Robert Bloch’s Psycho

Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho dates from 1959. A year later it would be the basis for one of Hitchcock’s most famous movies. I like Bloch as a writer so I can’t offer any adequate explanation for the fact that I had never read the novel until now.

There is one problem here. If you’ve seen the movie (and I’ve seen it several times) then you know something very important about Mother right from the start. I think it’s obvious that Bloch expects the reader to have very strong suspicions by the halfway point but it’s also obvious that he doesn’t intend for the reader to be absolutely certain. When you know for a certainty right from the beginning it does inevitably lessen the enjoyment of the novel quite a bit.

The movie followed the novel very closely, but with a couple of subtle but important differences of focus.

I never assume that everyone has seen a movie even when it’s as well-known as Psycho so I’m going to try to avoid spoilers.

Mary Crane (she becomes Marion Crane in the movie) has stolen a great deal of money from her boss. It’s Friday. Nobody will know the money is gone until the banks open on Monday (banks being closed on weekends was always a useful plot device in crime thrillers of the past). Mary has covered her tracks well. She has switched cars several times. Now she’s lost so she’s very grateful when she sees the motel Vacancy sign. She needs to eat, and to sleep.

The motel manager is a slightly odd guy named Norman Bates. He lives in the house behind the motel with his mother.

The first thing Mary needs to do is to change her clothes. Of course she doesn’t know that Norman is watching her undress through a hole in the wall.

After having dinner (which Norman was kind enough to prepare for her) she really needs to take a shower.

Other people will become involved. People like insurance investigator Arbogast. He wants to recover the stolen money. He’s prepared to offer Mary a deal. If she returns the money no charges will be laid. Mary’s boyfriend Sam Loomis and her kid sister Lila will also become involved. They all want to find Mary.

Hitchcock made a very daring narrative choice in the film. Something happens a third of the way through that you don’t expect to happen at that stage. This also happens in the novel but in the novel it’s no big deal. It’s the kind of thing you find in plenty of crime novels. It’s a very big deal in the movie because Hitchcock very cleverly misleads us into thinking that a particular character is the central character but the central character is actually someone else. It’s just a slight change of emphasis but it’s enough to demonstrate Hitchcock’s genius.

The movie made a few interesting changes. In the novel Norman Bates is 40, very overweight and balding. Apart from his other issues he is clearly very physically unappealing to women and that’s a major part of his problem. You get the feeling that all it would have taken would have been for one woman to go on a date with him and then he might have had a chance of avoiding all the subsequent disasters. By casting Tony Perkins, a fairly good-looking actor with a great deal of charm, Hitchcock emphasises Norman’s tragedy. He is not a hopeless loser because women find him repulsive. He really didn’t have to end up as a hopeless loser.

This makes him a tragic oddly sympathetic monster which was presumably Hitchcock’s intention. And Hitchcock’s instincts were correct. The movie packs more of an emotional punch. All Norman needs is to find the confidence to actually approach a woman. If he did, she might well go out with him. But he never does find that confidence and tragedy ensues.

It’s intriguing that Brian De Palma made a similar change when he adapted Stephen King’s Carrie. In King’s novel Carrie is very overweight which emphasises her inability to attract interest from boys. In De Palma’s movie Carrie is no super-babe but she’s kinda cute in her own quirky way. When Tommy takes her to the prom he really isn’t embarrassed to be seen with her, or to be seen dancing with her and kissing her. Carrie goes so close to making it.

Psycho is very much one of those stories that requires the reader (or the viewer in the case of the movie) to take the wild and wacky theories of psychiatry seriously. Back in 1960 people actually did take this stuff seriously. It’s also a story that really doesn’t work once you know the solution, and that’s an even bigger problem with the novel. At least the movie has Hitchcock’s stunning visual set-pieces. Psycho is far from being my favourite Hitchcock movie and the novel really doesn’t do much for me at all. Both the novel and the movie are greatly weakened by having things over-explained in a very unconvincing fashion. Worth reading perhaps if you’re a very keen fan of the movie.