Norman's House

The eerie wind whispers through the canyon, blowing dust across the hot blacktop. Down the scrubby, run-to-riot hill, is a down-at-the-heels low, once-white building that has seen better days. It has a low porch, and a dismal, unappealing facade. It badly needs painting, its chipped, weather-battered surface paying mute testimony to the countless hours it has been squatting here, baking in the unforgiving California sun. Minutes tick into hours and fade into the oblivion of ungentle time.

The sign out front reads: BATES MOTEL.

Up the hill, brooding like a sentinel on the edge of Hell, is the two-story Victorian manse crumbling to dust, slowly, inexorably. Inside, it's stifling, choking arena of dark shadows and tittering vermin; unsafe, the central staircase invites, with its broken, jagged teeth, the unwary visitor or explorer to come, enter, venture upward to the old bedrooms and guest room, the place where life unfolded decades before, and decades before that, little drama and sad scenes being imprinted upon the environment, so that the psychically sensitive can unspool these somber memories. The ghosts can shadow forth into their occult half-life.

Can you hear their whispers? Conversations recorded, imprinted, again, on the otherwise so-still-you-could-hear-a-pin-drop environment. The clouds cover the sun; the shadows shift. There is no one here to hear a scream.

The primary ghost of the place, the tall, lean, undeniably handsome NORMAN BATES, is an American legend, a cinematic icon come to life, full-blown, in the minds of anyone and everyone who has been touched by his sad melodrama, his psychopathic saga, his descent into the madman's thicket, or tarn. But it was not only Norman that disappeared, like Marion Crane's car, beneath the muddy surface of the brackish waters of the lake. No. The undertow pulled Norman down, down, into terrible, dark depths; it also pulled the one person in life most important to Norman, a person he both worshipped and detested in equal measure: NORMA, his "Mama."

Mother.

Mother.

Norman dressed in an old Victorian dress, the hem of the skirt trailing the dusty floor boards, a grey wig upon his head. In his hand, a butcher knife. Now what in the Hell is he going to do with that? Lila Crane, Marion's sister, comes into the basement room. A lightbulb, jogged into movement on the end of its hanging cord, swings round and round, unleashing a whirlpool of light and dark, swirls of obsidian covering and revealing the horrible thing sat in the ancient rocker, the dessicated, shrunken, shriveled image of the cadaver rifled from her grave, preserved by the delicate, oh-s-delicate hands of a man given to stuffing his pets and other assorted roadkill when he picked them up during solitary sojourns. Out under the hot sun they baked, but not Norma.

Much like Victor Ardisson, or Count Von Cosel, Norman has stolen Norma from her grave; all the better to try and preserve her, in the manner of ancient Egypt, as his most beloved "mummy." Stop laughing. And quite shuddering.

Ed Gein

It was not either of the gentlemen, however, upon whom the character of Norman was initially based (beyond the immortal interpretation of actor Anthony Perkins). It was a small, grizzled, little crawdad of a man named Ed Gein, a Wisconsin farmer (or, at least, the owner of a once-thriving farm) whose murderous passions gave way to putrid pass times: graverobbing, cannibalism (so some claim), and the creation of strange, primitive, and ghastly artifacts, including human-flesh faces, human flesh leggings, a human-flesh tom-tom, and a torso complete with female breasts. Ed was working on a ritual of transformation, or self-actualization, donning the flesh of the dead, dancing in the Wisconsin moonlight in the cold, isolated fields, with only a vengeful and angry God looking down at his bizarre and profane perambulations.

Human skull soup bowls and lips on a drawstring were small, eccentric pieces of the Gein puzzle. The largest piece belonged to the late Augusta Gein, the shrewish termagant whose smothering rendered Ed and his late brother Henry social incompetents. Henry wanted to escape but never did, perishing in a suspicious "fire" during a hunting trip. Ed was along for that trip. And people wondered.

As a child, Ed had come upon his old, drunken Pa and religiously-obsessed Ma (all women being "Whores of Babylon" in the mind of Augusta Gein), clothed in leather aprons and slaughtering a pig. It affected Ed in the deepest possible way; it must have turned him on plenty, and he never forgot it.

When Sherriff's deputies found the slaughtered, headless torso of BERNICE WORDEN hanging in Ed's shed, dead, it seemed a fitting capstone to Ed's obsession with the slaughtered, hanging pig carcass Ma and Pa were butchering. And why not butcher human pigs as well? Ed must have surmised that, yea, this was all well and good.

Ed had previously shot and butchered barmaid MARY HOGAN, and Worden came later. Her son was a deputy sheriff. When she went missing in her hardware store on November 16th of 1957, and with the discovery of a slick of blood, the policeman naturally went looking for the last known person to enter and do business in the store: weird little wet-fart, "Fast" Eddie Gein, the Elmer Fudd of Plainfield, Wisconsin. A man many had already surmised was vastly mentally ill, and getting worse. They didn't know how far the mental rabbit hole had fallen. But they, along with the rest of America and the world, would soon find out.

Ed's filthy farmhouse, which, eventually, mysteriously burned to the ground, was a squalid disaster, stuffed with garbage and detritus, Ed's pile of racy (for the era) detective magazines, some featuring bondage-type poses, and books on cannibal tribes and Nazi atrocities (think Ilsa Koch and lampshades made of human skin) stood out prominently. Since Mama had died, Ed had let everything go to hell, puttering around in the cold and dark, living on Van Kamps pork 'n' beans, and sitting alone on bitter winter nights, listening to the wind howl through the trees.

However, he cared for Mama's room, making sure to keep it tidy and clean, closed off from the rest of the shocking filth in which he dwelt.

Ed was arrested, packed off to jail, then to the sanitorium, as he was adjudged, "mentally unfit to stand trial." And this is the way it would remain for over ten years. Finally tried for the murder of Worden, Gein admitted to the Hogan murder as well. (He is suspected in others.)

Judged "not guilty because of insanity," Little Ed was confined to the Mendota State Hospital where he lived out the remainder of his years mopping floors, as a model inmate. He died there July 26th, 1984, at the age of 77.

When apprehended, Ed had somewhat the same puzzled, almost comic look of surprise on his face as David Berkowitz, New York's 44.- Caliber killer who addressed his letters to the papers as "Son of Sam." (This turned out to be a dog that psychically communicated with Mr. Berkowitz.) what, Ed must have wondered, was all the fuss about? Why all the sudden deluge of attention poured out on an insignificant little man that no one had ever given two thoughts of before?

Wonders never cease.

Hitchcock, Bloch, and the Birth of Psycho

The Ed Gein story ruffled the mental feathers of author Robert Bloch, a titan of Twentieth Century horror and crime fiction who was a boyhood penpal of the Old Man of Providence himself, Howard Philips Lovecraft (the "Shadow Out of Time"). Lovecraft was so impressed with the young Bloch that he wrote a story, "The Haunter of the Dark," in honor of him, calling his protagonist "Robert Blake." Bloch published regularly in the pulps of the era, finally lending his considerable talents to writing teleplays for such classic shows as "Star Trek," "Thriller," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and, in more modern times, "Tales from the Darkside," and "Monsters." And that's probably just a small sampling.

Bloch (and the rest of America) were stunned to learn of the Gein crimes and their sickening aftermath. IN later years, he protested that Norman was, in fact, NOT a literal adaptation of Gein's case, as should be apparent to anyone. He stated:

Thus the real-life murderer was not the role model for my character Norman Bates. Ed Gein didn't own or operate a motel. Ed Gein didn't kill anyone in the shower. Ed Gein wasn't into taxidermy. Ed Gein didn't stuff his mother, keep her body in the house, dress in a drag outfit, or adopt an alternative personality. These were the functions and characteristics of Norman Bates, and Norman Bates didn't exist until I made him up. Out of my own imagination, I add, which is probably the reason so few offer to take showers with me.

Be that as it may, Ed and the fictional Norman will be forever linked in the minds of audiences for horror and true crime, who note the cleaned-up alternative world fiction of Psycho is disabused the viewer when he or she learns of the hideous, repulsive, and sickening Gein, who was the near polar-opposite of the handsome young Anthony Perkins; Norman's whose Victorian home was more something from the Addams Family than Gein's wretched, compost heap of a dwelling.

It took the corpulent Alfred Hitchcock to transform Bloch's novel into the "wide-awake nightmare" (to borrow a line from a Slayer song; a group who, incidentally, used the Gein murders as the inspiration for their song "Dead Skin Mask") that was 1960's shock-fest, Psycho, starring Perkins and Janet Leigh, whos daughter Jamie Lee Curtis would go on to achieve horror film immortality in her own right, as the character of "Laurie Strode' in John Carpenter's mega-blockbuster slasher classic Halloween (1978), which has inspired a franchise of films.

When once asked about the necessity of the brutal, bloody, shocking shower scene of Psycho, arguably one of the most famous scenes in film history, Hitch retorted "What about the opening scene of Hiroshima, Mon Amour? "

The interviewer replied it was "Necessary for the integrity of the film."

"So was the shower scene in Psycho," answered the Master of Suspense, testily.

Originally filmed for a two-parter television episode for "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," Hitchcock decided to release it as a feature film. The resultant cultural impact was phenomenal, Psycho becoming a mega-hit and a cultural milestone. Somewhere, as David Lynch and others would observe in ensuing decades, there was perversity burrowing, like ravening bettles, beneath the well-clipped lawns and bright, green hedges of white picket fence suburbia, the affluent America of "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best." In other words, America's unquestionable preeminence following our defeat of the Third Reich was belied by the underclass of overwork poverty, low education, and seemingly, an inability to grasp the bottom rung of the ladder on the upwardly mobile ascent to all that American consumerist, bourgeois opulence. Brando, James Dean, and Charlie Starkweather all paid testimony to the other side of America, one that was like examining the buried side of a rock. Ed Gein's unwashed, comic-grotesque visage paid testimony to it, as well. (And if you wanted further proof of ugliness and fear, you didn't have to look any further than segregation and lynchings in the South, the racial strife and injustice endemic to the era).

And into all of this a simulated reality, a place poised on the edge of a Universal Studio backlot, a guided tour of a facade, with nothing much inside of it. A yawning cavern that takes the imagination of a moviegoer to animate the interior, to make it "live." (Odd choice of words, perhaps.)

In our collective unconscious, Norman still rocks his black sweater and comfortable, all-American slacks; the casual dress of an attractive young man with a nice, well-groomed, kempt appearance. Perhaps he is just a little too friendly, a little too corny, and a little hackneyed, overly affable and accommodating in his cheerful, friendly demeanor. He is given to exposing a deeply nervous, anxious side beneath the genial exterior, a side seething, brutal; one of rage.

He changes the linens, signs in the guests, but there are so few these days. When Marion Crane comes calling, carrying forty thousand dollars in money she has stolen from a cretinous and very wealthy man, Norman is unaware of the huge wad of money--but he is struck by the girl. Or rather, NORMA, his alter-ego, the demonic mother-self that possesses him, is struck by her.

WHORE.

In the shower, stripped bare, with the water washing away her sin and guilt, Marion sees a vague image loom behind the plastic curtain. Suddenly, it's ripped away, revealing the dark shape, the silhouette of a tall, matronly woman in a dark grey wig. The butcher knife comes up, the blade coming down on bare flesh.

Stab, stab, stab...

The shape exits. Marion reaches out to the curtain, feeling the sleek plastic slip through her fingers. The shower is still running, the trickles of black blood swirling down the drain as she falls over, pulling the shower curtain with her. Frozen forever, she dies with her eyes open, scanning the bathroom floor. "My," she might have thought as her consciousness receded into black, "that young man sure does an excellent job of keeping the floor in here clean." Then, at the landing of a single fly, she dies.

In the fullness of time, all things die. All things go down to their inevitable dissolution. Death is inexorable, and cannot be staved off forever. It can, in fact descend with instantaneous speed upon any of us, rendering all of our cares and concerns a moot point. One day, this reality, or rather, your conscious awareness of it, will cease to be.

In light of that fact, we must ask ourselves: What is real? What is true? In the case of Norman/Norma, not the story of Psycho. It is manifestly NOT the Ed Gein Story told factually. It is a mirage, an illusion. An idea. You ask anyone about Norman Bates, and, if they know the name and what it entails, it will carry its web of associations.

None of that is reality. It is a cinematic mirage, the magic-lantern show of images and ideas, all filed away.

Because the world is for dreaming.

And showers for screaming.

Goodnight, Norman, wherever you are.

The Making Of Psycho

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