Hitchcock’s figurations: some reflections on Textuality in Psycho

Abstract

The article explores the implications of Psycho as a cinematic text a filmic array of iterable, signifying, verbal and visual, signifiers. It makes a distinction between prospective and retrospective movie viewing which allows examining how a film text reads itself, first in its treatment of proper names in the opening credits. The credits are analyzed as a narrative with its own shape, that introduces the figural modality of the film as a whole. Moving on to the diegetic narrative, the article analyzes how the movie represents the tensions and contradictions of signification as a problem of interpretation first of all for its characters, and specifically for Marion and Norman. It concludes by suggesting that the world of the movie posits the negotiation of signification not just in the twists and surprises of its melodramatic plot, but also in the conduct of mundane, domestic experience, whose trammels become central to the movie retrospectively in the light of the ultimate incoherence of the horror story.