Psycho (1960)

Our rule of thumb is to consider virtually any movie set primarily at Christmas as a Christmas movie, a litmus test significantly more liberal than most. I'm sure a lot of people roll their eyes at hearing Jaws: The Revenge or Alien: Covenant described as holiday entertainment, but I'm really not trying to play with technicalities or make a joke. These movies are, in my opinion, as much about Christmas as, say, The Shop Around the Corner, and shouldn't be excluded on arbitrary decisions based on which traditions they're part of.

I'm opening with this because Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film, Psycho, serves as a rare counterexample. While it's set entirely during the Christmas season (between December 11th and the 20th, to be specific), I do not seriously consider it a Christmas movie, and the reason why highlights why I consider the aforementioned rule of thumb so useful.

First, let's talk a bit about the movie, which I'm kind of embarrassed to admit I only just saw in its entirety for the first time. I actually watched about half the movie back when I was in high school. I remember thinking it was good and always meant to see the rest. For whatever reason, I just never got around to it. About a year ago I picked up a collection of Hitchcock and watched a number of his classics, but kept putting off Psycho in favor of other of his classics I knew less about. When I finally put in the blu-ray and saw the date, "Friday, December 11," pop up on the screen, I smacked myself in the head for taking so long.

The movie is notable for its unconventional structure, which involves cycling through protagonists multiple times. The first half of the movie follows Marion (played by Janet Leigh) as she steals $40,000 from her job and runs away, planning to use the money to start a new life with her boyfriend, Sam (John Gavin). This segment of the film follows the template of a fairly conventional film noir, focusing on her anxiety and second thoughts as she travels alone, eventually finding herself at the now iconic Bates Motel. It's essentially the first half of a psychological thriller that establishes her arc and seems poised to continue her story.

Only that isn't what occurs. Instead, she's brutally murdered in the film's famous shower sequence. The movie doesn't provide a clear view of the killer, so we're left uncertain whether the crime was committed by Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates or his mother (strictly speaking, the movie tells us it's the latter, but the lack of clarity makes it pretty obvious there's something else going on).

After we see Norman clean the room and dispose of Marion's body and belongings (along with the money, which he never even realizes he's dumping), the movie's protagonist shifts to Arbogast, a private investigator attempting to locate the missing money. He eventually tracks Marion to the Bates Motel and realizes something's fishy. He alerts Marion's sister, Lila, and Sam to his progress, but soon after is killed.

The last section of the movie follows Sam and Lila as they go looking for Arbogast and Marion. They meet with the local sheriff and learn that Norman's mother died ten years earlier, along with her boyfriend. Sam and Lila go to the hotel and pose as newlyweds in order to investigate. While there, they discover the unearthed, preserved corpse of Norman's mother and subdue Norman himself, who's taken on his mother's personality.

In terms of quality, there's a reason this is a classic. Hitchcock knows how to build suspense, and the unusual structure provides him with a sandbox to play with the audience's assumptions and expectations, subverting their trust that the main character will survive until the end. The movie is designed to throw us off balance and magnify our paranoia. No one seems safe.

That said, there are a couple elements that come across as dated, starting with the murders. These aren't bad, per se, but they certainly don't look realistic. Fair or not, I recall thinking the first of the two murders looked campy and a little silly when I saw it in high school. I'm more forgiving now that I have two and a half more decades of experience with films of the era under my belt, but it still strikes me as awkwardly framed and shot (though it's worth noting a lot of that comes down to the complex choreography needed to conceal nudity - this was anything but lazy).

More than that, some elements of the epilogue feel forced to me. While I love the final shots showcasing Norman (or arguably his mother's) grin (there's a subtle overlay of the corpse's desiccated face that's brilliantly disturbing), the preceding sequence where a psychologist spends a few minutes blandly explaining Norman's pathology kills the tension and tone. Admittedly, sequences like these used to be commonplace, but there's a reason they more or less vanished from the medium.

Now let's talk about the movie's yuletide setting, as well the reason I don't consider this a Christmas movie.

As I said before, the opening of the film establishes the date as December 11th. We're never given another date, but the movie is unusually clear about the number of days passing. It's a plot point that the movie starts on Friday, and the climax occurs on Sunday, nine days later. The epilogue's timing is a little ambiguous, though it seemed to imply that was set the same night.

Beyond that, there's only one shot tying the movie to December, a brief sequence where we can see some street decorations early in the movie. There's also some imagery that arguably resonates with December in the form of dead trees and bushes, but despite several opportunities to do so, the movie includes no further reference to the holidays.

What's notable here is the movie seems to establish the holiday unnecessarily. It's important to the viewer's understanding of the story and characters that we know what day of the week it is and how much time is passing, but the fact it's taking place in December feels extraneous. So, why bother telling us?

Immediately after watching, I came up with four theories. My favorite of the four was that a Christmas or New Year's setting would have perfectly fit the story the movie didn't tell. If Marion hadn't been killed and this followed the trajectory it was on, a resolution on either holiday would make perfect sense. Perhaps, I thought, the setting itself was a misdirect. Only if that had been the case, you'd expect a lot more references to the season throughout the first half of the film. Misdirects aren't typically subtle, so why are we only shown decorations once? I also considered the possibility the timing was a subversive inversion of the Virgin Mother and the twisted relationship between Norman and his mother. This at least made sense with the understated nature of the holidays, as you might want to keep something like that under the censers' radar.

My third theory was that it was playing with trends in what we now call noir. There's no shortage of such films with holiday settings on the 40s and 50s, so I thought it was possible this envisioned as an extension of that tradition. Finally, I had one more theory, the only of the four that wouldn't qualify as a Christmas movie in my book if confirmed. What if the decorations in that one shot had been included accidentally, and Hitchcock added the date at the opening rather than reshoot or live with the continuity error?

Usually in situations like these I'm left without an answer, but this time Wikipedia had my back: it's the last one. The movie was produced on a tight budget which made reshoots undesirable. They never intended those decorations to appear, but covering for them by adding a date in post-production was the easiest (and cheapest) solution.

When I say a movie like Alien: Covenant is a Christmas movie despite not including the word, "Christmas," or any obvious reference to the holiday, it's because the movie's setting was an intentional choice conveying thematic meaning. Over the years, I've encountered numerous people attempting to define "Christmas movie" in terms of whether the movie is really "about Christmas." The problem with those tests is they almost always start with the preconceived assumption that Christmas conforms to some specific archetype (usually either Dickensian England, post-war America, or - on rare occasions - Christianity). But Christmas is bigger, older, and more complicated than any of those: we're doing the holiday a disservice by reducing it to any single template. I'd argue almost every movie set at Christmas is, in one sense or another, about some version of the holiday, or at least some aspect. Or to put it another way, every movie set at Christmas is actively choosing to be set at that time for thematic, tonal, character, or story reasons, and by exploring the reasons for those choices, we'll gain some insight into both the movie and the holiday.

Wait, did I say, "every movie"? That should be "almost every movie." Because as we just ascertained, Psycho is the extraordinarily rare case where it really was accidental.

Well, mostly accidental. I mean, obviously they still made a conscious choice to tack on the date, but it wasn't for artistic or meaningful reasons. Unless you count commercial reasons as inherently meaningful, but it's not like those shed any light on the holidays.

In America.

Okay, so maybe - just maybe - there's a case to be made that the necessity of adding a nominal Christmas setting in post-production reflects something about the country this was made in, but this was all caused by a trivial, incidental event, a random occurrence resulting in holiday decorations popping up unexpectedly. That means nothing.

Well, nothing other than the omnipresent nature of the holidays during the Christmas season, when visual reminders become so ubiquitous a film crew could literally fail to notice those decorations were framing a key shot, creating a perfect symbolic representation of the season swallowing up everything around it, even a movie being filmed and arguably resulting in a genuine, unintentional Christmas movie emerging against the wishes of its director.

Oh, crap.

I think I just accidentally argued this is a Christmas movie.