Desire in Cinema as Derived from the Mother Figure in Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds

 “The problem is not if our desires are satisfied or not, the problem is how do we know what we desire” (Zizek, 2006, 00:16), Slavoj Žižek states this in the beginning of his film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Directly going on to say “There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural about human desires” that they are artificial , that desire is something that we must be taught. I don’t think that our desires ae necessarily taught by cinema itself, but that cinema reflects to us and can teach us how the nature of human desire is spawned in each individual’s psyche and how different virtuosities and perversions can either be suppressed or carried out.

The desires seen in the films of Alfred Hitchcock always seem to lean to the perverse. There never seems to be a simple, childlike drive to make anyone happy for the sake of it, to make ethical decisions because that’s what one does or to be seen as an upstanding member of society without expecting personal gain in return. Hitchcock is showing us the murky and unspoken sides of human desires. The desire toward voyeurism, control, the want to be scared and the drive toward death. The sexual wants of his characters always seem to sway into the realms of the sado-masochistic, the oedipal and the jacostal.

Cinema as an artform lends itself to revealing the desires of its subjects as the audience can view the ego of the characters while also showing the battle between the superego and the id behind how this ego preforms to satisfy these desires. Here of course I’m referencing Freud’s theory laid out in his Structural Model of the Psyche, of the ego which is the outward facing part of one’s personality where the superego is the idealised and morality inspired idea a person has of their ego which is the near opposite of the id which contains what Zizek describes as “illicit desires” (Zizek, 2006).

Hitchcock is quoted in Giani Canova’s book, Alfred Hitchcock : Cinema on the Edge of Nothing, saying; “You have to shoot a sex scene as if it were a murder. And vice versa” (Canova, 2019, p.23). In Hitchcock’s films it is the dark undercurrent, the id, which triumphs over ethics and morality in the way he lets his characters’ desires come to fruition. These characters, in the tradition of film noir and horror, that are running from the law and or chasing love that is based in voyeurism and control are out for themselves and are letting the imaginings of Freud’s id influence their dealings with the other people and the worlds of Hitchcock’s films.

To speak further on the topic of desire in cinema through the lens of the films of Alfred Hitchcock I will focus on two of his films, Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). The way I see the id influencing the desires of Hitchcock’s characters is clear in his two most obvious horror films. In both the themes of how the central male-female couples interact to try and get what they want as well as the ever present third, the mother figure, and the cinematography, the audience can see the underlying darker desires of each person wining over morality and ethics. Out of these character tropes seen in both films I want to discuss in particular how the mother figure in each is the main driver of desire. Firstly by asking if it is the so called oedipal complex felt by either Norman Bates in Psycho or Mitch Brenner in The Birds which controls their actions toward their blonde counterpart, Marion Crane or Melanie Daniels respectively. Is it their unorthodox relationship with their mothers which lives in their subconscious that Hitchcock uses to determine their desires. Is it this psychosexual bond which makes Norman compelled to murder Marion in the infamous shower scene and what makes Mitch attracted to Melanie in the first place. After discussing each film in relation to the Oedipus complex, looking at both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis I will argue that the male characters in these films do not actually posses as much autonomy over how they feel as we as viewers are inclined to think.

The understanding of the Oedipus complex which is employable to these films is that where the son has subconscious sexual perversions towards his own mother which can take a more metaphorical and symbolic form, he’s not actually going to try and have sex with his mum but there will be traces of her in future partners and so on. This is a more “pop-psychology” way of explaining the Oedipus complex than fully accepting and applying what Freud’s full theory was, as laid out in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s article The Oedipus Problem in Freud and Lacan. Freud is quoted in this work arguing “At a very early age the little boy develops an object-cathexis for his mother, which is originally related to the mother’s breast…the boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him… the boy’s sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle for them” (BorchJacobsen, 1994, p.268).

As in neither film is there a father figure to speak of, a literal interpretation to the original Freudian concept doesn’t apply to the more subconscious and metaphorical human relations that Hitchcock is trying to portray. For this reason I think if one is trying to argue that the Oedipus complex is behind any of the desires in these films, it’s more likely to be inspired by the Lacanian interpretation of it. Lacan was notably critical of Freuds Oedipus theory as he thought it was a more metaphorical explanation, not as literal as Freud made it out to seem, calling it “Freud’s dream”. The Lacanian interpretation explains that it is more metaphorical, that the sexual attraction to the mother was “signifier”, a metaphor or symbol for a more abstract psychological issue (the signified) rather than a literal desire for a person to have sex with a parent (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986, pp.126-129). It’s this explanation of the psychological phenomenon which I think intuitively makes more sense when looking at the drivers for desire in both Psycho and The Birds.

 In Psycho (1960) the leading woman, Marion Crane played by Janet Leigh is on the run after steeling forty thousand dollars. She spends the night at a dingy motel ran by Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, and his mother. We see how his sexual desire for her competes with the control his mother has over him which drives him to murder her after a night of voyeurism and mad ramblings in the infamous shower scene. Here I think the Lacanian interpretation comes into play. It is Norman’s obsession with his mother which is the signifier for a deeper psychological perversion which the film deals with after Marion’s death. Norman’s twisted desires which make him feel the need to preserve his mother’s corpse and play pretend like she is still alive to torment him coupled with his sexual desire towards Marion are an excellent, disturbing show of the darker fantasies of human beings. Norman killing Marion is the Lacanian signifier of Norman’s mental distress. “ the sight of something that should not be seen, the violating of privacy and intimacy. It is rooted in the voyeuristic violation that appeals to us, excites us and causes us to become his accomplices and break the law along with him.” (Canova, 2019, p.104). These voyeuristic desires that end in violence come from the figure of the mother in Psycho ( like when Norman spies on Marion through a hole in the wall and even when he dresses up as his mother to kill her, this is like the deceased mother’s voyeuristic desires living on in his subconscious that he carries out for her) as Norman is clearly still haunted by his mother’s control over his life and mind from when she was alive and this still lives on with him and controlled his actions all throughout the film. Hitchcock’s theme of a mother’s control through second hand voyeurism (see fig.1)and also subconscious control over her son’s desires carries on in his second most notable psychological thriller, The Birds.

Although the metaphors are not as obvious as with Psycho, in this later work, Hitchcock employs the same themes just more subtle when shown in the case of the human relations while the attacking birds themselves are the physical signifier of the subconscious, incestuous undercurrent in the relationship between Melanie Daniels and Mitch Brenner, you can’t tell me she doesn’t look like his mother and that this was unintentional in Hitchcock’s vision. Slavoj Žižek calls the birds “raw incestuous energy” and that Hitchcock is using their unexplained decent on the town as a metaphorical device(see fig.2), that the birds are “not a part of the natural set up of reality” (Zizek, 2006,06:51). This again relates back to my point on Lacan’s interpretation of the Oedipus complex

Both of these examples though, imply too much that it is the male in each film who is the main curator of desire, only inspired by his mother’s overbearingness. Even just after explaining the different examples in each film this doesn’t seem right. The figure of the mother seems to loom a lot larger, be in a lot more control than any other character in the film, than both the male and his blonde female seductress. Not to say that these men are pathetic, wishy washy characters being completely controlled by their mother, who is compelled to control them because of their own subconscious sexual desire and desire of control over their sons, but at this point I think I am saying that. The Oedipus complex is too simple and I think under explains Hitchcock’s mastery of controlling the sense of a hidden psychological undercurrent in his films, and undercurrent more unnerving and spooky than any knife or seagull’s beak stabbing into a young woman’s flesh .

Instinctively we usually think of the men having power over the world of desires in films of the mid twentieth century. As John Berger writes about female nudes in oil painting in the literary adaptation of Ways of Seeing, “ A man’s presence is dependant upon the promise of power which he embodies…The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you… By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her” (Berger, 1972, pp.45-46). He argues that traditionally in visual art the man is the one who does onto others because of his inherent male power, whereas the women are controlled by the male gaze put on to them and then internalised, becoming a self-policing and passive entity. To apply this to how Hitchcock used psychoanalysis in film you would have to agree with the idea that it is the male characters’ own oedipal desires in each film which they act on, and the women are passive to this. Marion and Melanie being the subjects to this and Ms. Bates and Ms. Brenner being the starting points in each man’s life to these perversions.

From watching these films I really do not think either man has this much autonomy in his own thoughts and actions for us to be able to give all the credit to either, that credit going for being the main or sole driving force for how desire is played out in each film. Both Norman Bates and Mitch Brenner seem more like characters swept up in something more abstract, they know it’s out of their control and taboo, something I don’t think they can name themselves or have much control over. I think as a viewer, using the same psychoanalytic process that would have been en vogue during Hitchcock’s time, it’s easy to see how actually it is the figure of the mother in each film who drives the sexual desires in the men. Rather than the men acting upon an oedipal complex as explained above, it is the mothers who are manipulating their sons because of their own Jacosta complex which compels the desire based parts of the narrative in each film.

The Jacosta complex is like the reverse of the Oedipus complex and is quite similar but I think the distinction made between them is an important one as it determines who has power over how desires are created in the films. This is a psychoanalytic theory first explained by Raymond de Saussure in 1920. It describes the mothers sexual desires towards her son rather than the other way round. While the oedipal complex is usually used to explain why men look for female partners that remind them subconsciously of their mother, the jacosta complex more so is realised in a mother’s perverse need to control her son’s sex life while also infantilising him. I think this explanation of the incestuous undertones of each film that makes the most sense. In Psycho Norman Bates is being controlled by his mother from the grave up until the very end where she still speaks through his voice in the jail cell. The same goes for The Birds although it is more subtle. “Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b] linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim” (Freud, S. and Strachey, J ,1975,p.62). The mother in both Psycho and The Birds uses manipulation of their son as an extension of their id to satisfy their desires compelled by their Jacosta complex which then influences all other desires in these films.

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