Psycho: The parlor scene

The parlor scene has the two characters Marion Crane and Norman Bates. While we have been watching Psycho for a couple of weeks, we've been focusing on gender and dominance of characters.

In this scene there is a man and a woman. No, their not getting frisky. In this scene, the dominant character is already established: Norman. He invites Marion to her parlor and questions her. His dominance shows again when he gets angry at Marion:

Marion Crane: Wouldn't it be better if you put her... someplace.
Norman Bates: You mean an institution? A madhouse?
Marion Crane: No, I didn't mean it like...
Norman Bates: [suddenly angry] People always call a madhouse "someplace", don't they? "Put her in someplace."

The dominance in this scene definately suggests that the male character is more dominant than the female throughout the movie. Throughout this scene, Marion doesn't speak much either. She looks very worried as she observes the room.


However, the room isn't empty. As the audience, you notice that the room has a lot of stuffed birds.

Norman Bates: My hobby is stuffing things. You know - taxidermy.

These birds can be described as "birds of pray", which causes the audience to believe that Norman is a twisted mind going for the kill. In one frame of the scene, the camera looks up at Norman, this shows how his dominance over Marion, making the audience feel that Marion is looking up at Norman. In the same frame, you see a bird with it's wings spread out diving towards it pray.
Staying on the same frame, the lighting is only used on one side of Norman's face, keeping one side bright, and the other dark. The camera focuses on the darker side and at the same time, Norman is angry with Marion. This shows Norman's "darker side".

Hitchcock puts in a lot of sexual jokes in the movie, and using the word "bird" we can understand the deeper meaning behind these lines. As we already know, Norman likes to "stuff" things, this suggests Norman's interesting for having sexual intercourse with Marion. Also, "bird" is used to describe a woman, therefore, Norman likes to have sex with women.
What is also ironic in this scene is that Marion's surname is "Crane", a breed of bird.


Lighting needs to be emphisized in this movie, because it's a black and white movie, so lighting is used to symbolise meanings. For instance, a character with a lot of lighting on them suggests the purity of the character. In this scene, Marion has a lot of lighting on her suggesting that between the two characters, Marion is pure and true. This is very ironic because she just stole $40,000 from a customer in a previous scene.
I've noticed that a lot of movies and television series make the "bad guys" seem good. For instance "Prison Break" & "Oceans 11".