She’s not wrong to feel that way, as in this universe worry is the best indicator of an occurrence’s looming inevitability. She is paranoid that the world is out to get her because nothing in her life has given her reason to think otherwise. Coupled with the murder she witnesses and the one she perpetrated on a man who had been raping her, it’s not a stretch to say that for Norma the night is truly dark and full of terrors. Said marriage, proved a frying pan/fire situation but, at the very least, it gave her her true love, Norman. Herself suffering under an abusive father, paired with a present, but distant mother, she fell victim to a predatory older brother who raped her daily until she escaped through the guise of marriage. Norma is by no means a perfect parent, given as she is to intense overreaction and histrionics, but given her own personal history as spelled out by the series, this kind of behavior is understandable, if not acceptable. “I looked at all the case studies I could find in the literature and in my work, and saw that for all the psychopaths, including dictators, who had psychiatric reports from their youth, all had been abused and often had lost one or more of their biological parents.” Fallon can attest as such, saying in his book, Being raised in such a chaotic, unstable environment and being exposed to such violence from such a young age is devastating to the psyche of even a psychologically sound child, much less one so apparently given to fracture as Norman. "Bates" builds up his influence, showing him in flashback to be an angry, abusive man whom Norman eventually kills in an attempt to protect his mother from his father’s onslaught. Conspicuously missing in the "Psycho" world is the presence of Norman’s father. This is best evidenced in the film by that slightly excruciating scene near the end in which the psychiatrist explains just how Norman’s psychotic break was due entirely to an overbearing mother. But the whole of the blame for such an upbringing can hardly be placed solely on Norma. That, then, would make Norman Bates an unlucky psychopath. He categorizes himself first as a “prosocial psychopath” and then as a “lucky psychopath”: lucky that he was raised in a positive, nurturing family with two parents who took care to create a safe environment for him to thrive. While never blatantly malicious, Fallon recognizes how troubling such choices were for those around him, even while admitting he’s not much bothered by their feelings. He also recounts stories from his life in which he exhibits careless, manipulative behavior, often with little care for the well being of others, including an incident involving a trip with his brother to Africa under the pretense of visiting Kitum Cave to see the elephants that gather, but in reality to afford Fallon the opportunity to visit a spot not yet widely known to be fostering a Marburg (an Ebola-type) virus, all unbeknownst to his brother. Fallon’s research reveals that PET scans of diagnosed psychopaths have recognizable and identifiable patterns in the brain that could lead to greater understanding and identification of the group, potentially providing demonstrable, verifiable evidence of a psychopath. They’re vivid descriptions, but they fall short of our, still evolving, understanding of psychopaths.įor instance, in "The Psychopath Inside" by neuroscientist James Fallon, the author recounts the experience of finding out that PET scans taken of his own brain showed identical earmarks to those of a typical psychopath. He does, however, call Norma a man-hater who dominated her son and Norman a secret transvestite with a burgeoning interest in the occult. Despite the title, Robert Bloch never calls Norman a psychopath. The brilliance of "Bates" is how it chooses to reframe this narrative by building out the history that precedes not just the film’s timeline but that of the series itself, refusing to settle for taking the word of a known psychopath.Īs our understanding of Norma has expanded, so has our understanding of what Norman is since the novel was written in 1959 and the film was made in 1960. Through his eyes, we see a repressed, shrewish, near incestuous harpy hell-bent on bending a weak-willed son to her whims. To say that Norman is an unreliable narrator in the film and the book that inspired it is an understatement at best. A specter that haunts every corner of "Psycho," it’s only with the inception of "Bates" that the audience comes to understand just how misrepresented Norma has been all these years. The evil mother figure is a well-worn trope in film and television alike, and Norma, as originally conceived, is no exception.
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