Not to its credit is the rest of the film, which repeatedly fixates on the brain’s potential to psychosomatically change a body’s physiology. To its credit, Shyamalan’s script uses the more up-to-date term of dissociative identity disorder rather than “multiple-personality” to refer to Kevin’s condition. Split tops the Friday the 13th franchise in a walk, however. Viewers are torn, sympathizing both with Norman’s victims and with Norman himself, and that ambiguity is what sticks long after the credits roll. Sympathizing with him and making him human makes him a richer character overall, and lends the murder scenes a stronger emotional and psychological undercurrent. Norman is the truest casualty of his tyrannical mother, and Hitchcock has a clear compassion for the character’s tragic dimension. Norman Bates’ mommy complex is torn straight from Freud 101, but Hitchcock lent the character more nuance than the analyst’s profile in the concluding scene suggests. He vilified the brain itself, and its ability to turn on its owner and whisper troubling orders into the subconscious. Where else could the phenomenon begin but with Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rosetta Stone for translating a huge chunk of modern horror cinema? The mind’s capabilities to misfire have frightened the public imagination since Jack the Ripper’s sociopathy cleared the streets of Whitechapel after dark, but Hitchcock was the first to put it into pop-psych layman’s terms.
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