When “Psycho” first came out in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock caused quite a stir by demanding a “no late admission” policy to his audience during the screenings of the movie. This decision was taken by the director in order to avoid spoiling the plot of “Psycho”; for the same reason, journalists and critics were also only allowed to watch the movie with the rest of the audience. Hitchcock was very particular about not giving any hints, so that in 1959 there were rumors he burned every available copy of Psycho, the book which inspired the movie, to prevent anyone from discovering the plot. This intent of his is also noticeable throughout “Psycho”: Norman (Anthony Perkins), the main character, is not shown until 20 minutes in the movie, and the presence …show more content…
The camera starts separating Norman and Marion by alternating between shots of him and her to follow the rhythm of the dialogue: as she is eating he is shown to be clearly nervous, stuttering on his sentences and playing with his hands. While Marion is the apparent portray of confidence, from her pose while eating to her sarcastic reply to Norman’s joke (“And you’d know, of course”), he seems to be a shy boy who does not really know how to talk to people. As the audience is slowly charmed by this innocent and almost sweet side of him, he reveals that his hobby “is stuffing things,” birds in particular because they are “kind of passive to begin with.” With these few lines already the director is subtly hinting at another level of reading behind the immediately apparent one. The seemingly innocuous similitude between Marion and a bird is not easy to ignore, especially given that the same term could be used, even then, as a derogatory definition of a woman. The line Perkins follows up with also contrasts vividly with the portray of Norman until now in the eye of the audience: even if “it’s more than a hobby” is justified by him stating he uses taxidermy to fill time, and not pass it, the sentence still appears as