The Norman Heuristic

The Norman Heuristic: Interrogating the not-so-obvious

by Mark Adnum

Norman-clature
In two completely unrelated movies, made twenty years apart, hoary voiced matriarchs demonstrate their dominance by calling the names of their weaker male companions in condescending repetition.

“Nor-man!” barks Mrs Bates, the shadowed killer in the Psycho house, dragging her son’s two-syllable name into a gravelly quasi-sentence as she issues her meek son Norman with bloody directives and derogatory put-downs. As his mother, we can assume that she was responsible for naming Norman, and so it is with wicked relish that she uses it pejoratively, taking full advantage of the name’s ontological connotations of impaired normality and incomplete manhood. In its lettering, Norman is a word that is not quite normal, and Norman also suggests a somehow retrograde adult male, a no-man, a trapped and stunted identity that is neither boy nor man. For emphasis, she sometimes splits the name and uses a truncation of the first syllable and an infantilisation of the second to create the Norman echo heard at the start of “No, boy, I tell you no!” Indeed, she regularly substitutes the loose Norman synonym “boy” (male that isn’t a man: a no-man) when addressing her developmentally stunted son. Interestingly, though half-a-dozen different actors provided Mrs Bates’ ever-changing voice, when she says “No”, “No, boy” or “Norman”, Mrs Bates somehow always sounds the same*.

Similarly, On Golden Pond’s Ethyl Thayer, played by Katharine Hepburn, quotes Mrs Bates as, with Hepburn’s imperious vibrato, she repeatedly shouts her husband Norman’s name when instructing him to look at loons, return for dinner on time, or to cease dying. As with Mrs Bates, Ethyl employs her husband’s name as a signifier of his tenuous identity as a man. Her husband is becoming old and frail, and while she has transferred with ease into her matriarchal role, he is struggling embarrassingly to hold onto his lost virility and diluted masculinity, and is dragged backwards in time by an ongoing quarrel with his daughter who is chasing his withheld love. We assume that Norman was called Norman long before he met his wife, but Ethyl snatches up Mrs Bates’ example and uses her husband’s name as a hierarchical control tool. Ethyl delights in using her husband’s name when he has crashed a boat or collapsed with angina, and she substitutes withering terms-of-endearment such as “loon” and “coot” when she tires using ”Norman”.

This proleptic couplet of crotchety Norman-croaking is, on its own, a fun but mild coincidence, somewhat of a stretch and of little analytical value. It isn’t the subject of this analysis. Where it becomes uncanny and important is how it forms an eerie auditory backdrop, an uncanny choral invocation that, Siren-like, lures me to explore a separate Norman connection, one that revolves around two men named Norman, that also has a root in Psycho, but which yields a compelling and valuable heuristic, an elaborate helix of intertextual, speculative meaning. Mrs Bates and Mrs Thayer, and the Norman heuristic that they cunningly call my attention to, create a double-decker set of what Noel Sanders may call an “uncanny rhyming gizmo” or “a melismatic metaphor”. According to Sanders, such gizmos set the stage for crypto-analytical, abductive guesswork, a creatively speculative process that automatically amplifies faint connections to form what Roland Barthes, in “Rhetoric of the Image”, called “floating chain[s] of signifieds” out of ostensibly polysemous ephemera. In this process, boundaries between fact and fiction, intuition and logic, scholarship and fandom, collapse and, to paraphrase Wayne Koestenbaum, contradictory realms of experience, time and space dissolve into consonance.

The two Normans of the Norman heuristic are both of unhinged and murderous mind and, as a result, they both ended up incarcerated. They have ambiguous sexualities, and, as they are illustrative of several decades of dialogue around “queerness”, have an extra-temporal aura. Both are locked in the orbits of famous movie directors which gives them a kind of celluloid skin and makes them signposts in a study of gay cinephilia. They are Norman Bates, brought to fame by Alfred Hitchock’s 1960 film Psycho, and Jonathan Norman, currently serving twenty-five years-to-life in a Californian prison for stalking and planning to torture and rape Steven Spielberg in 1997.

“Norman” is the primary link between the two Normans. It forms parentheses, or bookends, around on arrangement of their names - Norman Bates, Jonathan Norman - and forms a joint middle name in another - Jonathan Norman Bates.

But beyond this initial onomastic similarity lies a rich weave of immanent and interpretive intra-messages that creates uncanny continuity, much like how my other pair of apparent strangers Mrs Bates and Mrs Thayer sound just alike when they call out “Norman”. An archaeological dig around my Normans reveals a rich suite of eerie conjunctions that begins promisingly but which, as per Barthes’ definition of the obtuse meaning (“at once persistent and fleeting, smooth and elusive”) only occasionally clarifies itself. Though several decades separate the Normans, and though their exploits took place on different planes of existence (on-screen and off-screen) a tight bundle of yoked messages and matching symbols does exist between them and this suggests that some hyper-real, metaphysical, third place of meaning exists somewhere between the elder’s celluloid fiction and his junior’s suburban reality. As per Barthes and his “Kitchen of Meaning”, for me “Norman” becomes a principle of classification, something I can use to collate my enormous mass of apparently anarchic facts, and then appraise them as one: in this analysis, “Norman” is the textual matter that matters.

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*Mrs Bates’ voice was provided by Jeanette Nolan, Virginia Gregg, Ann Dore, Margo Epper, Anthony Perkins’ friend Paul Jasmin and the enigmatically-named Mitzi. Psycho sound engineers overlaid the vocal tracks or spliced them together, so that at most times when Mrs Bates talks, a combination of the recorded voices are heard together. Anthony Perkins did not “speak” for Mrs Bates, indeed, when he addresses her after the shower scene, the bass line of his vocal track was removed, at Hitchcock’s request, to make him sound more “adolescent”.