On Being Norman (Bates): Performance and Inner Life in (Alfred) Hitchcock's Psycho
1997; Issue: 44 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoI would like to offer tentative exploration of performance in Alfred Hitchocock's Psycho (1960), concentrating on Anthony Perkins in the role of Norman Bates. This is far from straightforward. For one thing, Hitchcock is famous for his dismissive attitude to the importance of acting in creating our sense of characters in his films, adhering to the conclusions reached by Kuleshov to the effect that audiences use clues around an actor's appearance (such as the imagery of adjoining shots) to project onto the character their own expectations and responses, the actor's expressions having little to do with their readings. Although Hitchcock would be reluctant to admit it, such clues may not even be primarily his, as television programme on the music of Bernard Herrmann attempted to demonstrate by showing part of the sequence where Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) drives towards the Bates Motel both with and without the accompanying music, our sense of Marion's state of mind very different in each case. Nevertheless, it has also been generally acknowledged, despite Hitchcock's apparent belittlement of actors, that there are fine and complex performances in his work, and that Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates is one of them. If disentangling Hitchcock's and Perkins's contributions from each other presents one sort of challenge, there are further difficulties in distinguishing amongst the various performances at stake, given that Norman himself `performs' number of roles, both as himself and as his mother, and to number of different audiences (us, Marion, Arbogast/Martin Balsam, Sam/John Gavin and Lila/Vera Miles, the Sheriff/John Mclntire, and - in their conversations together, where he plays both roles - his `mother' and himself). There are complications too, perhaps, in the fact that the roles played by Norman exceed those played by Perkins: As Stephen Rebello points out (in Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Mandarin Paperback edition, London, 1992), the voice we hear as `Mother' does not belong to Perkins, but is spliced and blended from a mixture of different voices (p.133), nor is Perkins the figure who murders Marion in the shower: Stuntwoman Margo Epper portrayed Mother in the sequence. An amused Tony Perkins recalled: The crew always referred to Mother and Norman as totally seperate people (p.113). However, such details need not detain us, since it is commonplace that stand-ins are used from time to time, and this seems similar sort of case (if more heavily foregrounded in the case of the voice). Still, we shall need to be careful not to attribute the construction of `Mrs Bates' to Perkins himself, even though we may reasonably attribute it to Norman. My interest is in the link between an actor's performance and the `inner life' of the enacted character. In other words, in the present case, what conclusions can we draw about Norman's awareness, motivations, and feelings from the performance details available to us? What does Norman know? What does he want? What does it feel like to be Norman? Yet another complication in this very complicated film is that what we know, as opposed to what Norman knows, is radically different on first and second viewing, given the suppression of our knowledge that Norman's mother is dead until very late in the film. Does this change the way we think about Norman on subsequent viewings? Clearly, in some sense, it does, yet oddly enough not in terms of the questions just posed (his knowledge, motives and feelings). If Norman is deceiving us, it is only because he is deceiving himself, or, rather, his deceptions are to prevent his `mother' from being found out for Marion's murder, so what he tries to hide from Arbogast, Sam and Lila, but not from us (that Marion was at the motel, that she--and, later, Arbogast--are dead), is product of the larger illusion, which we share with him, that his mother is still alive. In contrast to his deceptiveness towards those investigating Marion's disapearance later, with Marion herself he is largely truthful, at least in terms of what he himself believes to be true. …
Referência(s)