Psycho and the Priming of the Audience

Transcription

1 : s y a w h t a P w e N g n i b r u t Dis Psycho and the Priming of the Audience Everything in Psycho s first forty minutes gives the audience the impression that Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is the main character and that the narrative will follow her story until its conclusion (DVD still, Psycho). 2 By James Kendrick

2 Psycho and the Priming of the Audience 3 Abstract: This article uses priming effects to explore Psycho s narrative and visual effects on audiences. By taking into account how audiences had been primed by classical Hollywood films, it shows how Psycho s defiance of classical norms helped pave the way for future films by initiating audiences into a new narrative structure. Keywords: audience effects, film violence, Alfred Hitchcock, narrative, priming effects, Psycho When Alfred Hitchcock s Psycho first opened in the summer of 1960, viewers were faced with a new kind of film, and they responded to it in ways that had not been witnessed since the earliest motion picture projections of the Lumières s oncoming train shook and disoriented unsuspecting audiences with excitement and even terror. As Linda Williams explains it, when viewing Psycho, audiences took pleasure in losing the kind of control they had been trained to enjoy in classical narrative cinema (15). This loss of control was manifested in gasps, screams, yells, even running up and down the aisles, all of which was unprecedented (15). Lines began forming around theaters at 8:00 a.m., and theater owners reported people going berserk in the audience and even some who fainted (Rebello 161). Some moviegoers walked out of the film in disgust, theaters were boycotted, and churches and psychiatrists talked of banning the film. As Stephen Rebello puts it, Never before had any director so worked the emotions of the audience like stops on an organ console (162). Shot on a low budget in black and white by a television crew, Psycho was Hitchcock s antithesis to many of the larger-than-life Technicolor thrillers Rear Window (1954), Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) 1 that had immediately preceded it. As psychologically, socially, and narratively complex as those films are, they do not approach Psycho s simple starkness, grotesque violence, and ugly, twisted humanity. Psycho was, in more than one sense, a completely unexpected movie, which was enhanced by several factors: Hitchcock filming the movie in the utmost secrecy; the marketing scheme utilizing a vague trailer that offered no scenes from the film itself only Hitchcock in his familiar, televisual Alfred Hitchcock Presents persona giving a tour of the movie set while speaking in vague generalities about murders and the woman 2 ; and, most importantly, Hitchcock s now-famous insistence that no one be allowed to enter the theater once the film had begun, not even the manager s brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)! (Paramount Pictures). Because of the effect Psycho had on both the cinema and the American culture at large, 3 it has been one of the most written about, analyzed, and scrutinized of Hitchcock s films. With the exception of the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Psycho s infamous shower murder has been deconstructed and analyzed more than any other sequence in motion picture history. As a whole and in its separate parts, Psycho has been explored from literally every possible angle, although the favorite mode of analysis has been some variation of Freudian psychology. It has been analyzed in terms of how semiotics and psychoanalysis affect classic film structure (Hesling); how the replacement of one narrative structure (Marion s) by a second (Norman s) is metaphorically the confrontation of two psychic structures (Bellour); how questions of sexual identity and its containment affect the narrative structure (Klinger); and how identification with the characters relates to the Freudian psyche (Benson), to name just a few. While these are all useful and worthwhile methods of analysis that have shed a great deal of light on the structure and functioning of the various textual and symbolic systems at work within Psycho, they do little to explain exactly why audiences in 1960 experienced such intense reactions to the film. Most of the analysis mentioned above (and much more not mentioned) involves greatly detailed and painstaking deconstruction of the film to get at its psychological roots. And, although those roots are certainly responsible for how the film plays to audiences, they are still precisely that roots meaning most of them are buried far beneath One of the ploys Hitchcock used to enhance the mystery and aura surrounding Psycho was to refuse admittance to the theater once the film had started (DVD still, The Making of Psycho). Copyright 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC DOI: /

3 4 JPF&T Journal of Popular Film and Television Lines of anxious moviegoers began forming outside theaters playing Psycho as early as 8:00 a.m. (DVD still, The Making of Psycho). the film s more obvious surface features to which initial audiences would have first reacted. To offer another approach to understanding the incredible impact Psycho had (and continues to have) on first-time viewers, this study will utilize a broad framework of mass communication theory, most notably priming effects, to explore the film s narrative and visual effects. Movies and the Model of Mass Communication Although movies are a form of mass communication, film scholars rarely utilize traditional mass communication theories to analyze them. This is a strange omission in the research literature because communication theories can be used in numerous ways to explore not only how the textual systems work within the confines of the cinematic narrative, but more importantly, how certain films affect certain audiences. As Jowett and Linton write, The movies are messages generated within a filmic communication system, then, and a full understanding of their nature, function, and effects requires an approach that focuses on the movies as processes of communication (17 18). Mass communication is a phrase that has multiple meanings, but for the purposes of this study it will be conceived in terms of three characteristics first articulated by Charles Wright (1959): (1) it is directed toward relatively large, heterogeneous, and anonymous audiences; (2) messages are transmitted publicly, often timed to reach most audience members simultaneously, and are transient in character; and (3) the communicator tends to be, or to operate within, a complex organization that may involve great expense (qtd. in Severin and Tankard 4). It is apparent that movies in general (and Hitchcock s in particular) fit comfortably within this model, with the exception that many of Hitchcock s films (especially Psycho) are the rare kind that refuse to be transient. Granted, although recent film and media theory has steered away from the idea of movies as mass communication focusing instead on the increasingly fragmented nature of contemporary audiences and their divided attention in terms of not only available films but also the media through which they view those films (theatrical screenings, DVDs and Blu- Ray discs, the Internet, various portable devices, etc.) it is important to remember that, at the time of Psycho s release, the experience of viewing films was a predominantly mass-mediated ex-

4 Psycho and the Priming of the Audience 5 perience. While the new medium of television had been increasingly diverting and splintering audience attention away from the theatrical marketplace throughout the 1950s, average weekly movie attendance in 1960 was around 40 million, which, although down considerably from the industry s high point of approximately 90 million in the late 1940s, is still considerably higher than the average weekly attendance of 26 million in 2007 (Motion Picture Association of America; Robertson). Although film studies research has given significant emphasis to even the most deeply buried and arcane aesthetic, symbolic, and psychoanalytic elements of Hitchcock s films, Hitchcock saw himself first and foremost as an entertainer and not just any entertainer, but a mass entertainer, who arguably achieved his greatest success with Psycho. As he said in an interview with François Truffaut: My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on audiences, and I consider that very important. I don t care about the subject matter; I don t care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. (283, my emphasis) As Robert E. Kapsis shows, Hitchcock and his promotional team made an extra effort to ensure that, even though audiences were splintering in the late 1950s along age and gender lines, all audiences would be attracted to Psycho. Hitchcock appealed to younger audiences with his gimmicky admissions policy that would not allow anyone into the theater after the film had started, and he appealed to older viewers who had fond memories of his films from the classical era by emphasizing that there was no sex and violence for their own sake and that his primary goal was, in his own words, to excite and shock audiences only within the bounds of good taste (59). Thus, Psycho represents as much as possible a film that could cut across the various divides that were separating the mass audience into smaller, specialized audiences, which is what made it so effective in fundamentally shattering conventional expectations. The Priming Effects Model One mass communication theory that holds great potential in analyzing Psycho s profound effects on audiences in 1960 is the priming effects model. For purposes of mass communication research, researchers generally use the psychological model of priming to explain how audiences react to news and events carried by the mass media; however, in a slightly adapted theoretical form, this model can also be instructive for movies by attempting to account for the ways in which media (movies) can affect how consumers activate and use stored knowledge (experience with previous movies) to evaluate new stimuli (Psycho). The priming effects model, in its most simplified form, features three general elements: (1) the knowledge store (or long-term memory), which is composed of a network of constructs about social objects and their attributes, goals, values, and motivations, and affective or emotional states; (2) active thought; and (3) current stimuli, which is the particular external environment with which perceivers are interacting. It is essentially adapted from a cognitiveneoassociative perspective on learning, which explains long-term memory as a series of networks. 4 The strength of the associative pathways between the various constructs (or nodes) in these networks relates to many factors, including contiguity, similarity, and semantic relatedness (Jo and Berkowitz 45). In essence, this means that how a moviegoer reacts to a particular film will be informed by his or her previous experiences with other films. Viewers are primed by the structural and symbolic components of previous films to expect certain things and not expect others and to have certain emotional reactions to typical scenarios and situations. In terms of the cinema, two kinds of priming can be seen at work: internal, or short-term, and external, or long-term. The internal priming works within the various texts of the particular film being viewed. That is, scenes near the beginning of the film can prime the audience for scenes that come later. For instance, in a murder mystery, the introduction of each potential suspect primes the viewer to see those characters as suspects. Later, those emotional pathways created between each character and his or her position as a suspect are either closed down when the narrative makes it clear that he or she is not the criminal, or they are vindicated when he or she is found to be guilty. This is, essentially, from where the enjoyment of mystery and suspense films is derived: the vindication of our suspicions. The external, or long-term, priming comes from a viewer s experience in viewing other movies. That is, the movies we have already seen inform how we view any given film. The narrative structure, in particular, is especially important when considering the effects of Psycho. Moviegoers in 1960 had been primed by classic Hollywood narratives that were traditionally linear with only minimal use of flashbacks, little stylistic embellishment, and a reliance on shot reverse shot dichotomies. When audiences entered a movie theater, they were primed to expect certain things from years of movie-going experience. The expectations derived from these previous experiences include assumptions about how the narrative should be structured, what films typically show and Although film studies research has given significant emphasis to even the most deeply buried and arcane aesthetic, symbolic, and psychoanalytic elements of Hitchcock s films, Hitchcock saw himself first and foremost as an entertainer

5 6 JPF&T Journal of Popular Film and Television do not show in terms of controversial or taboo subject matter, how the camera behaves within the film s narrative confines, and how certain rules within the filmic text govern the existence of characters played by iconic movie stars. Although virtually every aspect of the classic Hollywood paradigm was violated by Psycho, this paper will focus mainly on the effects of the shower murder, in both a narrative and a physical sense. The Narrative Less than a month after Psycho was released nationally, Moira Walsh, a movie critic for America, wrote the following about Hitchcock s intent in the movie: [he] seems to have been more interested in shocking his audience... than in observing the ordinary rules of good film construction. This is a dangerous corner for a gifted movie maker to place himself in (443). As it turned out, it was not a dangerous corner for Hitchcock to be in, but rather a dangerous corner for movie viewers like Walsh, because what she considered a violation of good film construction is now considered a brilliant plot twist that redefined how a suspense film could be structured. Raymond Bellour even goes so far as to call this twist the film s singular genius (314). And, according to Willem Hesling, Quite an abundant literature has stressed the fact that Psycho The fact that Vertigo did not fare particularly well at the box office might indicate that audiences were not ready for such a bizarre narrative rearrangement in the middle of the film; the fact that Psycho did particularly well might indicate that audiences were better prepared this time Vertigo had, to an extent, primed them for such a possibility. not only stands for an important turn in the career of its director, but also that the film in content and style does not completely bare the structure of a traditional Hollywood film... in fact it could be regarded as one of the important transitional films of the last years of the Fifties (185). This notion of Psycho as a transitional film is important when analyzing it in terms of priming effects. What this implies is that Psycho helped to pave the way for future films by initiating audiences into a new narrative structure, one for which they had previously not been primed. The most obvious violation of the traditional Hollywood narrative is the fact that Janet Leigh s character not only dies in the first forty-five minutes of a 106-minute film, but is brutally murdered. This has a twofold effect. First, it marks a sudden and radical departure from what the audience has presumed to be the focus of Psycho s narrative progression. For the first half hour, Psycho quite clearly seems to be about a young, frustrated woman named Marion Crane (Leigh) who cannot marry her lover (John Gavin) because he is in debt, so she steals $40,000 in the naïve hope that they can run away together. Everything in the film up until the murder gives the audience this impression, causing viewers to assume that Marion is the main character and that the narrative will follow her story until its conclusion, which will presumably take place right before the final credits. Hitchcock admitted that the entire first part of the film was merely a red herring to heighten the murder : We purposely made the beginning on the long side, with the bit about the theft and her escape, in order to get the audience absorbed with the question of whether she would or would not be caught. Even that business about the forty thousand dollars was milked to the very end so that the public might wonder what s going to happen to the money (qtd. in Truffaut 269). When Marion is killed, Hitchcock literally rips her character away from the audience as the subject of identification. That she is physically reduced to a corpse in the trunk of a car and is narratively transformed from the character of primary identification to the catalyst of a murder investigation that drives the rest of the plot is upsetting and disorienting to audience members who had invested their identification with her. However, this was not an entirely new narrative device. Hitchcock had achieved something similar two years earlier in Vertigo (1958), in which he led audiences to believe the film was a supernatural mystery only to twist it in the middle and unveil the narrative s true function as a study in obsession. The fact that Vertigo did not fare particularly well at the box office might indicate that audiences were not ready for such a bizarre narrative rearrangement in the middle of the film; the fact that Psycho did particularly well might indicate that audiences were better prepared this time Vertigo had, to an extent, primed them for such a possibility. The second and more shocking effect of killing off Marion Crane was the fact that she was portrayed by Janet Leigh, a beautiful, rising movie starlet who was already a veteran of more than thirty pictures. Although Kim Novak s character supposedly dies near the middle of Vertigo, she comes back to life in another character. To audiences in 1958, this only served to reinforce the iconic nature of a movie star like Novak sure, you can kill her character in the first hour, but she will be back, simply because she s Kim Novak. The same cannot be said for Janet Leigh in Psycho, and it was hardly something for which audiences would have been prepared. View it in terms of the simple outline of the priming effects model: the Janet Leigh construct in the minds of viewers would have been linked with constructs such as movie star, glamour, beauty, and most certainly, character invincibility. Her being killed, especially in the gruesome manner depicted in Psycho, forced the viewers to create new associative pathways for the Janet Leigh and, consequently, the movie star constructs. For the first time, the movie star construct could be associated with not only glamour, but also vulnerability and even gruesome death (although the strength of the pathway between movie star and glamour would still be stronger because it had fifty years and thousands of movies supporting it). However, it is

6 Psycho and the Priming of the Audience 7 still notable that Psycho arguably forced the creation of a disturbing new associative pathway that could be strengthened by later films. Prior to Psycho, there had simply been no reason for this pathway to exist because there had not been any reason to link such seemingly unrelated constructs. Hitchcock said he cast Leigh in the role specifically to make her murder more unexpected (qtd. in Truffaut 269). It could easily be speculated that the long-held dolly shot emerging from Leigh s eye after the murder and the extensive time Hitchcock invested in following Norman Bates s (Anthony Perkins) cleanup of the murder scene functions within the narrative to reassert to a baffled and shocked audience that, yes, Janet Leigh is dead and she s not coming back. This way, Hitchcock allowed the audience time to get settled with that fact before pushing the narrative in a new, Norman-centered direction. Always the master showman and promoter, Hitchcock used the film s advertising campaign to heighten audiences awareness of Leigh s character and her presence in the film by using her scantily clad photo as the centerpoint of the promotional posters. Her name was last both in the opening credits and on the advertisements, but it was printed as large as the other principle actors; her name often appeared on a line by itself, and it had the added emphasis of mentioning her character by name. By singling out the actress and her character in the opening credits and on the advertising, Hitchcock reinforced the previously held assumption that she would be the star of the film. In other words, he intentionally strengthened associative pathways he knew his film would ultimately violate. Audiences associated the relative space given to a movie star on the promotional poster and the size of her name on the marquee with that star s relative importance and longevity within the filmic narrative. Psycho proved that was not necessarily the case. The Shower Murder The murder of Marion Crane in the shower some forty-five minutes into film is the scene that will forever be identified with Psycho. This scene is, in effect, its calling card, and, almost fifty years later, it is still a shocking and jarring sequence, especially when seen for the first time by an uninitiated viewer. Although uninitiated viewers are few and far between at the present date, when the movie was released in 1960, everyone was ill-prepared for what was going to happen. The notion of the audience being unprepared or not primed for the shower scene is the key to understanding its impact. In effect, audience members in 1960 had never witnessed anything like it before; it was, as Rothman describes it, a savage assault unprecedented in its violence (301). The critical reception of Psycho in 1960 is interesting because it illustrates just how ill-prepared the audiences and critics were for the film. 5 When the reviews first came out, they were almost uniformly negative, and even those critics who wrote positively about the movie as a whole still had negative things to say about Marion s murder. Philip T. Hartung of Commonweal called the shower scene one of the bloodiest scenes ever shown in a movie (469); Walsh of America said it was the bloodiest bathtub murder in screen history, and she suggested that Hitchcock s chief sources of subject matter were Krafft-Ebing and the Marquis de Sade (443); an unnamed critic at Time described it as one of the messiest, most nauseating murders ever filmed ( Cinema 51); and Stanley Kauffman, writing for The New Republic, called the two murders in Psycho among the most vicious I have ever seen in films, with Hitchcock employing his considerable skill... to shock us past horrorentertainment into resentment (22). Writing in The Nation, Robert Hatch did little to conceal his feelings about the film: I am shocked, in the sense that I am offended and disgusted (18). Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned, You had better have a pretty strong stomach and be prepared for a couple of grisly shocks when you go see Alfred Hitchcock s Psycho (37). 6 That many critics and audience members were shocked, horrified, and often repulsed to the extent of being angry with Hitchcock for the graphic nature of Marion s murder is understandable, considering the depictions of on-screen murder over the previous sixty years that mainstream Hollywood cinema had primed them to expect. 7 The relationship between Hollywood cinema and its spectators is crucial when considering the shower scene in Psycho because, before that scene, there had been a sort of tacit agreement between filmmakers and audiences that movies would not be gratuitous in their displays of violence. Although murder was always seen as a nasty, duplicitous, immoral act (all of this demanded by the Production Code, the industry s written policy of selfregulation), classic Hollywood cinema had developed a complex system of visual poetics to keep the camera from depicting the physical reality of those acts (Prince). Gunshot wounds were often invisible and, if they did bleed, it was only enough to allow the audience to know where the wound was located. More brutal acts like strangulation (e.g., Double Indemnity, 1944), dismemberment (e.g., Rear Window), or bodily mutilation (e.g., The Searchers, 1956) took place off-screen and were referred to only in dialogue. Graphic violence could be a necessary plot element in classic Hollywood, it just could not be shown. According to the priming effects model, the knowledge store or longterm memory of audience members would essentially be filled with scenes such as those listed above, which kept explicit or unnecessary violence offscreen. In effect, in each viewer s network of cinematic long-term memory, the brutal violence construct would be linked to the what s kept off-screen construct, giving each viewer the false perception of safety from having to witness such violence directly. However, the associative pathway between the two constructs would be forever altered by the shower sequence in Psycho, which forced viewers to connect graphically violent acts with graphically violent onscreen depictions of the physical reality of those acts. The force and suddenness of the introduction of a new associative pathway was intense enough that it lasted with

7 8 JPF&T Journal of Popular Film and Television Of the thirty-four shots in the shower murder scene, arguably six are from Marion s point of view however, an astounding sixteen are from Mother/Norman s, which means that the viewer is forced into the uncomfortable position of alternating between the killer s viewpoint and the victim s (DVD still, Psycho). considerable intensity for the duration of the film. As Hitchcock told Truffaut: It [the shower scene] is the most violent scene of the picture. As the film unfolds, there is less violence because the harrowing memory of this initial killing carried over to the suspenseful passages that come later (227). The spectacle of Marion s murder attacks the viewer in two ways: aurally with Bernard Hermann s shrieking violins, Leigh s ample vocal chords, and the hideously audible sound of the knife piercing Marion s body seven separate times; and visually, with its graphic display of physical violence created largely by the montage editing. The murder itself is composed of thirty-four separate shots, from the first time Mother/Norman is glimpsed through the shower curtain to the shot that shows her/him leaving the bathroom. However, there is an additional component to the shower murder that scholars often overlook in shot-by-shot analyses: the majority of the shots are from either Marion s or Mother/Norman s point of view. Of the thirty-four shots, arguably six are from Marion s point of view and, more importantly, an astounding sixteen are from Mother/Norman s. This is notable in the context of priming analysis because no movie before Psycho had forced the viewer into such an uncomfortable position, alternating violently between the killer s viewpoint and the victim s. While there were certainly films of the classical Hollywood era that used point-of-view shots to depict violence (e.g., the shooting of Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon, 1941), no mainstream film had featured such sustained visual identification with such a brutal act of murder. If graphic violence had traditionally been kept off-screen in Hollywood films, Hitchcock did one better than just showing what had been previously unviewed: He forced the viewer right into the middle of the violence as both the person suffering and the person inflicting the pain. This, more than anything else, was an aspect of cinematic power that mainstream audiences in 1960 were not prepared to endure, and it resulted in the mass emotion Hitchcock so desperately wanted to evoke. By refusing to play by the rules preordained by five decades of classical Hollywood narrative, Psycho, in effect, helped to open up new possibilities for the movies by allowing them to take advantage of these new associative pathways, which means that the conventional understanding of Psycho s influence on the cinema has been frequently understated. Although slasher films like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) are the movies most readily associated as being heavily influenced by Psycho, Hitchcock s lowbudget masterpiece has arguably had more effect on such varied films as The Crying Game (1992), The Usual Suspects (1995), The Sixth Sense (1999), Memento (2001), Identity (2003), and Secret Window (2004), each of which at some point in their narrative radically breaks with audience expectations, usually via what has often been described as a twist ending. Like the narrative ruptures in Psycho, particularly the murder of Marion, these twists in more contemporary films are fundamentally

8 Psycho and the Priming of the Audience 9 unexpected and have a disorienting effect because they force the viewer to resituate him- or herself in relation to the film narrative. They work so well on unsuspecting audiences because, prior to each twist, these films rely on the assumptions audiences have constructed over the years about the nature of film narrative, whether it be trusting the veracity of diegetic narration in The Usual Suspects or assuming that the protagonist in The Sixth Sense is actually alive or that the antagonist in Secret Window really exists. Like Psycho, such films, regardless of genre, willfully alter the narrative contract with the audience and force the creation of new associate pathways. Thus, they are Psycho s true descendants. Notes 1. The majority of these films used complex technical devices beyond the traditional Hitchcockian aesthetics of montage, sound, and camera placement that were used to such great effect in Psycho. For instance, Dial M for Murder utilized the then-popular gimmick of being in 3-D, and Vertigo used eyecatching visual effects and animation, most notably in Scottie s dream sequence. There was also a vast difference in cost. Hitchcock s movie that directly preceded Psycho, North by Northwest, had cost $3.3 million whereas Psycho cost $800,000 to make. 2. Even the trailers accompanying the film s re-release in 1964 were vague so as to keep in the dark anyone not familiar with the film s narrative. They showed only unidentifiable snippets of the film (a close-up of Perkins s eye looking through the peep hole or the close-up of Leigh s hand as she grabs the shower curtain), followed by a quick shot of a woman in the shower screaming (not Janet Leigh, by the way, but Vera Miles in a blond wig) as the word PSYCHO rapidly advances in size from the middle of the screen. The main point of these trailers was to emphasize that it was the movie TV did not dare show. The trailers also continued to insist that no one would be seated after the movie began. 3. According to Rebello, Psycho was cited as the locus of many serious and frivolous phenomena, including a rise in crime, a decrease in the sale of opaque shower curtains, a rise in violence toward women, and a decrease in motel business (172). Whatever the effects of Psycho in the subconscious of the popular culture, one thing is for sure: taking a shower would never be the same again for many people. 4. Theories of associatism, which led to neoassociatism, have existed in one form or another for more than 2,000 years. For a historical overview of associatism, see Anderson and Bower. 5. According to screenwriter Joseph Stefano, Hitchcock told him he felt the critics panned the film because they were upset that they had not been allowed to see special screenings; in fact, one critic told Stefano that s why he gave it a bad review (Rebello 164). However, although the barring of critics from special screenings and entering the theater late probably did set them in a foul mood, it is much more likely that the effects of Psycho on them were just as strong and unsettling as on regular audience members. There is little reason why critics would have been better prepared for Psycho than anyone else. 6. Crowther s comments are particularly interesting because they imply an assumption on his part that his readers would appreciate a warning about what was to come, which is, in a sense, an attempt to prime potential viewers for the violence to defuse some of its power. 7. Two additional examples of just how angry and offended some viewers and critics were the actor and playwright Charles Bennett told Hitchcock that the film s cruelty indicated the director was a sadistic son of a bitch, and an English critic said the film was the work of a barbaric sophisticate (Spoto 462). Works Cited Anderson, John R., and Gordan H. Bower, eds. Human Associative Memory: A Brief Edition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, Print. Bellour, Raymond. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion. A Hitchcock Reader. Ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague. Ames: Iowa State UP, Print. Benson, Peter. Identification and Slaughter. CineAction 12 (1988): Print. Cinema: The New Pictures. Rev. of Psycho. Time (27 June 1960): 51. Print. Crowther, Bosley. Psycho. Rev. of Psycho. The New York Times 17 June 1960: 37. Print. Hartung, Phillip T. The Screen: All that a Mother Can Mean. Commonweal (1 Sept. 1960): Print. Hatch, Robert. Films. Rev. of Psycho. The Nation (2 July 1960): Print. Hesling, Willem. Classic Cinema and the Spectator. Literature Film Quarterly 15 (1987): Print. Jo, Eunkyung, and Leonard Berkowitz. A Priming Effect Analysis of Media Influences: An Update. Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. Ed. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, Print. Jowett, Garth, and James M. Linton. Movies as Mass Communication. London: Sage, Print. Kapsis, Robert E. Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, Print. [N]o movie before Psycho had forced the viewer into such an uncomfortable position, alternating violently between the killer s viewpoint and the victim s. Kauffman, Stanley. Several Sons, Several Lovers. Rev. of Psycho. The New Republic 143.9/10 (29 Aug. 1960): Print. Klinger, Barbara. Psycho: The Institutionalization of Female Sexuality. A Hitchcock Reader. Ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague. Ames: Iowa State UP, Print. Morrison, Ken. The Technology of Homicide. CineAction 22 (1995): Print. Motion Picture Association of America. Theatrical Market Statistics: Sept Web. < Theatrical-Market-Statistics.pdf>. Paramount Pictures, prod. The Care and Handling of Psycho. Paramount Pictures, Training film. Available on the special ed. DVD of Psycho from Universal Pictures.. The Making of Psycho. Paramount Pictures, Available on the special ed. DVD of Psycho from Universal Pictures. Prince, Stephen. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, Print. Rebello, Stephen. Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. New York: Dembner, Print. Robertson, Patrick. Film Facts. New York: Billboard Books, Print. Rothman, William. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, Print. Severin, Werner J., and James W. Tankard, Jr. Communication Theories: Origins, Methods, and Uses in the Mass Media. 4th ed. New York: Longman, Print. Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Ballantine Books, Print. Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. Rev. ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, Print. Walsh, Moira. Films: Psycho. Rev. of Psycho. America (July 1960): 443. Print. Williams, Linda. Learning to Scream. Sight and Sound 12 (1994): Print. James Kendrick is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

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