PSYCHO Image Analysis 2

While the audience could have assumed she was to be the final girl, this scene flips the character roles about and turns Marion into a female victim. This connotes to the ideology of the ‘taboo against sex’. In the initial scenes of the movie, we see that Marion has just had sex with Sam Loomis. In this shower scene, Norman murders Marion with a knife, a phallic symbol, which expresses his domination over Marion and the negativity of her having sex with Sam, as the two of them were not married and at the time this was severely against the norms of society. This idea of Norman watching Marion shower before murdering her is a form of voyeurism, also connoted through the use of the phallic symbol weapon, showing that Norman is gaining some sexual pleasure from this murder. The idea of voyeurism in this film stems from Alfred Hitchcock’s strange and perverse form of humour. He was notorious in Hollywood for throwing extravagant parties with weird catches. One example was when he threw a party in a much too small room and he behind a two-way mirror, watching as celebrities forced their way in and were slowly crushed together and against the mirror. He found this hilarious and gained some strange form of pleasure from it, which in turn is represented in this scene.