that Psycho has proven that the system of suture is not relegated to the shot-reverse-shot technique alone but to multiple elements of the film, narrative being the most important. “Narrative, however, represents a much more indispensable part of the system of suture. It transforms cinematic space in dramatic place, thereby providing the viewer with not just a vantage but a subject position” (Silverman 208). Unsurprisingly, Psycho was groundbreaking in terms of the Classical Hollywood tradition and remains to this day an important step in the art form’s current incarnation.

not proofread yet

The last scene of the movie is Marion's car being pulled out of the water.