Playing the audience, 'like an organ'

Confession: I have suffered from a nearly lifelong phobia of watching the movie Psycho (the original 1960 version, I mean). So much so that I almost turned down the opportunity to see it for free on the big screen recently. 

Thank god I didn't. It's a masterpiece. Who knew that the dialogue was so smart, that the cinematography was so drolly atmospheric, that the underlying comedy was so black or that Norman Bates was so likably All-American? Obviously... anyone who has seen the film knows these things, and yet the reputation that precedes Psycho is one of unbelievable horror. 

'After you've seen it, you'll never be able to take a shower again!'

Well, let me tell you, I came home after the film and took a shower and didn't even bother to lock the bathroom door. Then I logged onto Amazon and bought the pulp fiction novel on which the film was based.

In a 1978 interview, Alfred Hitchcock described the thinking that went into Psycho's cinematic construction. 'You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story,' he said, 'they like to feel they know what's coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts.' In Psycho, this meant a lengthy and essentially irrelevant (but lush, vintage) build-up of fugitive escapism heaped on top of romantic drama, and then the rug is pulled out from under the audience. It also meant clever marketing that conscripted audiences as co-conspirators while reiterating the film's shock value: 'Do not reveal its secrets!'

'I was directing the viewers,' Hitchcock said. 'You might say I was playing them, like an organ.'

The astonishing thing, to me at least, is the degree to which audiences are still being played by the film and its reputation more than 40 years later. Not by the original set-up and shock; most of the film's secrets are common knowledge now. Rather, it's the reverse. Expecting to be shocked (an expectation that can easily be traced from the present all the way back to the initial publicity campaign), instead we get subtlety. Amazing.