"Psycho" is one of Hitchcock's most mature works, and it is also the pioneering work of psychological horror films. Its analysis of the characters' psychology to the spiritual level makes it a classic. The mental state of the character is inextricably linked with the architectural space where the character is located. Norman's home and motel make up the main interior spaces in Hitchcock's Psycho. According to Gaston Bachelard's "Poetics of Space" (La poétique de l' espace), the interpretation of the psychological symbols from the cellar to the attic in the home, the spatial location of Norman and the mummified corpse of his mother who symbolizes Norman's second personality in the film has a metaphor for Norman's mental state. The hotel was brought to the Norman family by the mother's lover. The hotel is always oppressed by the tall and gloomy image of the house in the perspective of looking up. The hotel is essentially a subspace oppressed by the former Oedipal order of the house. The killing place of Norman's incarnation mother - the bathroom of the hotel - connects the dark world and the light world of the space, and the representative installation of the bathroom "toilet and bathtub" connects the invisible sewer (swamp) with the visible living space. Norman's housework-style cleaning of the crime scene also reflects a phenomenology of housework. The mother's lover, Marian, Lyra, Sam, and the private detective are outsiders in the sense of a purely spatial demarcation, and they constitute the dialectic of inside and outside with Norman (Mother), who represents the inner space. 1: The spatial symbolism and order of the house (1), the former Oedipus order of the house space Norman's house and motel are the main interior spaces of the film. Traditional psychoanalysis has explained the spatial symbols of the house in Psycho, including but not limited to, the first layer symbolizes Norman's normal self, the second layer symbolizes the superego of the mother's personality, and the cellar symbolizes the id. This kind of spatial symbol with strong Freudian color has the suspicion of strong personality formula. "Many of our memories are settled because of the house, and if the house were a little more refined, if it had cellars and attics... We've been dreaming of returning to those places all our lives (The Poetics of Space, Chapter I, II) )”. The home is first and foremost a spatialized memory. In the childhood when Norman's personality was not fully developed, the house in the continuous sense of Bergson was a symbol of the mother's womb and breast, which constituted and participated in the creation of Norman's pre-personality memories and dreams. According to Lacan's theory of the Three Realms, due to the loss of his father at an early age, the transition from the mirror stage to the symbolic stage lacked the father as an intermediary to slowly guide the release of the child's hostility. Norman did not spiritually separate from the mother and accept the existence of the father. Oedipus' primary narcissism accompanied Norman into childhood, and a pathological symbiosis developed between Norman and his mother. "Memories are static and solidified by being spatialized (The Poetics of Space, Chapter I, II)". The intrusion of the mother's lover destroys the stability of the house space, and the stable symbol of the mother's womb in the house is threatened by outsiders, and without the buffering effect of the father's image, this threat is particularly acute and irreconcilable. Under the influence of the death drive (understood by Lacan as a nostalgia for a lost harmony...a desire to return to a pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother's breast), the promise of childhood In order to maintain the reality of a morbid symbiosis with his mother and protect the image of the family house and his mother's womb, Mann kills his mother and his mother's lover. Norman kills his mother in the name of spiritual mother, and the killed mother turns to continue the symbiosis with Norman in an undead, ghostly dimension and drives Norman to kill in the name of mother as well outsiders who pose a threat to the symbol, thus maintaining the order of symbiosis. There are many examples in the film. When Lyra entered the Norman family house, Norman's mother's room was very neat, her mother's clothes were still hanging neatly in the closet, and everything was placed exactly where her mother was. Norman maintains the pre-Oedipal order of the house by symbiotic symbolic symbiosis with his mother after her physical death. In the attic of the family home are Norman's childhood toys. "The space of solitude is constructive... When we lose the little loft on the roof, what never changes is that we once loved one... We go back there in our late-night dreams. These humble cottages have The Value of Shells (The Poetics of Space, Chapter I, II)". Norman's childhood dreams are still protected in this shell, where time has not flowed, where order has not been touched. The constructive manifestation of Norman's solitude is not to construct, but to keep everything as it is. (2) mother The location of the mummy is a metaphor for Norman moving his mother's mummy from his mother's room on the second floor to the underground fruit cellar. "It [the cellar] is above all a shadowy existence in the house, a existence that is part of the power of the underground. In dreaming of the basement, we agree with the deep irrationality" (The Poetics of Space, Chapter 1 V). The subconscious is deeply irrational, the cellar symbolizes Norman's subconscious, and the mother's displacement indicates that Norman's subconscious has been completely occupied by the mother's personality. At the climax of the film, Laila found her mother's mummified corpse in the cellar and was terrified. In the panic, the electric light in the cellar was touched by Laila's terrified hand and shook, and was killed by Norman, who had taken her mother's personality away with a knife. The tension of the narrative is at its peak. "In sympathy for the trembling...the primal and specificity of fear is revived...our civilization puts the same light everywhere, installs electric lamps in cellars...the unconscious cannot be civilized (The Poetics of Space) "Chapter 1 V)". The shiver of the electric light and the shiver of Lyra unleash an instinctive primordial fear in a phenomenological sense. Civilization will be obliterated in the dark cellar by the subconscious symbolizing the primal, barbaric and irrational mother. Fortunately, Sam arrives just in time to stop Norman's murder of civilization, and of the precarious self-consciousness within Norman. With this successful suppression, the factual order, which symbolizes rationality, triumphs over the pre-Oedipal order, which symbolizes irrationality. 2: The phenomenology of the house (1), the spatial phenomenology of the bathroom 1. The spatial structure of the bathroom The bathroom is one of the representations of the horror space in the movie, and "Psycho" also uses this "bathroom" element to construct the murder in the film. lens. First of all, the toilet is the service space with the highest utilization rate in the living space, and the nature of the toilet service space determines that it is not a pure autonomous space. connected, connected to a sewer buried deep in the ground, and led directly to a filthy swamp. The toilet is at the boundary of phenomenological perception, and at the same time it has the dimension of serving the perceptible reality and connecting the imperceptible dark world. So the living space we are accustomed to (the surface space of the bathroom) overlaps with the dark world of our unknown plumbing. The bathroom we experience in our lives is just the tip of the iceberg of its real spatial dimension. Norman watched with interest as all the heterogeneity (Marianne's corpse and blood, newspaper with stolen money) was packed into Marilyn's car trunk and sank into the dark swamp The whole process of sinking. Norman smiled when the car completely sank. The place where the blood can reach through the toilet sewer is unsurprisingly this dirty swamp, so we complete the spatial puzzle of the bathroom: a place called the toilet, the sewer, and the swamp. 2. The device of the bathroom Phenomenology The toilet and bathtub constitute the main device of the bathroom. In the film, Marianne shreds and threw a draft of data on the money she stole into the toilet, hoping that the evidence would be brought into the dark world of oblivion, a symbol of oblivion, by the whirlpool of flushing water. Spiritually, Marianne hoped to take the opportunity of this flush to bring the shame and anxiety of fleeing with the money into the realm of oblivion along with the piece of paper. Phenomenologically, the bright world is the reality that we can perceive in the ordinary, and the dark world is another dimension that our perception cannot experience; the dark world is often a space for washing the dark side of human nature or hiding sins, but in the dark world In the dualistic dialectic with the world of light, the light, which is often a symbol of reality, is superior at the practical level. In the asymmetric recognition of light and darkness dominated by light, it is not difficult to imagine that Marianne's plan failed. Paper remains by the toilet. And it was this piece of paper that symbolized Marian's failure to become the best evidence that Marian had been to the hotel. The factual order, symbolized by the light, triumphed. The bathtub was the key target for Norman to clean up the blood stains at the murder scene. The blood stains were cleaned up into the sewer of the dark dimension, and the bathtub returned to white. Here, the bathtub The function of cleaning the body overlaps with Norman's cleaning of the bathtub. The bathtub helps the body get clean and Norman helps the bathtub get tidy. The blood from Marian's body pooled with the water from the still-on nozzles, creating a vortex in the drain that, in Hitchcock's language, eventually became Marian Dead eyes respond to the orthodox gaze of the viewer with the entire interior living space. "When you are staring at the abyss, the abyss is also staring at you (Nietzsche's "The Other Side of Good and Evil")" Here, the abyss symbolizes the dark world of the bathroom, and the mutual gaze of darkness and light symbolizes the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar different interactions and interactions. The dark world of the bathroom is to the building as the city's drainage system is to the city, and the dark world is also deeply involved in the construction of the reality we are familiar with. (3) The phenomenological film of housework unexpectedly presents various details of Norman's clean-up of the crime scene. This seemingly redundant presentation is precisely the essence of Hitchcock's presentation of Norman's spiritual space. "Rilke... wrote...he wiped the furniture: '...when everything was clean around me...gained a new sense of room volume...'Rilke's mother' from his weakest From the beginning of his childhood, he ordered him to dust the furniture and do all kinds of housework'. How can we not feel Rilke...the nostalgia for labor...the joy of helping my mother...(The Poetics of Space, Chapter 2 IX)". In the example of Rilke doing housework given by Bashra, we learn that the experience of doing housework can not only bring about a new awareness of the space of the home, but also the joy of labor and the joy of helping a mother. 1 Housework is work Norman's ego personality is deeply controlled by his mother's personality. Norman's job as we know from the movie is nothing more than taking care of the hotel business and cleaning the room and changing the sheets every week, just as a child gets the joy of helping a mother by helping her with the housework. And cleaning up blood was just a nuanced (bloody) repetition of his usual work. “I think that this tells us a lot about the satisfaction of work, of a job well done, which is not so much to construct something new but maybe human work at its most elementary:
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