Marilyn Fabe is Professor of Film Studies at UC Berkeley. From its early, voyeuristic scenes of self-censored sex in an anonymous hotel room, to Janet Leigh's cold pursuit of hard cash, to a cop-car chase shown almost entirely in a small rear-view mirror, Psycho is a study in chilling frustration, effectively photographed in varying shades of gray. Ironically, things only begin to warm up at the motel where Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates brings the film its first elements of vulnerable humanity, and his relationship with his mother, its first hint of intimacy. Mother inhabits not only the house, but the son. Let us remember that "mother" is just "other" without an "m." Norman's female vulnerability is both off-putting and contagious, and it rubs off on Janet, hence the famous shower. Hitchcock wants it to rub off on you, too. Psycho will be preceded by a 40-minute short-story comedy that has been described as "a Freudian vaudeville"-the last word on the demon mother.