Throughout the adolescence of an art style, the various forms of creation evolve in a variety of ways. Some stay relatively the same throughout the decades and some change rapidly. Over time, the filmic thriller genre intensified, which is particularly noticeable through the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In Rebecca (1940) and Psycho (1960), both of the principal antagonists are suffering from mental illnesses and neither are gender/sexually normative. The more explicit linkage of queerness and gender/sexual nonconformity with mental illness, alongside increased violence in the time between the films’ releases reflects the changed political and cultural attitudes of the early Cold War era Americans.
In the 1920’s, Hollywood was in its golden age. Cinemas were booming; actors, producers, and directors were celebrities; and the film industry was speaking on more adult topics. This time of mass popularity in the industry eventually came crashing down because there were movies depicting women in power, frequent drug abuse and violence, and there were frequent scandals involving murders, rapes, and death surrounding Hollywood stars. This led to interest groups putting political pressure on the studios to stop showing “morally taboo” subject matter, which worked because of the increased need for moviegoers and decreased appetite for risk taking caused by the Great Depression. Thus, the Hays Code was born: prohibiting certain things such as profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic and/or realistic violence, and “sex perversion,” (Lewis). By the time Rebecca was made, the aforementioned adult–now taboo–topics had to be depicted very subtly or in a different light. In “Madly in Love: The Mental Threat of Homosexuality in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940)”, Gesine Wegner posits that due to the Hays Code’s restriction of “sex perversion”, gay characters were forced to “take on a new identity: that of an evil and, [Wegner] argue[s], often equally ‘mad’ villain,” (Wegner 82). Rebecca, despite being a work of gothic fiction that was labeled a “woman’s picture” when it was made, perpetuates lesbophobic narratives by implying lesbianism’s causing the housemaid character of Mrs. Danver’s to go mad. This fits in with the cultural attitude towards and anxieties about homosexuality at the time, and its pathologization as a mental deviation from what would be considered “normal” and “good” (Wegner 82-83). It’s also riddled with “themes of [male] dominance, femininity and masculinity,” (Dickason 95). Gender and sexual roles are rigid and wholly reflective of patriarchal heteronormative views. Women are either helpless or villains; the men are flawed, yet strong, with their misdeeds going unpunished – and heterosexual love triumphs over the twisted housemaid.
Further, the establishment of Mrs. Danvers’ mental illness and lesbian identity were extremely subtle at the time: through the use of body language and meticulous details like the use of a particular last name and how one cleans a room. Mrs. Danvers’ antagonism doesn’t even make sense if one ignores the lesbian undertones of her feelings towards Rebecca. Why would she torment Mrs. De Winter over and over again (even attempting to get her to commit suicide at one point), all the while continuously attending and maintaining a dead woman’s room? It’s as if she’s relishing in the memories, and acting like as long as she continues doing what her job once entailed, Rebecca’s death won’t have happened. The second Mrs. De Winter is a threat to this false reality and thus must be gotten rid of. Moreso, in one scene, as Mrs. De Winter and Mrs. Danvers are conversing, the latter “starts to talk about Rebecca very much like a love struck teenager.” In the same conversation, she uses the first person when describing where she puts Rebecca’s things; which is strangely personal for a housemaid of a dead woman. Even stranger is the fact that Mrs. Danvers personifies Rebecca’s clothes, calling them “delicate” and describes her grief so painstakingly as to make one believe they were listening to sorrows from Rebecca’s husband (Wegner 83). A normal housemaid wouldn’t do that, and so one must look deeper, which leads to the comprehension of her lesbian feelings. Rebecca herself is also quietly implied to be a lesbian, as she uses Mrs. Danvers’ last name when she visits the doctor about her cancer rather than her maiden name. This communicates that their relationship is more than just employer and employee, rather something akin to their own marriage.
However, society–through the Hays Code, the producer, and Hitchcock–dictated that people like Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca were unfit to live among it and therefore had to die. Thus, both homosexual characters succumbed to their “sickness” (85), with the former going out in a “final and fatal act of jealousy” (Dickason 105). The attitudes reflected in Rebecca are staunchly traditional and conservative.
Although technically grouped with post-classical cinema chronologically, Psycho (1960) is a modernist film and has influenced film scholars and the public in a plethora of ways. The film demythologizes old Hollywood tropes and in doing so mirrors the breakdown of traditional social roles and anxieties about the world following the Second World War. This is chiefly seen in the character of Norman Bates. Norman (Nor-man)’s characterization is chiefly composed of two mental illnesses: Dissociative Identity Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which stem from his traumatic childhood. Also he, like Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca, is queer-coded. His obsession with his mother and his subsequent dressing as her later in his life comes off as allegorical for being transgender. For instance, there’s a scene “in which Norman goes up the stairs of his home, swinging his hips effeminately,” (Martins 42). Also, “‘men wearing women’s clothes is connected with homosexuality by most people,’” both in the 1960s and today (43). So,
Norman can be read as either gay or transgender. Both of which were, and to some extent are, demonized and fear mongered against. The public at large is told that queer people are “invading” the country and “perverting the minds of children” through their existence. Psycho plays on that, and depicts the awkward boy taking care of his infirm mother to be one of the “invading perverts” that kills Marion. Anyone could be Norman, and Norman could be anyone. He erodes the fabric of American trust in one another through his corruption of the innocent and wholesome man. On top of that, at the end of the film, he looks into the camera, smiling maniacally to acknowledge his perversion alongside the audience’s voyeurism to imply the audience is just as perverted as he is. This breaking of the fourth wall presents the world of the film, characterized by “madness and queer monstrosity” as our own (51) with this acknowledgement, further cementing fear into the audience.
Norman isn’t alone in upending the traditional view: Sam Loomis and both of the Crane sisters also portray a twist on the traditional patriarchal gender norms. Sam is, by appearance alone, the typical Hollywood male lead. He’s classically handsome, and upon first glimpse, we as the audience think he will be a more active character than he ends up being. However, we are quickly informed of who he actually is, and how the movie subverts gender roles when we learn that Sam and Marion have an affair. To complicate this, Marion is the one who wants to advance the relationship and get married to Sam. Sam, on the other hand, is hesitant due to financial constraints from his recent divorce. He also implies that the taboo affair itself is what makes their relationship more intensely desirable for him. The established gender attitudes and ideas are swapped. This goes farther than their opinion on their relationship however, as Marion continues to be the driving force in the film: she steals the money and we follow her until her death. On the contrary, Sam continues to play the traditionally feminine role: he is hesitant to go searching for Marion after she disappears while Lila takes the active male role. Sam, also importantly, is not the one who investigates the Bates’ house; Lila is. And Lila is the one Norman tries to kill at the end, which completely casts Sam away. One last nail in the coffin is that Sam can barely contain Norman as he’s holding him back, solidifying Sam as weak both physically and gender wise. Sam and Norman are intertwined in other ways, however, as they literally mirror each other numerous times throughout the film. When Marion first meets Norman, he eventually offers her dinner. This is a flip of the beginning of the film in which Sam offers Marion sex instead of lunch, suggesting that Sam’s treatment of Marion isn’t all that different from Norman’s eventual treatment. To emphasize further, “Sam’s unwillingness to marry Marion prevents her from achieving the American dream and thus constitutes a kind of murder,” (Corber 215). Despite playing opposite roles in the narrative, Sam offers the audience no catharsis of hope for the best, and we are hinted he will not be saving the day.
Psycho deconstructs more than contemporary gender, it also critiques the government and the suburban family unit which had just sprung up after the war. With the character of Tom Cassidy, Psycho “establishes a theme of problematic parent-child relations that runs throughout the film…[as Cassidy’s daughter] will probably be better without the $40,000 house, which is clearly a symbol of her father’s power over her,’” (Thesus 51). Fast forwarding to the ending: the psychiatrist’s reconstruction of the case, which suggested that Norman’s mother was really at fault, changed the crime the police should be investigating from Marion’s murder to “Mrs. Bates’s violation of the ‘laws’ regulating the eroticized space of the middle-class nuclear family,” (Corber 189).
In the early ‘40s, a writer named Phillip Wylie coined the term momism to describe over attachment to one’s mother. He argued America was becoming a matriarchy due to mother’s smothering their sons with “unnatural affection” and disrupting the Oedipal structure of the nuclear family. The effect of this unnatural affection on boys supposedly made them susceptible to becoming gay or a communist, as the idea was that incompetent mothering led to political deviance. At the same time, being a communist was linked to being gay. So, as momism became more and more popular, so too did the idea that homosexuality was a threat to national security. (197-198). Also then, Norman is understood to be the result of such smothering. All of this goes to increase the paranoia of Americans towards their fellow countrymen, for “anyone could be gay” and therefore anyone could be a murderer or national security risk.
By the end of both films, there’s no real return to normalcy; by which I mean that the characters can never have their same lightness as before. In Rebecca, Maxim tells his wife exactly that when he holds her after the fire and says she looks different than before because she lost her innocence. In Psycho, Marion and Arbogast are dead which traumatizes Lila, Sam, and everyone else involved. The psychiatrist’s explanation lacks closure for all. This is symbolic of the denial of a return to pre-war America.
The effect of Psycho becoming a phenomenon was the increased endangerment and misunderstanding of an already marginalized and disenfranchised group of people. Medically, the linking between mental illness and antagonism “has particularly negative consequences for the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders…” as it will “encourage the misguided perception that those with mental disorders are dangerous and to be feared,” which in turn leads to “those suffering from a disorder [being] less likely to seek help if they are afraid of being [labeled] ‘insane’ or dangerous to be around,” by those closest to them and the rest of society (Lipczynska 61-62). This is even addressed in the film when Norman scoffs at Marion’s idea of sending his mother to an institution, bringing up how by doing so he’d be surrendering to the idea that the mentally ill can’t live in harmony with everyone else in society.
Socially, both Rebecca and Psycho say that “the same thing [mental illness/psychosis] can happen to you,” (Zimmerman 48). Therefore, they “were made villainous by their mental illness,” (Lipczynska 61). Psycho also “‘provides the original model of the mentally disturbed cross-dressed murderer’” therein “Norman’s gender-bending, expressed by dressing and living as his mother, threatens gender binaries and thus creates a veritable monster,’” (Quinowski 1-2). This monster can therefore be anyone, as anyone can become incidentally raised poorly and therefore anyone can go mad.
Throughout fiction, monsters can be seen as lessons about society and about what makes society afraid. They keep people in line by warning what not to do. These ideas can change intensity with the times. This is the case with Hitchcock, who reflected the society’s anxieties at the times of Rebecca and Psycho with his villains. This reflection intensified by the latter due to the heightened insecurity towards gender/sex and mental illness. So, as corny as it may sound, Hitchcock was telling us we are the monsters.
Works Cited
Corber, Robert J.. “In the Name of National Security : Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America.” Duke University Press, 1993. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=1167695.
Dickason, Robert. “Ambiguity and uncertainty in Rebecca”. Marret, Sophie. Féminin/masculin: Littératures et cultures anglo-saxonnes. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999. (pp. 95-105) Web. <http://books.openedition.org/pur/36007>.
Lewis, Maria. “Early Hollywood and the Hays Code.” ACMI, Australian National Museum of Screen Culture, 14 Jan. 2021,
https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/early-hollywood-and-hays-code/. Lipczynska, Sonya. “‘We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes’: The Problematic Depiction of Psychotic and Psychopathic Disorders in Cinema.” Journal of Mental Health, vol. 24, no. 2, 2015, pp. 61–62., https://doi.org/10.3109/09638237.2015.1022252.
Martins, David Klein. “” We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes. Haven’t You?”: Psycho and the Postmodern Rise of Gender Queerness.” Aspeers 10 (2017).
Theus, Tyler A., “Hitchcock and the Material Politics of Looking: Laura Mulvey, Rear Window, and Psycho.” Thesis, Georgia State University, 2013. doi:
Wegner, Gesine. “Madly in Love: The Mental Threat of Homosexuality in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).” Re/Presenting Gender and Love. Brill, 2015. 79-88.
Zimmerman, Jacqueline Noll. “Hitchcock, Chaos, and the Devils of Unreason.” People like Ourselves: Portrayals of Mental Illness in the Movies, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD, 2004, pp. 47–67.
Leave a Reply