[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.
[00:00:17] [SPEAKER_08] We all go a little mad sometimes, haven't you?
[00:01:13] [SPEAKER_05] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, the New York Times, or as you call it, the Jew-York Times, just came out with their list of the top 100 TV shows of the century. Do you want to guess where Deadwood ended up?
[00:01:29] [SPEAKER_04] You know, I didn't look for Deadwood. I mean, we agree it should have ended up as number one. Yeah. Especially since they didn't include The Sopranos, because I don't know what their rules were. It had to start like after 2000.
[00:01:38] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, but then they did include Twin Peaks, which is in the 40s or something, but I think they just thought The Return was its own show and not connected.
[00:01:46] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, it's good because I didn't actually look. So I saw like the top, top ones. So I'm going to guess they put it at 52.
[00:01:53] [SPEAKER_05] No, but like we should burn down. I mean, we should burn down the New York Times anyway. But like if it was at 52, that would have been an outrage. Even greater than the outrage than it actually is, which is 24.
[00:02:08] [SPEAKER_04] Oh, good, good. So I was guessing in the direction of outrage. Yeah, of outrage. 24. It's not that I don't find it conceivable that those idiots would put it at 24. It's that when you read what's above it.
[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_05] White Lotus is above it.
[00:02:25] [SPEAKER_04] Like talk about recency bias.
[00:02:27] [SPEAKER_05] It's not even the recency of it. It's just not like a very good show. No, it's a bit of a... It's fine. It's like, it's kind of fun at most. But like Deadwood was our fucking Shakespeare and like it's like putting like the Victorian times put best like playwrights and Shakespeare was 24. 24.
[00:02:47] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. What are the top fucking 10? Yeah. Breaking Bad, of course.
[00:02:52] [SPEAKER_05] Number one.
[00:02:52] [SPEAKER_04] The Wire.
[00:02:53] [SPEAKER_05] Wire or two is I have no issue with.
[00:02:56] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, I don't. Succession, whatever. I was pleasantly surprised that Fleabag was five.
[00:03:02] [SPEAKER_05] No, there's some ones like Veep also is very high as it should be. Arrested Development.
[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_04] I'm surprised Atlanta got up there. Like did they even watch it or are they just saying...
[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. No, I mean like I think Atlanta is kind of up the New York Times alley and it was up my alley. Like it would make my top 10 maybe. It would be right around 10. It would probably make my top 10. Arrested Development. Yeah, good. It's fairly high. Girls, by the way, is better than Deadwood. I don't know if you knew that.
[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_04] I just noticed that Girls is number 13 and I have feelings about this. This is crazy. Six feet under. That is fucking patchy. Dude, dude, there's like just millennial women who like made this.
[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, I think that's right because the American office is higher than the British office.
[00:03:44] [SPEAKER_04] The British office, yeah.
[00:03:46] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, 30 rock at eight. It's a little ridiculous. Yeah. Game of Thrones, which everyone hated. Like if you want to say Deadwood, well, it didn't end well. It ended better, like a hundred times better than Game of Thrones ended from what people say.
[00:04:00] [SPEAKER_04] Yes, for sure. Like I watched the whole thing. It was great. If you could remove the last season, it belongs up there.
[00:04:06] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah.
[00:04:06] [SPEAKER_04] But I'm sorry. There are consequences.
[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, Lost is better than Deadwood. The Crown is better than, like all these shows that kind of suck.
[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah.
[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_05] Better than Deadwood.
[00:04:15] [SPEAKER_04] I like the Americans being up there. Yeah. Not better than Deadwood, but I like that it's up there.
[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_05] No, I agree.
[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:04:22] [SPEAKER_05] Anyway, I don't know if this will rise to the level of what we're going to talk about in the opening, which is things that could turn us into psychotic serial killers. But we are doing this very quick opening segment in honor of our main segment, which is Psycho. Yes. For a peek under the hood, we've recorded the first half of it and it was so long and we were so tired and we realized we were just past the shower scene. So we've got to make this quick.
[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_05] But anyway, these are things in life that could maybe, you know, turn us into the Norman Bateses of our time. Do you want to start with your first one?
[00:05:02] [SPEAKER_04] Sure. Sure. This is my recency bias because I just attended a conference that consisted of both philosophers and psychologists. And I really wanted to scratch my ears out when philosophers sit there and give, when you give your talks by just reading your boring paper up there, like this is 2026. Like we can read your paper. It's a bad paper. Like you read it, you reading it is me making it worse.
[00:05:30] [SPEAKER_05] So you wanted like a tick tock of the paper or something like that?
[00:05:34] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. I wanted AI to transcribe it and give me like bullet points. I don't know how you can get up there seriously and like not make eye contact with the audience and just look down and read.
[00:05:45] [SPEAKER_05] And it's not like, cause I do a fair amount of reading, but not of the paper as it's published. Like I completely redo it in a speaking way because I like.
[00:05:54] [SPEAKER_04] Well, that's normal.
[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Do you write it verbatim? No, not quite, but close. But I don't always like use like all those notes in the presentation, but I write, you know, like part of me designing a presentation is writing it out because, you know, like I know my voice, I know my presenter voice. And so I always write in that. I actually think that's a good way of just writing writing is to imagine you're going to be giving this, you know, part of the reason it's so boring when a philosopher reads their papers because they're boring writers. Yeah.
[00:06:24] [SPEAKER_05] And like, if they wrote it in a way where it was like, oh, I'll be presenting this and they gave a shit about how their presentation goes, which they clearly don't, or at least some of them, then, you know.
[00:06:36] [SPEAKER_04] Have the pretense, just even the pretense that you're not reading it.
[00:06:39] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. You know what it is? And I think this is maybe where it gets homicidal for you is they have this attitude where it doesn't matter, like the style or whatever just gets in the way. It interferes with this glimpse of the truth. Yeah. That I'm giving you. And that's all that matters. You know, like.
[00:06:57] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah.
[00:06:57] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah.
[00:06:57] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. It's true. You've like ripped open the metaphysical curtain. Yeah. You're letting me peer at the things in themselves.
[00:07:04] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. And meanwhile, here you are like, they should have PowerPoints and like funny videos and stuff.
[00:07:09] [SPEAKER_04] You know.
[00:07:10] [SPEAKER_05] Show me a baby doing something crazy. No, but I'm on your side. And especially like when they start going long too, when, you know, they're supposed to talk for like 45 minutes and they start to get into 55 minutes. That's where you want to throw the gasoline on them.
[00:07:25] [SPEAKER_04] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Psychologists do that too. I hate it when like sometimes there are these short talks at conferences where everybody has like 15 minutes to present their data or 20 minutes or whatever. So there's somebody showing them how much time they have left and they just ignore that. Or they'll give a little nod and they'll be like, yeah, yeah, just a couple more slides. And then they just go on for like time. And they're just like ripping time out of the like presenters. Yeah. Like ahead of them.
[00:07:47] [SPEAKER_05] No, I know. And sometimes this is the thing that actually like I want to strangle is they'll look at this and I was like, I guess I don't have time for this. Because you're looking at how many pages they have left. You know, you're kind of looking, you're seeing if it's both sides. And then they pause for a second. They go, no, you know what? Let me just go. I'll go through this kind of quickly. And then they just end up reading it word for word and going 15 minutes over. So like they tease you like that's a feeling that no, we're back. Yeah.
[00:08:14] [SPEAKER_04] All right. What's yours?
[00:08:15] [SPEAKER_05] All right. Mine is, you know, like my age, like technology is going to be a big part of what turns me into a killer. I do voice text all the time. And iPhone, for whatever reason, is very bad at transcribing. It doesn't do context or things like that. It doesn't like have a memory of past things you've corrected. You know, it's very frustrating.
[00:08:40] [SPEAKER_05] Like even if you're texting someone and you say their name or you say someone else's name in a group chat, that doesn't mean for them that it's likely to be that name. So like it really is bad. But the thing that drives me completely insane is when it transcribes what I'm saying correctly as I'm going. So I'm like and I like see it. I'm like, OK, good. And I'm continuing. And then as I'm speaking the next part, it goes back and then changes it to something just totally insane, just deranged.
[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_04] When it actually makes up like a word that doesn't exist and it knows it because it will red underline it as like a nonsensical word.
[00:09:17] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. And it's not even something that sounds like what you said. It's capitalized. So to like often be a proper name that doesn't exist. That's when I think it's actually trying to drive me insane. Like it's actually like designs to do that.
[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. This might be like MKUltra. Like they might be in league with the government to try to like induce mental illness in like some you've been like randomly assigned to the mental illness condition. Yeah. Definitely. The other day I was typing something on my phone in notes. It might have even been for like our psycho notes. And it kept writing something in all caps. And I was like, what? What are you doing? Like when? When have I ever written anything like that in all caps? This is machine learning. This is what like the AI revolution has brought us.
[00:10:00] [SPEAKER_05] This is the thing we're worried about. It goes rogue and like annihilates humanity. Yeah.
[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. I believe it might annihilate humanity by mistake.
[00:10:07] [SPEAKER_05] Or by like making us all just like kill ourselves. Yeah.
[00:10:13] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. You know, this gets to another one that I wasn't going to bring up because like I feel like uncomfortable revealing these things. But there's two kinds of ads that I've seen lately depending on what it is that I'm looking at on the internet. And they're both AI based. And they're both exactly what I would think you would never want AI for. One of them is AI music apps that are aimed at like music creators. They're like, you can now make like amazing music.
[00:10:41] [SPEAKER_04] And it's just like some shitty, you know, you just prompt it. And they always have like a musician being like, give me four bars of the blues riff starting in the key of whatever. And it's like, really, do you think like a musician wants that soul sucking technology? Like if you know enough to say that to the AI, then you know enough to like do it yourself. And the second one though is AI porn, which like unfortunately, like I see ads where it's like the combination of everything that is soul sucking about AI art.
[00:11:11] [SPEAKER_07] Yeah.
[00:11:11] [SPEAKER_04] Combined with this like weird, I don't know, maybe misogyny or it's like create the girl of your dreams. No need to like deal with like, you know, like actual rejection, you know, or like you don't have to deal with actual physical flaws of any real person. You can make them have, you know, and it's just like tiny waist, big boobs. And you can create these things and I guess jerk off to them.
[00:11:38] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Well, I have not like.
[00:11:40] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Maybe it's just Pornhub and you don't get that. I don't. That's true.
[00:11:45] [SPEAKER_05] I need a VPN. Yeah. That, that, that sounds terrible.
[00:11:51] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, dude. Like also, do you like prompt, you prompt the woman of your dreams and you jerk off to her? Like that is even less satisfying than like me jerking off to a real person. Yeah. Like, which is already depressing.
[00:12:06] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Which you can't. Like.
[00:12:09] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Maybe it's just Pornhub and you don't get that. I don't. It's true.
[00:12:13] [SPEAKER_05] I need a VPN. But yeah, that, that, that sounds terrible.
[00:12:19] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, dude. Like also, do you like prompt the woman of your dreams and you jerk off to her? Like that is even less satisfying. Yeah. Than like me jerking off to a real person. Like, which is already depressing.
[00:12:32] [SPEAKER_05] It's already depressing.
[00:12:33] [SPEAKER_04] Oh God. Just at that point, just use your imagination. Yeah. Your imagination is the ultimate AI. Yeah. You can imagine whatever you want. Exactly.
[00:12:40] [SPEAKER_05] Unless you're YOL.
[00:12:41] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. That's right. Our young men are being robbed.
[00:12:45] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. It was funny. It's like a lot of things, you know, it's like blogging. Like the last generation had a golden age of porn. Like the first generation porn sites for free at your fingertips when you're like 13. And now it just, it sucks, you know, like you would always starts out really good and then it gets really bad. I guess I will say that, you know, I guess I would do a Twitter one. Israel discourse on Twitter is typically kind of enraging.
[00:13:13] [SPEAKER_05] But like one thing that I absolutely can't stand are these people, you know, who reply to people who are pro-Palestine, who are critical of Israel, who call it a genocide or whatever. They're like, how come you always talk about Israel and you don't talk about Sudan or you don't talk about Ukraine? And it's like these people obviously don't give a shit about Sudan. They couldn't even tell you what was going on there. They heard that atrocities were happening there.
[00:13:40] [SPEAKER_05] And so they used it to accuse people of anti-Semitism. Like it has such an easy answer, even if the charge was in good faith, which is like the American government is supporting. It's like we're giving them the weapons to do this. We have been hand in hand with Israel. That's why you're protesting it. That's why you're outraged. If you are an American, like so it has the most obvious answer. We have been explicitly supporting it and we haven't been doing that for like Russia. Or have we?
[00:14:11] [SPEAKER_05] You're such a Russiagate liberal.
[00:14:14] [SPEAKER_04] No, but just the general like, well, why don't you care about X is such a buffet thing. Right.
[00:14:19] [SPEAKER_05] Because that's the other thing is to condemn one thing. It doesn't mean you don't condemn other things. The whole actually the way the accusations of major Jewish organizations, the way they accuse people of anti-Semitism without even pretending that it's not just about being critical of Israel or critical of Zionism. That does drive me absolutely insane.
[00:14:42] [SPEAKER_05] It makes me very ashamed of Judaism because when all the major, not all, but many of the major institutions that are central to Judaism are engaging in these kinds of tactics and all in service of atrocity upon atrocity. Like that makes you want to question things.
[00:15:02] [SPEAKER_04] You need to work on your filters on Twitter, like keyword filtering out tweets.
[00:15:07] [SPEAKER_05] I know.
[00:15:08] [SPEAKER_04] Man, you just got all real on me. Like here I'm talking about porn, you know, and now you got all smuggled in a real topic. I was going to bitch about like QR codes or some shit, you know, like for menus.
[00:15:19] [SPEAKER_05] Well, I, you know, I saw one of those like yesterday. But, you know, like and it was only when talking about it that I realized like I'm really disgusted by the way the Jewish institutions in America, the way they have handled all of this is. Yeah, it's not like I was involved with them in the first place. But you've like resigned from the board. I've resigned from the board. Yeah.
[00:15:46] [SPEAKER_05] I had always kind of pre resigned, but now making it official.
[00:15:51] [SPEAKER_04] All right. Do you have any more? I don't think I can offer anything after after your answer. Here's the apex.
[00:15:58] [SPEAKER_05] When the blueberries are too soft.
[00:16:02] [SPEAKER_04] When a little piece of toilet paper gets stuck in your butt.
[00:16:07] [SPEAKER_05] Well, I wasn't trying to bring the room down. Well, all right. Then let's get to our main episode. We'll never know what happened to Norman to make him. Well, I guess we'd kind of do. We got it laid out to us explicitly. We'll be right back to talk about Psycho.
[00:16:29] [SPEAKER_08] You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps. Clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw, but only at the air.
[00:16:49] [SPEAKER_08] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.
[00:17:35] [SPEAKER_05] This is the time of the episode where we'd like to take a moment and thank all of our listeners who get in touch with us, who communicate with us, who argue with us about AI. We really love to hear from you. We read all our emails, and we're really grateful when you reach out. If you'd like to do that, email us, verybadwizards at gmail.com. Tweet at us, at peas, at Tamler, at verybadwizards. There is a verybadwizards subreddit.
[00:18:04] [SPEAKER_05] You can follow us on Instagram. Like us on Facebook. Give us a five-star review, and you can say whatever funny thing you want. But that five-star review really helps other people find the podcast who might otherwise enjoy it. So we really appreciate anyone who takes the time to go to their podcast platform and give us a review, especially Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I take it are the best. We're also available on YouTube right now, but not video, just audio.
[00:18:32] [SPEAKER_05] If you'd like to support us in more tangible ways, the best way to do that is to go to our Patreon and become one of our beloved Patreon supporters. I took a little break from our bonus episodes because we still don't have a new series, but I can tell you this for the next bonus episode a week from today. Sticking with our Alfred Hitchcock theme, we will be releasing an episode on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Stone Cold classic, in my opinion.
[00:19:00] [SPEAKER_05] Very underrated as Hitchcock movies go. I think you can make a case for it being top three Hitchcock. So I'm excited to talk about that. Of course, we have all sorts of bonus episodes available. A lot of David Lynch stuff with me and Natasha and Jesse. David and Paul do some Star Trek stuff. Dave and I have tons of series, including The Ambulators. Deep dive into every episode of Deadwood. Really the best thing that either of us has ever done.
[00:19:29] [SPEAKER_05] Also, The Lotus Eaters we're quite proud of. Our series on The Odyssey, which we are now releasing for everybody. Every Thursday. The Reintegrators with Paul Bloom on the second season of Severance. And Noir Summer. A bunch of great classic and neo-noirs that David and I did a couple summers ago. There's so much up there.
[00:19:56] [SPEAKER_05] And we love putting them out as a reward for all the people who support us and keep the lights on here at Very Bad Wizards. At the $10 and up level, you'll also get access to our Brothers Karamazov series, which we're also quite proud of. Not to pat ourselves on the back too much. $20 and up, you can ask us a question every month for our monthly Ask Us Everything episodes.
[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_05] And we will answer you in video form for you, audio form for everybody else. This last one was a lot of fun, but just tons of other good stuff on the Patreon. So please consider that if you have a little spare cash and you'd like to support this podcast. We're so appreciative of everybody's generosity. Thank you so much. Now let's get to talking about Psycho. All right, let's get to our main topic for today. It is Psycho.
[00:20:52] [SPEAKER_05] I can't believe we haven't talked about this already in 340 whatever episodes. But yeah, this is a 1998 Gus Van Sant movie starring Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche. Julianne Moore.
[00:21:09] [SPEAKER_04] It's right up there, in my opinion, with Spike Lee's old boy.
[00:21:13] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, no, actually we are. Well, I'm sure we'll cover that on a later episode. Episode 1923 when we have nothing left. We're like 90 years old. You'd be excited to make it that far, right? I would be. Do you want to pledge right now if you live to be 90 that you'll record on Gus Van Sant? That's a good trade, right?
[00:21:36] [SPEAKER_04] What was he doing?
[00:21:37] [SPEAKER_05] What was he doing? Not worth it for me, personally. You know, you could do a solo episode or old Paul Bloom. So this is actually, we're going to be doing the 1960 movie by Alfred Hitchcock starring Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin and Martin Balsam. Written by Joseph Stefano.
[00:22:03] [SPEAKER_05] And I will say that one of the things that I was this go around so impressed with is the screenplay. I think it's one of the best written of his movies. I think sometimes the screenplay can be a little weak, you know, given everything else going on. But I think this is a perfectly crafted and like really well done. Like it's both like so perfect in how it sets things up and also so perfect in how it misdirects you.
[00:22:29] [SPEAKER_05] So you're never, you always think you're worried about something and then it turns out like that thing is irrelevant. And just like the characters are often just on the wrong track and the wrong scent. And the screenplay just weaves that in and weaves in all the themes perfectly, subliminally sometimes. It's just really, really great. So what do you think of this movie? What's your history with it? It's like it needs no real introduction, I don't think.
[00:22:55] [SPEAKER_04] It doesn't. I mean, if anybody hasn't seen Psycho, like go watch it for real. Man, this movie is so good. I agree with everything you said about the screenplay and I have a lot more good things to say about it. And this is my history with it. I have no idea when I first saw it. This is a movie that I feel like I have always seen. Like I've always been somebody who has seen Psycho. I feel like you're born into the world with innate knowledge of Psycho.
[00:23:22] [SPEAKER_04] It pervades culture in such a way that even if you think you don't know like anything about Psycho, you probably do. I mean, the strings, the shower scene.
[00:23:31] [SPEAKER_05] I can't think of another movie that's more like that where you just know Psycho in your bones even if like you haven't seen it.
[00:23:41] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. And even as famous as it is, my experience is whenever I watch it, it's always better than I think it is. Because I think for some reason in my head, like early on, it got associated with the genre that it spawned. And then you watch this and you're like, no, no, this is like an incredible film.
[00:24:00] [SPEAKER_05] And at times like an art film. Like that's what's so interesting about it. It's like a movie genre. Yeah. Completely like sets the language for horror films to come. But then it's also like really impressionistic at times. Totally. It just gets into like the use of shadows. You're just, this is like German 1930s. Yeah. The angles, like the sideways angles of characters.
[00:24:22] [SPEAKER_04] Man. It feels like Hitchcock at his peak. And it really is an amazing illustration of something we and many people have talked about, which is that constraints are so good for creativity. And this is like a prime example of Hitchcock, in some cases, constraining himself, in some cases being constrained by the system. Doing a lot with a little in a way that made the art shine through so much. Like you said, the screenplay, like, you know, the guy was not very experienced.
[00:24:52] [SPEAKER_04] It was based on a book, $800,000 budget, which was nothing, obviously. And was like, I'll use my crew for my TV show. I'll do it in black and white.
[00:25:01] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, and he had to do all this like carnival barking for it and like this crazy promotional stuff. And, you know, it's very hard to separate legend from fact, but I heard that he had his assistants buy up all the books. Like he was so intent on making this a surprise. And like even just that Janet Leigh gets murdered or never mind that actually the mother is not alive. All of these things were a surprise to people due to his hard work in making it so.
[00:25:31] [SPEAKER_04] Right. Getting theaters to agree to not let people in late. And I think just like influential in so many ways, like on cinema, like you said on marketing cinema in general, not even just slasher films, like just the thought of like an indie film. Like I guess, you know, the studio system was changing, but this is like right at the beginning. This is somebody showing I can do this.
[00:25:53] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Yeah. He's a hugely established and like marketable director. You know, it's not like a racer head or something like that where David Lynch is scrounging money and like working on it in the summers when he can get a little more. Like it's not like that at all. Like he had just done North by Northwest and rear window and vertigo, I think is before this. Yeah. So these are big budget, big star movies.
[00:26:21] [SPEAKER_05] And yet he makes this kind of indie low budget horror movie. Yeah. Like anytime somebody does that now, like back rooms or obsession, like it's like kind of like what he was doing.
[00:26:34] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, totally. Totally. And it sort of like came together because having that TV show in that crew of people who were willing to work for you and also getting stars who are willing to work in that budget, which is something people do now, you know, I guess. But like just being like, yeah, these are like huge stars. You want to work on this shoestring budget, black and white when color is already a thing.
[00:26:58] [SPEAKER_05] That's the difference is like, you know, at most usually these indie movies has one star that wants to like do an art film. But you took two, like I guess Anthony Perkins at this time would be in a lot of teen movies and like he was a bit of a heartthrob kind of. He was kind of dreamy, you know. Yeah. And then Janet Leigh, she was a real star sex symbol.
[00:27:20] [SPEAKER_05] And just to use them just so you could subvert the audience's expectations about like what kind of person is this and what happens to them is so brilliant. That's the thing about this movie that I've always known, but I'm always just newly in awe of is the way it kind of strings you along and then completely subverts and surprises you. And, you know, it does that even when we already know what's going to happen.
[00:27:48] [SPEAKER_05] And like so but I am jealous of people who got to see it. I know. Like just completely fresh.
[00:27:54] [SPEAKER_04] Can you imagine? Because I, you know, like I knew Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins from Psycho. So there was not much subverting going on.
[00:28:02] [SPEAKER_05] And you knew like what the deal was. Exactly. I think it's possible when I first saw this that I didn't know about the mother, that he was the mother. Yeah. Yeah. Like. I didn't know about the mother. But I don't even know that. Like I hope that's true.
[00:28:14] [SPEAKER_04] And you know what's also just clear is like you think about a low budget movie and it comes with, you know, like the inexperienced directors. It's like Alfred Hitchcock at his best.
[00:28:28] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. No, he's just so amazing. He's super interesting like that because I think like this is for all it's like genre, you know, and low budgetness. It's probably the most film scholar poured over movie of all time. Like maybe it's up there. It's in the top five. Yeah. But it doesn't present like that. And he doesn't present like some filmmaking genius, you know, like Orson Welles or Bergman or Tarkovsky, you know, like he's like this Looney Tunes character. Yeah.
[00:28:58] [SPEAKER_05] He's like a persona. He has like a persona, this big droopy figure. He really is one of a kind that way. And yet, like this is a work of art that, yeah, I don't think there's a movie that's been more dissected and talked about in history. And like hands down his most famous movie, right? I think so. Yeah. Vertigo or this maybe. Rear Window, like those three. Yeah.
[00:29:21] [SPEAKER_04] But still, I think like in the average mind.
[00:29:24] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, that's right. Like, you know, my students will certainly know Psycho and many may have seen it, whereas nobody will have seen Vertigo or and certainly not Rear Window. Yeah.
[00:29:35] [SPEAKER_04] Right. And imagine thinking, like telling him before he did this, this might be literally the most influential movie or the most famous movie you ever make.
[00:29:43] [SPEAKER_05] Part of the thing that happened with Hitchcock was that Truffaut just like discovers him. You know, he's very influential for the French New Wave. And he like is a big part of saying, look, this is actually art. And then he does that interview book with him, Hitchcock Truffaut, which like I think kind of put in people's minds, oh, wait, this guy is actually like a supreme artist. And like I wonder if it hadn't been for Truffaut, like that might not have happened to the extent that he did.
[00:30:13] [SPEAKER_04] Absolutely. I'm 100% convinced that that's the case. Yeah. It took the Frenchies saying like, oh, it's a genius.
[00:30:20] [SPEAKER_05] All right. So this movie, like any general themes that pop out at you? Like it is kind of Freudian, I would say, to some extent.
[00:30:31] [SPEAKER_04] It's very Freudian. Apparently, you know, Hitchcock was like kind of really into psychoanalysis. So, yeah, it's almost like hilariously the surface reading of the movie is the Freudian depth psychology reading where it's like a boy who's been ruined by a domineering mother. And it goes crazy. But there's so much more. Like, I mean, there is like the psychoanalytic stuff for sure.
[00:30:54] [SPEAKER_04] But the more I thought about this movie as I was preparing for this, the more I was like the Marian part of the movie and like the relationship of somebody to the law, the moral law. And like her impulsive decision to go on the dark side for a moment. And it's like kind of mirrored by this guy in the second part in a way that's like hard to connect.
[00:31:15] [SPEAKER_05] But also not hard to connect. Like there's certain scenes that seem like mirror images of them. They're mirror images.
[00:31:21] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. And there's like themes of misogyny that like I think are there, like violence against women that I kind of think like I never would think that Hitchcock would be that concerned about. But it's like, you know, like the birds of prey that are just like surrounding that are women and that have been stuffed and killed and helpless.
[00:31:38] [SPEAKER_05] Like I know Hitchcock doesn't have the best reputation about how he treated actresses. But like this is a really strong character that he presents before he kills her for being too strong willed and having too much agency. And sexy, really. Yeah, and being sexy. But like she's a really complex female protagonist in, you know, in a time where you didn't see a ton of that.
[00:32:03] [SPEAKER_05] And yeah, I think obviously it is about like how men can't fully handle that.
[00:32:09] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, yeah. You know, I love that this movie, for all of the reasons that we were just talking about him going indie, that this is a movie where he has this creative freedom. Where he can like present, like you were saying, she's a complex character. Part of that complexity you get from the very beginning where she's a woman having essentially like an affair kind of with a man and she feels like it's not on the up and up. But like she's just a person got caught up in this like relationship with this guy. Too poor. Who won't marry her.
[00:32:39] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, they're having cheap sex in a hotel.
[00:32:41] [SPEAKER_05] I mean, when we get into it, like just the opening and kind of revealing that it just kind of sets the stage. Again, it's like that's what's so brilliant about the movie, about the screenplay. Like every scene kind of sets the stage for what's going to happen, but also misleads you about where it's going.
[00:32:58] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Oh man, the things you're worried about, like at the beginning, you're like the money. Oh shit, the money. Just goes down in the swamp.
[00:33:05] [SPEAKER_05] You know, what's his name? Loomis is like, you took the money, you know. The funny thing is Norman doesn't even know about the money. Like he has no idea that she even had money.
[00:33:16] [SPEAKER_04] Every time I see this movie for like a day, I'm like, do you think the money could have survived? Like if the windows were closed.
[00:33:22] [SPEAKER_05] You're going to be like that Korean woman or Korean Japanese who searched for the Fargo money. You know, there's a movie about that. I don't think it really happened, but she thought Fargo was real. Yeah, I actually saw. Like that's you like going into the swamps of Northern California looking for the money.
[00:33:43] [SPEAKER_04] Oh, performances. I mean, Anthony Perkins. Did he win for this? He didn't get nominated for this. Oh my God. Because it did, this movie did win something.
[00:33:53] [SPEAKER_05] It actually didn't win any Academy Awards. It was nominated for cinematography. That's good because it was a fucking masterpiece of cinematography. Art direction, also good. Supporting actress, Janet Leigh, interesting. And director, he was nominated for. But no wins.
[00:34:13] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, good. The performances are so, I mean, Anthony Perkins, I know he gets a lot of praise for this. I still think it's underrated. I think the subtlety that he brings to this character.
[00:34:23] [SPEAKER_05] Totally agree. I think it is underrated is the right word for it. Because even though it's celebrated, I think it's like hands down the best performance in any Hitchcock movie that I've seen. Like I don't think anything else comes close. He's so good. And the way he is like, you know, when you're first watching him, he's like boyish and awkward and maybe a little on the spectrum. But then also all of a sudden kind of creepy and menacing and then a little cocky.
[00:34:49] [SPEAKER_05] And he just kind of like moves through that in a way that you never doubt. This is that guy. This is Norman Bates. And, you know, like that's I think why he got typecast for it.
[00:35:01] [SPEAKER_04] I know. It kind of sucks.
[00:35:03] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:35:04] [SPEAKER_04] And just to connect it to the Freudian grand theme, like this boy, like childishness that is exuding from him at times when he giggles when he's nervous. You know, you're just like, yeah, this kid is trapped as a 10 year old. Like he doesn't know what to do. The way he eats the candy corn. And exactly. Which apparently was his idea. Yeah.
[00:35:23] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, yeah. Yeah.
[00:35:24] [SPEAKER_04] I mean, it makes every other performance seem just like a normal. I mean, they were good.
[00:35:28] [SPEAKER_05] So I would say that Janet Leigh is, I think, also awesome. It's not maybe as God tier as Anthony Perkins.
[00:35:37] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah.
[00:35:38] [SPEAKER_05] It's A tier. It's close between A and S tier for now. You know, like we're going to do.
[00:35:44] [SPEAKER_04] That's our language. Exactly.
[00:35:47] [SPEAKER_05] So but like I also think Arbogast is very good. I think the guy that plays Sam Loomis is maybe like less good. I think Vera Miles is good, solid. It's just she's a pale reflection of Janet Leigh in it. And that's part of like her job is to be like that. And then I also think Pat Hitchcock is awesome. She is very small Hitchcock.
[00:36:12] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Hitchcock's daughter is like flirting with you. He must have noticed my wedding ring.
[00:36:17] [SPEAKER_05] And the drunk old sleazy rich guy is like he plays that part really well. You know?
[00:36:22] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Yeah. The cop, apparently he's that character in a lot of movies. But but a great one. The score is, you know, legendary. Like how how many good things can you say about that score? Also a product of I think constraint where he really wanted to pay Bernard Herman like good money, but he just didn't have that much. So Herman was like, all right, I just won't do full orchestration. I'll just do strings. And like born of that, we get like the fucking legendary.
[00:36:49] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. It's that was another thing I was kind of tuning into this time is the score at like not just the. It's really subtle and it's really good. And then it's really interesting when there's no score. Yeah. It's actually like bad that we've gone this long. We haven't mentioned the score.
[00:37:19] [SPEAKER_05] I'm very glad that you brought it up because I think it's yeah, it's part of the iconic nature of the movie.
[00:37:25] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, absolutely. The tension building, you know, what what Hitchcock was a master of like was just but this is just like such a holistic blending of everything coming together to make this these like tense scenes so perfect.
[00:37:38] [SPEAKER_05] It does seem like he had perfectly figured out how to get the audience to feel what he wanted them to feel at that point, you know, like like a conductor of our feelings.
[00:37:49] [SPEAKER_04] That's right. And that's why I think him doing it at that stage in his career is crucial. You know, it's like somebody who's so good at doing it that like it's maybe second nature to him. So he didn't need a huge budget. It's also his biggest hit.
[00:38:03] [SPEAKER_05] Like it made him rich. Like, you know, I think he had to mortgage his house to make this. It really is funny. Like what you said earlier, like it has a lot of the indie qualities of a movie. And yet this is a guy who's been working in Hollywood for 30 years at this point. All right. Should we get into it? Yeah. All right. So Saul Bass, another person we haven't mentioned and whose role is hotly debated.
[00:38:31] [SPEAKER_05] We can maybe get into that when we get to the shower scene. But like he definitely did the titles and they're good. You know, I don't think it's like the best Saul Bass titles, but they're very good.
[00:38:44] [SPEAKER_04] No budget. It's telling you right in the title card that there's, you know, it's like slicing through the letters and it's like the top half and the bottom half. It's like cutting the end in half.
[00:38:54] [SPEAKER_05] Everything is just subliminally planting in you kind of what's going to happen. Yeah. And it says Phoenix, Arizona, 243, something like that, PM. And you just get this establishing shot where you think it's going to be like, oh, that's a normal establishing shot. Hitchcock does this all the time. And then like it cuts to some room and people are talking. You just want to know where they are. But like this time it just kind of floats and then goes into the windows and the blinds and like peeks through.
[00:39:23] [SPEAKER_05] So it just makes us like peeping Tom's and goes in and, you know, you want to see something. And at first you see just a dude with his shirt off, but you know, Janet Leigh's in the movie and then you see Janet Leigh in a nice white bra. She's hot. She's hot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask you, what do you think of Janet Leigh?
[00:39:47] [SPEAKER_04] I mean, I, yeah, I'm like Norman Bates.
[00:39:54] [SPEAKER_05] I'm a little struck by her. You're looking through the people at her taking a shower. Yeah. Yeah. You know, she's very sexy in this. Like, do you remember we talked recently about her in a movie, A Touch of Evil, for our noir summer series on Patreon. And I feel like there she's like, I think these are kind of roughly around the same time and they're very similar movies. We, I think we talked about that at the time in terms of like, she's in danger, but there's
[00:40:23] [SPEAKER_05] something about her in this where she's just a little sexier. She's a little hotter. Yeah.
[00:40:28] [SPEAKER_04] I don't like the guy. I didn't like, I'm not into the guy.
[00:40:31] [SPEAKER_05] A bit of a dud.
[00:40:32] [SPEAKER_04] Exactly. She could do better. And she's like telling him as much, but jokingly, you know, but I'm okay with that because I think that like, it's on theme that sometimes very competent, strong, like great women get sucked into relationships with guys that just don't deserve them.
[00:40:48] [SPEAKER_05] That's film language. That's a trope. Yeah.
[00:40:50] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, exactly. And so I kind of believe that she's being a little bit like poor judgment here.
[00:40:57] [SPEAKER_05] And also like, I don't want to marry you because I'm too poor. There is something that he, it is a little emasculating, even though he's having sex with her, there is something about his position. And I think maybe she thinks like money will cure unhappiness. Maybe kind of not only put them in a position where they can comfortably marry, but also get this guy, his balls back that was taken to him by his ex-wife and like just this poor financial situation that he's in.
[00:41:27] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. He's like paying off his dad's debts and his alimony. It's like, maybe my ex-wife will marry somebody else and then I can stop paying alimony.
[00:41:35] [SPEAKER_09] Oh, Sam, let's get married.
[00:41:38] [SPEAKER_06] Yeah. Live with me in a storeroom behind a hardware store in Fairvale. We'll have lots of laughs. Tell you what, when I send my ex-wife her alimony, you can lick the stamps.
[00:41:49] [SPEAKER_09] I'll lick the stamps.
[00:41:51] [SPEAKER_05] There's a very meaningful exchange about like, she says, I don't want to meet in these hotel rooms. I want you next time, like we'll have dinner with my sister and it's respectable.
[00:42:00] [SPEAKER_09] We can even have dinner, but respectably in my house with my mother's picture on the mantle and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.
[00:42:11] [SPEAKER_06] And after the steak, did we send sister to the movies, turn mama's picture to the wall?
[00:42:15] [SPEAKER_09] Sam.
[00:42:17] [SPEAKER_05] And also planting in our mind, a mother watches over you from above, you know, and then like judges you. So you have to turn her face away. Like, I don't totally get why he doesn't want to marry her, but I don't think it's important. I guess it's just, I don't want you to see me like this or something. Yeah.
[00:42:35] [SPEAKER_04] Like, I think the importance is that she thinks that she can save the situation. Like, that's the thing that motivates that impulse that she then regrets.
[00:42:45] [SPEAKER_05] Then we get the Hitchcock cameo just out of the way early, you know, so people don't have to be looking out for that. It's kind of amazing that he was already that famous that everyone's like, oh, I got to see, I got to do the Kit Hitchcock cameo. So then she goes to the office, kind of a late lunch. And yeah, her co-office worker is played by Hitchcock's daughter, Pat Hitchcock. And she's hilarious in this, I think.
[00:43:12] [SPEAKER_04] She's really good. I didn't know until this time around that that was Hitchcock's daughter. She looks a little...
[00:43:21] [SPEAKER_05] And it's very funny. Like another mother mentioned, right? She says, oh, like you have a headache? Take these. She's just giving out pills. Like, she's great. But she says, my mother gave me these. And then like, they were tranquilizers for her wedding night.
[00:43:37] [SPEAKER_04] And then, yeah. And then she's like, did anybody call? She's like, well, Teddy called. Then my mother called to see if Teddy called.
[00:43:42] [SPEAKER_05] You know, also kind of reminding Janet Lee that she's not married. That's part of this, you know, seeding in her mind. Yeah. Then the drunk, old, rich sleaze comes in. And I guess he's buying a house with $40,000 cash for his 18-year-old daughter who's getting married. But meanwhile, he's like hitting on Janet Lee. And in the process, like, again, every seed is planted, right? Like when he says, you know what I do about unhappiness?
[00:44:12] [SPEAKER_05] I buy it off. What do you make of the, like, it doesn't buy happiness. It just buys off unhappiness, he says.
[00:44:21] [SPEAKER_04] Like, you don't buy happiness. Like, I get what he's saying. Like, keep people off your back. Which really matches what Loomis is going through. Which is like, okay, money's not going to make you happy. But it can at least keep the shit at bay. And then you can pursue your happiness.
[00:44:35] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, it can, like, remove the stress. Like, it's actually kind of a wise thing, actually. I think it can buy off unhappiness. But it's, yeah, it's much worse at buying you actual happiness. Because that involves things that money can't buy.
[00:44:52] [SPEAKER_04] Where he's wrong is when he says you can't buy off unhappiness with pills.
[00:44:55] [SPEAKER_05] He doesn't say that. She says that.
[00:44:58] [SPEAKER_04] She says that.
[00:44:59] [SPEAKER_05] So wrong. I think that's why she has to die. Because she said something so false. That's how I read that.
[00:45:08] [SPEAKER_04] So does she make the decision? Do you think she's making the decision there? I don't know. Like... I'm trying to calculate where her little fall from, you know, mini fall from grace is here. And I think that she goes through a bit of a slippery slope in this whole situation where he has the cash and he says explicitly, I never carry more than I can afford to lose. Yeah.
[00:45:30] [SPEAKER_05] And he also says he doesn't declare it. Like, because Pat Hitchcock says, I declare. And he just says directly to Janet Leigh, I don't. That's how I have all this money. So it's already kind of stolen money to begin with.
[00:45:43] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. And him being sleazy, like, makes her, you know, like, he kind of deserves it. Like, all these things are happening. In a... Actually, only as I'm talking about it now, in a really nice way, like, credit to the screenplay, all of these, like, things are going on that you could feel would be a situational force to turn somebody, you know, to the dark side temporarily.
[00:46:02] [SPEAKER_05] And also, like, making us completely on her side because we're seeing it, you know, like, we're... Exactly. Fuck this guy. Fuck this guy. Like, she should take his money. It's, like, more just for her to take his money.
[00:46:15] [SPEAKER_04] That's right. And then when we see her in her hotel room packing up a suitcase, money sitting on the bed, now she's in the black underwear. Like, she's, like, she's turned to the dark side.
[00:46:25] [SPEAKER_05] She's in the black bra now. We saw her in a white bra. We see her in a black bra. Yeah. One thing I wanted to say before we leave the scene, but when she goes into the office to say she's going to take the money and then go home from there, there's a shot of a painting behind her where five men are just looking directly at her in that painting. And so it's this other thing where she's constantly going to be watched from this point on in the movie.
[00:46:52] [SPEAKER_05] And, like, you see that perfectly in that shot of the painting and her in the office.
[00:46:57] [SPEAKER_04] That's cool.
[00:46:58] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, it's very cool.
[00:46:59] [SPEAKER_04] The male gaze.
[00:47:00] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, and that is, like, basically the next, until she dies, she's being watched from now on. Yeah. And the music starts here, like, the score here, it's a little eerier than it should be, given that you're completely on her side for stealing this money. There's something about it that makes you feel more uneasy. And I think, like, this is where the stress starts.
[00:47:24] [SPEAKER_05] Like, all of a sudden, from now on, she's going to have very rarely, like, a non-anxious moment. A not guilt-ridden and regretful moment, you know?
[00:47:36] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just with the theme of guilt, you know, I think that there is something, the mirror image of the two sides are, like, they're different kinds of guilt that, like, they're being put through. One feels like the father guilt, like the internal, like what Freud really did think of as internalizing the father, as internalizing authority and norms. And here she is, like, flouting that, like, she has decided to do something that goes so
[00:48:03] [SPEAKER_04] against society and is feeling the pressure and the guilt of violating that. And then later on, it's like this weird kind of internalized maternal guilt that's, like, fucking with Norman. But both of them are going through some guilt syndrome.
[00:48:20] [SPEAKER_05] So you think with Marion, it's more like superego, like authority kind of norms guilt?
[00:48:29] [SPEAKER_04] That's what it feels like to me. Like, the thing that us normal people might feel when we do something really wrong or, like, illegal.
[00:48:36] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. And we see the mirror, like, there's almost no shots in this movie without mirrors. But, like, when we see her reflection, that's a signal. Okay, now we are with the more darker id, impulsive desire, satisfying side of her. And, yeah. And, like, this next sequence might be my favorite in the movie. Just between now and her getting to the Gates Motel is so stressful. And we're stressed for all the wrong reasons. We're stressed because we think someone's going to catch her with the money.
[00:49:05] [SPEAKER_05] And she thinks that. And that guilt is oppressing her. And here's where everything, like, the fading, the music, the black and white photography, it's all just, you know, starting with seeing her boss at the crosswalk. It's like everyone is watching me right now. Everyone knows that I'm guilty. Like, it conveys that feeling so perfectly, I think.
[00:49:30] [SPEAKER_04] By the way, her boss crossing the street and seeing her in the car, like, Tarantino must have just stolen that for Pulp Fiction. Totally. You're right.
[00:49:38] [SPEAKER_05] Like, I knew I kind of recognized that, but I never made that connection. I think you're totally right. Yeah. But, like, you know, like, now everybody's watching her. Like, if she can't even just get out of Phoenix without, like, her boss seeing her, of course she's going to think that everybody is on to her. Like, I think this plays out so well with the cop at the dealership.
[00:49:59] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, the dealership is incredible. Like, the cop scene before that when she's sleeping in her car. Yeah. His face, that shot, like, there's a lot of shots in this movie that I feel like could become posters. And that shot of the cop with his sunglasses on taking up the entire frame somehow. You know, one of the things that I learned about this movie is that he was shooting on a 50 millimeter lens for most of the movie, which is right around, like, how we see normal life. You know, not, like, wide.
[00:50:27] [SPEAKER_04] There's no, like, distortion from the wide lenses or anything like that. So when he takes up the whole frame, like, his face in the window, I get nervous, man. Like, I'm like, this is just too much authority in my face. And I read someone or heard someone saying that, like, when they play this for their students, if they play the audio, the cop sounds like he's being, like, just normal. He's being just like, are you okay? You know, like, kind of just checking in on her.
[00:50:55] [SPEAKER_04] But when you play the audio and show his face, all of a sudden it's like, no, he's super threatening.
[00:51:01] [SPEAKER_05] Because that's, we're seeing it from her perspective and we've internalized her, like, situation. Like, it's our situation. Like, we definitely don't want her to get caught by the cop at this point. And it just seems like, yeah, you can't see his eyes. It's not exactly mirrored, but it's kind of mirrored. But, like, it's just dark. It's just a void. And we all have had that feeling. Like, that feeling of when you're guilty, it's like an accompanying paranoia that comes with it.
[00:51:29] [SPEAKER_05] And it's a snowball effect or this, like, you know, like, reinforcing thing where if you're paranoid, you start acting a little weird, which makes people look at you a little funny, which makes you more paranoid. And that's exactly what happens in this scene with the dealership. It culminates in that.
[00:51:45] [SPEAKER_04] It's so good when she's pulling out finally and you're, like, kind of relieved for her. And then the car pulls up and you hear, hey! And she freezes.
[00:51:53] [SPEAKER_05] It's just because she forgot her fucking suitcase, you know? And the cop has come over at that point. And they're just kind of looking at her. Like, at that point, it's not, this is where it becomes more impressionistic, I think. They're like zombies. They're just, like, these watching things. They're not even really talking. It's not clear what the cop is doing there. If he wasn't going to detain her, why is he there? Yeah. When he's watching her from across the street at the dealer, it's, like, so nerve-wracking. But then he gets in the car and you're like, oh, thank God he's leaving.
[00:52:23] [SPEAKER_05] Maybe he got a call that he has to go. But then he just crosses the street with his car, parks there, and just kind of gets out. And both him and the dealer are looking at her. And it's like, are they going to do anything? No. Like, that's the last we hear of either of them. It's just that feeling of, like, fuck, fuck. Yeah.
[00:52:45] [SPEAKER_04] Totally. Totally. Now we're getting, like, I agree with you. This is such a great, like, until she gets to the Bates Motel. It's so good. Like, the tension is so good. So here's what I want to ask you. Well, I guess two things. One, like, how subjective is the point of view that we're getting? Like, that cop looming so large does seem like you were saying, like, from her perspective, like the fear of a cop being in your window. Maybe it's just, like, distorted and we're seeing her perspective.
[00:53:13] [SPEAKER_04] And then as she's driving, her paranoia is presented to us as her thoughts, thinking about what people are saying about her.
[00:53:21] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. Starting with those two that she just saw kind of watching her as she left.
[00:53:27] [SPEAKER_04] So, like, I remember thinking, are we supposed to think that we're hearing what they're really saying?
[00:53:33] [SPEAKER_05] No.
[00:53:34] [SPEAKER_04] But she's reacting to the thoughts of what they might, like, she's just making up them saying all that stuff.
[00:53:39] [SPEAKER_05] That's how I always read it, right? Because at one point it's like, it's Monday morning, like Pat Hitchcock says. They literally say that something that's in the future. And I think that's why it's so good, you know, when she imagines Cassidy, the rich drunk guy, finding out about it and it was, like, saying, and she was, she tricked me. She was flirting with me. And she gets that kind of semi-demented smile. Yeah.
[00:54:04] [SPEAKER_04] That smile. Oh, it's so good. Yeah. The grin. And that grin says a lot. Like, she's just accepted at this point that, like, she's getting away with it and she kind of likes that she's, like, been this bad person.
[00:54:17] [SPEAKER_05] But at the same time, we feel that way too. Like, fuck that guy. So, like, that demented smile that she has is also, like, our smile. Because we're just totally with her.
[00:54:29] [SPEAKER_04] And that's what's so great. Like, Hitchcock does this so well. Like, he gets us on her side.
[00:54:34] [SPEAKER_05] And, you know, some of that stuff could have been from her perspective too. Like, maybe the guy wasn't that lecherous, you know? Like, but whereas if you think we're taking this completely from her perspective, then, you know, there's reason maybe to question, you know, how justified it seemed up till now.
[00:54:52] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. The rain as, like, adding tension is insane. We've all been in, like, those severe rainstorms where visibility just completely cuts out. And they're showing that and she's driving and you're just like, fucking stop, dude. Like, you cannot be driving in this. You're like, should I pull over? Like, you have that moment where you're just like, wait, no, this is serious. I got to pull over, right?
[00:55:16] [SPEAKER_05] Because you can, like, see two feet in front of you. Yeah. And the wipers are doing that thing, which it actually does in these things is your wipers are just going insane. But it also is very much like a stabbing, you know, in the shower.
[00:55:28] [SPEAKER_04] Foreshadowing the shower. Yeah. The blades, the wiper blades, Tamler.
[00:55:33] [SPEAKER_05] The wiper blades. Yeah. And then, like, it's completely, like, no visibility until just suddenly there's a clearing and it's Bates Motel. Bates Motel.
[00:55:43] [SPEAKER_04] Have you been on the Universal Studios tour?
[00:55:46] [SPEAKER_05] No. Have you?
[00:55:47] [SPEAKER_04] Oh, so many times. Before I ever saw the movie. This is how I learned about it now. And to see that house, even when I had never seen the movie, it's seared in me. Like, that house. And it's, like, built. I don't know what the scale is, you know, like two-thirds or something. You know, it's like they're using tricks to make it seem more distant when it's closer. So it's a smaller build and it's only a facade.
[00:56:10] [SPEAKER_05] Oh, really? I thought you could go into it, but there was nothing in it.
[00:56:14] [SPEAKER_04] No, no. You only see it from afar. And the little tram goes by the motel part. And you see it up on the hill. And it's literally now just three sides. During the movie, it was only two sides, the two sides that we see. And then they built in the sets,
[00:56:29] [SPEAKER_05] like they built the, like, actual. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the staircase leading up to it and how it's kind of steep it is.
[00:56:36] [SPEAKER_04] Apparently, based on an Edward Hopper painting, did you see this?
[00:56:38] [SPEAKER_05] Of a house that was by, like, kind of abandoned railroad tracks. And it was just there by itself, by it. And also, like, in the Truffaut interview, which I read, he said, this is just like a normal house in Northern California. We call it California Gothic or in particularly hideous cases, California gingerbread.
[00:57:03] [SPEAKER_04] That's so funny.
[00:57:05] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah.
[00:57:05] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. But that house has a personality of its own, like, from afar.
[00:57:09] [SPEAKER_05] You know, like, all this stuff is so perfectly pulled off. Yeah. So he comes down. I like that he starts the first, one of the first things he says, it's a dirty night. Yeah. Like, dirty, you know?
[00:57:22] [SPEAKER_04] Uh-huh. When he picks her up or, like, when he gets her into the hotel when it's raining outside, he's holding an umbrella but not using it. But it's like, so it just shows something is off with him already.
[00:57:34] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so they have their conversation. He asks where she's from and she puts her wrong name down. She says Los Angeles just looking at the newspaper that she bought. And he's about to maybe pick key number three and then he switches to room number one when she says that. So, like, just like, she made the choice with the money, he's making the choice. Oh, I could put her where I can't, like,
[00:58:03] [SPEAKER_05] spy her and then kill her. Yeah. Regular room or murder room? And I wonder if there's something about the fact that she said Los Angeles that made him do that. Like, oh, she's already kind of full of sin or something like that.
[00:58:17] [SPEAKER_04] What are you saying about Southern California?
[00:58:19] [SPEAKER_05] No, but, like, maybe that's how you think if you're in this town clearly attracted to her. In a way that, like, mirrors, this guy is so sleazy, he's already so rich, he won't miss this money and he's a tax cheat anyway. You know, like, she's a whore from Hollywood.
[00:58:41] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, no, totally. Like, the Ed Gein, like, all women are harlots, like, that kind of voice in his head.
[00:58:48] [SPEAKER_05] Exactly. So, yeah, like, I mean, I don't know how to talk about this scene is so significant at every level, but this is, you know, one thing I would say is Anthony Perkins is just so perfect. Like, he seems sweet and awkward and you feel bad for him, but then you're also like, wait, is he totally creepy and is he trying to rape her? Or, you know, so you're not ruling that out either. He plays it so well.
[00:59:13] [SPEAKER_04] He's just charming. He has this boyish charm and he's, like, being really nice to her and then he's just surrounded by these, like, birds of prey that have been stuffed and that are, like, You're being torn. Like, wait, what is this guy?
[00:59:28] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah, any line can be sweet or just a little weird in an endearing way or it could be, like, this person's a psycho. So here's my question, though. Right before they go into the bird room, he invites her up to the house, right? And he says, I'll come back to take you with my trusty umbrella, you know, and it's, like, that's where he's, like, his most boyish. Like, he's an eighth grader taking, like, a girl to the school dance or something.
[00:59:55] [SPEAKER_08] Would you have dinner with me? I was just about to myself. You know, nothing special, just sandwiches and milk, but I'd like it very much if you'd come up to the house. I don't set a fancy table, but the kitchen's awful homey.
[01:00:10] [SPEAKER_09] I'd like to.
[01:00:11] [SPEAKER_08] All right, yeah, you get yourself settled and take off your wet shoes and I'll be back as soon as it's ready.
[01:00:16] Okay.
[01:00:18] [SPEAKER_08] With my trusty umbrella.
[01:00:21] [SPEAKER_05] So then he goes up and, you know, they have that scene with the mother where she yells at him that she hears so clearly and so loud from her hotel room.
[01:00:33] [SPEAKER_10] No!
[01:00:36] [SPEAKER_01] I'm bringing strange young girls in for supper by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds. Mother, please!
[01:00:46] [SPEAKER_05] Why can we hear that so clearly? But also, why did he invite her to the house? Like, is he already thinking he's going to stage that play with the mother and he's already setting his trap? Does he already know he's going to kill her? Or does he actually think maybe she could come up to the house until he inhabits the mother? This is where I don't know what's going on in his head. When he invites her to the house, like, I don't know how to read that.
[01:01:15] [SPEAKER_05] And I honestly, like, how do you read that?
[01:01:18] [SPEAKER_04] So I read it as it really is Norman bringing home a friend. And I think when he's Norman, he really is Norman. And at times his mother's voice he might hear in his head. But like, I think it really is the case that he was innocently trying to just make a friend. And when he gets up to the house, whatever cues that mother personality to kick in was like, how dare you bring this strange woman
[01:01:47] [SPEAKER_04] into the house. And so he's like, maybe just dinner in my parlor.
[01:01:52] [SPEAKER_05] Okay. So you take that at full face value.
[01:01:55] [SPEAKER_04] At face value. Yeah. But like, that's... I think that's the...
[01:01:58] [SPEAKER_05] I think I agree. You know.
[01:01:59] [SPEAKER_04] And even with the like choosing room one, I think he's still low level Norman pervy where he's like, I can see her shower.
[01:02:07] [SPEAKER_05] You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So not to kill her, but just to look at her in the shower.
[01:02:11] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. And you know, I think given what the psychiatrist says like in my reading of what's going on is that what must happen is that when he starts getting dangerously like, you know, lustful thoughts in his head, the mother kicks in. So like, he's not yet there, but like for sure once he like is thinking about bringing her to the house and everything that might go along with bringing her into the house,
[01:02:40] [SPEAKER_04] then the mother kicks in because he's had an impure thought. And once those like impure thoughts, the guilt is so strong that there's just full on mother is taking over.
[01:02:50] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. So when he gets like a chubby, like his mother.
[01:02:54] [SPEAKER_04] Exactly. Yeah. His mother's like, how dare you? Like, I know you want this horror.
[01:02:59] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. No, I think that's definitely one way to read it. And I have questions about like then what's going on at the end. but yeah, like get as a reading in terms of he is at this point when he's apologizing for his mother or wishing he could like he's being somewhat sincere there.
[01:03:19] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. And he plays it so sincere that I'm just like, I want to believe it.
[01:03:22] [SPEAKER_05] Yeah. And disarms her to the point where she wants to invite him in her room and he says no and then takes her to the stuffed bird room which is so like that owl is going to be in my nightmares. like the way a lot of the shots are framed it's like staring right at you. It's like I heard some podcasts where like an owl came down and ripped out a person's scalp and like everyone thought it was like this murder or an alien attack or whatever but it was later shown to be like this owl
[01:03:52] [SPEAKER_05] just scalped this person. Oh my god. Like that's what that owl looks like it's gonna do and it's staring right at you. You know?
[01:04:00] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. It's so good and like the camera placement as this scene develops is so good. You know one of the things you hear about Hitchcock or whatever like I hear from analysis of his films is he doesn't favor dialogue he's like very into just showing not telling kind of
[01:04:16] [SPEAKER_05] Dialogue is a last resort for him.
[01:04:19] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah exactly and so there's not a lot of a lot of dialogue and this one you're like oh but there's a lot of dialogue and this is the longest continuous dialogue in the movie but what he's doing what he's showing you is still so important like the way that he's like at times presenting Norman as like vulnerable and kind and then at times presenting really threatening and you know he is right underneath that big owl attacking you know it's stuffed
[01:04:48] [SPEAKER_04] in the attack pose sometimes and then sometimes he's next to just like a you know like a little perched bird
[01:04:54] [SPEAKER_05] bird yeah no totally and he's sometimes shot more from above making him look smaller and sometimes like looks really big and that is done you know to great effect I think throughout the movie and then his performance
[01:05:09] [SPEAKER_04] of being set off by like the slight things that she says and like almost losing it but pulling it right back you know I feel like that's a template for performances that I've seen later on
[01:05:21] [SPEAKER_05] yeah right it's like I'm menacing but then I soothe you somehow but you're not totally soothed but like oh I didn't mean to go crazy
[01:05:31] [SPEAKER_04] there for a second yeah
[01:05:32] [SPEAKER_05] yeah yeah I also love like just in terms of the endearing awkwardness but also just a kind of like almost lynchian weirdness he says to her you eat like a bird and Janet Leigh is like well I guess you know and he goes no not really so it's like a little banter for three lines and then it just ends with a thud and she's like oh like I thought with all these fucking birds around you I just stuffed them
[01:05:57] [SPEAKER_04] I don't really know that bird
[01:05:58] [SPEAKER_05] yeah and then I think just one of my favorite lines in cinema history is when she says do you go out with friends sometimes and also the way he delivers this it's like a boy's best friend is his mother like it's just
[01:06:14] [SPEAKER_09] so good do you go out with friends
[01:06:20] [SPEAKER_08] well a boy's best friend is his mother
[01:06:23] [SPEAKER_05] and it's like he says it as if okay I figured out the way to answer this question and it's just it's one of the great like it's so funny
[01:06:34] [SPEAKER_04] so she's eating with him in a way that feels very like she's eating sandwiches and she didn't eat the sandwiches in the hotel room with her lover and there's something happening here right feels meaningful to me that she's letting it's like here's a guy who's like trying to actually be good to her like be gentlemanly in a way that her man really kind of wasn't and I feel like herself letting herself be vulnerable
[01:07:02] [SPEAKER_04] by eating his food
[01:07:04] [SPEAKER_05] and him being vulnerable also like because this guy's like I'm too like I can't marry you right now like not when I'm swimming in debt but like this guy's just willing to be vulnerable and I think her performance here is really good too you can see where she's kind of charmed by him and when she feels comfortable and then when she feels like wait what the fuck and then like when he says the thing about like we're all in our private traps we're clamped in them and none of us can get out
[01:07:33] [SPEAKER_05] we scratch and claw like there's another thing that's happening there where she's thinking oh I'm in a trap like I trapped myself by taking the money and you can already see it in her face there like I need to turn back
[01:07:49] [SPEAKER_04] and it's interesting that the conversation with him did that to her like to the point where like I think she's probably kind of grateful like he's a weird guy but like you know this snapped me into like to my senses it is a good I don't know how true it is but it is a really like deep thing for Norman to be saying
[01:08:06] [SPEAKER_05] about the traps
[01:08:07] [SPEAKER_04] yeah
[01:08:08] [SPEAKER_05] like and then that he was born in his trap yeah but he doesn't mind it and she says well you should and he says well I do I just say I don't
[01:08:17] [SPEAKER_07] I love that
[01:08:18] [SPEAKER_05] yeah like he speaks for all of us then you know like the traps that we're in you know like but I don't mind it like we're all in our traps but I do
[01:08:30] [SPEAKER_04] apparently Anthony Perkins you know was on record as saying like he had a very domineering mother growing up and he was like closeted gay at this point
[01:08:38] [SPEAKER_05] yeah it's like it sounds like it was very similar like the situation like his dad yeah died and he kind of felt guilty because he kind of wished him he was dead so he could be with his mother like I I thought is that schtick it sounds so on the nose
[01:08:54] [SPEAKER_04] I know it sounds like what the studio would make you say yeah
[01:08:58] [SPEAKER_05] it's great a son is a poor substitute for a lover one of the girls again it's like just like that line and now she's like you know completely freaked out but then she still feels bad and then that's where she says put her someplace and then he gets a switch flips and like I guess is he the mother when he's talking right now
[01:09:21] [SPEAKER_04] I don't know like it sounds like it could be the mother right there yeah in that moment and then like when he clicks switches back because like it's weird because the psychiatrist at the end will say like you know toward the end he was more the mother than Norman like whatever Norman was was kind of a shell of Norman
[01:09:37] [SPEAKER_05] but then I also got the sense of like him describing the madhouse he might have spent some time there that's how I read it like it gets very personal to him but I don't know like maybe that's not true maybe the mother spent some time in a madhouse but the way he talks about it like you get the sense he's witnessed it and then there's just a bunch of lines like when he says like I don't hate her I hate what she's become where you feel like he's talking about himself as himself
[01:10:07] [SPEAKER_05] but using her as this kind of projection this like voodoo doll that he can stab when really it's him that he's upset with which I kind of like that reading more that's not that like all of a sudden she's possessing him but that like he is really kind of conflicted about this like he is giving in to her and he still feels like he could not give in to her or at least he once felt like he could not give in to her
[01:10:32] [SPEAKER_04] yeah there's almost no answer there I feel you know it's all in his performance it's just all like it is like what is presented to us it's some mingling of all of these things that you're saying like is it like a multiple personality thing like strictly where it's like snaps back and forth but no like I think it's like I imagine that he without having like the personality of his mother like without having like the weird multiple personalities he would still be super fucked up
[01:11:01] [SPEAKER_04] like he could still have his mom as a thing he could still have thoughts that his mom is like you know judging him and condemning him so like I think that's just also all going on even when he's Norman you know
[01:11:12] [SPEAKER_05] yeah I agree and I think that's probably the way we have to look at it because ultimately it is him and he has always had her personality entangled with him whether you know he's doing her voice or not like that conscience is in his head Norman okay so I like when she gets up to go to bed she's like enough of this like she turns and she's like I'm gonna go I gotta get out of this conversation
[01:11:41] [SPEAKER_05] and then she looked he looks so small this is a great example of that like he looks like a little tiny kid she looks like the mother at that point like just so big kind of lording over him and then she goes in and the other reason is she's made the decision to go back now and she like we see that and this is where he does his little peeping Tom thing did you see
[01:12:06] [SPEAKER_04] that the painting that he moves I don't know if you like looked up what the painting was but it's like Susanna and her and the elders I think is the name of it but it's just about like old men trying to like check out a woman as she's bathing
[01:12:17] [SPEAKER_05] yeah yeah yeah I actually saw something where it was like there's a bunch of variations of that picture that you see and some of them are a lot more like they're kind of attacking her and other ones are just like they're watching her like he just sprinkles stuff all over the movie so when he looks at her he doesn't think he's gonna kill her then right
[01:12:40] [SPEAKER_04] I don't think so so my reading again I guess is just the straight like the face value where he's getting off like he's super excited to see her and he gets the chubby and he goes back home and that's when the mother takes over
[01:12:53] [SPEAKER_05] but when he looks at her name in the register knows she lied about her name he seems there to be like not innocent little kid I'm excited like there's something about that that seems to give him a justification for something maybe it's just looking at her through the people but I don't know
[01:13:15] [SPEAKER_04] yeah I don't know either one thing when you were saying how she looms large in that scene and then this like I just wanted to like make a note about his physical performance is really good in that like he can be he can seem small and he can seem big and the guy was 6'2 yeah like he was a tall guy so that he can make himself seem like small
[01:13:39] [SPEAKER_05] and weak you know and sometimes freakishly tall like when Arbogast pulls up like and he's on the thing he looks like some circus stretch freak or something like that
[01:13:49] [SPEAKER_04] yeah is he right outside the house there
[01:13:51] [SPEAKER_05] that's outside the hotel when Arbogast pulls up Arbogast
[01:13:56] [SPEAKER_07] love that guy
[01:13:59] [SPEAKER_05] so he goes up shower scene I don't know like what can we say about the shower scene
[01:14:05] [SPEAKER_04] what can we say you know one thing that I just never hear people talk about is that she's getting in the shower obviously it's not in people's shower but like this is her cleansing this is her baptism this is her moment of purity you know and this is like because she's made the decision yeah so she's freed in that moment she's freed herself from like this guilt yeah
[01:14:24] [SPEAKER_05] and in fact I think the symbol of her doing that is you know like I've calculated the money I know what I can give back and she flushes it down the toilet which makes cinema history by the way because that's never happened before like first toilet flush
[01:14:41] [SPEAKER_04] so crazy and apparently
[01:14:42] [SPEAKER_05] like the screenwriter was adamant about keeping that in that's amazing but we later find out that it never fully went down so it's like we think she's cleansed the sin and she's having her baptism but like it didn't take you know it didn't go all the way down and so yeah but yeah
[01:15:01] [SPEAKER_04] we could do a whole episode on just the shower scene I'm sure just like as a cinema scene it was gonna be silent like did you hear that like he wasn't gonna yeah and he wasn't satisfied which what a good call
[01:15:14] [SPEAKER_05] and like yeah apparently just gave like almost doubled Bernard Herman's salary when he saw how it played and yeah like so let's just you can watch 50 videos on the shower scene that will do more justice to it than we can here but I will say the fast cuts the cuts are so good the cuts and the stabbing and the way the chocolate syrup going down the drain
[01:15:40] [SPEAKER_04] yeah the ability to devise some way to film shower water coming down onto the lens
[01:15:47] [SPEAKER_05] yeah it really really is incredible I'll also say that even though you know like if you're our age or younger there's no way you didn't know that she was going to get killed in the shower but I still feel the weight of Janet Lee's death you know like it's like holy shit like first of all because she's been a very compelling character and we are I think attracted to her and to have her die like that and also even though I like people will
[01:16:16] [SPEAKER_05] do this all the time now I still feel like I get a little bit of that I can't believe they killed Janet Lee 40 minutes into the movie like I still get that feeling you know
[01:16:27] [SPEAKER_04] absolutely I was going to say the same thing and it's because it doesn't matter how many times you watch it you're pulled into her story so well that like it's always going to be like a wait what that's it and it it just presents well like the indignity of any death where it's just like oh their story is just done like that's just what death is like oh okay like they're done all of the things that you cared about like don't matter anymore they're just all over
[01:16:54] [SPEAKER_05] the dealer like yeah her boss doesn't matter
[01:16:58] [SPEAKER_04] the fucking money is now and just like wrapped in that LA Tribune yeah just doesn't matter
[01:17:03] [SPEAKER_05] totally so then you get this long cleanup scene and it just seamlessly switches from her perspective to his perspective now we are with him as he's doing all this cleaning and it's so brilliant the way okay now like we've been passed off to this guy now and you know like famously when he takes the car finally he's done with the cleanup and it goes into the swamp and then it goes down and he's kind of nervous
[01:17:32] [SPEAKER_05] eating the candy watching it go down and we're like right there like we want the car to go down and then when it stops we're like oh shit you know even though we were just so on Janet Lee's side now all of a sudden we want the car to go down
[01:17:45] [SPEAKER_04] incredible like you said seamless because in that moment when the car isn't going down like I'm sorry you just feel it you're just like and his performance there is just like his turning around and looking it's just so natural it's so well done and you're
[01:18:01] [SPEAKER_05] like oh shit and he's kind of praying you know he's got his hands together and kind of a praying thing and I think why do we want that car to go down you know because it's weird I think it's because we just watched him do all this fucking work you know like he really takes us through the cleanup and it's like we didn't just watch all that and now the car won't go down or something like that like I think that's one of the ways he gets us to walk you know
[01:18:30] [SPEAKER_05] like that has to lead to something you know
[01:18:33] [SPEAKER_04] yeah I think that's totally right like I never thought about that but that is that for sure gets me like you're kind of satisfied at like all the cleanup you know yeah and it's weird because it is so fast because that amazing shot of the drain swirling you know the chocolate sauce and then her eye and that's when like it hits hardest to me that her story is over is in like her lifeless eyes and then just the cleanup like it's just boom like okay
[01:19:02] [SPEAKER_05] yeah so then we go to a hardware store which is Sam Loomis's where he works and a weird scene with the woman it feels like it's significant you know yeah but you don't know why yeah yeah like insect killer should be painless like it should always be painless
[01:19:21] [SPEAKER_04] it doesn't say on the can whether or not it's painless yeah
[01:19:26] [SPEAKER_05] and it's just weird and it's also just a little like agitating like why are we yeah and then we see Lila played by Vera Miles the kind of bee person that I would think like the shadow or not the shadow but like a paler reflection of her sister she is the shadow
[01:19:41] [SPEAKER_04] on the cave she's the yeah yeah
[01:19:43] [SPEAKER_05] right it's funny they show Arbogast who we later find out is a private investigator chasingg Miriam to get the forty thousand dollars he's watching both of them in the background and we see that so it's another thing that everybody's watching and then Arbogast comes in and they convince him that they're not part of this you know I think
[01:20:02] [SPEAKER_04] yeah and I think he's like him watching the way that they're talking to each other probably convinces him fairly early on even though he has to like play the role of detective I really love the way that Lila responds to him when he's like I might believe you that yeah and she's like I don't care whether you believe you or not which is exactly what I'm feeling at that moment like who are you like I don't give a fuck like I'm looking for my sister
[01:20:23] [SPEAKER_05] right the presumption of like you must be so relieved that I believe yeah yeah some private investigator that has nothing to do with you it's not like the cops or something exactly so they kind of he says he's going to go look for and he goes to all the hotels yeah a little montage yeah until he gets to the Bates hotel it's funny like I feel like it's obviously you don't stop at the Bates motel or you at the very least if you are you're going to be careful
[01:20:52] [SPEAKER_05] but I guess that's you only know that if you've seen Psycho he starts out cocky he starts out kind of cocky you know and like even the way it's filmed Arbogast looks like a midget or a little person sorry and he looks so tall just the angle but then that slowly kind of it gets closer and he starts out acting pretty sure of himself yeah and then like you said yeah he gets kind of nervous the more Arbogast is talking to him
[01:21:19] [SPEAKER_04] and this is where I think like in my notes I was like his little mumbliness like that that whole thing is just done so well
[01:21:26] [SPEAKER_05] yeah it's like when he says at first that he's going to change the sheets in all the rooms which he does once a week like I hate the smell of dampness don't you it's a I don't know it's a creepy smell and then yeah he literally starts stuttering and it seems like he's some part of his childhood is coming out of him
[01:21:45] [SPEAKER_04] right but then he's like come on you want to join me like help me change the sheets like pretty confident
[01:21:49] [SPEAKER_05] he's very childlike I think absolutely throughout like he uses words wrong like I think in this scene he says mental picture picture exactly
[01:21:59] [SPEAKER_04] yeah even when he says falsity I think like that's a word but you know that it's like he doesn't know that's a word
[01:22:05] [SPEAKER_05] and also it's not a word for that I was trying to think what is the word for that it's not a falsity this is an interesting scene where he starts Arbogast who's clearly picked up that he's involved somehow but he thinks like they're all wrong they're all being misdirected in the same way we were like he says like that you're gallantly protecting her you wouldn't be fooled you'd know how she was using you wouldn't you and he says I'm not a fool I'm not capable of being fooled
[01:22:35] [SPEAKER_05] not even by a woman
[01:22:36] [SPEAKER_08] but I'm not a fool and I'm not capable of being fooled and I'm not even by a woman well this is not a slur on your manhood I'm sorry let's put it this way she might have fooled me but she didn't fool my mother
[01:22:50] [SPEAKER_04] another one of those lines I know yeah I love though this just the this stretch of the investigation where they're all so wrong about what happened because they can't see past the $40,000 like the crime that's been committed looms large for normal people who care about money this is the mystery and they just have no idea what's at the underbelly
[01:23:19] [SPEAKER_04] of this guy's story and his hotel and everything that's right
[01:23:24] [SPEAKER_05] they recognize his culpability but they have no idea what it's for it's so far beyond what they conceive and I guess rightly so why would they think that this guy who has
[01:23:38] [SPEAKER_04] like a hotel that's financially like obviously not doing well so like maybe he has some reason she was an attractive young woman maybe they made some deal like it's all plausible it's just nothing in that matches the psychology of Norman Bates
[01:23:52] [SPEAKER_05] and the other thing that they all do is they recognize that the mother is involved somehow and they want to talk to her they feel like if they can talk to the mother they'll get to the bottom of this so Arbogast tries to do that but again he's not a policeman so he can't so then he leaves and Norman gives a kind of creepy smile when he leaves and then he just says he's going to go back to the house cleanses Loomis of any guilt he says to Vera Miles he's not involved
[01:24:22] [SPEAKER_05] and then he walks up to the house this is so Texas chainsaw massacre which I kind of was thinking I don't know why that was the first time somebody goes into a fucked up house and you can tell that they're going to die but it really is this is the template of that you don't want to go into that house yeah
[01:24:40] [SPEAKER_04] you know I heard an interview with I don't remember if it was the screenwriter maybe referring to himself or Hitchcock himself where they were expressing that they didn't believe that people actually screamed out in theaters like don't go in there kind
[01:25:09] [SPEAKER_05] of
[01:25:15] [SPEAKER_04] like we talked about the house the look of the house looming over I want to talk a little bit more about just the house as a
[01:25:45] [SPEAKER_05] not a comfortable place to be not a safe place to be also the way like it's so steep the rise up to it for reasons that are kind of unclear but that gives the bird of prey
[01:26:15] [SPEAKER_04] that for Denzel Washington at some point where he's walking down the sidewalk but he just has them floating yeah it's super cool but
[01:26:22] [SPEAKER_05] it's not like a double dolly right I
[01:26:24] [SPEAKER_04] don't know him falling down the stairs might be it might be but it does feel like he's doing that Hitchcock zoom a little bit when Arbogast is climbing the stairs yeah I it's any of the actual plot points but
[01:26:47] [SPEAKER_05] why is the basement the id I don't know because that's where he puts the mother that's really
[01:26:51] [SPEAKER_04] yeah other than it being dark and scary I don't know why and I don't know what it means that he puts the mother down there I feel like it means something
[01:27:01] [SPEAKER_05] yeah I people are going to start getting suspicious and so he has to repress her more but she doesn't like that she wants to come out of him so yeah the Arbogast scene the Arbogast scene is iconic as anything you know like just the overhead shot of coming out
[01:27:31] [SPEAKER_05] incredible
[01:27:32] [SPEAKER_04] so you get this overhead and you get the coming out of Norman dress as mother and you're still if you don't know you still don't quite know because that overhead shot is it's not only a cool shot it's hiding the faces of both of them in a way that's not obvious that the director is trying really hard to hide the face
[01:27:52] [SPEAKER_05] no not at all because it's this overhead shot and you're only seeing the wig what
[01:28:29] [SPEAKER_04] do you almost feel like okay he's taking over from them to give them just like the update because now they know that he's not calling when he went back to question the mother like he would have called just to even tell us that he got nothing he would have called
[01:28:53] [SPEAKER_05] and he exonerated Sam of any complicity in this so now they can be a team going up I would say they are the least satisfying team to go into the Bates motel but first he goes just by himself Sam and she stays at the hardware store to wait and there's a shot of the rakes over her where it's just like again these birds of prey there's like five of them with claws waiting
[01:29:23] [SPEAKER_05] together or you could think of a skeleton hands and Perkins is by this is almost comedic he's another car has to go down and as he's watching the car go down eating his candy corn he hears someone call for Arbogast and he's like you've got to be fucking kidding me you know it's just like this is never going to end right so but then he leaves and then they come back and they go to the police I don't really have much to say about the police scene do you
[01:29:53] [SPEAKER_04] all I have to say about it is when he says Arbogast is the first time I realized it's Arbo and Arbogast is it here where they learn that she's been dead
[01:30:06] [SPEAKER_05] yeah they learn that she's been dead but they think that he faked her death they faked her death like of course they're not going to think he stuffed her with sawdust and dresses up like her you know he robbed the grave stuffed it
[01:30:40] [SPEAKER_04] night and it's like no nothing's wrong he was just sleeping that's
[01:30:44] [SPEAKER_05] why he didn't answer the door so then they go back to they go to the hotel pretend to be a couple do you think they're going
[01:31:10] [SPEAKER_04] like
[01:31:12] [SPEAKER_05] and that's like yeah it doesn't I didn't for Marion either that's why she stole the money she didn't want to wait and why
[01:31:24] [SPEAKER_04] she was pressuring him to get married
[01:31:25] [SPEAKER_05] yeah so they go there they pretend they're getting a room he gives them room 10 so way the fuck away from what happened but they kind of creep around searching and then they too have this idea that they need to talk to the mother
[01:31:39] [SPEAKER_04] yeah who's alive in their mind yeah and so they do get to marian's cabin and this is where they find the scrap of paper in the toilet which is actually a hilarious little plot device because all she was writing was 40,000 minus the 700 which i think she puts together right like she
[01:31:57] [SPEAKER_05] was like oh she's you know like yeah she was subtracting something from 40 000 yeah i don't want to tell like hitchcock's editor in this who's obviously a genius like their their job but this part could have been cut out like she was clearly there like they already established that so they need another thing right so then they decide to split up another horror movie trope right yeah the
[01:32:21] [SPEAKER_05] girl goes to the scary place the guy has uh yeah and so he has to distract norman and he's again it's like Arbogast doing it it was like crime and punishment you know like but when uh loomis does it it's just like again he he's got the wrong idea he's also kind of aggressive and norman the way norman is acting is kind of interesting he's kind of done trying to pretend he's not involved
[01:32:48] [SPEAKER_04] and he's being uncooperative interesting yeah i read it as just loomis being so inept that he was like you're not like this guy like this guy's gonna get something out of me
[01:32:57] [SPEAKER_05] yeah exactly and then meanwhile she goes up the stairs and you know there's always two sets of stairs there's the going up to the house stairs and then the inside stairs and yeah so first she goes
[01:33:11] [SPEAKER_04] to the upstairs yeah and this is like creepy like she's looking through and i forgot like this part when i was re-watching it like one like i i do remember that just the weirdness of the bed being like indented like the mother's bed like having so indented it's so indented that it's unclear like does she weigh more being stuff like that can't be right because it's sawdust but like is he putting
[01:33:40] [SPEAKER_04] her there every night do they sleep together there or do they sleep together yeah like son is a poor substitute for a lover yeah but it looks like the outline of one body and kind of a fetal position like yeah so it's likely norman and probably the mother i would think i never thought about that
[01:33:59] [SPEAKER_05] oh creepy yeah did you like look through the room it feels like you could go down a rabbit hole for
[01:34:06] [SPEAKER_04] every item there i did not i was tempted to i didn't have time i was tempted to pause like in his
[01:34:11] [SPEAKER_05] room yeah both of them like the two hands together you know like that sculpture every painting i think there's probably a youtube video essay about yeah norman's room is like a little more like a little
[01:34:24] [SPEAKER_04] kid's room right it's preserved as a little kid yeah it's like what his room was exactly when he was
[01:34:30] [SPEAKER_05] a kid yeah like i don't think he could fit in that bed now that's why i think he sleeps in his mom's
[01:34:36] [SPEAKER_04] room uh the eroica symphony is on this record that he has so i saw people trying to figure out why eroica like the the screenwriter apparently has it in the script that it's eroica so like it clearly has some meaning and this might be dumb but i feel like it's there because it's close to erotica maybe she also opens up a book that we never they never show the contents but her reaction makes it seem like there's something bad in the book like and it might be some perverted shit
[01:35:05] [SPEAKER_05] yeah probably so you think he bought the eroica thinking it was erotica and then it's like a beethoven symphony about napoleon and he's like oh shit i didn't read god damn it but i you know i could still jerk off to my magazine with it
[01:35:20] [SPEAKER_04] i mean that's as good a theory as any i can come up with yeah what who knows like i you know maybe just subconsciously if you see the word eroica you might read it as erotica that was my thought
[01:35:30] [SPEAKER_05] like for the viewer not for him the napoleon complex is just a complex about being short right yeah if there's one complex he wouldn't have so yeah like this it's just you feel the meaning of everything there without exactly knowing how to like and it's so creepy this is
[01:35:51] [SPEAKER_04] what gives me the like you're entering norman's mind vibes like the house is norman's mind and like the only other times i see a room preserved like that in childhood is usually when somebody's like in the movies when like parents haven't been able to get past the death of their child and so they like keep it that way yeah it's like psychically he's dead at 10 yeah right and so
[01:36:14] [SPEAKER_05] like he preserves the room of his 10 year old self yeah with that rabbit that yeah like little stuff feels like that rabbit was like punished you know like it looks like it's been kind of ripped apart yeah at times uh yeah so meanwhile loomis is just like drilling him he thinks he figured it out that uh he took the forty thousand dollars to buy a new hotel you know he had this whole story in his mind
[01:36:40] [SPEAKER_04] again it's like small minds you know you're not thinking big like norman exactly right that's why you
[01:36:45] [SPEAKER_05] can't totally get behind him here and norman is just kind of blowing it off until he realizes holy shit where's your wife or you know where's the other one and so he goes up and now we know you know suspenses he's good at it um yeah and so we know now that he's coming he knocks loomis out pretty easily although he should have finished the job and then uh he runs up and now we see her going down
[01:37:15] [SPEAKER_05] the stairs calling for the mom right and then when she sees that he's coming in she goes into the
[01:37:22] [SPEAKER_04] basement yeah this is so cool this is like the you know the total like german expression it's like the light bouncing across her face yeah it's so good even just going to the basement you're like
[01:37:36] [SPEAKER_05] oh god and but we don't know what's going to be there like i do think i at least got that out of my first feeling that i didn't know what the deal was and what you would find here and even when you do like when i watched it now like it's still so like just the way it shows the skeleton on her face her
[01:37:55] [SPEAKER_05] reaction to it and then norman coming in just like uh yeah there is something that is so undignified
[01:38:07] [SPEAKER_04] in seeing norman clearly dressed up in the getup which is like it was mysterious before the shadow of
[01:38:13] [SPEAKER_05] shower yeah it's like it becomes like german cabaret or something like that you know in the 20s
[01:38:21] [SPEAKER_04] or something you know like the mother's face you know it's like missing the eyes which is just really creepy like i don't know that there i have an intellectual connection to this but there is something that reminds me of like the cop looking in like with the black sunglasses on non-reflective really like um that is echoed here like the missing there's something about eyes
[01:38:46] [SPEAKER_04] you know we get lots of shots of eyes yeah and that hers are missing i think is like she's looking
[01:38:51] [SPEAKER_05] through norman's eyes now a hundred percent and in a movie that's so much about watching like watching people illicitly to have her eyes missing and that yeah norman's eyes are looking through there and yeah the light bouncing as you said and then just like going back to the shot of the mother at the end of that scene but yes loomis saves the day and like who gives a shit really i know i know i
[01:39:17] [SPEAKER_04] wish it was i wish arbogast had been able to save the day yeah this is my big criticism of this film
[01:39:22] [SPEAKER_05] yeah um yeah now we get a very controversial scene right you get this sheriff who had just been like saying oh no you're crazy norman and now he's just kind of worthless that sheriff i resent the time that we have to spend with him and then the psychologist just giving us a very detailed breakdown in a kind of insufferable manner like absolutely way he's talking describing it yeah i
[01:39:47] [SPEAKER_04] don't want anybody giving me like psychoanalysis that confidently yeah he's so full of himself you
[01:39:53] [SPEAKER_05] know i didn't get the story from norman like i said it wasn't norman yeah and then when they ask him something so he's dresses up as her and he says well yes and no yeah like a transvestite actually
[01:40:08] [SPEAKER_04] yeah yeah he preserved her body he must have killed them both which i don't know you know i guess it was like murder suicide we thought but now we're to believe like i don't know how the psychiatrist
[01:40:21] [SPEAKER_05] would know that norman killed them both yeah well maybe because the mother said that to him or something yeah but yeah i think the original story was a murder suicide but we come to believe that it's actually norman that did that it's at least open to question whether he did it with his father when he was five you know yeah but certainly nothing suggests that necessarily right by the way
[01:40:44] [SPEAKER_04] the only connection you know you're talking about the hardware store where the woman's looking at the poison for the bugs and she's like doesn't say whether it's painless or not we do know from the sheriff that the way that the lover died that the man was from strict nine poisoning yeah which is rat poison i guess i don't know if it's used for bugs but he says like not a nice way to go like so so we know that like they probably died a horrible like a horrible death and so if it was norman who did it
[01:41:12] [SPEAKER_04] now we know that norman like killed them in a very painful way oh that's interesting which also
[01:41:17] [SPEAKER_05] probably reinforces his guilt and identification with the mother so yeah and then we got the famous shot of him as her with the her voice in his head and it's just a little hard to figure out like how to
[01:41:33] [SPEAKER_04] interpret this yeah i mean his performance again like you're told just sit there and like still like your acting is entirely going to be subtle movements of your face yeah like what a great performance i assume that somebody was feeding him like the lines to react to as as they were being said it's sad when a
[01:41:55] [SPEAKER_01] mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son but i couldn't allow them to believe that i would commit murder they'll put him away now as i should have years ago he was always bad and in the end he intended to tell them i killed those girls and that man as if i could do anything except just sit
[01:42:17] [SPEAKER_01] and stare like one of his stuffed birds oh they know i can't even move a finger and i won't i'll just sit here and be quiet just in case they do suspect me they're probably watching me well let them let them see what kind of a person i am i'm not even gonna swat that fly i hope they are watching they'll see
[01:42:47] [SPEAKER_01] they'll see and they'll know and they'll say why she wouldn't even harm a fly
[01:42:56] [SPEAKER_05] it's just like a like a lot of these things it seems full of meaning and like begging for interpretation but i don't so like if we take the psychiatrist's word he is now completely her but she is as her pretending that it was norman that killed all those people because he was trying to
[01:43:20] [SPEAKER_05] make them believe that she did it like what's going on here yeah i don't know it's puzzling and
[01:43:26] [SPEAKER_04] it doesn't in the end matter because you know whoever it is is going away like whichever one of them it's going to be imprisoned now and so it's weird she's trying to say like her whatever her part of the mind is saying like norman's been blaming it on me like he's going to say that i was the one who killed those girls but in fact it was norman all along and i had to tell them that yeah and so that's sucks like i had to tell on him so you know i guess if you really think that she's you know dumb
[01:43:55] [SPEAKER_04] enough to think that she's not embodied in norman that she's somehow like condemning him and she's getting away with it but like the question as to whether or not norman was norman when he killed them or whether he was mother when he killed them like it's still kind of open after this i think so even though he was dressed up like mother yeah like maybe he's trying to frame frame his mother for the
[01:44:18] [SPEAKER_05] murder yeah right like yeah i've never really heard that suggested but is that what she means by this yeah she's like i can't let them think that i would commit murder right or are we to think she's such a you know an overbearing and domineering mother that she was killing them but she has to frame her son
[01:44:39] [SPEAKER_04] so that they don't know the truth yeah you know if he is feeling so guilty about what he did to his mother and he wants to preserve the idea of his mother as like a pure thing a good thing then like there's some confusing way in which he could be in the persona of his mother truly believing that she wasn't the one who did it and blaming him for it there's also that line they know i can't even move
[01:45:04] [SPEAKER_05] a finger uh which makes it sound like she has some awareness that she's actually a corpse but then she says and i won't so that sort of undercuts that yeah i mean i think that's what's great about it we don't need to figure it out it just feels like whatever the truth is it's very fucked up it's very
[01:45:22] [SPEAKER_04] fucked up and a little flash of the mother's face you know is so good skeleton yeah is it a true skeleton or is it actually the mother's preserved face like it's hard to know i didn't pause i think
[01:45:34] [SPEAKER_05] it was the mother's preserved yeah like it's the same face that we saw in the basement okay and his little grin as the camera's pulling in on him which is a reflection of her grin as she was imagining uh calloway finding out about the money being gone you know yeah so what are we to make of that like
[01:45:53] [SPEAKER_04] is the grin that she's gotten away with murder murder yeah yeah so she's grinning because she's admitting that she's the one who did the murder or is she like i guess so yeah yeah i mean i think
[01:46:06] [SPEAKER_05] the implication of what she's saying well right at first it was like i'm just protecting myself against his attempts to frame me but then the smile makes it thing yeah yeah because if it's
[01:46:18] [SPEAKER_04] symmetrical like in both cases the women are happy with their handiwork yeah and and then you know i
[01:46:25] [SPEAKER_05] know how well all this jibes with what the doctor says which is the fact that you know out of guilt for killing her he inhabited her and dug her up and did the that's by the way the like another good part of
[01:46:38] [SPEAKER_04] the sheriff scene they're like if his mother's up there who's buried in so-and-so cemetery yeah
[01:46:46] [SPEAKER_05] it's such like small town sheriff like waved yeah and i think the doctor there kind of gives him a look like why don't you take like 10 minutes let the grown-ups here talk yeah i do like somehow like
[01:47:00] [SPEAKER_04] when you know whoever's there i don't know if it's like the da or or some police um and they're like wait a second are you trying to lay the foundation for some kind of defense yeah and he's like oh trust me psychiatrists are not here to lay the groundwork for anything we're here to tell the truth as it is like the philosophers yeah we're here to peel back the curtain he thinks he's figured
[01:47:22] [SPEAKER_04] it out like yeah yeah so i would like to believe that norman slash mother is grinning because he has
[01:47:31] [SPEAKER_05] something on them like they haven't figured it out yeah i think that's exactly right he thinks he's fooled them and we've seen versions of that grin from norman earlier like when arbogast leaves and when the car goes down you get a little so like i think he can be kind of proud of himself yeah and now it's i guess he's heard so do you think that he is completely her right because of the voice i mean
[01:47:54] [SPEAKER_04] i've always believed that at that point you know when she's like oh he's chilly you know and she's just like talking like i do feel like she has completely taken over she's suppressing him i like your
[01:48:07] [SPEAKER_05] theory that he was dressing up as her to frame her it would make when he appears you know with the knife and you see his face it makes more sense you know there because he's so norman there you know and he never says anything in that voice uh when he's dressed up so maybe he is trying to frame his
[01:48:27] [SPEAKER_04] mother yeah one thing that i read i didn't quite pick it up because i wasn't listening for it but apparently there are three different voices of mother did you see this yeah which is nice like i like
[01:48:38] [SPEAKER_05] that there's no consistent it makes sense yeah although when we are meant to think that it's his voice when it can be heard from the house right when uh marion hears the mother like clear as day i i guess there's no other explanation for that yeah but yeah i guess it's like but still in your head and even when you speak it given that you're speaking in a different voice it'll sound different
[01:49:03] [SPEAKER_05] yeah it's another little detail that hitchcock is quite famous for i think yeah all right any final
[01:49:09] [SPEAKER_04] things to say about this movie no you know i sometimes wonder what it is about this movie like obviously there's like a historical social sociological and artistic reasons why it's like famous and influential but even with that like even the granting that it was you know before it's time and influence all this stuff what is it that is making it loom so large there's some combination
[01:49:36] [SPEAKER_04] of these things like the black and whiteness like the the creepy house the house the yeah the like disturbing image of the mother like anthony perkins performance and then dressed up as mother just like that there could be a like this innocent seeming young man who has like such darkness
[01:49:55] [SPEAKER_05] underneath him yeah i think it's all of that the fact that people take road trips and they stay in weird motels i mean not as much as we used to now it's all been you know like yeah right now it's like you stay at a holiday and express or something but like but yeah roadside motels were a huge thing yeah i've stayed in so many of them over my life you know like so people could relate to that danger and then yeah it just has so many iconic things the house the mother's skeleton the motel itself
[01:50:25] [SPEAKER_04] um the performances and obviously the vulnerability of being attacked in the shower like that yes of
[01:50:31] [SPEAKER_05] course because like everybody takes a shower and you're in your most vulnerable position yeah i can see
[01:50:37] [SPEAKER_04] your shower in the background there and i all i can think of is you might get stabbed to death well i don't shower there your garage apartment well that's why that's why aren't you ever in the
[01:50:49] [SPEAKER_05] shower and you're like you think you hear something yeah it's like the worst time yeah um and so like all these things uh you know you have like five i completely iconic things in one movie and then i think also like the psychoanalytic aspect of it the mother the suffocating mother the boy who's overwhelmed by it and the covering up of a crime and just but you're right it's still mysterious even with all
[01:51:15] [SPEAKER_05] that why this more than citizen kane even yeah in some ways more than any other movie maybe like you know the shining is also up there in terms of its uh creepiness kind of and also just how kind of iconic it is the overlook hotel just people can like know the lingo even if they haven't seen it they know the things that happen but the twins you know and the shining yeah and you know the first
[01:51:41] [SPEAKER_04] part of it the marion stealing the money part is such a good noir film yeah you know it's just like
[01:51:47] [SPEAKER_05] a straight up noir and really good one too like you're very she's a very compelling character and you're with her all the way i think and you identify with hers and you can imagine the audience thinking
[01:51:59] [SPEAKER_04] like oh okay janet lee noir hitchcock like okay it's black and white like you think you're going in to see a noir i mean it's called psychos but do you think is she the psycho was psycho a term
[01:52:09] [SPEAKER_05] yeah i don't know i actually don't know the answer to that like like psychopath was a term by then right yeah but i don't know if anybody had like used it to he's not a psychopath either right or is
[01:52:23] [SPEAKER_04] i you know that will turn on what freud meant when he said psychopath he's not a psychopath in the way that we use it now yeah but freud had the distinction between psychosis and neurosis and i think that this is meant to like neurosis is her and psychosis is him i think is the way it's supposed to go but i
[01:52:42] [SPEAKER_05] can't i don't really know yeah so it gets at like the archetypical things that we are worried about both consciously and unconsciously yeah absolutely all right uh well you know another fucking podcast about psycho like how many have there probably been now there's one more yeah all right join us next time on very bad wizard
[01:53:09] [SPEAKER_02] just a very bad wizard
[01:53:53] [SPEAKER_02] you
[01:53:53] you you you you you