Hitchcock wanted his film murders to affect viewers in the same way that reading about his favorite domestic murderers had always affected him, disrupting the humdrum of middle-class daily life. This is evident in his American work, too, in which a phalanx of fatally charismatic men from respectable backgrounds seek to reshape the world in their own vision, using murder as their tool. “I certainly admire people who do things,” says Robert Walker as Bruno in Strangers on a Train (1951) while plotting a murderous scheme that he thinks will elevate him above ordinary people. Guy, a handsome tennis player, expresses horror at Bruno’s suggestion that they each commit a murder on behalf of the other, causing Bruno to plead “what is a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead.” When Joseph Cotten was struggling to get inside his serial killer character in Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock said it was simple: “To him, the elimination of his widows is a dedication, an important sociological contribution to civilization. Remember, when John Wilkes Booth jumped to the stage in Ford’s Theatre after firing that fatal shot, he was enormously disappointed not to receive a standing ovation.” Hitchcock may have been appalled by real-life violence, but he understood the urge to be publicly known for one’s audacious brilliance, to subvert reality, with an audience gasping in thrilled disbelief.
As an artistic gesture, the shower scene echoed an event sixty-six years earlier, when Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé were published, and the world got its first shocking glimpse of John the Baptist’s severed head dripping thick ropes of black blood onto the milk-white page. Fittingly, in Robert Bloch’s novel, the shower murder isn’t a frenzy of stabbing as it is in the film, but a decapitation, the victim’s head sliced off by the blade of Bates’s butcher knife.
Wilde and Beardsley were prominent among a generation of late nineteenth-century artists who rejected realistic depictions of the natural world in favor of fantasies, dreams, and nightmares, locating beauty in disorder and disharmony. Their work fed the shadows and monsters of German expressionist cinema, which in turn had a profound impact on Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock publicly acknowledged the debt. He said that in his youth he had been so taken with symbolism, the movement of painters that included Paul Gaugin and Gustav Klimt, that their canvases spilled into his dreams. The aestheticism of Wilde, itself directly influenced by symbolism, had a similarly strong impact. The Picture of Dorian Gray was one of Hitchcock’s favorite novels, and Wilde’s dry witticisms, logical inversions, and agreeable iconoclasm all manifest themselves in Hitchcock’s work.
The evidence of Wilde’s influence seems to have been in Harold Hayes’s mind when he wrote to Hitchcock a few months after the release of Psycho, asking for a contribution from Hitchcock that would unpack for his readers “those aspects of your technique which give violence a certain sophistication in this day and age” for a forthcoming edition of Esquire magazine. Under Hayes’s guidance, Esquire would become an important voice in the sixties, tapping into the cultural ferment of that decade, and he apparently recognized earlier than most critics that Psycho was more than a scary movie. It was, he believed, a marvelous example of Hitchcock’s elevated depictions of violence in a world after Auschwitz and Hiroshima; “people have undergone so much in the past 30 years that it takes a particular kind of genius today to shock them at all.” The resulting article provided Hitchcock’s tips for how to conduct the perfectly sophisticated murder, in distinctly Wildean terms, ironic and playfully goading. On selecting a victim, Hitchcock suggests that “for amusement, choose from among the pillars of the community; for whimsey, have a go at The Common Man.”
In certain ways, Hayes was surely right. Psycho was the climax of a creative life spent exploring imaginative, novel, often humorous depictions of cruelty, domination, and obsession. Even so, it seems wrong to cite Psycho as the apotheosis of Hitchcock’s “sophistication.” Though Hitchcock was adamant that the shower scene was no more violent than any of his other murders because it was impressionistic, it was a disingenuous view. The whole point had been to film something that the viewer experienced as the most shocking act of bloodshed; the fact that this end was achieved by technical ingenuity is neither here nor there. On top of the terror and agony that Marion Crane suffers, she is humiliated, slaughtered while defenseless and naked, and done so in a way that is also meant to mock the audience. We’ve spent forty minutes looking at the world through her eyes, listening to her thoughts, feeling her anxiety, and hoping that she’ll somehow get away with her theft of forty thousand dollars that began the whole story. We thought we were with her for the long haul—and suddenly she’s butchered and tossed away like the carcass of a Christmas turkey. The still image of Leigh’s screaming face, her wet hair stuck slick to her head, is a spectacle of horror perpetrated for its own sake, exhilarating but awful.
