Psycho: Hitchcock and Hopper

Alfred Hitchcock’s use of Edward Hopper’s House By The Railroad (1927) as the specific visual precursor for Norman Bates’ home in Psycho (1960) might be the most celebrated crossover from painting to cinema, but I think the artist’s influence goes much further than that. There’s something deeper than just visual similarity at work here.
Hopper’s work expresses a very modern dislocation (though much less dramatically than Hitchcock), in which people are separate individuals, even in crowds. He shows people – from a distance – in unfulfilling, melancholy moments, or perhaps fleetingly glimpsed from a car or train. In his most celebrated painting – Nighthawks (1942) – it is hard to imagine even the couple breaking into conversation. The figures rarely occupy the foreground in Hopper’s work, which heightens this sense of distance. While Hitchcock does use close-ups and shots of faces, it’s this distance that ties in with Hitchcock’s work which is so often about looking, or being looked at. Rear Window (1954) is predicated on the idea that one man is watching, to all intents and purposes, a lot of films at once. Vertigo (1958) is a complex story involving the surveillance of a woman who turns out to look exactly like someone else before … well I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it. And you should.
Back to Psycho.
Shots resembling Hopper paintings pepper the film, but there’s a psychological similarity, too. Hitchcock co-opts the look of the paintings because they touch on the conditions that give rise to monsters like Bates while never morally judging any of the protagonists. Psycho is permeated with the feeling that the interactions of modern life are off-kilter, and in a very real way, dreadful. Few of the conversations are relaxed or easy, especially those that involve Bates, but the scene when Marion buys a car is awkward, too. It’s easy to forget that Janet Leigh’s character is on the run after embezzling $40,000 when she’s murdered.
The Bates house, left behind by the modern world and looming over the motel’s cabins, is the most potent symbol in the film: it is an avatar of Norman Bates. Tellingly, we are spared any hint of the domestic until the climax of the film, when the home turns out to be the very seat of terror. The rest of the film plays out in public or semi-public space like hotels and offices. Slavoj Žižek proposes a very specific analysis of the three floors of the house in his Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. You can see the relevant clip here.
Hopper isn’t the only artist whose style influences the film, though. Psycho is black and white, though Hitchcock had shot in colour since 1948’s Rope. This choice – because the director thought colour would be too gory – allows for some dramatic lighting effects that refer back to film noir and German Expressionist cinema. It’s a kind of chiaroscuro, played out in moving images. Those influences, which are filtered through the work of directors like F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, are rooted in artists like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Piranesi, and Goya.
Hitchcock famously used Salvador Dalí to conceive the dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) which make mainstream Surrealism’s connection to the moving image. Dalí had, of course, collaborated with Luis Buñuel on the visually arresting Un Chien Andalou (1929), and perhaps cinema is peculiarly suited to displaying the psychological confusion of Surrealism. But Psycho isn’t surreal. Hopper’s work – plain and ambivalent – acts as visual and ethical backdrop in front of which the turmoil of Bates plays out.