Theme, Symbol, Or Character.

Norman Bates is the most interesting character by far in the movie Psycho. When we first meet Norman, he appears to be a normal man, but as the story continues, we realize that he is far from ordinary. He seems to trip over his words when he first encounters Marion Crane at the Bates Motel. He seems taken away by her beauty. You see Norman hesitate when he is choosing which room to give Marion. When he chooses room one, that is the moment that he decides to kill her. After Marion retreats to her room, Norman knocks on her door and asks if she would like to have dinner with him. And when she accepts, and they go to the back room of his office in the motel. He makes sandwiches for them and from the conversation we see that he isn't in a normal state of mind. Norman makes Marion feel very uncomfortable and from that he catches her in some lies about where she is going. He doesn't question her, though. It only helps his thought process on how killing her will bring about no trouble. She convinces Norman to let her leave so she can go to sleep. After Marion is in her room, Norman spies on her through a hole in the wall while she is getting undressed to get in the shower. He seems to feel conflicted about doing this, guilty about what he is seeing. Later he goes to his house to speak with his mother, who is not pleased about having this woman staying in the hotel. We never see Norman's mother, but we hear him talking to her while he is in the house. In the next scene is Marion in the shower. The camera is angled so that we see from the shower out into the rest of the bathroom. We see the shadow of a person opening the door and slowly walking towards Marion. The shower curtain is then thrust back and we witness Marion being stabbed to death. As the audience, we don't see the killer. Later, the killer leaves and Norman returns, talking to himself and saying his mother has killed her. He cleans up the room, takes all her belongings and Marion herself to her car, and drives it into a river. A time later, Marion's sister and boyfriend show up at the Bates Motel looking for Marion and we see Norman's very birdlike qualities. The way he cranes his neck and pecks at his food shows how he is much like the birds he stuffs. Marion's sister and boyfriend see through Norman quickly and discover his secret. They go to his house searching for his mother to get answers, when his mother attacks Marion's sister. But to her surprise, she sees that it isn't Norman's mother at all, but Norman himself dressed as his mother. They discover that he has stuffed his mother and kept her much like he does with the birds. The story tells us that Norman became this way because he was jealous of his mother's boyfriend, but we will never know. Much like we will never know why his mind made up for his mother passing away. At the end of the film, Norman is completely lost to the mother side of his brain, and the film ends with the famous line "She wouldn't even harm a fly" as Norman (truly Norman's mother) is sitting in the police station.