Marie Samuels (English Version)

 Preface

The objective is to reflect on the concept of Doppelgänger in Freud and its consequent reactions of strangeness with the self. At the same time, we will lead the character Marion Crane and her double-self (Doppelgänger) Marie Samuels to the recognition, at the end of the dinner with Norman Bates, that a hasty attitude can be a "madness", that we can all go "crazy" sometimes, or psychotics.

The purpose of this work is purely educational and academic. It is a dry film reading accompanied by some images from the 1960 film Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

The copyright owner of the film is Paramanout Pictures. From 1960 to 2017 the copyright belonged to the studio. As we are in 2022, the film becomes public domain in the United States of America. That's why the explanatory note about copyright, because in Brazil we are not sure about the copyright of the film.

This present essay is in memoriam of Alfred Hitchcock and all those friends who are no longer present.

Summary and Psycho-Analysis

In a hotel room in Phoenix on a Friday afternoon, December 11, at 2h43m PM, Marion Crane and her out-of-town boyfriend Sam Loomis appear to have ended a carnal relationship, she lying on the bed in her bra and he standing next to her shirtless asks ironically if she hasn't had lunch. Marion wants to marry Sam, but her father's inherited debts and his own child support payments with alimony don't leave him enough money to support Crane as she would like.

Marion Crane meets Sam Loomis during her lunch break at work, and doesn't have much time to discuss this seemingly wrong relationship between them.

She wants to marry him and end this relationship of occasional meetings, while being well regarded by society. When Sam Loomis makes fun of Marion Crane she gets out of bed and goes to button her shirt in front of the mirror. The first notion of Doppelgänger appears here.

Doppelgänger

We see the first notion of the double-self in this basic scene, where she talks to her boyfriend while seeing her other self inside the looking glass. The Doppelgänger is present in many moments during the narrative, and at this moment in particular because the dressing glass is facing away from the spectator and facing the character during the performance of the act.

Marion Crane wishes to marry Sam Loomis, however, in spite of working for ten years as a secretary, she still hasn't managed to earn enough savings. Loomis in turn inherited his father's debts and has to pay alimony to his ex-wife. The couple of characters execute the discussion of this financial problem in front of the looking glass, where we can have the double (double-self, doppelgänger) of Crane and Loomis at the same time.

Modern society divides subjects within themselves. The subject begins to confuse himself with the object. The strangeness with the environment and with life becomes unbearable. How two decent people have worked and struggled for so long and they don't have enough money to complete their love?

Finally, Crane realizes that she is late for work and here we find the basis for our argument about Doppelgänger present in this character:

Miss Crane, our heroine, returns to the real estate office where she works as a secretary, arriving before her boss, Mr. George Lowery and her client Mr. Tom Cassidy, who buys a Lowery house with $40,000 in cash. Lowery, her boss, tells Marion to put the money in the bank vault by Monday. Claiming a headache, Marion asks to take the rest of the day off after her trip to the bank.

This headache is the first hint of the double in Marion Crane. The viewer knows she doesn't have a headache. Suddenly, that whole situation at the real estate office changed.

Because a factual event that occurred with some frequency, the secret meetings with her boyfriend during lunch break, did not end with a happy ending. Sam Loomis lives far away from her and none of them are in a position to legally fulfill this love. So that they can be honored and accepted before society by the sacred institution of marriage. Note that Miss Crane isn't wearing any rings on her fingers.

Another factor that accelerates the Doppelgänger effect in our heroine is the character of oil leaseholder Cassidy, who buys a house on Harris Street for his daughter's wedding with $40,000 in cash and undeclared to the IRS.

As we will see below, Marion Crane's character arc is simple, she is an honest, punctual, self-confident and trustworthy secretary and has worked for ten years in Mr. Lowery's real estate office.

Oil leaseholder Mr. Cassidy is a man with plenty of power, money and full of words. Mr. Cassidy says my sweet little girl, so that he would make the secretaries there think he was referring to them. A manipulative strategy to get attention.

Mr. Cassidy thinks he is powerful, and continues the speech of how he loves his daughter who will marry and leave him, sits at Miss Crane's table, and takes a picture of his daughter to show our heroine.

It is evident that Mr. George Lowery has some profit on this deed, and some illegal profit as he is embarrassed when Mr. Tom Cassidy says that from now on he has money to install an air conditioner in the two ladies' offices.

Cassidy says his daughter is 18 years old and his daughter has never had a single day of unhappiness in her entire life. Which draws our heroine's attention to Mr. Cassidy's gaze.

The boss of the ladies is dismayed by such evasion of the client, Tom Cassidy, and calls him to go talk alone, inside the office that has air conditioning. However, the client thinks he is always right, and because he is rich he believes he can harass the secretary without any harm to himself. Thus, Tom Cassidy is the first psychotic persona introduced into the narrative. Because he is rich, he is powerful and inside his head he can do anything, because money buys everything. 

So Tom Cassidy tries to harass Marion Crane on the grounds that he can bribe unhappiness. That is, Cassidy realized that Miss Crane was upset for personal reasons, and went to harass her, to tempt her with his wealth, like a demon using snake's shoes. 

Another way of saying the same thing is “If Miss Crane is sad I can bribe her sadness! I can provide you with money and end your unhappiness!” But at what cost does this money arrive? At the cost of her dignity.

Mr. Cassidy insists on the harassment and asks Marion Crane, with the utmost bluntness, if she is unhappy. She lowers her gaze thoughtfully, not knowing what or how to respond to such an abusive person at a situation like this.

In the end the fellow secretary, Caroline, said that Mr. Cassidy was flirting with Marion Crane because he must have seen the wedding ring on Caroline's finger and not on Miss Crane's fingers. Does the fact that Marion Crane is single guarantee that any man can harass her? What we see is not a flirt, but an emotional invasion. Caused by a psychotic persona. 

When asking Crane if she is unhappy, Mr. Cassidy suggests that she should prostitute herself to him to end the unhappiness she is feeling.

We see that within the character arc, the Doppelgänger does not appear “out of nowhere”. It is caused for Mr. Cassidy attitutes, words and acts. 

Marion Crane didn't freak out overnight, her character arc is built scene by scene. We see the social elements that contributed to Miss Crane's sudden uprising. At first, she invented the headache so she could take the afternoon off, and since she's an exemplary employee, she would definitely be able to.

However, Mr. Tom Cassidy changed the situation completely and from here we are sure that the double-self, the other, the Doppelgänger or any other denomination arises.

Bringing together the factors that gave rise to the character Marie Samuels, from Los Angeles, California:

a) Unhappy and unstable relationship with her boyfriend. Both are not financially able to get married and Marion Crane is unhappy with her current situation.

b) Mr. Tom Cassidy harasses her inside the office during working hours. Mr. Tom Cassidy is old enough to father Marion Crane. Mr. Cassidy insinuates that Marion Crane must prostitute herself to him to end the unhappiness of his life.

c) Tom Cassidy shows up with USD 40,000, undeclared, irregular money that he hides from the IRS.

We know of the shift to estrangement when Marion Crane warns her boss, Mr. Lowery, that after passing the bank he will go home to rest due to a massive headache.

Caroline, his married secretary colleague, offers her an Aspirin. Marion Crane looks down on Aspirins and then says that you can't bribe your unhappiness with pills. (doppelgänger effect of Mr Cassidy over the general character of Miss Crane).

It follows that one can bribe unhappiness with money, as Mr. Cassidy had just said.

Our heroine begins to show signs of a change of character. She knows she doesn't have a headache. She knows she's lying to her boss, that she's not going to sleep at home but packing her things to go to California, where Samuel Loomis, the love of her bosom, lives.

Mr. Cassidy's illicit attitudes decisively influenced our character's duplicity. If an oil leaseholder can embezzle $40,000 from the IRS, why can't an employee steal from another thief?

We deal with this problem of criminal continuity, or that one wrong attitude leads to another, and so on. As Miss Crane gets ready to travel, not sleep as her double-self had said, we see the transformation.

That confident and self-assured girl starts to shudder when she looks at that 40 thousand dollars on the bed. By observing that without any kind of planning, she is filling her suitcase with clothes to go on a trip to California. 

She is moving from being Marion Crane of Phoenix to gradually becoming Marie Samuels of Los Angeles.

Marie Samuels is the inverted reflector of everything Marion Crane once was. Honest, trustworthy, respected... Marie Samuels is a passionate, impulsive, lying and ultimately psychotic thief.

In this scene of the room where Marie Samuels is getting ready to travel, we observe how her breath is panting, how her gaze tries to understand who this new person is who occupies the position of Marion Crane.

We see several Doppelgängers in this scene, as Marie Samuels gets dressed, we see a picture of herself as a child behind her, we see a picture of a man and a woman side by side, who are her parents and finally she goes to the dressing glass , and can't face this new character in the mirror, prefers to turn his back to the glass (Doppelgänger) and look at the lump of money inside a white envelope on the bed.

We can observe, for sure, by the time Marie Samuels starts driving, that there is someone else inside her head talking to her. The Doppelgänger reflecting on herself, now Marie Samuels begins to take charge of the character and use metathinking to infer what other people will think about this theft and how Marie Samuels should react to run away and dodge these problems.

Inside Marie Samuels' head is Sam Loomis, asking her what she's doing in California, why is she so weird? As Marie Samuels dreams of her beloved Loomis, the traffic light closes and Marion Crane's boss Mr. George Lowery crosses the street and notices her.

Here the fear of the character is very clear. He smiles at her, but at the same time remembers that she had lied to him, saying that she was going home to rest due to a headache. Her fear increases even more, as Mr. Lowery recognizes her but looks at her strangely, as if she is no longer that girl who works for ten years at the office but a legitimate stranger. Bernard Hermann's soundtrack makes even more thrilling and visible the tension caused by this fear of the other who is actually herself.

Marie Samuels is insecure, fearful, the other side, the weird side of Marion Crane. She supports her head with her hand, she bites her own finger, and is startled by a shock to have her lie exposed in the crosswalk. The head of real estate, Mr. Lowery noticed her and could see the change in character by her face and by the unconcealed lie of Marie Samuels.

Marie Samuels describes the feeling of unease when we experience something familiar suddenly turning strange.

We define the Doppelgänger as someone or something that is baffling like the self and yet completely separate from it. Marie Samuels is full of fears and paranoia while Marion Crane is sure of herself and doesn't need to lie/run/hide to live.

We notice that the Doppelgänger takes the form of mirrors and shadows in the way the main character is filmed. How she was dressed in white until the criminal act of robbing her own boss and how she dressed in a darker color when she assumed the strange identity of Marie Samuels.

Marie Samuels bites her lip, looks back suspiciously as if the boss with some magical power might follow her, or has already noticed her bad intentions.

The Doppelgänger is frightening because it is like the self and yet threateningly another self

We went from a girl dressed in weak colors to a girl dressed in strong colors. We go from a scene where she is driving during the day and we arrive at a scene where she is driving at night.

From Phoenix to California, it takes approximately 9 hours by car, on a 590 miles journey. Marie Samuels left in the afternoon and got dark on the way.

She decides to stop the car on the side of the road and get some sleep, as she hasn't found any hotels nearby. A police car stops behind our heroine's car and goes to the window of the car and wakes up Marie Samuels.

She wakes up startled and stares panicked at the police officer and tries to start the car to get out.

From here, all the insecurity and uncertainty of the character are assumed. She makes it very clear to the police officer that she is hiding something, that she is suspicious, that something is out of the ordinary.

The same attitude she takes when she decides to change her car. The salesperson, California Charlie is amazed at her haste, is amazed when he asks for USD 700 for the car exchange and she accepts without question, the salesperson is speechless when she makes the cash payment and  run out of the car store, leaving the policeman, California Charlie and the astonished car shop mechanic.

In the scene where Marie Samuels counts the 700 dollars in the bathroom, we have another dark scene, with the Doppelgänger, the looking glass facing her in the suspenseful moment in which she separates the bills to pay the salesman for the car swap.

The Doppelgänger intensifies as she drives towards Sam Loomis. Now she starts talking to herself what the policeman would have asked California Charlie. Meanwhile she bites her lip, looks at the bag on the passenger seat with the stolen money, looks at the camera, the viewer.

We know how fear leads to paranoia. And how paranoia leads to psychosis. And how a psychosis produces an even greater psychosis. Marie Samuels imagines her fellow secretary, Caroline, talking to her boss, Mr. Lowery. Her paranoia tries to configure each and every possible way out of this problem. Running away, hiding seems like a good choice.

During this meta-thought of Marie Samuels we noticed that when she imagines Tom Cassidy's reaction to the theft of his money, and that he can't do anything nice like call the police because the money wasn't declared.

Marie Samuels imagines Tom Cassidy being very angry about the theft and wanting to punish her for it. At that moment, Marie Samuels sketches a smile on her face that confirms the impulsive attitude that caused the Doppelgänger, and is also a reflection of another Doppegänger that will only happen at the end of the end with the other one: If Marie Samuels is the double-self of Marion Crane , Norman Bates is the double of Marie Samuels. When the mother's Doppelgänger smiles at the end of the film, we have the same jocular, ironic expression as the other-self.

Let's not forget that Marie Samuels left California Charlie's car shop during the day and again she finds herself lost in her meta-thoughts, of the "whats" that the other characters would be thinking of her, as she delves into the new self, Marie Samuels smiles and enters the rainy night road.

During this storm of water it was very difficult to drive. So she ends up finding the Bates Hotel, with the announcement that there are vacancies available.

Norman Bates, the double of the double (The Doppelgänger of the Doppelgänger)

We will not discuss in depth the issue of the double in the character Norman Bates and his double-self, his Mother. Our intention is to study the behavior of our heroine, Marie Samuels, during her journey of discovering the truth, which ends up happening with recognition.

Marie Samuels realizes that she is a strange person when she meets Norman Bates, because he is also strange, he is also dominated by a stronger personality: his mother.

Marion Crane is dominated by Marie Samuels, and just the recognition of an oppressive situation could make the initial self wake up to reality and let go of fantasy.

She waits for the hotel bellhop to help her with an umbrella and carry her luggage, but no one shows up. Marie Samuels decides to get out of the car and look at a mausoleum, an old and decaying house and in the upper window of the mansion passes a character that looks like a woman walking from left to right, she seems to have squinted wird eyes at Marie Samuels from up.

Marie Samuels gets back in her car, and honks a few times to see if the woman who was walking upstairs could come down and help her get into the room.

It turns out that whoever leaves the old mansion is a young man who apologizes for not having noticed her arrival because of the heavy rain. When both enter the hotel's office, the notion of the double-double becomes very clear.

At one point the images of Marie Samuels and Norman Bates are together inside the looking glass, which is near the office counter.

During the scene where Marie Samuels asks if there are vacancies, the glass is always present, always reaffirming the character's double nature.

Norman Bates explains that he has twelve cabins and twelve spaces available. There is no one staying at the hotel because the public administration has changed the route of the highway, so few customers pass through there.

Norman Bates also explains that his hotel guests only end up there because they get lost and leave the main road.

Bates offers the notebook for her to put the name and street name where she lives along with the name of the city. But she hesitated when writing the address, and Norman Bates told her that just the name of the city would suffice. Marie Samuels looks at the newspaper inside her bag and decides to write that she is from Los Angeles. Before, she enunciates aloud, while Norman Bates chooses the key to cabin 1, the cabin closest to the hotel's office.

When Norman Bates opens the cabin, or Room 1 for Marie Samuels and says it's stuffy inside, there's repeatedly the Reflector Doppelgänger, which reproduces and unfolds from one scene to the next.

There's also Norman Bates' shadow Doppelgänger, as he walks to open the window in Room 1, his shadow grows, distorts, changes shape and is clearly visible on a black and white film.

Norman Bates describes the room options and shows that he has some repression with bathrooms, as he cannot pronounce the word, only “over there”.

Who pronunciates thw word bathroom is Marie Samuels who finishes the sentence.

Norman Bates then invites Marie Samuels to have dinner with him. Bates claims that he himself was about to have dinner. Note that during this scene Marie Samuels is standing next to the looking glass. And Norman Bates in front of her with his dark shadow projected across her back.

We also observe a childish attitude in the eating behavior of Norman Bates, who politely wants to say that he doesn't have anything special for dinner, like pasta, soup, what he has to offer is just a sandwich and milk.

As Marie Samuels devises a way to hide the money inside her hotel room, wrapping the money in the newspaper she had bought at California Charlie's Car Store, she hears an older woman's voice yelling "No! I said no. !”.

The woman in this case is Norman Bates' mother. Ms. Bates says she will not allow her son to bring girls to dinner with him. That she is jealous and possessive. She won't allow cheap, vulgar romances and candlelight dinners. That young men like Miss Samuels and her son are depraved.

Bates begs his mother to stop. But Ms. Bates insists and asks what more depraved could happen after dinner. Music? Whispers? The son explains to his mother that she is just a stranger, a hotel guest, and that she is hungry and doesn't have a diner or restaurant nearby.

The mother, always denying all her son's attitudes, declares that men don't care if a woman is known or unknown to have desires for her. The mother refuses to talk about this disgusting, disgusting thing that is sex.

We have observed that Ms. Bates has a tremendous amount of an irreversible sexual block against carnal relationships and, in addition, is jealous, possessive, controlling of all her child's relationships and thoughts.

The mother makes it very clear that Marie Samuels is not going to satisfy her hunger by eating her son. Ms. Bates' threat is very real.

As Marie Samuels tries to be polite by telling Norman Bates that she got him into trouble, we notice the Doppelgänger in Bates' reflection in the wall glass next to the character.

Norman Bates explains that his mother is no longer herself these days. Marie Samuels remains polite and says he shouldn't have bothered making a sandwich and bringing her milk for dinner. She wasn't even that hungry.

Norman Bates apologizes and says he wishes he could apologize to other people, just in case, to apologize for the scandal his mother made exposing both her son and the hotel guest.

Marie Samuels then decides to consider Bates' work and decides to have dinner with him. She makes a body gesture that means an invitation for Bates to dine with her inside Cabin 1.

Another famous movie Doppelgänger occurs in this scene where Bates steps forward to enter the hotel and have dinner with Samuels, and yet takes a step back. This scene is interpreted as the nature of hir duplicity. The son wants to go in and have dinner with the interesting lady, but the mother who controls him doesn't want that. The son takes a step forward. The mother takes a step back.

Of course, at that time he was scared to death because he had invited her to eat inside the house. But since his mother is no longer herself (strange), he takes a step back, becomes crestfallen, brooding, and finally claims they'd better eat in the office. An excuse not to expose the poor lady to Ms. Bates' psychosis.

And Marie Samuels hinted, with her body movement, that it would be comfortable for her if they ate inside her room. So the step back is very meaningful because they couldn't have dinner inside Ms. Bates' house, nor inside Samuels' room, otherwise Ms. Bates would imagine disgusting things and we don't know what her weirdness can result in terms of emotional actions.

Bates claims it's not convenient to eat at the office (that the office is too officious) and invites her to eat at the reception.

Here we have a shower of Doppelgänger when turning on the light we see some stuffed birds and Marie Samuels notices the gigantic stuffed owl on the wall with its wings spread. And then a crow and its shadow.

They are small signs, small symbols of death that begin to awaken the sense of recognition in our heroine.

The reception is filled with stuffed birds. Marie Samuels with her impeccable upbringing says that Bates is very kind. He in turn says he's not hungry.

Then she picks up a piece of bread with her fork, and Bates, sitting on the opposite side of the reception room, smiles and comments that she eats like a bird.

It's a pretty remarkable comment in a room full of stuffed birds and birds. Again Bates chokes on a word, this time the word "falsehood." He tries to explain that the saying that eats like a bird is false, because birds eat a lot, or at a very high frequency.

Norman Bates says he doesn't know anything about birds, just how to stuff them. His hobby is taxidermy, the ancient Egyptian science of embalming, mummifying a dead organism.

Bates hates seeing stuffed animal faces, like foxes and chimpanzees for example. Some people even stuffed dogs and cats, but Bates doesn't appreciate that. Bates explains that birds are well stuffed because they are passive.

First he associates Marie Samuels' eating with the habits of a bird. Now he says that birds are passive, submissive to death. Therefore Marie Samuels is also passive.

Further on, Norman Bates says that stuffing birds is not a hobby. That a hobby is something that people do to pass the time, and what he does is dedicate himself fully to stuffing birds.

Marie Samuels asks if his time is so empty. Bates, leaning back in his chair, with his shadow behind him, says he runs the office, takes care of the rooms, the floors, and does errands for his mother. Here he looks away from the interlocutor and looks at the upper right corner.

Marie Samuels questions if he goes out with friends. Bates claims that a boy's best friend can only be his own mother. Bates retaliates and says that Marie Samuels must never have had a moment of emptiness in her life. With a bit of aggression in speech.

When Bates asks what she's running from, paranoia takes over. She asks why he asks this kind of thing. Bates deflects and says people never run away from anything.

Then Samuels and Bates strike up a conversation about traps. Samuels says that sometimes we fall into our own traps. Bates confesses that he was born into his trap. And that he doesn't care about it anymore. He doesn't care about his mother/trap anymore.

Bates clarifies that the source of his problems is his mother. Bates says he no longer cares about being born into a trap. Bates says he wishes he could challenge his mother, but he can't because she is sick.

Bates says she had to raise him alone after his father died. He was only five years old and imagine how difficult it must have been for Ms Bates. She didn't have to work because Mr. Bates left some money for her to raise the child, some kind of alimony or insurance.

Bates explains that a few years ago his mother met another man. This man convinced Mrs Bates to build the Bates Hotel. And that he could have convinced his mother to do anything. And when that second husband passed away, it was doubly shocking for his mother to deal with it again.

The second husband must have died in a horrible way. It was a great loss and his mother no longer had anything or anyone but her own son, replies Marie Samuels.

Bates says that a son is a poor substitute for a lover. Marie Samuels asks why he doesn't leave. And he says he needs to take care of his mother. He doesn't hate his mother. He hates what she's become over the years. He hates his mother's mental illness.

Marie Samuels suggests having his mother committed while Bates is highly offended. Bates cannot imagine his mother being committed to an institution like a clinic or asylum. Now both the words and the look and body position of Bates, leaning towards Miss Samuels, denote a high degree of aggression.

Otherwise the Doppelgänger manifests itself, this time in comparing its mother to the stuffed birds. Bates claims his mother is as harmless as one of these stuffed birds. It is inferred that if the mother is as harmless as a dead body, we can take a step forward and say that her mother is so harmless that she is dead. The same way before as Samuels eats like a bird and birds are passive. 

The mother needs to be with the child. It's not like she's a maniac or a freak. She just gets a little crazy sometimes. We all get a little crazy sometimes don't we? Bates smiles and looks at Marie Samuels.

At this moment we are sure of recognition. Bates had just been furious with Marie Samuels for suggesting that her mother be hospitalized. So he recognizes that the mother has moments of lucidity, that she only goes crazy sometimes. And that we all go crazy sometimes.

Marie Samuels meets Marion Crane at this time. Marie Samuels is discovered and purged, like a decoy, because she's gone a little crazy, but she's not that person, she's not like that, she's never been like that. In the end, Marion Crane doesn't want to be committed to an institution, or to be held against her will. Recognition of her double-self made her wake up to the risk this theft could pose to her life.

Bates asks if she's ever been crazy at times and Marie Samuels says so. That just once is more than necessary.

Carlos Henrique Barbosa - Doppelgänger