Salvador Dali Makes an Impression on "Psycho"

Hitch at the opening of the Broadway musical The Seven Lively Arts, December 1, 1944. The painting is from a seven-piece series created by Dalí, also called The Seven Lively Arts, which hung in the Ziegfeld Theater lobby for the duration of the show.

Take a look at the two pictures below. If Hitch didn't consciously borrow from Dalí's painting when he came up with the scene in Mother's bedroom in Psycho, I'll eat Magritte's hat.

Mother's final resting-place.

Dalí, Surrealist composition with invisible figures, ca. 1936. (For a closer look, right click on the picture and open it in a new window.)

The bed with its outline of feminine curves, the water and the bright red gem on a pedestal are all sexual symbols. Undercutting that eroticism, however, is a swarm of ants clotted where the invisible woman's sexual parts would be. (They're hard to see in this picture.) In Dalí's skewed, alternate universe, those bugs represent death and decay. Sadly, his wife, Gala, had recently undergone surgery which rendered her infertile.

For now, let's focus on this painting's quality of desire and repulsion, femininity and rot. These are notions that had been on Hitch and Dalí's mind for years. Dalí referred to this as the "phenomenology of repugnance." Yes, it's a mouthful and if you say it out loud, you'll sound like a Harley-Davidson with a fouled spark plug. Try it! Still, it's a key to understanding the painting, along with Psycho.

In La femme visible, Dalí wrote:

"Repugnance would be a symbolic defense against the intoxication of the death drive. One experiences repugnance and disgust for what one wishes to get closer to, and from this comes the irresistible 'morbid' attraction, conveyed often by incomprehensible curiosity, of what appears to us to be repugnant."

In other words, Dalí explained why we slow down to rubberneck at the scene of an accident.

He had been reading Freud's The Pleasure Principle and was at least aware of Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation) and Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai, who wrote in Der Ekel (Disgust) in 1929 that "our psychic ambivalence regarding death lies behind most reactions of disgust."

The point is this: as artistic contemporaries, Dalí and Hitchcock drank deep from the same philosophical well.

(Preter-)naturally, that brings us to Psycho. As you might have caught in my post on Hopper's influence on Psycho a couple of weeks ago, when making that movie, Hitch had much more on his mind than how he was going to secretly replace Marion's blood with chocolate syrup. One of its themes is the notion of attraction/repulsion, disgust/fascination.

When Lila Crane (Vera Miles) is drawn to the Bates mansion seeking her lost sister, she is pulled forward by both her curiosity and her fear. The audience, likewise, wants her both to flee that murder site and proceed into the house.


Lila goes straight upstairs to Mother's bedroom, where she encounters a room many audience members in 1960 would have seen in the film's trailer. It's a scene loaded with more red herrings than a communist Bar Mitzvah. (Ba dum bump.)

Though we half expect a skeleton to fall out of the wardrobe, there's nothing in there but a rack of out-of-fashion clothes. Notice the asexually modest long sleeves -- all the better to hide mother's withered arms.

Hitch zooms in on this lifeless statuette of hands on a Bible. Creepy, perhaps, but harmless.

As if to make sure it's real, Lila touches the impression of Mother's body on the bed.

Lila's tour of Mother's room confirms one thing: this room is occupied by a very real, though absent, person -- and it is very much in the spirit of Dalí's Surrealist composition above. Of course, the irony is that Mother has been dead for quite some time. In that way, this room is even more Dalí-esque, for on that bed is a fresh imprint of someone long gone. That understanding, however, is available only to audiences who are seeing the movie for the second time and know how it ends. That is, on first viewing they will think it's Mother's body print; on second viewing, they know it can only be her corpse (or, perhaps, Norman's body print, which would hint at incest or necrophilia). I believe that Hitch planted these clues just for those repeat viewings. Regardless, Psycho is even creepier upon second viewing.

Of course, Lila's "incomprehensible curiosity" doesn't end there. Eventually, it leads her to the fruit cellar -- a storehouse of slowly decomposing vegetation -- to finally come face-to-face with the desiccated flesh of death itself.

So, next time you see a horror movie and your friends yell at the heroine not to go down to the basement, simply tell them that her behavior is quite normal. Tell them that she's simply acting on Dalí's principal of the phenomenology of repugnance. Who knows? Maybe it'll get you laid. Or not.

For more details about Hitch's connection to surrealism, take a look at my post from May 24, 2007 -- updated with new pictures!

Hitchcock and Surrealism

Dalí and Hitch.

In his 1960 essay "Why I am Afraid of the Dark," Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated a keen grasp for his place in the history of arts and culture. He noted that his work has elements of surrealism, which, in turn, was partly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, whose torch Hitch carried. He wrote:

"And surrealism? Wasn't it born as much from the work of Poe as from that of [French surrealist] Lautreamont? This literary school certainly had a great influence on cinema, especially around 1925-1930, [Hitch's formative silent film years], when surrealism was transposed onto the screen by Buñuel... Rene Clair... Jean Cocteau.... An influence that I experienced myself, if only in the dream sequences and the sequences of the unreal in a certain number of my films. [I try to tell a] "perfectly unbelievable story with such a hallucinatory logic that one has the impression that this same story can happen to you tomorrow." [(Italics mine.)]

When most people think of surrealism, Salvador Dalí's melting clocks and Luis Bunuel's icky eyeball slicing in Un Chien Andalou are the first images that come to mind. But those artists had very clear political aims. They sought to disrupt the human psyche in much the same way that terrorists disrupt society through random violence. Surrealism was primarily a revolutionary political movement -- art was its by-product.

Here are a few thoughts from Wikipedia:

"Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer."

Gleefully irreverent, this role-reversed Pietà could only have been conceived of by an iconoclasting surrealist.

Max Ernst, The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus, 1926.

Hitchcock told François Truffaut that he "practiced absurdism religiously." In fact, he described North by Northwest as a "fantasy of the absurd."

From this high-angle point of view at the United Nations building, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) seems about as significant as an ant as his nightmare intensifies. Summing up the film's artistic and political statement, this matte-process shot is as surreal as anything by Dalí.

I don't think Hitch dropped absurd surrealist flourishes into his movies just to imbue them with a sense of the weird (though that was a motivation too). He was critical of the international political scene of his day and was ambivalent about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

Those messages are loud and clear in Saboteur, Rope, NxNW, Topaz and more. The anarchist politics of Surrealist Manifesto author Andre Breton and the early surrealists influenced Hitch's own politics, appealing to his own revolutionary artistic sensibilities. (Read more about them in my August 22, 2005 post.) In the case of NxNW -- a critique of the Cold War -- it made sense to use surrealism and the absurd to express his feelings about the tragic absurdities of the Cold War. Wikipedia continues:

"The characteristics of this style - a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological - came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality."

Roger Thornhill's surreal experiences certainly helped 'make him whole with his individuality.'

14 years earlier, the Dali-created dream sequence of Spellbound got all the attention in that movie.

The dream sequence.

But there are several more surreal touches in that film.

The series of doors that whip open during Constance and J.B.'s kiss (Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck) symbolize the doors of her subconscious flying open -- a surreal, symbolist touch.

My favorite non sequiter in all cinema: when lovestruck Ingrid gushingly asks for "liverwurst!"

Breton once declared that "the purest surrealist act would be to go into a crowd and fire a gun at random." Hitch neatly pulled that idea off at the end of the movie, offering up a close-up of a suicide gun that fires into the audience, followed by the non sequiter of Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman laughing it up at the train station.

Bang! You're dead.

Hitch would have liked to do more of this kind of thing in the film, but his conflicts with Selznick prevented it.

Publicity still of Ingrid Bergman from a section of the dream sequence that was cut from the film.