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Well, that was great. I don't know what I expected, beyond consciously trying not to expect anything or think about it too much, but I could not have predicted that... Clusterfuck. And I mean that in the best way. Hilarious, oddly touching, scary (viscerally so: big old trigger warning, btw) and intriguing by turns, it's a modern-day interpretation of a story that, while wonderfully told in its own right, is still pretty crazy, even today.
Six months ago, gawky 17-year-old Norman Bates woke up from a short drugged nap to find that someone -- who is clearly him -- bludgeoned his father to death. Mother Norma's weird affect about the whole thing is our first clue (beyond the title, I guess) that things are not at all okay, or what they seem. After six month of apparently not therapy, the pair buy and move into a motel, found at auction, and within minutes they've been initiated into the town: Sheriff Nestor Carbonell and Hot Deputy Mike Vogel will be a continuing authoritarian presence, a coven of cute teen girls has sweetly adopted Norman as their own little playtoy, a strange-looking teacher is causing weird feelings in Norman's pants, and worst of all, the guy who got foreclosed is a real mean customer -- an overall-wearing, drunken Straw Dogs ne'er-do-well, of the sort you often see lurking around and under Tennessee Williams porches.
The girls secretly whisk Norman off to a transcendently weird, beautiful teen party full of pot and lighting concepts -- and a frenemy played by that Canadian kid that is in every television show -- just long enough Norma to have a scorned-lover fight with Norman's older brother Dylan (he should be along soon), and then for the grizzled prospector dude to bust into the house and beat and handcuff and brutally assault Norma.
As far as these things go, it's fairly earned just off the top, but once Norm helps her out of the jam and she stabs the guy like one million times, it starts feeling pretty okay. Mostly this is thanks to Norma's craziness and pragmatism plus Vera Farmiga's magnetic watchability -- "That sucked, getting raped and killing a dude, but you know what, I've got a motel to get up and running, so put on your big girl panties and help me treat my various wounds and let's do this." -- but honestly, it all happens so deep into the episode that you're way more entranced by then at the way these two manipulate and choreograph their way around each other, like a couple of cobras who think they're looking at a mongoose and not another cobra.
In the struggle to first cover up the stabbing, then rid themselves of the body, the pair make the acquaintance of the cops and Norman finds a notebook scrawled with manga torture porn, that seems to be actually happening in some other location (and possibly will influence his crush on the English teacher in some nonstandard ways). day at school Norman barfs, meets another girl -- this one a quirky CF kid, complete with flair-covered O2 tank -- and generally freaks out.
Back home, Norma and Norman have the most romantic outing yet: A moon-dappled rowboat trip to the middle of a lake, where they can toss the body of the rapist. After discussing matters of their relationship, finer points of parenting, and even some choice Jane Eyre quotes, it's clear that everything is going to be just fucking peachy from now on, so they row to shore. It's funny, original, smart, creepy, and above all, confident. You can get away with a lot, given some swag, and -- beyond the talent -- it's so far the show's best feature.
But none of this is really what you want to know, what you want to know is:
Q: Why did they make this show?
A: Still not sure why, but I do like to think we could be so tired of reboots and remakes that we are now rebooting the idea of a reboot. It feels genius, it looks great, and if you think about this aspect too long you'll get high. The town seems like a character -- like it's going to be one of those shows where everybody is keeping everybody else in sex dungeons and whatever -- so the setting really pulls you in with its oddly timeless modernity. Some places are like cyberpunk almost, too bleeding-edge, and then the interiors on their property are so retro-dead feeling you can smell the dust. It's lovely to look at. You feel everything. The movie you're thinking of recedes so far back in your head it's like a dream one of the characters had, because the reality of what's going on is so present and emotionally viable.
Q: Is that Billy Elliott?
A: No, and it's not the one from Love Actually, it's Pantalaimon and the only good thing about the horrible Spiderwick Chronicles which even Nancy Botwin sucked in, and he's adorbz. Also fantastic to watch, and every bit his mother's son -- and equal. He's tragic and scary and secretive and has about ten thoughts for every one he expresses, and you find yourself rooting for him not to become... what he already pretty clearly is. When one character randomly describes him as a "beautiful, deep still lake in the middle of a concrete world," you're like, Yeah, I'll allow it. Especially since nobody knows about the gators at the bottom, least of all Norman himself.
Q: Am I offended?
A: No. I mean, do what you want, but the show has its shit in order. A stronger warning about the brutal sexual assault would have been nice, but it's not there to titillate or contribute to a culture of violence or anything. Unless you mean the kind of violence where girlfriend immediately stabs her rapist in the abdomen until he is just a jelly in that region, which is like the most fun possible kind. I don't really do well with this kind of thing, this looking-to-be-offended thing, so I'm not the one to ask. Oh, but the title of the source material I guess you could go here too, which is why it's such a profound and humanizing shocker: Just how workaday, lalala, true-to-life (for the most part) their mental illness(es) is/are, from the first minute. We get hints, you can see them setting up a plausible progression of mental dominoes to take us to the end, but Norma is only slightly more wack than plenty of people you know and love. I mean, she's intense as hell, but not in a campy or overdone way: She's just this lady who is intense as hell. To whom a succession of very fucked up things happen, throwing off the balance even more.
Q: But is she amazing?
A: Well, hell yeah she's amazing. It's the perfect match of strikingly intelligent, humbly talented, scary/sexy actress and the ex nihilo whirlwind that is Norma on the page. While there are elements of the neurotic-making moms of the past (Running With Scissors is prevalent in the mix, as are both Beales and both Mildred Pierces), it's still something very specific and new and mesmerizing and of-this-moment that she's doing: A female character that could only exist now, in 2013, and never before. Farmiga takes a character whom we only really know as the imaginary voice of one person's deepest repeating unwanted thoughts, and manages to turn her into a living, breathing, frustrating, heartbreaking, crazy-as-hell, abusive, narcissistic, beautiful, repugnant, angry, nurturing, smothering, self-sacrificing, parasitic, repellent and charismatic mess of a woman.
Q: What is the deal with them?
A: I don't know what the deal is with them, but I think they make a great couple.
Q: Couple of what?
A: I know, right?
NOTES
So the pilot's title refers to Cornell Woolrich, a writer whose life mirrored Norman Bates's in some oddly key ways and whose biographer (whose book bore the same title) has said, "He did in prose what Hitchcock did in film." He was gay, alcoholic, lived on and off with his mother, did well in the movie-option department and seemed like an all-around total genius I would never have otherwise heard of or enjoyed so much as I have in the past few weeks since first googling this phrase.
I think it's more than a wink at the extensive and multivalent connections between Cornell, Norman and Alfred H (and Anthony P), though. As the show itself drifts in its various layers of reference, reversion, reverence and retelling, picking and choosing from things on every layer in order to tell the story it wants to tell, it makes total sense to quote a man whose work influenced Hitchcock and yet who seemed to himself be a Hitchcock character. In fact Rear Window was based on a story of his which -- layer-violating once again -- was a remake of an H.G. Wells short story and so on.
All of which is to say: This is the world we are looking at, a world that pulls equally from all time and cinematic history, from disparate levels of mimesis and simulacrum, biography to fantasy to all and sundry refilmed-remade-rebooted-retellings, equally. The ultimate postmodern (in the actual sense of the term) spin-out and remix of a story that has proven widely and wildly remixable. Over the past week, I've learned that any review of this show that opens with bitching about iPhones is not going to be worth reading, because it has no idea what it's looking at.
This is not even the first Norman Bates story with iPods, for chrissake. A thing I can't remember anybody bringing up all week long. But while Gus van Sant was practicing creative restraint and this is a show is about externalizing the duality of self, one must wonder - why is this the story, why are we continually returning to this particular thing to work out our zeitgeisty-artsy obsessions? When in ten years they develop, I don't know, Smell-O-Vision or four-dimensional timespace dramas or liquid downloadable drinkable movies, there will be a Norman Bates story within the first six months. I guarantee it. Do I really need to tell you why?
It's the soup of culture surrounding the oldest story in history and the oldest fear at the heart of humans. Does the mother overtake the son? Does the son overtake the mother? Male privilege will tell you that the world is about son overtaking father, becoming father, displacing father -- until he's old enough to become one. But that's a story with a beginning and middle and end: This is a story that surrounds you so much you can't even talk about it. You can talk about "legitimate rape" and birth control rights and bake sexism right into the cake, but you can't talk about it. Unless you do it like this: Horribly, horrifically, sadly and deliriously.
And the other thing, too: An Oedipal story about fathers and sons doesn't have women in it. It has objects with vaginas, but no women. But properly, a story about this stuff would put the woman at the center of it all. We like to pretend that for every Oedipus there's an Electra, that men and women are absolutely interchangeable and that one day we'll all be gender fluid otherkin in bunny ears having demiromantic cuddle parties on Google+ and calling it feminism, but that's bullshit, too.
The truth is that men are born from women... and so are women. And so while a boy vs. daddy story is a good story -- the only story men seem interested in telling, to this point in history -- the truth is that a me vs. mother story is universal. And anybody who tells you that's untrue or gay is caught in a story about men, not people. But men aren't the only ones telling stories anymore.
It's so dangerous we don't even really go there and when we do it's like this: Insanity, generation-blending, sexual danger, gender-confusion that's so confused it needs itself explanation and yes, postmodern remix of old and new and versions within versions, commenting on versions of versions, presenting all at once in whatever way these particular folks feel will tell the best particular story. Which is all it's called on to do or to be: A story that uses color and style, sex and love, torture and light to tell you 1) a dream that will 2) end in death.
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
Cary Grant: "All she ever wanted was a home."
Ex-GF's New Fiancé: "Well, I'll certainly try to give her one..."
Cary Grant: "Are you gonna live with your mother?"
Fiancé: "Just for the first year!"
Norman wakes up -- after how long? -- and heads out, stumbling, into the hallway. It's only when his momentum slams him face-to-face with his parents' wedding photo that he rouses, gets a terrible feeling and runs through the house. Everything is on pause: The iron's dripping with steam, dinner's boiling over, everything is crazy and silent. Out in the garage the blood's still wet.
Norman runs back down the halls, bashing into doors, and when his mother finally comes to the door she looks tired, interrupted; she fastens her robe and wonders why on Earth he's so upset now. When she follows to find Norman cradling his father's dead body, she searches his face for shame or fear, but there's none. Only misery. She takes him to her, wrapped in her robe and rocks him as he grieves. "I'm so sorry," she says. He was her best thing and he's broken.
SIX MONTHS LATER
Heading up a seaside highway, lush and green and perfect. The thing about a narcissist, about a lot of people actually, is that it's hard to tell where you end and somebody else begins. When you have to talk louder than anybody else just to be heard -- when you're a woman like Norma Bates -- it's sometimes easier to just demand that the world put itself in order. She's not wrong. But sometimes, say, she'll put words in his mouth. It's a fun game -- her words, coming out of his mouth. For now, that's fun.
Norma: "This is the part where you say Mother, this is beautiful. I'm so happy we're moving here. You are so smart to have thought of this."
Norman: "Mother, this is so beautiful. I'm so happy you're [making me move] here. You're so smart to [force me to do things I have no say in]."
She laughs at him, she likes his spirit. She parks their old wagon and tells him to close his eyes. When he opens them, she's arranged on the hood of the car, laid out like a supermodel; blooming over her, filling his vision, is a motel. Eight rooms, it looks like, arranged all along a parallel. And behind the building -- you've seen it, you know what it looks like -- is a house as big as the sky.
Norman gets worried -- this isn't the first of her big ideas. But it might be the biggest. All she ever wanted was a home.
Norma: "Oh, it's not crazy, it's not! We own a motel, Norman Bates."
It was a foreclosure, so it's fully furnished. Plastic on everything, but it's there. A little old world, full of little old things. There's been so much said about the style, but it really is something: A dusty sad place, new life bursting up through the cracks of somebody else's dead dream. We're only borrowing this life. You think you own a place in the world, but you don't. Not really. It belongs to the men. She got this because one of them made a mistake and the other dogs circled and barked and threw him out. That's the only way you can, by exploiting some other fool who did it wrong. The world doesn't just hand you things.
But this world, now is like a lake in the middle of a concrete world. The motel to sustain them and the house to call their own. Her name, a woman's name, on the papers. Out there, a man's world; in here, Norma's. And down the hill a bit, little cages to keep them in, when they visit. It's the perfect economy: A world away from men, who only visit to give her money. Like having a million husbands to clean and cook for, but they don't come in the house -- into this holy place -- and they eventually leave. And Norman remains.
His bedroom is, of course, door to hers. He knows partially that this is about him, something about him -- he was sick or did something. But she casts it as grief and then she casts even that off: This is about new beginnings, plain and simple. His father is dead and his brother might as well be, but those were just mistakes. This is the thing that was meant to be. This is what they built. All she ever wanted was a home.
Norman: "Maybe some people don't get to start over, maybe they just bring themselves to a new place."
Norma: "You say that a lot, and less than you think it. You think I'm impulsive and irresponsible, because you don't see the way I have to take apart and put this world back together every time it invades, with my hands. But you will. You'll understand what it's like out there and why we need this place to be safe. But until then I will describe it another way. People do get do-overs, sometimes. But they have to try."
Norman: "Yeah?"
You have no idea how hard they have to try. You will: The world is torture.
FIRST DAY
He's listening to classical at the bus stop, he's got some ideas about himself and what people do. How to live. A girl from the tortured world sees him and jumps, seizing on him: There is something there, isn't there. Some kind of innocence or a... he's untouched. Still new. But he's not soft, either. He's not shy. There's a difference between quiet and shy. She can see that too.
She drags the girls along with her -- nameless for now -- to question him. There should be three, classically there would be three, but there have to be four, for reasons we'll see in a second.
What is the boy's name? Norman Bates. When did Norman Bates move here? Last night. Where? What house? This house; the motel. So you bought the motel? To live or to flip? We're not flipping, he says, with conviction. Not this time. Does he have brothers? Just Dylan, just the half-blood mistake. But not here.
Norman: "It's just me and my mom."
Girl: "Got a girlfriend?"
Norman: "What did I just say?"
Another one rolls up in a brand-new car and they squeal. He smiles, content to let them leave with her. There's a lot to look at. But they can't let him go or leave him behind. There's something about him. Like a little toy. Like a man you could keep as a pet, safe behind the locks. She ushers him into the back of the convertible and climbs onto him: Four girls, three seats, one Norman. We don't even know we're doing it, half the time.
She takes his phone and snaps a practiced selfie for her contact info: "Bradley Martin. You have any questions at school, you call me. Okay?" He can tell she means it. She means what she says. Does she have a boyfriend? Yes, more than likely. Does that rule her out? Not really, but she's not offering. A dumber, a shittier, a more obsolete boy would call it the Friend Zone, but he wasn't raised here in the tortured concrete world. He knows the score.
BACK HOME
Dylan: "Thanks for letting me know you moved, Mom."
Norma: "Pretty sure the last time we spoke, you told me to Drop dead, bitch. Sorry I took it personally."
Dylan: "So your own son doesn't get to know? What if I was hurt? What if I was in the hospital? What if I needed you?"
Norma: "Are you those things?"
Dylan: "No, I just need money."
Norma: "Later. Click."
Click.
ENGLISH
He looks at Bradley all through class: This girl who navigates the concrete world like she was born to it, like it doesn't hurt her at all. Norma wouldn't like her. Would like even less Miss Watson, with her fire-bright hair and lipstick talking about poetry and time.
Miss Watson: "I want you to just think about poetry tonight. What does it mean? Why is it timeless? Why is there power in words arranged in cadences and structures?"
Rules for the concrete world, words. The way they tell you what to do, how to be, what a man is and a woman. Poetry takes this and twists it, bends it, breaks it and puts it back in the shape of something else. Brings it into the house on the hill, and when it comes back out again it sounds like a dream. There's a fluorescent light up there in the attic; you never know when it's going to flicker into light and show you what you've made. What you can show the world of torture, what you made in the world beneath those waves. The fire you stole.
MISS WATSON ADVISES
Miss Watson: "Norman, your test scores are amazing. But your grades..."
Norman: "We move a lot. Five different high schools. My mom's impulsive, she gets these ideas and we move and everything is new. Which is good."
Miss Watson: "Wings are good. But so are roots. I want you to think about joining something."
Norman: "Not sports. Not the world of men."
Miss Watson: "What about a sport that isn't? What about track? Ever run?"
Norman: "Not as a sport, no."
Miss Watson: "Listen, I realize I'm going to have to go the extra mile here, so I'm gonna tell Coach Carpenter you'll try out. Is that okay?"
Bradley Martin lives in the concrete world, but she moves. Miss Watson looks at him, at the length of his body and calls him a runner, so he can try that. He can see what the world is like. Miss Watson watches him thinking. (Miss Watson, of all the Canadian actors here, is the most memorable to me: She played the most important and my second-favorite, member of a certain cult aboard the Galactica.)
Miss Watson: "Norman, I see that you lost your dad recently. I know how hard that must be. So please know that you can come to me if you have any issues or questions -- about anything -- because I'm here for you. Okay?"
In the moment that she touches his hand, looks at his body, tries to replace Norma, he can hear it. It doesn't speak in words yet, but he can hear it. He runs. Not as a sport, not as a game: It's concrete.
AFTER SCHOOL
Norma's in a quiet mood. Sitting at the table, dinner covered over in tinfoil, waiting for him. He knows the answer for this one: The biggest smile, the biggest needs. The hunger to be nurtured.
Norman: "Wow. Dinner smells great, Mom!"
Norma: "I've been waiting. Alone, in this house. Making it beautiful. Making a home."
Norman: "I was late because I was trying out for track team. It was Miss Watson's idea..."
Norma: "The hell is that? Is she pretty?"
Norman: "-- I got on the team, if you sign this permission slip I can..."
Norma: "Practice every day after school, track meets on Saturdays... you realize we just bought a hotel? A world?"
He knows this one, too and tries to jerk the slip back out of her hands, smiling hugely, apologetically: Not a problem, forget it happened. Forget this, turn off the light, let's have dinner.
Norma: "No! I'm not gonna... be the mother who tells her kid he can't be on the track team. It's fine, it's okay. I'll just do everything myself. The way I always do..."
It's unsubtle enough that he jerks around, tries again for the slip, begs her to sit down and eat dinner: He didn't think this one through, it was just an idea. Wings are good. Home is better. He already has the roots he needs. But she's made the point; she's poisoned it for him, forever. She signs the slip, loose and bristling now and heads out angrily for groceries. Ashamed and cornered at the table as she vanishes, he shouts her name; her name is Mother.
DAY
Norman's beating rugs outside when the guy shows up: A dirtier, stupider Vincent D'Onofrio. The guy's drunk, but not moving slow. He's a man, walking right up to the edge of safety. Norman shivers.
Summers: "You're Norman, right? Just moved in, right? With your mother?"
Norman: "You know her? I can go get her..."
Summers: "You're seventeen, your dad died. You're here from Arizona..."
Norman: "Yeah, all true. Listen, I'll be right back..."
Summers: "Just the two of you. What the fuck do you know about running a motel?"
Norma: "...Can I help you?"
Summers: "Looks like you need help."
Norma: "The fuck you say."
Summers: "I'm Keith Summers, my great-great-grandfather built this house in 1912. My grandfather built that motel in the Fifties. That's my grandmother's rug you're beating. This property has been in my family for over a century..."
Long time, long line of men. I wasn't sure what would happen, but I had a pretty good idea -- the tone in his voice reminded me of nothing so much as the time Veena Sud killed the Internet's dog, that same entitled, privileged whine -- but I had no idea how far it would go. Which I guess was the point.
Norma: "Listen, I know it was hard to lose it to the bank. But I mean, it's ours now."
Summers: "I know everything about this place! Every nook and cranny, every dirty secret. You don't know how this place works. You don't know how this town works. What makes you think you can run this place by yourself?"
This is what happens when we don't do what you say. This is what happens when you try to build a life that isn't about you: You think something's been taken away. When you're entitled to everything, someone else having something feels just like this: Like it was taken away. Like your ownership has been stolen, leaving you with nothing. "Who the hell do you think you are, living without caring what I think about it?"
Rule #1 For a Happy Life: Never explain privilege to a person while they're actively demonstrating it. You'll get nowhere. She knows enough to know that the only thing he's going to hear is another man, so she becomes one. It works enough that he stumbles back and away.
Norma: "Because I can. Get the hell off my property and don't come back."
Summers: "Go ahead, call the cops! I fish with half of them, we grew up together. This is my house!"
When he rapes her, I said out loud, that's what he's going to say. "This is my house," or maybe, "This is my town." I didn't believe it, but I said it. I should have known better.
Norma: "That was okay, that didn't crack any concrete. He's pathetic, a drunk loser slob who needed to yell. But he won't be back."
She says it, but she doesn't believe it. She knows better.
BEAST OF BURDEN
Inside the house, it's the 1960s and everything is safe. It's only when they step outside that the concrete starts to crack. They're listening to the Stones on an old cabinet player, inside the house: Jagger swearing she'll never control him, not even if she gives in; begging and begging for her to give in; demanding to know why his wild free selfishness isn't working its usual magic: "Ain't I rough enough, honey?"
Norma: "This roof's been here since the '50s, man. If you reschedule me again I'll just go someplace else. I'm not waiting until century."
When the doorbell rings, they both freeze. The music practically screeches to a halt. The world of men, intruding: Coming to take them both, to separate them. Lock them in concrete. Even the girls have boys' names, out there.
Bradley: "Mrs. Bates? I'm Bradley Martin, we're friends with Norman from school! Can he come out and study with us?"
Norman: "Ladies, hi!"
Norma: "Nice to meet you, but we've got tons of work to do here..."
Girl: "Your house is so cool!"
Norma: "Thank you, sweetie. There's a shit ton of things to do, but it's got potential."
Norman: "I mean, maybe I could..."
Norma, without looking: "-- Nope, sorry. Another time."
Bradley: "That's totally fine! Nice to meet you, Mrs. Bates! Goodnight, Norman!"
BACK INSIDE
Norma: "Heh. No way."
Norman: "How could you do that? You put words in my mouth..."
Norma: "That was the part where you say Yes and I say No, and you know that and I'd know you know that, so you'd just be doing it to..."
Norman: "You want to start, to have, a life here. This is how that works. That's how that looks, you have friends and you connect with people, you let them into your life..."
Norma: "You don't know them yet. You have to be more careful than just that."
All she ever wanted was a home for both of them. She's giving it to him and to herself: A beginning, a real thing. A lake in the concrete world they'll be safe.
Norman: "She's pretty! Maybe she kind of likes me! I'm seventeen! Why do I have to be careful?"
Norma: "Do not lose your temper with me. I'm protecting you."
He runs upstairs and she tells him to stay there, but she doesn't mean it. He'll come down, smiling, unctuous, to compliment her hair or the work she's done on the house already, how much work they still have to do. Together.
UPSTAIRS
He punches a bunny, then regrets it. "I suck," he says without conviction; he texts Bradley and throws himself from a third-floor window, onto the porch and then down. When he gets to the bus stop, they laugh: He's carrying his books. He actually thought they'd be studying.
THE PARTY
Is over the top, in a kind of great way: There's a blacklight bed-jumping room, all Minaj lips and glowing undies; there's an acid heaven of lasers and smoke and Chinese lanterns. People kissing, rolling joints, passing beers back and forth. Dancing. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: "I need a rival/ I need a rival/ I found my soul and I set it on fire..."
He finds himself in a gorgeously lit kitchen, all blue and cold, arranged between several red objects on the counter, watching everything happen. He's not shy, he's not crazy. He's just watching. Making up stories, listening to the even-pithier Radiohead: "The Tourist," if you can believe it.
"Sometimes I get overcharged/That's when you see sparks..."
He realizes he's staring at Bradley a second before she does.
"Did those dumb bitches leave you here by yourself?" This is how she moves, in the concrete world. She speaks its language.
Norman: "I'm good, actually. Lots to look at."
Bradley: "Are you... was that a line?"
Norman: "No, I mean I am literally looking at everything. But the fact that you think I was hitting on you means that's a thing reality might admit, which means..."
Bradley: "You are sorely different, Norman Bates."
Norman: "I wouldn't know. People who are different don't know they're different, because they have nothing to compare it to. That would take words. A mirror."
Bradley: "You're a beautiful, deep, still lake, in the middle of a concrete world."
That's exactly what he is. There are gators down there, in the black, but he is beautiful, and deep and still. Untouched. The concrete world keeps you trapped, tortured: One thing all the time. One thing defined by words, by men: What a person is, what a man is or a woman is. What to fear. The concrete world would look at Norma(n) and see just a reversal, just affirmative action, just the old story told backwards: Because to acknowledge what it really means, that stories happen even when you're not there to tell them, would tear the whole world apart.
If the world had room for a woman like Norma, they wouldn't feel the need to turn her into this. The world has an immune system -- call it male privilege, call it the patriarchy -- specifically in place to deal with bitches like her and it's breaking down. In some countries, on some socioeconomic levels, the old ways aren't working anymore and Bradley's proof. But Norman's proof too.
Norman has the distinct and historic pleasure and pressure of being part of the first generation of young men in the world, in the correct country and socioeconomic level, to have this sort of mother. He is the birth pains of what happened to the world, the day women became people; he doesn't make a lot of sense to everybody else because they're still stuck on obsolete stories: Stuck in the world this story last described, a century ago.
But tonight he's poetry, to them and to himself. He's poetry, tonight. Broken words, reformed. Curated and placed perfectly between objects.
Norman: "That's kind of weird."
Bradley: "You're kind of weird."
He loves it. He holds her gaze -- like his mother, he barely ever blinks when he's considering you -- and for a second she can see it: He's not shy. He's the opposite of shy. It's just that he's quiet enough you could be mistaken: "...Weird good," she murmurs, hypnotized.
Richard appears; he seems to be the boyfriend, he calls her "Brad." She introduces them, laughing -- Richard's homework tonight was a diorama of the Globe Theatre -- and he absorbs the weird, good vibe. His hostility is submerged, he doesn't see Norman as a threat, but he's not enamored of the kid either.
Richard: "Great. Listen, babe, Jones just got here. Let's go say hi?"
Against his obvious wishes she invites Norman along, but he doesn't need to go. He's happy in the quiet, cold kitchen. Everything is still.
SUMMERS
When Keith Summers breaks in, Norma screams for Norman until she is hoarse. And when he rapes her, this is what he says: "This house is mine. And everything in this house is mine." And in her eyes you can see it: "Fuck me for trying. Fuck me for thinking I'd found a loophole, a crack in the concrete. A world safe from you."
All she ever wanted was a home. She made the mistake of hoping the world would overlook it.
Once Norman's knocked the guy out with an old black-steel iron note, she takes a second and then tells him to get the keys off the guy. Her son can't see it, but she's been handcuffed there, to the table. The table that was Keith's. Summers's legs start to jolt, as she gets herself free and she sends Norman off for bandages: He cut her, hand and panties, with a box-cutter. He brought gaffer's tape and handcuffs and a box cutter, to the house that was once his. It wasn't going to be a short night. He's not dead yet, but he really should be. Soon. Sometimes it's best to turn the rape into a murder. Honestly, sometimes that's the right call:
Summers stands, handcuffed and grins at her. Even without the power, he knows what words will work. Words: "You liked it."
When Norman returns with bandages, his mother has stabbed Keith Summers about twelve times, with a large kitchen knife. Poetry. The blood is pooling. He calls her name, "Mother!" She's quiet. It is all quiet. She gave him a home and they took it away again. Every nook and cranny, but she won't call 911. It's not like she's pressing charges; it's not like it's the first death.
Norman: "It was self-defense!"
Norma: "This will become public, it'll be in all the papers. Everyone in town will know."
What she means is, the town did this. We are in a hostile place. Like any other place.
Norma: "Who's gonna book a room in the rape-slash-murder motel? We came here to start over, I'm fucking starting over."
And what about this? Where the hell was Norman? He lies for a second, but he can't lie to her for long. When he admits he was off at a party, it's without a lot of prelude; he sets his back straight and admits it with honor. He tells the truth: He honestly thought it was about studying. And then, seeing she's still pissed -- that the rape and the murder, he just witnessed are about to go on his permanent blame record -- he pulls the most manipulative move of the night: He flips out.
"I didn't know -- it hardly matters right now, there's a dead man on the floor, there's a lake of blood, what are we supposed to do, clean this up with paper towels and spray cleaner? I don't think so, holy hell! Mother! We're totally screwed, what are we doing? We don't know what we're doing!"
She reels him in, saying his name again and again. He lets her calm him. It stops being about him and starts being about them again. She goes quiet and cold and looks around and starts to plan.
I'll tell you this -- and it goes for both of them, already Norman is there -- the majority of shit that is wrong with you started out as a solution to something. The human mind is expertly functional and extremely efficient when it needs to be: Most non-chemical crazy is just solutions that stayed too long -- scaffold for a building that's since been built, that's now made weaker by it -- which is by the way why it's dumb to be ashamed of them. In this case, that little histrionic breakdown did exactly what it was programmed to do: Force her to compensate, to assume the shape he needs her to assume, so she won't flip this energy and attack him.
I'm not a doctor and if I were I wouldn't be caught diagnosing TV characters, but I will say this also: There is no marriage stronger or more toxic, than a borderline and a narcissist. None. And that's because those are the two strongest survival strategies we have, that just happen to perfectly feed each other's highs and lows. (Barbie the cokehead and Ken the investment banker: Borderline, narcissist.) They are weaponized crazy, both of them, and they are damn good at keeping you alive and in one piece. But the second you're not actually surviving, they'll move right in. Take over your whole house. We aren't born manipulative, we're beaten there.
"Norman, I'm sorry. I'm sorry this dirtbag raped me. But here you are and here I am. And he's not gonna win this one. So you go wash up a little, toss your bloody clothes and get your shit together."
MIDNIGHT
They bustle the body down the hill to the motel. Just for the night, he can damn well stay outside their home.
Norman: "Are you positive we shouldn't call somebody for help?"
Norma: "No one is ever going to help us. No one has ever helped us."
It's awkward -- beautifully so, all the way through the episode; like you can just imagine the bruises the actors got bumping around all the time -- but they get him into a bathtub. At one point Norman drops his end and even more blood -- "How can there still be more blood?" -- stumps out onto the carpet. As they're hoisting him over, she goes in with him: For a second, she's stuck under Keith Summers. But when she gets out, tripping on the sheets, she flips them back onto him with just her foot.
Norman: "Mom, what are gonna do?"
Norma: "We're gonna clean up that bloodstain, man."
But when she turns on the light, it's an absurd amount of blood soaked through, so, new plan: They tear up the carpets, not just here but in all the rooms with carpet that matches. She talks it out, to herself, hilariously conversational:
"So that way, this creep goes missing, anyone comes, starts asking us questions, you know, nothing will be out of the ordinary here, we're just... we're just doing some renovations, you know? We're just, like, recarpeting."
AFTER THAT
She's shoving rolls of carpet into a truck, one-handed with her injury, when the Sheriff drives up. Inside, Norman throws himself to the floor, having just found a very scary manga full of torture porn we don't really get a look at, beyond one picture of a girl in the shower.
Sheriff Alex Romero (Nestor Carbonell, aging into a dead ringer for Anthony Perkins) introduces himself and Deputy Zack Shelby (Mike Vogel, ace-looking as usual). There's something odd about their reasons for being there, but Norma can't track it: They must have known Summers was losing it, but don't seem to know that his enemies/victims had already moved in. They say they saw the lights on -- hell, maybe they figured Summers would try something. But something's off. Maybe she's seeing things; cops are always bad, but right now they're absurd.
Romero: "Norma and Norman? That's unusual."
Norma: "Boys take their father's names all the time."
Norma does a good job of acting like a person -- admittedly, a person who just happened to have cut herself open pulling up carpets in the middle of the night, like any old manic episode -- but not so good that they don't randomly ask to check inside.
Norman stashes his comic back under the carpet and goes into Good Boy; they're astonished that she's got him up and working so late and she laughs. She had no idea how late it was.
Norman: "Everything's good here. Except for this carpeting!"
Norma: "Sheriff Romero wanted to... see what we're doing, I guess? A little interested in design?"
Romero: "Wouldn't put it that way."
(Shelby: "Although I'm, by the way, loving that you just called him gay...")
Norma: "Well, what man is? My late husband, may he rest in peace, hated that stuff."
Shelby: "Oh, you're a widow? Sorry about that."
Norma: "Six months ago. Listen, I need a cop on my side. I can tell by the way you jumped on that, and the effect me calling another man gay had on you, so let's do some flirting."
Romero: "While you're doing that, I'm going to go use the bathroom you stashed a body in."
There's much talk about that, which does double duty of ratcheting up the tension incredibly while also letting Romero drop the fact that he was a friend of Keith's and thus should not be trusted anyway. They all wait, listening to him piss and make strangled conversation. When he comes out, he does not seem to have noticed that he was peeing near his dead friend's body and then they're called away.
DAY
An already unsteady Norman notices blood on his shoe and suddenly his mother is getting raped and murdering somebody right in front of him all over again, so he dashes away from his empty lunch table and, to keep it from being a total disaster, up some stairs to get away from the lunchroom before he pukes.
Richard's friends laugh at him, but he's gotten the download from Bradley by now and drags them away from the scene: "He's new, all right? He's not used to the food yet." (Making Richard Slymore the William Katt -- the semi-okay boyfriend of the compassionate Amy Irving -- and not the John Travolta -- the, well, John Travolta -- if you see what I mean. For now, at least.)
Emma Decody arrives, a quirky cutie-pie with cystic fibrosis severe enough that she totes a glammed-up oxygen tank on wheels with her: "Make sure you're done, don't try to cut it short just because it's embarrassing..." Once he's done, she produces a mint for him and he stares at her.
"I'm kind of an expert on vomiting. I have CF, so I've been on meds my whole life. Some of them give you any number of hideous side effects, puking being one of the more pleasant ones. Do you have some sort of chronic illness?"
He says no -- he's not exactly wrong -- and she seems crestfallen for one hilarious second, before she remembers to introduce herself. Turns out they are in Miss Watson's Language Arts together, although he didn't notice the first couple days. She makes sure he's okay, and then chirps sweetly at him and walks away. She's awesome, which he immediately groks; she's more accessible than the girl who only sorta likes him. He clocks that too.
TONIGHT
They carry the dude to the car and then out to a boat. It is serene, this lake in the concrete world. He rows them to the exact center and she goes dark again. Taking words, this time, from his mouth.
Norma: "I suck."
Norman: "Blaming oneself is a common response to the trauma of..."
Norma: "Hah! No, honey. I mean us. Today while you were puking I had a whole scene to myself where I discovered that they're building a new bypass on the far side of town. A new main road. I suck because I bought us a motel that nobody will ever know is there."
Norman: "Strange that the real estate agent wouldn't mention that..."
Norma: "Is it? Because I'm pretty sure we got it at auction and he was unloading a toxic asset, and I'm pretty sure it's his entire job to stay quiet and hope we're dumb enough not to figure things like this out, and most of all I'm positive of the fact that everybody is the worst."
Actually she says "suck" a few more times, which at first I thought was a script hiccup that shoulda been caught but then I thought, suck being their family's go-to negative word makes a gruesome, smart kind of sense. Everybody has a mother, but only one specific type of person sexualizes breasts -- they, too, had a mother -- but in Batesworld you never have to stop sucking, etc.: "Everyone I have ever known has sucked. Except you."
Norma: "...God, you're too good for me. I'm the worst mother in the world."
Norman: "Mother..."
Norma: "Look at what we're doing, Norman. You deserve so much better. When you were born it was like God gave me a second chance. And all I ever wanted was for life to be beautiful for you. And look at it. Look at what your life has been. I mean, what good am I doing you?"
"You are everything. Everything to me. And I don't ever want to live in a world without you. You're my family. My whole family, my whole life, my whole self. You always have been."
You want this to be some cartoony kind of prequel thing about this cartoony memory you have of the Hitchcock movie, but the Hitchcock movie isn't a classic because of monsters: It's a classic because it's beautifully wrought, beautifully told and realistically terrifying. The monster at the end of this book, hell, maybe Janet Leigh's the first person he ever kills. You know what I'm saying? This isn't a story about wackadoo crazies or monsters, it's about a basically reasonable, if sort of unhealthy, family unit that trips and falls into some nightmares. Provided for them by a world that is fairly realistic, all things considered. (A dream of our world, at least.) (And if it fails, knock wood, it won't be because it failed at this prequel side of things: It'll be because it was too good at the other stuff and it scared off all the so-called "men," who will start using words like "mess" and "irrelevant" because they need things in their own language.)
I mean, it's not a situation of "don't think of an elephant" or the incest stuff or any of that: I wasn't being facetious when I mentioned Gilmore Girls and Grey Gardens and Mildred Pierce. You already know the difference between those stories and this one: Everybody's got a mother, but there's a difference between daughters and sons. Put a boy into one of those scenarios, one of those worlds where femininity reigns and you'll end up -- we're told, over and over -- with a Cornell Woolrich or several Tennessee Williams characters, or a monster like Norman Bates. (Go back far enough and you can see generations of American fathers terrified into violence that this'll turn his kid gay, for instance.)
But it's really just the same old tale: A mother who couldn't be alone and a boy who wasn't ready to learn the difference between being a husband and being a son, when it was time. That's not how monsters get made, just wimps. Mom-rapes and brutal murders and these horrible people in the town, and apparently pervy manga, are how monsters get made. That and whatever is already going on with Norman that we don't know about yet, but is just another burden Norma's carrying so he doesn't have to.
Norman: "It's like there's a cord between our hearts..."
Norma: "Honey, that's from Jane Eyre. Orson Welles says it to..."
Norman: "Joan Fontaine. Yeah, but you know what I mean."
Not Mr. Rochester and Jane, note. Norman retreats into old films, but there's a slyer joke being made here about remakes and reboots and copies of copies and art. And, of course, the fact that Rochester owns a house with a madwoman upstairs, who comes between him and his true love even though all she wants is a home. And all he wants to do is give it to her.
Rochester: "I've a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string, somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave, I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly."
Norman: "It's you and me. It's always been you and me [by design]. We belong to each other."
Norma: "I love you, Norman. You're the best thing that has ever happened to me."
They sit there, on their midnight date, and feel good and healthy love feelings. And then they push Mr. Summers out of the boat, wrapped in chains, down to the bottom of the lake. He rows them back, then, to the concrete world. To the house on the hill.
DAY
It's raining when the men come to replace the sign. One of the most beautiful things in the world is the aqua color of the opening sequence and the little A&E bugs in the corner of the screen and the kitchen at Bradley's party. If you saw it in the daytime it would be a little garish, but at night -- surrounded by literal and figurative darkness -- there's something so sad and lonely about it. That motel sign, in that pale electric blue. It says morgue and killing floor and ice and sparks.
In his bedroom, as the sun sets, Norman gloats over his little book. His story full of nasty dreams. The girl takes a shower, cowers in the bathroom. There are tender kisses and violent ones. A girl is chained to the floor. A man wraps rubber around her arm and pulls out a needle. Her dress barely covers her. The story's in a language Norman doesn't know; it speaks to him in a language that does.
She pulls him to the window, once the sun is set and shows him the sign. She turned it on, just for him; she made it the perfect blue, for him. She put words on a thing.
For about week after this is posted, I'm gonna get emails you wouldn't believe, death threats and the whole thing, from men who feel attacked and brutalized by the mere suggestion that they don't run the world. When you've never been disagreed with before, by someone you actually were paying attention to, that's probably a slap in the face and it can take a man to some very slippery places very quickly. And the reason I know this is that every single time I -- or any of us -- write about this stuff, we get these emails and strange anonymous calls and weird angry comments on years-old blog entries. But I mean, what are you supposed to do when somebody responds to an emotionless explanation of privilege with a hysterical demonstration of it? Try to be loving, if I feel like it, and try to speak to where they're coming from. If I'm hung over, delete it. But I'm not exaggerating: It's not sometimes, it's every time. I can't imagine what it's like for women, it makes me want to barf if I think about that.
I tell you this not to complain, or whatever other ego thing -- being a feminist, especially if you're a man, doesn't make you a bad-ass: it makes you human -- but because I know it's true, and so you'll know that this is how the world works: Norma Bates isn't done being punished. This is a scarlet letter big as the world she's putting up, and they won't forgive her: She took a thing that belonged to men, that they were too stupid and sick to control, and she took down their signs -- "Seafairer," sic. -- and made it something fairer still: The BATES MOTEL. But are those just words? Or are they poetry?
Norma: "It's ours, Norman. It's our very own. And you know what? You know that new bypass? They're not gonna build it."
Norman: "When did that happen?"
Norma: "It didn't! Yet. I'll think of something."
Norman: "I'm sure you will."
He grins, her head nestled in the crook of his neck. It's a smile that says a lot: The empire, this sign that marks it for the world to see as theirs, as belonging to them. But oh, the cleverness of her: That belongs to him too. There's something in his smirk -- for a moment -- that has to do with her smell, her indomitable will. The way she wraps around the world.
"What's important is that we're together. And as long as we're together, then nothing bad can really happen. Right, Norman?"
WEEK
Something bad, probably multiple somethings, really happen. Dylan, for starters, and of course Norma's gotta work Plan Shelby, so that'll be a relief. But hopefully we'll get to know the school kids better, before the cops come back about Summers. It won't be long -- he represented this evil town's reaction to their presence and it didn't die just because he did -- but I'd like to see the motel up and running, so they have something at stake. I'm trying to avoid spoilers because clearly this is going to be a shitstorm. But there's one thing I am really intensely curious about:
BECAUSE
At this moment of his smile at the window, as she's saying those last words, somewhere -- who knows where, maybe in a basement or an attic somewhere, maybe right in this room -- a fluorescent light, just as lovely and just as pale, flickers on. It shines on a girl, chained to the floor. A man wraps rubber around her arm and pulls out a needle. Her T-shirt barely covers her. She rouses, shivering. One eye opens to the cold, concrete world.
One way to answer the question is: If she doesn't know whether she's real anymore, how are we supposed to say?
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps The Good Wife, Bates Motel, and Defiance for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, on Twitter, Facebook, and an upcoming regular column for Tor.com.
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