Film Dialogue

Preface

SARAH KOZLOFF

A vocal segment of my class on war films wanted me to know that they scorned the week’s assigned film, Battleground, the 1949 movie directed by William Wellman about the Battle of the Bulge, the World War II battle during which the Germans almost succeeded in punching through the Allied lines. I was flummoxed: screening it again had only raised my esteem for its subtleties and intelligence, its bitterness and pride. What could account for the difference in our reactions?

A few questions revealed that the students had not been listening to the dialogue. While I had been following the development of the young, jejune replacement into battle-scarred veteran and the cynical frustration expressed towards the army and home front by men who consistently risked their lives for one another, these students were waiting for all the chatter to stop so they could get to scenes of combat spectacle. And the spectacle in this case is decidedly unfulfilling, since Wellman’s mise-en-scène fluctuates between unconvincing studio sets blanketed in fake snow and blurry, edited-in documentary footage. Until I informed them that the script, written by Robert Pirosh, a master sergeant who fought with the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, had won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, the students hadn’t paid any real attention to what the soldiers were saying. Thus, they had missed the characters’ development and the script’s intelligent irony.

For example, at the end of Battleground the squad members, having lost half their number, endured days of freezing, starvation, and terror, and yet somehow managed to keep the German offensive from breaking through, are collapsed, exhausted, in the sun in a pile of dirty snow at the side of a muddy road. As in most World War II movies, the different soldiers represent different social types, but instead of crude geographic and racial labels, Pirosh mostly differentiates the men more subtly. Each has displayed his own mixture of faint-heartedness, would-be malingering, crankiness and almost accidental heroism. At the finale, as tanks and reinforcements at last rumble by, joining the fray, ‘Pop’ Stazak, the oldest member of the squad addresses the youngest and greenest, Jim Layton.

POP STAZAK: Hey Daddy, what are them things?

LAYTON: Ah. It’s a new kind of warfare, son. Mechanized, I think they call it. Read about it in the ‘Stars and Stripes’.

POP STAZAK: Well, what will they think of next?

Whereas when Layton first joined the third platoon he was nervous, hesitant and unknown, his relaxed, cynical tone, and the shared upending of age relationships show how accepted and acculturated Layton has become. As the scene progresses, the paratroopers cadge a two-day-old issue of the service newspaper, ‘The Stars and Stripes’.

JARVESS: You’ll be happy to know we’re in Belgium not Luxembourg.

POP STAZAK: Just so we’re going back. That’s all that counts.

HOLLEY: You mean you’re not happy in the service?

POP STAZAK: I didn’t say that. I love it.

KIPP: You found a home in the Army, chum.

LAYTON: Me too! Never had it so good in my life.

Printed text cannot capture the tone of Pop Stazak’s quick, solemn retort, ‘I didn’t say that. I love it.’ On the one hand, such a comment is sheer irony, because all the paratroopers have made it clear that they hate everything about the Army. But on another layer, Pop’s answer carries a deeper truth, a truth that Kipp and Layton immediately jump in to echo, something understated that has to do with brotherhood, loyalty and pride.

This same pride bursts out a few moments later as the platoon is marching away from the battle lines towards respite. As they stumble along, filthy and tattered, wounded and hobbling on frozen feet, they see a fresh platoon approaching. Holley, the smooth operator who almost deserted earlier in the film, reminds his sergeant of their traditional cadence count, a satirical ditty about some home front ‘Jody’ stealing their girlfriend.

Sergeant Kinnie takes the hint: ‘All right, come on! Come on! What do you want these guys to think, you’re a bunch of WACs? All right, all right pick it up now. Hut, woop, ‘hre-ee. Hut, woop, ‘hre-ee, four. Hut, woop, ‘hre-ee, four.’ The cadence count proceeds through call and response:

SGT. KINNIE: Your baby was lonely – as lonely as could be…

I COMPANY: Until Jody provided company!

SGT. KINNIE: Ain’t it great to have a pal…

I COMPANY: Who works so hard to keep up morale!

SGT. KINNIE: You ain’t got nothing to worry about…

I COMPANY: He’ll keep her happy till I get out!

SGT. KINNIE: You won’t get out until the end of the war…

I COMPANY: In nineteen hundred and seventy-four!

As they chant the soldiers disregard their pain, stand taller, toss away their cigarettes, fall into unison and march crisply. The wise-guy cynicism of their ditty blends with their proud bearing to show that the battling bastards of Bastogne are bloody but unbowed.

Seemingly simple, the dialogue of Battleground is anything but. To overlook the dialogue is to miss the heart of the film. As this brief analysis shows, the dialogue of Battleground gets to the crux of the wonderment of World War II, showing how an army of civilians – Holley calls himself ‘PFC, as in Praying For Civilian’ – managed to stand up to the militaristic Wehrmacht (and the Japanese).

My students were not listening well because of their specific expectations about war films, and because learning to listen to dialogue is hard. It is hard because visual spectacle is so much showier and attention grabbing, and it is hard because of the way we commonly teach film. All the introductory textbooks regarding film as art devote chapters to introducing students to the technical vocabulary regarding the image track: ‘low-key lighting’ versus ‘high-key lighting’; ‘zooms’ versus ‘tracking shots’; ‘matte paintings’ versus ‘computer-generated’ special effects. However, the textbooks mention dialogue only briefly, in chapters on sound, which devote most of their space to music and sound effects. Yes, the American Film Institute, ever searching for new gimmicks to package new lists, has created a ‘100 Top Movie Quotes’ collection, and imdb.com devotes a whole section to quotes from each movie, but the snippets of film dialogue are often one-liners that are chosen for their pithy portability, not for their subtle characterisations or narrative import.

This neglect, I think, stems from the ‘tragedy of the commons’: the fact that individuals will devote most of their time and effort to what belongs solely in their own backyard and neglect a shared domain. Film academics have highlighted montage and deep focus because these techniques are more specific to film; dialogue is common, shared by drama, literature, radio and everyday speech. Like the famous Four Corners monument that celebrates the site where four states’ borders touch, the study of dialogue lies at a disciplinary ‘six corners’ where film studies, screen-writing, media studies, dramatic theory, narrative theory and linguistics adjoin one another. Unfortunately, the more disciplines that could reasonably study dialogue the less concentrated attention it gets. When I undertook a serious examination of film dialogue in the late 1990s, I was astonished to discover how little had been written. Very little seems to have changed in the last decade or so.

The study of dialogue has also suffered from a persistent devaluing of speech as a trivial mode of communication. ‘Dialogue is fine in a movie’, says Conventional Wisdom, ‘as long as it is kept in its place’. Place? What place? Is this the place of the subservient to the master? Who put dialogue in chains and why? Why should dialogue be valued any less than any other artistic signifier?

The persistence of these questions, both inside and outside the classroom, indicates that this volume fills a real need by placing dialogue front and centre. The essays in this anthology exemplify the benefits of listening to characters’ speech. They display the multiplicity of ways in which dialogue is crucial to the film-going experience, to the study of genres, auteurs and ideology. Most of all, by example, these essays model close listening and the riches this attention reveals. When we begin to listen, many facets of film – from genre to authorship to ideology – will need re-evaluation. My own study, Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000), may have started that re-evaluation but the task is still unfinished, and I am delighted to see the progress presented by this present volume.

INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF PRIMER FOR FILM DIALOGUE STUDY

JEFF JAECKLE

Consider your favourite line of film dialogue. You know the words by heart, of course, but you can also recall their tenor, rhythm and placement in the narrative. You might remember as well how the filmmakers established the mood, anchored the character, advanced the plot, or echoed other films in the genre. Lingering over this line might also call to mind the historical era, including the film’s compliance with or reaction against prevailing cultural trends or political movements. So much in fact might be packed into the wording, delivery and context of this single line that its close analysis would seem not merely worthwhile but integral to your understanding of how the film works. This sense of curiosity animates Film Dialogue; a sense that patient study of film speech yields insights into the aesthetic, narrative and cultural dimensions of cinema that otherwise go unappreciated and unheard.

This central claim of Film Dialogue is that the most established areas of film studies – specifically genre, auteur theory and cultural representation – remain ripe with opportunities for reassessment and new knowledge because scholars have largely focused on cinematic images to the exclusion of cinematic language. This volume advances language-centred arguments to remind readers that ‘spectators’ are also ‘audiences’, that the look has its equal in listening, and that images are understood and appreciated through their interactions with words. Each essay here demonstrates that film is not a visual medium, as scholars have long touted, but an audio-visual medium replete with research possibilities.

Sarah Kozloff, whose contributions to the study of film dialogue in general and this anthology in particular cannot be overstated, debunks the longstanding bias against studying film speech in Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000), the first and only academic monograph of its kind. After dismantling arguments against speech as trivial and feminine, she charges film studies scholars with misinterpreting their object of study:

Perhaps the most noteworthy consequence of this anti-dialogue bias is that it has led to misconceptions in our model of how films actually work. Many of the ways in which narrative is communicated, empathy elicited, themes conveyed, visuals interpreted come from the interaction of the words with the visual images. Ignoring the role of the words has led to overestimation of what viewers understand from the visuals or the editing alone. (2000: 14)

Kozloff exposes these misconceptions by developing a lexicon for film dialogue study that she deploys in language-centred readings of four genres: westerns, gangster films, screwball comedies and melodramas. She refutes the narrow definition of cinema as a visual medium by demonstrating that ‘what the characters say, exactly how they say it, and how the dialogue is integrated with the rest of the cinematic techniques are crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound’ (2000: 6). Few have heeded her call to change, however, so film dialogue study has advanced little in well over a decade.¹

These critical gaps suggest that despite advancements in film sound studies, the belief that cinema is a visual medium continues to hold sway, in turn spawning a number of practical problems. Trained to critique elements of camerawork, editing and mise-en-scène, many scholars have not developed the necessary analytical tools to study dialogue. With few film studies programs offering courses on sound, and even fewer on dialogue, students are entering academia ill-prepared to pursue research agendas centred on cinematic language, while their mentors are too entrenched in image-based research modes to retrain and take on these studies themselves. Nor can they consult textbooks on film dialogue to develop these skills, for existing screenwriting and sound production manuals tend to include maxims on ‘good’ dialogue, with little in the way of context and analysis.²

Even readers of Kozloff’s Overhearing Film Dialogue will not necessarily come away with an easily deployable toolkit, for it is a study of structural and generic patterns, not a textbook. It does not include a glossary of key terms, nor does it explicitly outline a methodology. Instead, it lets the results speak for themselves, an indirect approach that Kozloff acknowledges in the book’s closing paragraph:

Earlier I spoke of the prejudices against film dialogue – despite the efforts of earlier advocates – lingering like the undead. Movies have taught me that there are two ways of finally vanquishing a vampire: driving a stake through his heart or tricking him into tarrying until touched by the light of day. What I’ve tried to do here is the latter, and my chief ploy has been seduction by quotation: Wait! Don’t leave! There’s more for you to hear, to hear again. And with each example, from Wuthering Heights to Moonstruck, my hope is that the sky has grown a little brighter. (2000: 267)

This approach shows readers great respect and makes for a study rich in examples, yet it may have limited the applicability of the analyses Kozloff so expertly performs.

The contributors to Film Dialogue want readers to see the light of day that Kozloff endeavoured to reveal. We also want them to contribute to this light through teaching and research. The remainder of this Introduction is my attempt to initiate this transformation. Rather than entice readers to me, as Kozloff does, I take a stake-through-the-heart approach by prescribing a methodology of film dialogue study designed to vanquish unproductive habits. I outline four dialogue-centred practices, model the benefits that attend their use and point to instances where ignorance or avoidance of them has led to missed opportunities and misguided arguments. I propose these critiques not as indictments but as instructive examples of practices that, when followed, can yield deeper and more nuanced analyses. In the same spirit, I recommend essays here that readers might consult for illustrations of each dialogue practice. This explicit, step-by-step method aims to inculcate common-sense approaches to film dialogue study, so that readers can practice them, publish their findings and pass on their knowledge and skills to students.

I illustrate this methodology through Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a long favourite in discourses on cinema. Robert Kolker captures the film’s critical reputation best when describing the numerous essays and monographs on Psycho as indicative of ‘the progress of film criticism itself … from formal analysis through methodologies of gender and psychoanalytical criticism, theories of the gaze, and that rarest of all things, analysis of the film’s music’ (2004: 26). It is therefore an excellent example upon which to gauge the exigency and efficacy of a methodology of film dialogue study.³

Step #1: Quote film dialogue

Whereas screen shots aid analyses of cinematic images, quotations of film dialogue aid analyses of cinematic language. Yet few scholars take advantage of quotation, choosing instead to describe dialogue to summarise plot or articulate themes. Kozloff observes, ‘for the most part analysts incorporate the information provided by a film’s dialogue and overlook the dialogue as signifier’ (2000: 6). This approach gleans surface-level content at the expense of word choice, sentence structure and literary and/or rhetorical qualities, not to mention aural elements of pitch, pacing and volume that affect every line’s delivery. Quotation of dialogue is therefore essential to grasping what characters say as well as how they say it; it is the means by which scholars can appreciate aesthetic, narrative and ideological details only glimpsed in descriptions.

Raymond Durgnat’s descriptions of Marion in the first third of Psycho, first published in The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, or the Poor Man’s Hitchcock (1974), underscore the value of dialogue quotation in arguments about characterisation and mood. Recall that Marion (Janet Leigh), in a ploy to marry her debt-ridden boyfriend Sam (John Gavin), steals $40,000 in cash and flees Phoenix, Arizona to be with him in Fairvale, California. Along the way, she encounters an unnamed highway patrolman, who questions her for sleeping in her car, and a used-car salesman, who trades her car for another. Durgnat describes these encounters to develop his portrait of Marion:

A big, brutal-looking motorbike cop with dark glasses trails her, suspiciously […] He is the ‘law’, but he has a special, personal brutality of his own. Is he really following her, or is she only imagining he is? The psychological pressures complicate and intensify. To shake him off, she exchanges her car at a garage run by a very obliging character, apparently the very antithesis of the cop. The cop is saying, ‘I remind you of punishment: go back!’; the garagehand, ‘I make crime pleasant and easy, go on.’ (2004: 87)

Durgnat’s alliterative descriptors ‘punishment’ and ‘pleasant’ are a clever way to capture Marion’s ambivalence, and his speculations on her interior monologue are rhetorically powerful. If, however, we quote and analyse the characters’ dialogue, we can perceive and appreciate verbal complexities that complicate their personalities and show them to be surprisingly similar.

Some of this dialogue supports Durgnat’s argument. His claim, for instance, that the motorbike cop is a ‘menacing figure’ is substantiated by the fact that he is unnamed and speaks in commands, such as ‘Hold it there!’ and ‘Turn your motor off’, and in curt statements and questions such as ‘Frankly, yes’ and ‘Well, is there?’⁴ Yet Durgnat’s descriptions overlook the officer’s concerns with Marion’s safety, such as when suggesting that she stay in a motel, and his use of ‘may I?’ and ‘please’, which soften his character and highlight Marion’s paranoia. The dialogue also supports Durgnat’s claim that the salesman is a ‘very obliging character’. His non-threatening name, ‘California Charlie’, and considerate statements about treating Marion ‘fair and square’ and allowing her to do ‘anything you’ve a mind to’ make him sound harmless. Yet Charlie also reminds Marion of possible threats. He references ‘trouble’, asks if someone is chasing her, and tacitly questions if she stole her car, which complicate his obliging demeanour with a palpable sense of danger.

These findings, while certainly not earth-shattering, demonstrate that dialogue quotation can yield nuances that otherwise go unheard; in this case, they reveal details of characterisation that affect our judgements of the scene. Marion is, as Durgnant suggests, ambivalent about the theft; however, quotation reveals an unexpected parallel in characterisation: the cop and salesman are ambivalent as well, aiding and impeding Marion during their conversations with her. These shared ambivalences actually strengthen Durgnant’s argument by making Marion’s encounters more unsettling and confusing, thus heightening the tension and suspense that swirl around her indecisiveness about the theft.

To appreciate similar nuances of speech that might exist in any film, scholars must quote film dialogue with the same frequency and attention to detail that they currently afford images. Quotation is the prerequisite for dialogue analysis, for it allows scholars to perceive – to a degree that descriptions cannot achieve – subtle yet telling speech patterns that deepen our understanding of a film, whether about the character who uttered or reacted to a line, the performer who delivered it, the writer who composed it, or the numerous others who miked, lit, photographed, mixed and edited it. However, some lines yield greater fruit than others, just as some images do. The first three chapters of Overhearing Film Dialogue outline the forms these felicitous lines might take, including those that characters repeat to themselves and others, those that begin or end a scene and those that strike audiences as novel, whether for their length, literariness, or delivery. I encourage readers to consult these chapters to learn what to listen for. Readers can also turn to any chapter of Film Dialogue to study instances of dialogue quotation, but might pay special attention to Thomas Leitch’s quotations of monologues and Brian Wilson’s and François Thomas’ quotations of multi-character exchanges (polylogues). Above all, I would stress that readers approach dialogue quotation as a matter of course when studying any film, for a line’s presence on the page is the first step in explications that can improve understanding of it, the entire film and the broader verbal dimensions of cinema.

Step #2: Verify the accuracy of film dialogue quotations

Accurate quotations of film dialogue are essential to studies of cinematic speech, for they guarantee that arguments are based, quite literally, on a common language.⁵ When scholars rely on screenplays and subtitles instead of on-screen dialogue, misquotations can and do occur. Kozloff does not address these habits in detail, but warns against relying on dialogue compilations, such as those acting students use, since ‘anthologies of film dialogue contain discrepancies from the film’s final dialogue’ (2000: 67). She also admonishes scholars for analysing subtitles because they ‘only translate a portion of the spoken text, and only that portion that the subtitler has decided is most important’ (2000: 26), thus leaving scholars prone to misquotations. Regardless of where they originate, once published, misquotations spread misinformation about how films actually work.

Robert Samuels’ ‘Epilogue: Psycho and the Horror of the Bi-Textual Unconscious’, first published in his Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory (1998), illustrates the importance of accurate quotation when advancing arguments about characterisation and representations of gender and sexuality. He argues that the film dramatises shifts from concealment to revelation and, in the context of the female subject, from revelation to effacement. Sex plays a large role in these transformations, which Samuels claims are apparent in the film’s opening scene, when audiences encounter Sam and Marion engaged in pillow talk in a cheap motel during her lunch hour. Their innuendo quickly turns to a matter-of-fact discussion of their future, including Marion’s insistence that they achieve a modicum of respectability by meeting in public and at her house for dinner. Marion’s directness and partial nudity in this scene strike Samuels as an unprecedented revelation of sexuality in Hitchcock’s oeuvre that will eventually demand her punishment:

However, in this film, everything is pushed up a notch, and that which is usually concealed begins to be revealed. This movement of revelation is, in part, highlighted when Sam says to Marion: ‘You make respectability seem disrespectful.’ Hitchcock’s attempt to present sexuality in a respectful way has now crossed over to its crude opposite. (2004: 154–5)

Samuels misquotes twice: the phrase is ‘sound disrespectful,’ not ‘seem disrespectful’, and Marion says this line, not Sam. The first error is minor: Samuels cites the wrong word ‘seem’, which has a similar meaning to the correct word ‘sound’. The second error is major, for it provides false evidence for Samuels’ reading of sexual repression in Psycho, specifically his claim that the ‘male-dominated cultural order works by effacing the female subject’ (2004: 154).

In this misquoted conversation, Sam links Marion to the disrespectful and crude, prefacing her effacement later in the film. In the actual conversation, Marion challenges Sam:

MARION: Oh, we can see each other. We can even have dinner, but respectably, in my house, with my mother’s picture on the mantel, and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.

SAM: And after the steak, do we send Sister to the movies, turn Mama’s picture to the wall?

MARION: Sam!

SAM: All right. [pause] Marion, whenever it’s possible, I want to see you, and under any circumstances, even respectability.

MARION: You make respectability sound disrespectful.

SAM: Oh no, I’m all for it. It requires patience, temperance, and a lot of sweating out. Otherwise, though, it’s just hard work. But if I can see you and touch you, even as simply as this, I won’t mind.

This scene emphasises Marion’s presence and power, not her crudeness. It is she who dictates the terms of the couple’s relationship and chides Sam for making light of them, while he crudely references sex in his comments about sending away her sister and turning her mother’s picture to the wall. Sam also shamelessly confesses his attraction to Marion and his commitment to changing his behaviour; he wants to see her ‘under any circumstances’ and ‘won’t mind’ the hard work required to do so. Marion summons this power in her subsequent interactions with the film’s other male characters: she maintains her composure with the unnamed motorcycle cop, stands her ground with California Charlie and refuses Norman’s request to tarry in his parlour. Her dialogue in this opening scene with Sam is therefore crucial to understanding her character, for it establishes her verbal power over men, in addition to her more obvious physical allure. Samuels’ misquotation leads him away from these facts and thus from a fuller comprehension of Marion and the film’s treatments of gender and sexuality. His mistake demonstrates that misquoting even a single line of dialogue can transform how we read a scene, its characters and the entire film.

Scholars can avoid these pitfalls by quoting dialogue directly from the finished film, not from screenplays, subtitles, or dialogue anthologies. These texts are handy for quickly locating a line, but they should not be considered authoritative documents. Instead, I recommend that scholars manually transcribe dialogue that they intend to analyse. Hearing the dialogue as performed on-screen is certainly a good starting point for film dialogue study, particularly for vocal analyses, but transcriptions are the best means of verifying word choices, sentence structures and literary/rhetorical devices. Comparing these transcriptions to available screenplays and subtitles can clarify these details, but if these texts diverge, scholars should always defer to the finished film. (A notable exception would be research that explicitly traces a film’s evolution from script to screen.) Every essay in this volume models this practice of accurate quotation, but readers might find it instructive to consult the contributions by Hye Seung Chung and Stephane Dunn for transcriptions of dialect-heavy speech. Following these steps can ensure that quoted dialogue is accurate and therefore valid evidence, which subsequent scholars can bolster or challenge through recourse to the same language.

Step #3: Analyse the aural and verbal components of film dialogue

Whereas a single cinematic frame is an assemblage of photographic details of angle, scale, focus and lighting, a single syllable of film dialogue is an assemblage of phonographic details of pitch, pace and volume; this syllable also has linguistic and literary qualities pertaining to national language or regional dialect, word choice and wordplay. Audiences experience these elements simultaneously, but scholars can divide them into aural and verbal components for the purpose of study. The vast majority of dialogue in narrative cinema reveals a combination of these components, as performers’ voices shape sounds into words, clauses and sentences with aural form and ideational content. Concentrating on one to the exclusion of the other would obviously be a missed opportunity, yet many scholars do just that, typically by focusing solely on voices.

The most notable scholar of voice-centred analysis is Michel Chion, who has advocated convincingly for cinema as an audio-visual medium in Audio-Vision (1994), The Voice in Cinema (1999) and Film, A Sound Art (2009). However, he maintains a film-sound hierarchy that ranks the purely aural aspects of the human voice higher than its uses of language. Kozloff is critical of this position, explaining that Chion ‘regrets the dominance of intelligibility; he prefers what he calls emanation speech (what I term verbal wallpaper) – speech that may be inaudible, decentered, and that serves no narrative function. I find his argument misanthropic’ (2000: 120).⁶ Her frustrations stem, I believe, from the fact that Chion’s position flies in the face of how most narrative films actually work. Audiences gain information about characterisation, plot and theme from the specific words characters use. Without them, most narrative films would quickly fall apart and cease to compel our attentions.

Chion’s analysis of Psycho’s Mother in The Voice in Cinema illustrates that verbal-aural approaches to film dialogue can expand our appreciation of character dynamics. Chion contends that Mother’s existence as an ‘acousmother’ – an animate voice that lacks an animate body – does not diminish her dominance over Norman (Anthony Perkins), which she first exercises through her harsh criticism of him for inviting Marion to supper. He explains:

That’s when she [Marion] overhears a row offscreen, coming from the house, between Norman and an old woman with a hard, powerful voice that also sounds far-off and improbably bathed in reverb. The ‘acousmother’ unleashes her anger at her son’s gall, this libidinous boy, in proposing to bring a strange woman into her house. (1999: 141)

Chion’s descriptions of Mother’s vocal qualities ring true, yet their broad strokes fail to account for verbal patterns that unite the ostensibly opposite characters and show Norman to be a good deal more than a ‘libidinous boy’. An aural-verbal analysis of their dialogue reveals parallel argumentative strategies of mocking, rhetorical questioning and generalisation that suggest a twist on an old adage: like mother, like son.

Mother initiates these patterns in her opening exchange with Norman about inviting Marion to supper:

MOTHER: No! I tell you no! I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in for supper – by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds.

NORMAN: Mother, please!

MOTHER: And then what, after supper? Music? Whispers?

NORMAN: Mother, she’s just a stranger. She’s hungry, and it’s raining out.

MOTHER: ‘Mother, she’s just a stranger.’ As if men don’t desire strangers. As if – oh, I refuse to speak of disgusting things because they disgust me. Do you understand, boy? Go on! Go tell her she’ll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with my food, or my son. Or do I have to tell her ‘cause you don’t have the guts? Huh, boy? Do you have the guts, boy?

NORMAN: Shut up! Shut up!

Mother’s insults and commands establish her verbally abusive personality and set her apart from Norman, whose opening lines in the film (‘Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please’) characterise him as boyish and placating. Yet a comparison of Mother’s tirade about supper with Norman’s rant on institutions reveals the characters’ strikingly similar methods of