So I've talked in fairly extensive detail about Norman's handedness and why it's such a wonderful and critical component of the Psycho franchise, yet one that people either miss altogether or do not care to comment upon (I for one was disappointed to find no reference to it in Alexandre O. Phillipe's otherwise excellent 78/52*). Yet there's an obvious question prompted in all of this that I have thus far been dodging entirely. Norman's internal struggle - the battle between his independent urges and the part of his psyche that Mother has staked her posthumous claim on - is represented by his ambidexterity. Norman is apparently left-handed, but the right hand exhibits a frightening will and autonomy all of its own. Norman's left hand is the more benign of the two, and the hand that's aligned with his own personality, so as long as his left hand remains the dominant one then you have little to worry about. It's when the right hand, the hand that keeps him anchored to Mother's omnipresent grasp, takes over that you may be in trouble. It's a simple case of left hand, good, right hand, bad. The question this begs is, isn't it traditionally the other way around?
It's no secret that numerous cultures all throughout history have exhibited an extreme bias for those who err toward the right-hand side over the left. In the eternal struggle that is central to many world religions between mankind's quest for a moral wisdom and his need to consolidate this with his capacity for darker, less desirable urges, the opposing sides of the body were cast as symbols of this duality, of the basic choices facing every individual human being, and it's hardly surprising that the right-handed majority were able to claim the better half for themselves. The right hand is the embodiment of all that is sturdy, correct and righteous; the left, by contrast, represents everything odd, treacherous and depraved about the human condition; not for nothing did the term "sinister", the Latin word for left, ultimately acquire new meaning in denoting something that is off-kilter to the point of being threatening. For an example of this hegemony, we need only look to cinema's most iconic proponent of the idea that the battle between good and evil within a man's soul can be boiled down to a literal tussle between one's hands; a character so devoted to the notion that he goes so far as to have the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on the knuckles of his right and left hands, respectively. I speak, of course, of the Reverend Harry Powell, the murderous minister portrayed by Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's 1955 thriller The Night of The Hunter. Says Powell: "Shall I tell you the little story of Right Hand, Left Hand - the tale of good and evil? It was with his left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low!" Whereas the right hand? "These fingers have veins that run straight to the soul of man! The right hand, friends! The hand of love!" According to Powell, the entirety of human existence ("The Story of Life" as he calls it) is defined by the battle for ownership of both body and spirit between the right and left hand - "The fingers of these hands, dear hearts, they're always a-tuggin' and a-warrin', one hand against the other!" - a battle which, Powell assures us, will ultimately result in the triumph of good over evil. Spike Lee's 1989 film Do The Right Thing features a sequence in which Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) relays the exact same analogy. In both cases, the fight is rigged so that the left hand loses, its suppression justified by the rationale that nothing good could come of it anyway.
Above: Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) in Charles Laughton's Night of The Hunter (1955). Below: Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989). Each weighs in upon the distribution of good and evil within the human anatomy. I don't know about you, but I'm sensing a slight prejudice here.
With this in mind, it might be tempting to conclude that Norman's left-handedness should be taken as an early hint that there is something very sinister (in both senses of the word) about him and that, being the classically deviant southpaw, he is not to be trusted. But you still have to account for the fact that it is invariably his right hand with which he exercises his intermittent bursts of homicidal fury. The left hand prefers to accomplish far more mundane tasks, such as popping candy and cleaning showers. For Norman, the struggle is reversed, and yet the outcome still echoes Powell's analogy in that the right hand is depicted as the inevitable victor. In the original film, it is the right hand, the hand aligned with Norman's Mother personality, that emerges as the stronger of the two, dragging Norman into the darkest depths of insanity while the left hand effectively retreats altogether. In Psycho II it is confirmed that the fight is indeed rigged; despite Norman's sincerest efforts to move away from the shadow of Mother and walk the straight and narrow, an assortment of external forces collude (wittingly and unwittingly) in the form of Lila, Mary and Spool, and successfully drive him back into his old habits. The right hand suppresses the left hand much as the right-handed have suppressed and stigmatized the left-handed throughout history. This is not the triumph of LOVE over HATE, but the domination of the merciless over the powerless.
In Norman's case the conflict is more Freudian in nature, less a straightforward battle based on traditional notions of good and evil as a struggle between the various contradictory aspects of the human psyche; the impulsive and unconscious drives of the id versus the learned social values and ideals imposed by the superego. The serpent in the garden, for Norman, is his sexual curiosity, which is awakened by Marion in Psycho and later by Mary in Psycho II, and invariably leads to disaster as it throws his loyalty toward Mother into question. The trigger for Norman's murderously psychotic behaviour is always the suggestion that he and Mother are at risk of being separated. Freud's model of the id, ego and superego posits that the human psyche is comprised of three components; in its rawest state, it is driven entirely by biological impulse, but this is complicated by the development of a sense that not all of our behaviours are acceptable and may entail undesirable consequences, which in most cases would come primarily from our parents or other caregivers. Hence, the dichotomy of the id and the superego, with the ego somewhere in between attempting to negotiate a middle path. We might expect the id to be the more treacherous of the two, and yet Psycho presents us with an unsettling example in which the superego is stifling and distorting the id. Any exercise of autonomy on behalf of the id creates the need to balance it out by eliminating the source of the disturbance (carried out with Marion and toyed with with Mary). By controlling his libido, Mother keeps Norman permanently infantilised and denies him the ability to function as a separate human being. It is a war between madness and sanity, or whatever semblances of sanity Norman still has remaining, in which the underdog is represented by the subjugated left hand.
Before we go any further as to why, in Psycho, Hitchcock might have chosen to reverse the roles assumed by the right and left hand in traditional assumptions about human duality, it's worth acknowledging that we could, if we so wanted, cut through such discussions with a particularly sharp Occam's razor, which is that Norman is left-handed because Anthony Perkins was himself left-handed. Although Perkins did adjust his handedness for some roles - Robert Mulligan's Fear Strikes Out (1957), in which he portrayed baseball player Jimmy Piersall and was required to learn to bat and throw with his right hand, presented particular problems for him - for Psycho it may be as simple as Hitchcock allowing him to use the hand that came naturally to him for most of the film, and determining from there that the wayward Mother hand would be played by his non-dominant right hand. In fact, I think that probably is what happened here. But such readings are obviously no fun from an analytical perspective.
If we insist on trawling for deeper significance, I think there are two possible schools of thought here, the first being that Norman's own identity being aligned with the left hand is an indication that he's the more feminine of the two. It's also no secret that, throughout history, the division of male and female has been yet another dualism of which humankind has been all-too consciously aware, with the female, like the left-hander, being widely dismissed as the inferior of the two, often within the same breath. In The Left Stuff: How the Left-Handed Have Survived and Thrived in a Right-Handed World, Melissa Roth notes that, "it is perhaps not surprising that both religious doctrine and mythology have tended to feminize the "lesser" side of the body." (p.30) Roth makes extensive reference to the early 20th century studies of French scholar Robert Hertz, which sought to investigate the widespread cultural favouritism for the right hand over the left. Writes Roth:
"In Hertz's study of nineteenth-century cultures, he also uncovered a gender relationship to handedness. Certain African tribes considered the right hand the strong "male" hand: good lively, and designated to offer food and make presents. The left hand was "feeble, feminine, wicked and deathful" and was used to take things away...The Waluwanga tribe of Australia used two sticks to mark the beat during ceremonies. "One is called the man and is held in right hand, while the other, the woman, is held in the left," wrote Hertz. "Naturally, it is always the 'man' which strikes the 'woman' which receives the blows; the right which acts, the left which submits."" (p.32)
It's not terribly hard to see how this line of thinking may apply to Norman, for Mother clearly wears the pants around the Bates household, and the distribution of power dynamics within their relationship is intended to be unsettling. A criticism that is frequently lobbied at Hitchcock's film in terms of its implicit gender politics (second only to some of the more troublesome implications of Marion's arc) is that the shy, sensitive and distinctly un-masculine figure of Norman was intended as a statement against the rearrangement of traditional gender roles; deprived of a patriarch at a very young age, Norman grew up with his screaming shrew of a mother as effectively his sole influence in life, and his psyche has been hijacked by the overpowering compulsion to emulate her. In The Ultimate Horror Movie Guide: 365 Films To Scare You To Death by James Marriott and Kim Newman, we are told that, "Norman's cross-dressing can be seen as parodic of [the] ideal of the sensitive man, in touch with his feminine side." (p.100) Meanwhile, the film's more conventionally masculine figure, John Gavin's Sam Loomis, is ostensibly depicted as the hero of the piece, in being the one who overpowers Norman during the final confrontation, superficially reaffirming the importance and supremacy of traditional models of masculinity (even before Sam gets to physically tussle with Norman, he maintains the upper hand during their nervy lobby exchange, where Norman tries to pack Sam and Lila off to Cabin 10 as quickly and as trace-free as possible, but Sam insists on all the formalities). Still, Marriott and Newman also make the astute observation that, "the unevenness of the film, which loses momentum after the death of Marion Crane, forces us to identify further with Norman rather than the drab Sam and Lila." (p.101) In the end, Sam doesn't qualify as the "hero" of the film because the audience isn't prompted terribly to get behind him. I've heard it said that Hitchcock didn't think too much of Gavin's performance as Sam and considered him the weak link of the film, although I think much of it comes down to the fact that Sam isn't amazingly compelling as a character; he's such a dull, clean-cut everyman as to be unidentifiable. One has to question if he was really worth the hassle that Marion put herself through to secure that stolen money for his benefit. The fact is that the film does encourage us to sympathise with the gauche, sinister Norman over his more conventional counterparts, and that's because of his gaucheness, not in spite of it. Norman is so strange, off-kilter and visibly warped as to be entirely endearing; you feel for the screwed up loner whose left hand didn't know who his right hand was killing.**
The relationship between Norman and Mrs Bates is replicated, to a degree, in the parallel relationship between Mary and Lila in Psycho II. Once again, the patriarch has been displaced (here, that patriarch is none other than Sam himself, confirming that the conventional male is as mortal and destructible as anyone else), allowing the mother free reign in asserting her domineering control over her reluctant offspring. In Lila's case, she has a daughter, not a son, so the power dynamics may seem less offsetting from a traditional gender role perspective, but the tell-tale feature of Lila's debasement, even more so than her spiteful intentions for Norman, is the evident callousness with which she regards her own child, whom Lila is prepared to both endanger and corrupt for the sake of a particularly underhanded game of scab-picking. (I blame her marriage to Sam Loomis as much of the psychological fall-out from the events of the first film; that would be enough to crush anybody's spirits). For her part, Mary may have been spared the extreme psychological damage dished out to Norman, but she finds herself split between two compelling urges - her increasing affinity toward Norman's plight and her sense of familial obligation toward her mother. Going against her mother's wishes is clearly not something that comes naturally to Mary (at one point, she complains to Lila that "I've done everything you've asked for years"), but it is evident, both to the viewer and to Mary, that authority, for all its claims to moral righteousness, is steering her down a distinctively perverse path.
Which leads me onto the second school of thought, and the one that I personally find the more compelling of the two, which is that Norman's treacherous right hand is an implicit symbol of authority leading us astray, a demonstration that the forces in which we might ordinarily be inclined to place our trust may not actually have our best interests in mind. After all, Psycho is a film that revels in misdirection, and in luring its viewers repeatedly into a false sense of security, and nothing is more emblematic of our being wrong-footed than the right-hand side, which we are culturally accustomed to accept as safe, upstanding and reliable, offering us no refuge or stability. What's compelling about Psycho is the manner in which it leads us to a forked road and prompts us to identify with the overtly sinister, less conventional route. For Marriott and Newman, Hitchcock's foremost agenda is simply to deceive us, and our sympathies for Norman play directly into that purpose; they argue that the qualities that make him endearing amount to "less a sympathetic portrayal of madness a la [Michael Powell's] Peeping Tom...than another way for Hitchcock to pull the rug from under our feet." I would argue, however, that the film's predilection for aligning the viewer with the strange over the ordinary goes a step further than mere beguilement. The journey that makes up the initial portion of the film, in which the viewer accompanies Marion from the crowded diurnal world of the city to the nocturnal, intensely isolated world of the Bates Motel, sends us hurtling head-first into the unfamiliar, and it's here that it insists on keeping us. There is no return journey back into the familiar, with the ensuing narrative leading us not into comfort and safety, but ever deeper into darkness and chaos (the dry, drawn-out denouement of Simon Oakland's character unfortunately comes as an upset to this trajectory, but it is nevertheless the psychotic Norman who gets the last word). It is an unsettling experience for sure, and yet a curious thing happens when we enter this dark and disconcerting world. The strange and uncanny becomes the new familiar, and we become attuned to the threats facing the odd from the ordinary, the vulnerability of the eccentric in a world governed by convention. So when the prying voice of reason comes calling in the form of Arbogast, and later in the brawny and imposing Sam, we as much as Norman feel the intrusion on our personal territory. The revelation that Norman is the killer only goes so far to offset this - rather than dramatically alter our perspective on Norman, it plays as the sadly inevitable conclusion to the sense we've had all along of Norman being subjugated by an offscreen authority that claims to have his interests at heart but has been ripping his every sense of reason and autonomy to shreds.
This journey into the strange has no return route, in part because the mere induction into this world changes us. Marion's ultimate mistake is to naively assume that she can just pick up, drive back and reverse the upset to the status quo she caused when she decided to grab the ill-gotten money and run; as she discovers, the weird and the eerie, having welcomed her in, does not intend to let her go. When, twenty-two years later, Marion's spectre returns to the motel grounds by way of Mary, her genetic and spiritual successor, with the intention of conquering the strangeness, she discovers that she is actually entirely at home here with Norman. Mary does better than Marion, at least in the short-term, although the situation ultimately proves to be more than she can control. This is the curious duality of the Bates Motel - it is a place where you go to find yourself but simultaneously lose yourself. In between, it offers something very precious, a meeting point for the waifs and the strays before they're veered toward their inevitable destruction (literally so in Marion and Mary's case, psychologically for Norman); it's in these fleeting moments of affinity that we feel that, though not exactly in safe hands, we are nevertheless right (ie: left) where we are meant to be.
* Actually, I do have some other nitpicks of 78/52 besides, but we can talk about those at a later date.
** It is interesting to note that the tagline of Peter Walker's 1976 film Schizo also casts the left hand as the innocent one in the equation.
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