A Psycho’s Freak Show

Let us indulge in the possibility of a reach for “The American Freak Show” within the realm of Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Psycho.” Though, it must be stated, this piece may spoil the ending of “Psycho,” so if you wish to have full enjoyment from the movie, and you have yet to see it, I suggest doing so before reading. Beyond the very premise of a Hitchcockian film, where the audience spent money to see a story displayed on the silver screen, a story likely to be frightening, we also have a freak show displayed within this  film.

But first, what is a freak show? A freak show, as defined by Rosemarie Thomson in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, “Scrupulously described, interpreted, and displayed, the bodies of the severely congenitally disabled have always functioned as icons upon which people discharge their anxieties, convictions, and fantasies” (56). This is not completely meant for a definition of a freak show, but rather, a freak and it’s continuous “function” in society. The “freak” is made to become the space of the objet a, where anyone can compare themselves with in either a positive or negative way to feel better about their own life. The positive aspect is simply believing that if this “being” is possible, defying nature’s rules, the spectator can defy the rules of their world. A negative aspect, the “freak” illustrates how bad life can be, thus making life look so much better. It is as Thomson states, “Freaks were celebrities as well as spectacles, their popularity suggesting that audiences simultaneously identified with and were repulsed by the performers” (66).

In “Psycho,” Norman Bates becomes the “freak,” the individual we find ourselves identifying with, but repulsed by at the same time. Slowly, his split mind reveals itself with the way he acts in accordance to the way people treat him. Though, another level is interestingly the fact his mother, who is depicted as mentally disabled at the introduction of her character in conversation between Marion and Norman, is under the sensitive protection of her son Norman. Norman cannot accept leaving her, though she is abusive, because that would be treating her as inhuman, because insanity is still human. But as he and Thomson have said, “We all go a little crazy sometimes.” Though Thomson spoke of it in a more general sense of saying, we all, if we live long enough, will be disabled in some way (14).

The most interesting moment of displaying the “freak,” in the sense of a show, is when Norman brings Marion back into the parlor of the hotel’s office. Inside this “man cave,” we as the viewer alongside Marion, discover an array of stuffed birds. Possibly a reference to Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” it is also a display of death, of mortality, of the freakishness in this final step of life. And even beyond simply displaying dead things as alive through taxidermy, it reveals a bit more about the “Psycho.” Norman is different, odd. So he chooses an odd way to display himself, with a silent and still show of small creatures. As each character enters this space, they see these birds and are repulsed, enticed, and frightened. Little do they know, Norman’s mother is just the same. Little do they know that Norman is his mother. Alfred Hitchcock is the host of his own freak show, his own “man cave” filled with taxidermy.

Ridding the Eye

Once an individual reaches the end of the mirror-stage they consider themselves lacking something through the loss of the mother. Karen Coats says:

“He has to find some way of mitigating his loss, of managing the tremendous risk of performing the assertion of anticipated certainty, for while the assertion provides him with the freedom to become someone apart from his mother, it also sets him loose from the moorings of the prior certainty of his Imaginary place in the mother.”

The quotation expresses how the individual must find a way to make the loss of the mother much easier on their psyche because even though the mother provides “certainty of his Imaginary place,” there must be a separation and reconstruction of the individual’s imaginary space.

In the act of lessening the perception of this loss, as Coat states, “children must introject the loss, take it on themselves in such a way that they assume the characteristics of the lost object. They do not become the object they have lost, but they work to preserve the attributes that made the object precious to them in the first place.” Enacting Coat’s words, the individual must then maintain the reasons they knew the object to be satisfying within them so that they feel whole again. Only to find, the sensation of desire comes from the very preservation of these attributes of what makes the object significant to their identity.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator had gone through the Lacanian mirror-stage only to find himself caught in the moment of separation between him and the old man whom he works. In the very start of the story, the narrator admits “[o]bject there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes it was this!” As soon as he mentions the eye he comes to realize this is why he wants to kill the old man.

First of all, all of the details established in his reflection why hit on many key terms of the mirror-stage. If there is no object, then this would mean he has yet to fully separate his desires from the old man’s. And if there is no desire, once again the narrator is treating the old man as the nurturing mother figure he learns he must free himself of. Though it is the eye of the old man which strains him to wish such. Lacan says it is when the infant realizes the mother looks beyond the infant and desires other things, the infant desire to separate.

The dramatic, and psychotic, reaction of the narrator is murder of the old man, though he has “never given [him] insult.” The instant in the story when the narrator finally takes the swift movement of killing the old man, he feels grief through the context of the old man’s heart beating. When he disposes of the body he lessens the grief through trying to return to the way at which he worked for the old man: answering the door to the police and telling them he screamed in the night and the old man is out to the country.

Unfortunately, the grief is not lessened enough to keep the heart from beating in his mind, or the grief of his loss to bring him to reaching paranoid state in his Imaginary place. The other interesting element (discussed earlier with Freud) is the narrator’s fear of the old man’s eye, and the fact he needed to rid himself of the eye. In Freud’s perspective, would this constitute as self-castration. “When [the eye] fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”

The Unheimlich Raven

“Everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light,” because we are unprepared to face these things, because wherever they come from they are meant to be repressed from the consciousness. Unheimlich is a meaning Freud touched upon in hopes to understand its connection to the psyche. Freud hoped to see why people experienced the sensation of the unhomely and come to the idea it was an allegorical form of what we truly feared, thus what we couldn’t even fathom unless through another unrelated form. Though sometimes those things which are unheimlich find their way out of the unconscious and into reality through horrific events. One of my favorite moment in literature, which is certainly unheimlich, is “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe.

Many upon many moments in this poem exemplify the sensation of “the uncanny” through the use of objects you wouldn’t regularly encounter. Poe describes a disturbance:

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;

But the fact is I was napping and so gently you came rapping,

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you’—here I opened wide the door;—

Darkness there and nothing more.

The moment begins with the narrator building up courage after originally fretting over the “rapping” on his chamber door. It is apparent because he is “hesitating then no longer” and speaks to the entity he feels on the other side of the door and though we may have read this poem many times, he comes to only darkness on the other side. Normally, if there is knocking on our door, we expect someone to be on the other side. Darkness is unfamiliar, unsettling, but the truly unheimlich moment is when the raven enters his abode.

The raven taps again on the shutters, making the narrator believe it must be the wind and “nothing more.” Only when he goes to look, the raven “flutters” in and lands on the bust of Pallas over his chamber door. The raven looms with a presence and the word it speaks should be “unheimlich” because its presence so cleverly illustrates such. Instead, “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’” It names itself as the only unsettling word it knows and the narrator’s paranoia only builds and his fear only grows because the creature responds to him.

The raven could simply speak “nevermore” at the most odd times, but instead it chooses all the right moments to enact the meaning of the word. So the narrator cannot debunk what the bird says as merely “its only stock and store.” This continues the unheimlich, as the bird and its presence hadn’t been necessary to come into light, yet it did and it remains.

One could even say how the way the character speaks to the raven without reason is uncanny, how he falls into pieces before a simple bird with one word in its vocabulary. Though, Poe writes of many characters with deteriorating sanity as the narrative progresses. The act of having insanity grow like an infection in the poem, simply because of a bird repeating “nevermore” is all I need to feel Freud’s explanation of unheimlich.

In reality, the raven is representing something more to the narrator of the poem. The raven even represents something to the reader. In order for the raven to be considered unheimlich and to evoke the sensation of disturbance, it must be the conscious form of a deep repressed fear. My analysis of the raven for the character is it frightens him in reminding him of his own mortality and the mortality of his love. It is especially visible when he looks out into the darkness of his doorway whispering, “Lenore?” Some loss controls his state, and Freud would possibly come to say it is the loss of the phallus he fears in any case.

Diet Coke vs Pepsi: Either Make Us Sexy

Cola companies find it necessary to make someone come out on top after drinking their product. They aim their advertisements at either sex, illuminating our differences and our desires, telling us this intoxicating, carbonated refreshment with fill that empty space within us (not just our stomaches). Throughout the years, the masculine and feminine images change from subordination to revolution to equality, but sexual desires remain lurking in the background, desires seeking fulfillment in our selected preferences. So the cola companies seek to translate what their product can do in these instances, and why? Is it because we are always unable to satisfy that desire without external forces blessing us with superhuman capabilities? Is it because we seek reassurance in our preconceived actions toward our lustful thoughts? They seem to think so, they being Coca Cola and Pepsi.

Diet Coke has a number of advertisements focusing on the female consumer, especially of the white-collared worker. The method is to present the product into this environment as something significantly positive. In recent years it lightens up the mood of ridiculous work situations, but in the past they provided the perfect separation of mode and signifier between the sexes. This advertisement is below:

The advertisement expresses a number of elements for either men or women. First we see the office working diligently until it is 11:30 a.m. when they tell one another, “Diet Coke break.” We as the viewer think they will all take a short break to each have a soda, but they all crowd around the window of the sky-rise office to stare across the street at the construction site. The workers begin taking their break and one particular male figure removes his shirt and begins downing a Diet Coke. The women cannot resist their sexual attraction and the connection Coca Cola makes is between the signifier of a well-fit man and a refreshing beverage. This connection then produces a crowd of uncontrollable women, clearly fantasizing. In this case we have many women swooning over a man, and domination is produced through sexual desire. As the men are not looking in on women mud wrestling over a Diet Coke.

Though Pepsi chooses to take another approach, breaking up this sexual obedience to the male figure. Pepsi instills the feminist movement (in a rather contradicting manner) in a time period otherwise patriarchal. The following ad portrays three pop stars caged like gladiators in preparation for a spectacle within the arena, which an emperor overlooks drinking his and only his divine refreshment.

This ad is more diverse because of the aspects of desire toward the product in the commercial and how it represents the male and female figures at conflict. The commercial opens with a setting like “Gladiator” and the pop stars, one by one, notice the emperor (a man) opening a Pepsi from his stone cooler of Pepsi. They respond in anger, feeding the audience in the stands with energized music of their emotion for being repressed by their culture. It doesn’t need to be seen as simply female repression, though their clothing and sex distinguishes them as one force. They seem to have the knowledge that if they get the crowd pumped enough with their singing, it will shake the structure enough to rid the emperor of his precious drink and reward them with his power and object.

Sure enough the Pepsi cooler falls into the arena and sends the emperor into the arena, where he is humiliated and removed of his power. The ad seems to say, women deserve power, women deserve Pepsi. I distinctly feel it works to sell to the masculine mode in the way they feel they may give to a woman this Pepsi, spreading this idea of the power shifting. The irony is they wouldn’t simply give the Pepsi to a woman because of their new found power, but rather because they are attractive objects as presented in near to no clothing. They are desired by the masculine mode and therefore leave the consumers once more thinking Pepsi gives them something more than a soda.

Either way you look at it, drinking Coke or Pepsi supposedly makes us look and feel sexier. It signifies the gratifying moment of removing ourselves of desire because we have finally achieved what we have all been looking for. But how could we ever make it to such a moment? Wouldn’t life lose its luster, if our desires were fulfilled? And besides the deeper life question, how can we really expect a cola company to provide us with something that can get us anything more than a hydration to hold us over till we need another hydration.