{"id":78,"date":"2024-12-10T10:40:03","date_gmt":"2024-12-10T17:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/?p=78"},"modified":"2024-12-10T10:40:03","modified_gmt":"2024-12-10T17:40:03","slug":"marion-cranes-drive-psycho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/?p=78","title":{"rendered":"Marion Crane’s Drive (Psycho)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hitchcock spends a long time on Marion Crane\u2019s drive from Phoenix to her boyfriend\u2019s home in California \u2013 about 16 minutes of screen time from the start of her journey to its conclusion at the Bates Motel (Psycho<\/em> is 1:49 in length).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marion is shown driving through Phoenix where she encounters her boss at a traffic light. We see suspicion on her boss\u2019s face and anxiety on Marion\u2019s. Night falls, and shots with bright lights pass over her face. She spends the night sleeping in her car by the side of the road and is awakened by a highway patrolman, who frightens her (and who also becomes suspicious).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next, she trades her car for another, and this time both the car salesman and the patrolman are suspicious. She seems \u201cwrong\u201d to them. Then there is a rainstorm during which Marion wanders off the main road and stops at the Bates Motel. All his is accompanied by Bernard Herrmann\u2019s tense and disturbing music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Travel in road trip movies (I Happened One Night; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles<\/em>) is an essential ingredient to the storyline. The road trip movie is about<\/em> the road trip. Psycho is obviously not a road trip movie. What, then, is the point of spending 10% of Psycho<\/em>‘s running time on Marion\u2019s drive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A descent into the underworld \u2013 the land of the dead \u2013 is a theme in Western literature. Protagonists who descend into the underworld go through a dark and fearful passage, and eventually emerge into the land of the dead. Some manage to emerge back into the land of the living (Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante). Nearly all souls who die and enter the underworld stay put.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poet and musician, Orpheus, has lost his beloved Eurydice (to snake bite!), and begins to enter the underworld to retrieve her. I\u2019ll quote from the libretto for Gluck\u2019s opera, Orfeo ed Eurydice<\/em>. As Orpheus begins his descent he is surrounded by \u201cFuries,\u201d \u201cspecters,\u201d and \u201cangry shades\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

CHORUS
Who is this
who draws near to us
through the gloom of Erebus
in the footsteps of Hercules
and of Pirithous?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

May the savage Eumenides
overwhelm him with horror,
and the howls of Cerberus
terrify him
if he is not a god.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They dance, whirling round Orpheus, to frighten him.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Orpheus then sings a beautiful aria which calms the Furies et al and is allowed to enter the underworld, retrieve Eurydice, and return to the land of the living (where almost immediately Eurydice dies again).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Odysseus on his journey to Ithaca spends a year with Circe, a sorceress, who tells him that he must enter the underworld and speak with the prophet Tiresias who will tell him how to evade the curses of the gods and return home. \u201cFollowing the instructions given by Circe, Odysseus and his crew sail to the land of the Cimmerians, a place \u201ccovered up in mist and cloud\u201d to find the River of Ocean, an area that borders the underworld. Here, Odysseus pours wine and sprinkles barley before sacrificing a sheep.\u201d [Note<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the dead, Odysseus discovers his mother who died of a broken heart waiting for her son to come home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cMy child? How did you come here through the darkness
while you were still alive? This place is hard
for living men to see. There are great rivers
and dreadful gulfs, including the great Ocean
which none can cross on foot.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Marion\u2019s passage from Phoenix to the Bates Motel is dark and fearful. The rainstorm echoes the river Styx (and maybe her $40,000 is akin to the coin given to Charon, the boatman). Marion seems \u201cwrong\u201d to the patrolman and car salesman, literally because of her anxiety, but mythically because she is still alive and shouldn\u2019t be traveling to Hades. The underworld is a terrible place; so is the Bates Motel, which Marion never leaves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hitchcock spends a long time on Marion Crane\u2019s drive from Phoenix to her boyfriend\u2019s home in California \u2013 about 16 minutes of screen time from the start of her journey to its conclusion at the Bates Motel (Psycho is 1:49 in length). Marion is shown driving through Phoenix where she encounters her boss at a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":81,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,23,21,24,22],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-greek-mythology","tag-hades","tag-hitchcock","tag-katebasis","tag-psycho"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/0182.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83,"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/83"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/81"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bobyanal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}