Alfred Hitchcock 's The Mind Of A Killer

In the Movie, American Psycho, Patrick Bateman demonstrate challenges to identify his unique type of personality theories. The purpose of this essay is to review a selected film as a Psychology student, and discuss it from a psychological perspective. Also in this paper providing a diagnosis for a character in the movie and discuss the behaviors that support the selected diagnosis, and to explain and discuss the mental illness depicted in the film.

The diction and tone demonstrate a wonderful descent into madness. The story is written in first person, allowing us to better understand the narrator’s state of mind. As the story progresses, there is an abundant use of exclamation marks, giving off an erratic, exited tone. Many sentences are short and choppy, portraying the uncertain and off-balance state of mind of the narrator. Although it is clear that the narrator has finally lost her mind, the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper is still fairly ambiguous. It suggests that the narrator was finally able to free herself, although she did lose her sanity in the process. This is evident as she casually remarks that “jumping out the window would be

     Hitchcock uses misery, tragedy, and death to show the emotions of his characters. At no point is this more obvious than the end of the movie. Hitchcock spends the entire movie building up to this point and in the end he makes it extremely clear how tragedy has changed the relationship of everyone. After the nagging husbands murder of his wife has been confessed you see

Alfred Hitchcock in the film Psycho and Peter Shaffer in his stage production Equus both explore the true nightmares that manifest from sexual and emotional repression. The writers emphasise the motives and the reason for the characters actions opposed to how the causations of this repression occurred. Conversely, both works draw on the common theme of the disturbed human psyche, offering a critical perspective on the upbringing of each individual with regards to their early development, each characters subcontious fixations and abnormal behaviours through the use characters behaviours and representations. The characters Norman Bates and Marion Crane in Psycho and Allan Strang and Martin Dysart of Equus all face internal struggles against

Like many of his films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is an intense study in the sometimes-jarring idiosyncrasies of its main character, L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart). Jeffries is an observer by nature, a professional photographer confined to his apartment by an injury, with only insurance company nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) and his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) for company. This limitation impels him to begin observing his neighbors, and he witnesses events that lead him to believe Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wide. However, Jeffries’ watchful habit raises serious questions about the relationships between neighbors and ethics of observation in densely-populated urban settings. Rear Window uses set design and disparate camera techniques to codify the acceptable and unacceptable ways in which a city dweller might observe their neighbors, based largely on level on intent.

When looking at the collection of works by Alfred Hitchcock, it is common to notice similar threads throughout his life work. The films viewed in class alone, share many things, as both Psycho and The Birds consist of more than what meets the eye. Though one may be about a killer man and the other about killer animals, both Hitchcock films develop a deep, dark string of events leading up to inevitable death. Being in touch with a great love of drama, thrill and suspense, Alfred Hitchcock leaves you on the edge of your seat, with many famous scenes and never before seen ideas, making you incapable of averting your eyes.

The yellow wallpaper is the central symbol in the short story. It acts as a mental entrapment for the main character. As the narrator, Jane, tears down the wallpaper in the end, it was revealed that the woman trapped behind the wallpaper was in fact herself. This represents the point where Jane's illness has taken full control over her and leads to her own madness. The wallpaper has been part of her confinement and by her tearing it down, she is freeing herself from that confinement.

In the final three sentences on “The Yellow Wallpaper” the nameless woman has peeled off all of the yellow wallpaper by biting, tearing, and smudging it. At this point in the story the reader can come to the conclusion that the wife has gone completely mentally insane. When her husband, John, comes into the room he

The heroine’s attitude towards the yellow wallpaper has changed over the story. She hated it at first, then noticed that the wallpaper could move, and she thought a woman was trapped behind the wallpaper. The way how the heroine thought about her family and the society has also changed at the same time. Instead of being controlled and destroyed under gender discrimination and male chauvinism, the heroine chose to break through all restraints from the society and fight for her freedom at the end. She “didn’t like it a bit (Gilman, P77)” so she tore all the wallpaper, liberated the woman behind it. She crept out of the room before she getting a breakdown and she told her husband and Jenni that they could not put her back anymore. John’s faint symbolized the collapse of the patriarchal society under the rule of

Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film, Psycho, gives the audience insight on characters who display dual personality traits. The audience gets to see changes occur within Norman and Marion throughout the film. These two characters share nothing in common except for the fact that they are a capable of being normal and committing crimes, showing that they have two different sides to themselves. Hitchcock uses film techniques such as lighting, camera angles, and costume change to demonstrate the duality of human nature. When the film first starts off, Marion Crane is shown lying on a bed in her white underwear in a romantic scene along with her boyfriend Sam Loomis.

Though we are disturbed at the evil things he is doing, we feel a sense of sympathy towards him. We feel for him because of how his mother had treated him. We in turn teach our sub consciousness to start blaming the mother for all the murders that have been committed, just like Norman does. Both Norman’s façade of normality and our ambivalence towards his character verifies him as a quintessential psychopath.

Bruno is more charismatic than the all-American Guy and his potentially destabilising presence can be contained only by his violent expulsion from the diegesis just as their presence was contained by the government. Hitchcock attributes the homosexual menace to those heterosexual women who positioned themselves as subjects of desire than the gay men and women who avoided detection. Corber argues that “...the shot of Miriam’s murder in her glasses seems to acknowledge the films complicity with the production of a female subject who is desired rather than desiring” (118). Miriam’s murder is not shown directly on the screen, but is reflected in her glasses which act as a mirror in which her castration and by extension the castration of the

Being often nicknamed, “The Master of Suspense”, Alfred Hitchcock certainly does not disappoint in his black and white film, Psycho (1960), with his certain use of psychological examination of his characters that will have you intrigued from the very beginning of his film. Psycho not only puts you on the edge of your seat but will draw you in by Hitchcock’s use of little details, ghastly shots, plot twists, and his ability of making you feel as if you are in the movie yourself.

In The Yellow Wallpaper there are two details that seem irrelevant that turn out to be relevant after reading the story. In the beginning of the story the narrator talks about her room with the bars on the windows and the wallpaper torn off the walls from the children who lived in the house before. Another detail would be when the narrator sees the woman in the wall. These two details seem to be irrelevant when you first read the story.

Before the Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock made its way into theaters across the world, film was produced in a completely different way. Some of the elements that were in Psycho were things that nobody saw in movies before. According to Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, when the movie came out, it took place in “an atmosphere of dark and stifling ‘50s conformity” and that the elements of the film “tore through the repressive ‘50s blandness just a potently as Elvis had.” (Hudson). Alfred Hitchcock changed the way that cinema was made by breaking away from the old, “safe” way of creating a movie and decided to throw all of the unwritten rules of film making out the window. The main ways he accomplished this task was by adding graphic violence, sexuality, and different ways to view the film differently than any other movie before its time.