How Psycho Tricks You Into Becoming An Accomplice In Murder
1. How Psycho Makes Its Audience Complicit
Hitchcock was the master of suspense, and with the departure of Marion, the only person left in the film to project suspense onto is Norman himself. This comes to ahead as he attempts to cover up Marion's disappearance, and is exemplified best during the sequence where he pushes her car into the swamp.
This is a do or die moment for Norman, really. He fidgets, and exchanges nervous looks with the camera as the car sinks, and sinks and... stops. Panic engulfs his face, before the car ultimately submerges and with it, Norman's worries too. It's remarkably similar to Marion's own attempts to evade the law, and because the audience has already been kept under suspense in a similar context, they do - at least tacitly - sympathise with Norman, and even his efforts to cover-up the grizzly happenings at the Bates Motel.
It may just be a brief flutter of sympathy, given the subsequent death of private investigator Milton Arbogast minutes later, but it's only upon his arrival that the POV switches yet again, and even again after that, as two new protagonists appear in the form of Lila Crane and Sam Loomis. Until that happens, for a few brief minutes, the audience is trapped in this scheme alongside Norman.
For all the other terrifying moments Psycho can boast, this may actually be its greatest, as well as its most unnerving.