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Unconditional love of mother

I attended a screen writing session at FICCI-Frames yesterday. During the discussion a question was asked about how you got the audience to relate or sympathise with the villain. The speaker, Matt Costello, related the scene in Psycho where Norman Bates pushes the car containing the body into the lake but it gets stuck. For a moment the audience shares Norman’s worry, that the crime will not be hidden!

Another audience member pointed out that you don’t discover Norman is the killer to the end of the film so he isn’t yet a villain. Matt acknowledged the point but said “he is disposing of a body murdered by his ‘mother’. I think that makes him a villain.” At which point someone else in the audience says “Sir. He is doing it because of unconditional love for mother!” I was struck by how such a seminal film can function subtly across cultures. I have always read Psycho through the prism of psychoanalysis. Id, subconscious etc. but here Norman Bates was being read as acting appropriately, fulfilling his responsibility to protect his mother.

Later as I discussed my film with one of the other teams bringing a project through the X Media Lab I realised that one of the strengths of the project is the ability to bring strong dramatic Indian themes together with underlying, dark, traditions of the subconscious and psychoanalytical thought. The unconditional love of mother means many things. Probably at the same time.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Unconditional love of mother”

  1. danny says:
    March 27, 2007 at 3:12 am

    Hey Rob,

    I’m thinking here of Melanie Klein:

    “…feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother. The power of love - which is the manifestation of the forces which tend to preserve life - is there in the baby as well as the destructive impulses, and finds its first fundamental expression in the baby’s attachment to his mother’s breast, which develops into love for her as a person. My psycho-analytic work has convinced me that when in the baby’s mind the conflicts between love and hate arise, and the fears of losing the loved one become active, a very important step is made in development. These feelings of guilt and distress now enter as a new element into the emotion of love. They become an inherent part of love, and influence it profoundly both in quality and quantity.” (from Love, Hate, and Reparation)

    I think Klein’s work is useful for your story because she was trying to grapple with identity which is not about lost innocence. For Klein we in fact carry loving and sadistic impulses at the same time, even from birth toward the mother, and so rather than Bates’ conflicted position being a problem, within a Kleinian framework this might be precisely why we identify with Bates at that moment.

    It doesn’t surprise me that Costello, being a horror writer, would not admit such a position. Horror is one of the most distinctively white genres, and I think part of this might be due to how central the “lost innocence” trope is to the classical horror narrative since that time. Certainly, the gesture of killing off the leading lady 20 minutes in suggests some kind of “originary violence” that is perhaps radical compared to later works in the genre?

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