Suture in Psycho

Suture is a useful term for me, as it is a tidy way to explain a feeling that I always had to verbalize in a rather clunky way (for example, "I identified with" or "I related to", etc.). It is also a valuable way of understanding why visual culture and narrative art hold so much power. 

I haven't seen much Hitchcock, but what I have seen by him orchestrates suture very carefully. For example, Rear Window forces identification with Jimmy Stewart's character as a voyeur. At first, we (the audience) look down on him for looking in on people, but over time we occupy his perspective and forgive his voyeurism as the murder-mystery develops. The morality of his actions are swept under the rug as our (the audience) moral compass is enveloped by suture; we become more immersed in how the mystery unfolds than anything else, and we lose our critical lens through which we view the character we're now fully identifying with. This same concept can be seen in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, as Kyle MacLachlan's character is reprimanded by Laura Dern's character for "playing detective", but ultimately we become so engaged with what he uncovers through his snooping that the method he uses becomes secondary. We figure that since he has acquired valuable, potentially life-saving knowledge, he might as well use it even though the way it was acquired is rather creepy. I had seen both of these films but didn't put a comparison together until I heard Lynch name Hitchcock and Rear Window as influences, and in hindsight they do have extremely similar narrative structures. 

Another example of suture through voyeurism comes from De Palma's Hi, Mom!, which I found unsettling in the same way that Psycho is (although there's no serial killing in Hi, Mom!). You (the viewer) are made to occupy the perspective of a creepy character (De Niro's Jon Rubin and Perkins' Norman Bates, respectively). In these cases, the characters are voyeurs but the moral "switch" never occurs, and thus we remain aware of our forced relation to creeps, causing a very unsettling effect. The shot of Norman Bates looking through the peephole is extremely valuable to the tone of the shower scene, as even though it's not shot in POV, we are left with the residual voyeuristic feeling as if we are looking in on Marion while she showers. 

On a lighter note, suture does not always have to be so creepy. It is a very general term that can be applied to virtually every emotion that we feel when watching a film, but voyeurism happens to be a very clear and literal example of how we are made to relate to fictional characters. An example of a lighter form of suture in Psycho comes in the scene Silverman mentions, when Marion is in her room facing away from the money but feeling the temptation to steal it. In terms of how this scene is shot, it reminded me of various temptations I've felt in my everyday life. For example, when I've already brushed my teeth at night and I can just picture the Ben & Jerry's in my freezer downstairs... like Marion, it's out of my field of vision but I can visualize it and feel its essence. Money is a frequently used form of suture in movies, because under capitalism it has a tremendous emotional pull over every one of us. Like Marion, we all have situations that a stack of cash could resolve, and even those with enough money virtually always want more. Pretty much every Hollywood movie involves money and/or love as a major plot point. 

Money and love are extremely important to Psycho as well. It is integral to the murder of the main character halfway through the film; we feel the set-up, the Hollywood trope of "choosing love over money", but then we're offered a narrative get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of running off with the money. Then, Marion's guilt sets in and we start to feel bad for Marion, and our moral compass is reinstated. We start to root for her to make the "right" decision and return the money, and just when she does exactly that, she is killed. The shower scene is well done on its own, but it holds more weight because of the emotional journey that we have gone on by identifying with Marion. This began a trend of slashers being extremely cruel to their characters (victims) that lasts to this day; it is the nature of horror films to crush our hopes.

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