Here's a word to the wise - if you ever get tempted to watch Sacha Gervasi's 2013 film Hitchcock about the backstage drama involved in making Psycho...don't. I watched it last week and I can't recall the last time a film set my teeth so thoroughly and consistently on edge.* Among other things, the film's portrayal of Anthony Perkins (played by James D'Arcy) is so unbelievably mean-spirited, in that just about every line said by him or about him is a snide dig at his closet homosexuality. There's an extent to which everyone involved plays more like heavy-handed caricatures of their real-world counterparts than any actual human being who's ever walked the planet (because it is that kind of film), but whereas Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) are afforded the luxury of vague semblances of character development, Perkins is reduced to a mere running gag that's one hundred per cent at his expense. There's a bit where he says, "Mr Hitchcock, I can't count how many times I've seen Strangers on a Train and Rope," to which my response was, "Oh good grief, are we really going there?". While D'Arcy's Perkins is busy reeling off the Two Gayest Hitchcock Films of All Time, my eyes couldn't help but wander down to his hands (actually, I took a vested interest in D'Arcy's hands because I was curious to see if the film would be exacting enough to remember that Perkins was left-handed) and I noticed that as he said this he had his right hand wedged between his crotch. Real classy. Obviously, his mannerisms here are intended to mirror those exhibited by Norman in the actual Psycho during his dinner conversation with Marion (because Gervasi's film is keen to push the suggestion that Norman's eccentricities and Perkins' eccentricities were effectively one and the same) but given the context, the implication is blatantly that Perkins is well-accustomed to using the aforementioned films for relieving his own repressed homoerotic tensions. Is D'Arcy's Perkins left-handed? Frankly, he didn't get enough screen time for me to judge either way, although I did notice that while prepping for the parlour scene he was carrying the motel register in his left hand. So that's good at least. Although I'm still intrigued by the fact that it's his right hand that looks to be itching for a date with Rosie Palms during his meeting with Hitchcock. Was that intentional, I wonder? It is, after all, entirely in keeping with Norman's own characterisation that the right hand would be the one betraying those impulses that Perkins is so desparate to keep under wraps. Then again, perhaps I'm giving too much credit to a film that's so irritatingly flippant in its regard for Perkins (and to the fan of Anthony Perkins there can be few things more aggravating than seeing Tony subject to constant mockery in a film in which he's forever in the shadow of Anthony Hopkins...hang about, I'll explain**).
If I appear to be inordinately obsessive over such a pedantic detail, it's because handedness is a very big deal for Norman Bates. There is a wonderful strand of symbolism running throughout Psycho and its sequels (and which I touched on last time I wrote about Psycho II) in which Norman's hands function as antithetical forces, pulling him in different directions in accordance with how the balance of power is tipping between his split personalities. Once we are aware that Norman's handedness acts as yet another manifestation of his perpetual inner conflict, it becomes possible to read his hand movements as further indicators of how that interplay is functioning. Norman's hands have each aligned themselves with opposing sides of his personality, with his left hand being the more benign of the two, and the hand on which he is most reliant for carrying out menial tasks at the Bates Motel. For Norman is (among other things) a southpaw. He does everything with his left hand, apart from the one thing he is most famous for - that is, butchering dames in showers (and the occasional home intruder upon the staircase) while dressed as his deceased Mother. That special talent he reserves for his right hand, for this is the hand more closely aligned with Norman's darker impulses, ie: the Mother half of his fractured psyche (this is the only thing I'll admit to finding somewhat sinister about Norman, whom I otherwise regard as a highly sympathetic character - he's so committed to assuming his Mother's identity that he can apparently change handedness in the process, which frankly borders on the surreal***). Obviously, Hitchcock implemented this motif to emphasise Norman's split personality, and possibly to lead the more sharp-eyed members of his audience down a false trail. But there is more going on here than a simple game of switcheroo.
According to the denouement given by Oakland's psychiatrist at the end of the original Psycho, Norman has never been "all Norman" (although he has frequently been "all Mother"), and if we are attentive to Norman's hand mannerisms we can observe how Mother is constantly interjecting her way into the scenario even in those scenes where we appear to be in only Norman's presence. During Norman's sandwiches-and-milk dinner date with Marion, he spends much of the conversation wringing his hands together, which might be interpreted as nothing more than the awkward mannerisms of a shy, socially stunted recluse struggling to compose himself when blessed with the unexpected companionship of such a desirable woman. But this hand-wringing is also emblematic of Norman's inner struggle, for his hands are locked together in a physical tussle, which takes on particular relevance during the portion of their conversation where Norman talks about private traps. Here, his clashing hands become analogous to his observations that, "We scratch and we claw, but only at the air; only at each other. And for all of it we never budge an inch." Norman's dialogue takes a disturbingly nihilistic turn, conveying something of the overwhelming despair with which he contends on a daily basis. His specific references to scratching and clawing are early hints of his latently violent nature, for scratching at other people with sharp kitchen implements does indeed turn out to be one of his reflexive responses to the horrors of his own entrapment, but they also call attention to his fingers, which are currently engaged in the very kind of futile impasse he is describing. Norman carries out his worst kind of scratching with his right hand, but this is not to say that the left hand isn't susceptible to an aching fury all of its own. Norman's left hand is the one more closely aligned with his own identity, and as such it is the hand more capable of articulating the rage and resentment he feels at being permanently reigned in by his Mother, denied not only the pleasures of a social life and sexual gratification but also the capacity to be a complete and separate human being. When Norman admits to Marion that he often feels the desire to reject his Mother, he raises up his left hand in gesticulation of his suppressed yearning for rebellion (in reality, Norman had his moment of rebellion ten years ago and it failed spectacularly to release him from his private trap, for Mother had already succeeded in planting the seeds of her dominion inside his mind). Norman's entire parlor conversation with Marion reveals him to be a swarm of incompatible impulses and desires (to the extent he flat-out contradicts his statement on not minding his own private trap when challenged by Marion); mainly, his recognition that life with his Mother is bleak and stifling and his pathological dependency on her, which ultimately manifests in an overpowering hostility toward anything that might threaten to come between them (not least reality).
At the end of Psycho, Richmond tells us that the Mother half has finally achieved total dominion over the Norman half, and this is consistent with what we see in the final scene, where the balance of power looks to have tipped decisively in the right hand's favour. It is Norman's right hand with which he entertains (but withholds from) swatting a fly, while his left hand stays hidden out of view, as if having bowed out of the conflict altogether. Of course, Richmond's dire prognosis is not borne out at the beginning of Psycho II, for not only has the Norman personality since reasserted its being, but Norman may even have achieved the remarkable feat of finally becoming "all Norman". There is no trace of Mother in the Norman who leaves confinement ready for the 80s, so it appears that, with the help of Raymond (Richmond's less insufferable sequel counterpart), he was able to turn the tide and become stronger than his invasive Mother persona (although, as Norman later describes the psychiatric procedures during his toasted cheese sandwiches lament, he makes it sound more akin to undergoing an involuntary surgical excision than to any conscious victory on his part). Mother's dominion has been defeated (for now), but we can still see Norman at the crossroads during his sandwiches-and-milk dinner date with Mary (who, unbeknownst to Norman, is Marion's second coming). The nature of Norman's inner conflict has changed, for it is no longer about the battle of wills between his contradicting personas, but rather his conscious awareness of what he used to be versus what he aspires to be now. The paradox Norman faces in attempting to live a life of normality is that it requires him to somehow accommodate the knowledge that his psychosis caused him to kill seven people. Fortysomething Norman is still deeply haunted by the past, but the past that currently hangs over him is the present of the original Psycho, and the revulsions of that sandwich-preparation sequence arise mainly from the challenges of assuming a routine of banal domesticity against a backdrop of such iconic horror. Still, there is a minor disturbance to the supposition that Norman's darker impulses have been entirely excised along with his Mother persona, for his hands reveal a slightly different story - when tasked with cutting the sandwich for Mary, he retains the knife in his left hand and slices it without incident, but the right hand still gets to exercise its say, in moving the plate, and by extension the knife, just an inch closer to the unsuspecting (or not) Mary. It's subtle, but it's there.
The threat of Norman's wayward right hand resurfaces, more prominently, around the midway point (after his grip on reality has already taken quite a beating, thanks to the combined - if opposing - vigilante tactics of Lila and Spool). Believing that Mother has returned to the house, Norman offers to remain at Mary's bedside and protect her while she sleeps, only to find himself unconsciously passing the knife from his left hand into his right as he watches over her and, disturbingly, steering the blade in her direction. Why does Norman appear momentarily gripped by the temptation to resume his old habits and give Mary a good skewering? The very same reason he was compelled to butcher her aunt twenty-two years ago; he feels sexually aroused by her, and that brings on Mother's tyranny. Analyses of the shower sequence from the original film interpreting the knife as a phallic symbol (complete with ejaculatory spurts of blood/chocolate syrup) are of course ten a penny, but it's hard to deny that such symbolism is present here. Norman raises the blade above Mary as an act of aspiring penetration, as he finds himself approaching that same treacherous intersection that had him hopelessly bisected all those years ago. Norman's attraction to Mary is all good and innocent so long as Mother isn't around to disapprove, but now that Norman is on the verge of abandoning his acceptance that he killed her, he finds that his loyalties are once again tested. Significantly, although the knife has found its way into the right hand once more, Norman keeps both hands clasped against it, and when he later stands by the window and asks Mary if he is becoming "confused" again, he has his fingers locked together around the handle in a manner reminiscent of his constant hand-wringing in the original. His psyche is once again a tangle of conflicting impulses born of dread, desire and desperation, and the knife hangs ominously in the midst of all that, ready to be wielded in whichever direction Norman is ultimately swayed.
And yet, there is one complicating factor which would appear to belie the fairly straightforward implication that Norman's left hand represents his benign side and his right hand his harmful one, for Psycho II also presents us with a scenario in which the reverse would appear to be the case. Whenever Norman answers the telephone (one of the sequel's key devices for charting his slow but steady regression from relative stability into violent insanity), he always does so with his right hand, but it's when things start to go wrong that his left hand takes hold of the receiver. This happens four times, for Mary twice attempts to intervene by taking the receiver from Norman, and every time it finds its way back into Norman's hands, he consistently makes a point of taking it with his right hand and then passing it over to his left. Clearly something strange is happening here, but what?
Norman answers the phone three times throughout Psycho II (and we are prompted to believe that he has been fielding numerous other calls off of screen). The first instance occurs immediately after Norman has encountered Toomey for the third (and final) time, so Norman assumes that the call is yet another of his low-blow harassment tactics. Norman is unnerved by the call, but since he is able to rationalise the situation he remains entirely in control throughout. He even produces a snappy comeback, in which he uses his history of disturbed behaviour to his advantage: "Mr Toomey, if this is you then you're sicker than I ever was." (The evidence suggests that it's actually Lila Loomis on the other end, but the same principle would apply.) Norman keeps the receiver in his right hand for the entirety of this call.
The second onscreen call occurs much later on, after Norman has learned from Raymond that Lila has been making the hoax calls and as he is confronting Mary about her complicity in this. Norman picks up the phone with his right hand and immediately greets the caller, whom he presumes to be Lila, then stops eerily short and switches the receiver over to his left hand. He then starts up a one-sided conversation with Mother. Mary attempts to interject, but when she listens in she hears no one on the other end. At this point, there is ambiguity as to whether Norman has been talking to Spool (who was canny enough to keep mum whenever Mary stuck her oar in) or if Norman's sanity slippage has reached its breaking point, but given that all of the information he apparently obtains from this call is verified by the end of the film, the answer is...both, maybe?
The third call, which acts as a precursor to the climax, is the only instance in which we actually discover who is on the other end of the line, presumably because it's the one character in the film's four-way conflict who doesn't have anything to hide - Raymond calls Norman from the motel lobby to let him know that he has located the source of the nuisance calls. Only Norman really has lost the plot at this stage; there is no longer any question of this from the viewers' perspective. He answers with his right hand, expecting to hear Mother on the other end, then passes the receiver over to his left hand and immediately resumes their conversation from earlier. He continues to talk to "Mother" long after Raymond has abandoned the call (on learning that Mary, whose game Raymond is wise to, is still with Norman) and that's when things take an acutely more sinister turn (particularly as we know for sure that Norman is now conversing with a dead line).
Is there any analogue to this in the original Psycho? Kind of. We never see Norman talking on the telephone but we do see him immediately after receiving a call from Sheriff Chambers (John McIntire). He still has his hand on the receiver, and it is his left hand. This occurs right before he goes upstairs to confront Mother about the need to move her down into the fruit cellar.
The habitual receiver switching is a reminder that Norman's psyche is comprised of multiple contradictory impulses and, as with the knife pointing incident from earlier, when Norman seemed momentarily caught between his resolve to protect Mary and his latent desire to have his way with her, an indicator that some form of inner conflict is worming its way up to the surface. In the case of his rather baffling telephone routine, the conflict is a temporal one, for the fortysomething Norman is finally going back to his roots and renewing the cycle he was previously so bent on breaking free of. What we are witnessing in these moments is the disintegration of Norman's newly-established identity as a recovered psychotic eager to start anew, as he slowly reconnects with the emotionally warped mama's boy he's spent the entirety of the sequel thus far attempting to discard all traces of. Initially, when Norman is able to assert himself in the face of Toomey's derision (or what he believes to be Toomey), he does so using his right hand, the hand that ordinarily symbolises his darker nature, and we are prompted to see this as a testament to his newfound ability to maintain control of the situation. It is our best evidence so far that Norman may have successfully vanquished Mother, whose prospective return (down the telephone line) he is still balanced enough to reject at this stage. Crucially, this follows on from Mary's underhanded efforts to undermine his stability with her openly announced showering activities, which Norman had successfully countered by retreating to his piano in order to occupy his mind with a rendition of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". We see that Norman is doing what he can to weather any and all challenges to his aspirations of achieving normality. Several hoax calls, one local murder (that he's aware of) and an uninvited basement dweller later, and Norman's resistances begin to wear down. Faced with the increasingly impossible task of maintaining his sanity in a world that seemingly doesn't want him to have it, Norman becomes ever more nostalgic for the "normality" with which he was once familiar. The chaotic receiver movements signify this confusion, and the blurring of his better judgement with his almost infantile longing that everything can perhaps be restored to as it was before the outside world intervened. At this point the right hand takes its cue to reassert its perverse influence; when it passes the receiver to his left hand, it does so not as a relinquishment of control, but as means of subjecting the left hand (and by extension, Norman) to Mother's voice and authority. Norman's left hand is his dominant hand, but conversely it is also tied up with the more submissive side of his psyche, the side that longed to curse Mother or at least defy her and leave her forever but likewise knew that he couldn't. For she's always scratching right back at him with the adjacent hand.
In a nutshell, whenever Norman's hands appear at odds, it's an indication that he's deeply at odds with himself. And when the left hand doesn't know who the right hand is killing...well, we'll get to Schizo.
* Oh wait, yes I can. It would be that live action Beauty and The Beast remake from last year. Ah well, Hitchcock wasn't quite THAT bad I suppose.
** Sad but true. When you're an Anthony Perkins fan there's a part of you that does somewhat inevitably develop a slight grudge against Anthony Hopkins, against your better judgement, purely because of the high number of people who tend to get the two confused. I know that's unfair, as it's totally not Anthony Hopkins' fault, but if I had a penny for every time I came across someone referring to "Anthony Hopkins' ground-breaking performance in Psycho" I'd certainly have enough for at least a matinee and a small soda by now. I appreciate why people get them mixed up, to point - not only are their names kind of similar, but people have them subconsciously logged away under the same file because between them they excelled at playing arguably the two most infamous and celebrated cinema serial killers of all-time. Still, Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates are two distinctly different breeds of cinema serial killers - we're talking the Godzilla and the Bambi of cinema serial killers, respectively.
*** With apologies to ambidextrals.
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