Heartbreak Hotel, by Reed Lackey

This is the story of a boy and his mother. Perhaps you’ve heard it before, but never like this.

I must confess that when I checked out the first episode of Bates Motel, it was with more suspicion than excitement. Psycho has been a top-five, all-time favorite film of mine for nearly as long as I can remember watching movies. I had been burned pretty badly by the misfire of Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake in 1998 and although I’m a rather big fan of Psycho II, the prospect of taking things back to the beginning for Norman Bates and his mother seemed more born of hubris than of inspiration.

Thankfully, I was mistaken. Bates Motel aired its final episode last night, checking out after a mere 50 chapters in what proved to be a riveting, emotional, and immensely rewarding reimagining of the story first conceived in Robert Bloch’s best-selling novel and immortalized in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece.

The pilot was focused and entertaining, anchored in solid writing and commendable performances. Showrunners Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin had made some smart choices right out of the gate, from inspired casting to faithfully fresh set recreations to (perhaps most wise) a nebulous sense of time and place. Bates Motel skirted the border of past and modern, with mostly older vehicles and houses populating the town of White Pine Bay and a soundtrack consisting mostly of pre-1950s jazz standards, but piped through to Norman Bates’s ears through an iPod. The effect was both classic and fresh, setting the stage for what would be a delicate balance throughout the run of the show.

A Boy and His Mother

Taking up the heavy lifting in the early episodes was the ever-astonishing Vera Farmiga as Norma Bates, Norman’s legendary mother. Farmiga displays the type of rare talent that feels fully organic: so committed as a performer that she is immediately believable in nearly any role she undertakes. After noteworthy turns in Up in the Air, Source Code, and her directorial debut, Higher Ground, she was already a remarkable performer who would later earn her horror fandom bonafides playing Lorraine Warren in the Conjuring films. But she has yet to be given a meatier or more demanding role than Norma Bates. She was required to appear erratic and unstable, all while maintaining viewer’s general good will and the belief that she was unwaveringly devoted to her son. She is so consistently solid in the role that I don’t know if I’ll ever even view Hitchcock’s original without thinking of her as the shadow upstairs in the window.

But although her task was daunting, it could be said that Freddie Highmore’s was nearly impossible. Norman Bates is almost more than an icon; he’s symbolic of a wide array of unnerving and uncomfortable domestic horrors: Freudian obsessions, temporary insanity, and wild, uncontrollable jealousy all reach their nexus in the cultural character known as Norman Bates. Anthony Perkins was the epitome of the sympathy and discomfort required for the character to work, and we’ve already witnessed how big the shoes can be to fill in other dreadful attempts. But to say that Highmore makes the role his own is almost too reductive. Over the course of five seasons, Freddie Highmore accomplishes what Perkins was never even given the chance to attempt: he takes us inside the mind, and occasionally the very soul, of Norman Bates. He makes us understand him.

Highmore’s performance in the first couple of seasons is impressive, but still abides mostly under Farmiga’s shadow. However, as the story deepens, so does Highmore’s portrayal, extending to a near meta-human range of emotions and intentions. There are moments in seasons 4 and 5 which not only make you forget that Highmore is acting, they make you wonder how what you’re seeing could even be acting at all. Much credit is due to the writing and direction, which are consistently commendable, but it would all fall apart without such a masterful performer at its center. His portrayal is a work of performance genius; and I have never witnessed a character unravel into insanity so poignantly or powerfully as when Freddie Highmore takes you into the heart and mind of Norman Bates.

The Residents

But each major supporting player could almost merit their own separate article. Alex Romero, played by Nestor Carbonell of Lost fame, is a police chief whose sense of right and wrong steadily erodes as he is drawn deeper into the world of the Bateses. His story is truly a tragic one, as with each passing choice Romero loses more and more of himself to a domestic fantasy that was never likely to be a reality. He, like Norman, begins to assert his own desires for reality onto the canvas of what is actually happening and when that fantasy becomes irrevocably impossible, Romero’s moral compass dissipates with it.

Stealing the audience’s heart, however, is the lovely Olivia Cooke, who plays the frail Emma Decody. Emma attends school with Norman and begins to become a regular presence at the Bates Motel. Due to a lung disease, her future is uncertain and her presence is a continual reminder of both mortality and hope. Cooke endows Emma with a solid blend of strength and grace, even as her character suffers from debilitating weaknesses. That strength perpetually grows as her story does and she ultimately becomes perhaps the show’s most fortuitous creation not originally present in the source material.

Her rival for that title, however, is Dylan Massett. Dylan is Norma’s OTHER son – the product of and incestual assault – who is always at odds with a birth story he can’t accept and a mother who continually places him second to Norman. Max Thieriot plays Dylan as well-intentioned but who has been dealt horrible cards and must try to find a way to stay in the game even if he can’t win. By the show’s final season, Dylan has walked a hard road to reach a place of contentment, but his family’s curses may yet undermine all of it. It is Dylan’s story upon which the audience will likely hang their hopes for a happy ending, if one is even possible at the Bates Motel.

Prelude to Madness

In the show’s first seasons, the story take certain swerves into its own various subplots, but is primarily beholden to the cultural awareness of Alfred Hitchcock’s film. Part of what is so impressive about the first three seasons is how deftly the writers and creators navigate audience awareness: and frequently use it against them in surprising and exciting ways. The plot which develops over the latter half of season 2 (where Norman finds himself on the razor’s edge of accepting the blame for a violent crime he’s convinced he committed) seemed impossible to overcome without either unraveling the show’s fundamental conceit or revealing some grand deus ex machina. However, the show utilized the cultural staples of the original film to its advantage and delivered a surprising resolution that was both unexpected and completely in sync with the rest of the story’s mythology.

That Cuse and Ehrin were able to execute a show that was consistently entertaining, evocative of such a widely known cultural tent-pole, and still somehow full of surprises was nothing short of a modern miracle. The fleshing out of Norma’s eccentricities, the deepening of Norman’s madness, and the deepening of all of the supporting narratives are entertaining to watch unfold even if you were somehow utterly unaware of where the Psycho story resolved.

But the show’s creative and narrative pinnacle rises through its fourth season. Building off of the unique elements where its story has diverged from the original film on which it’s based, Bates Motel steadily begins to take a much braver – and darker – risk with its story. It was during the fourth season’s plot that I become more than a mere fan of the show and became something of an evangelist for it. It is challenging enough to anchor a show on two rather awkward and frequently unlikable figures, but to simultaneously invest us deeply into an emotional journey we know will likely end poorly is an even greater hurdle. In the fourth season of Bates Motel, they not only put their head in the proverbial lion’s mouth – they slit its throat from the inside.

Following a natural progression of character and plot, the show dares to go where few network shows would even consider in its penultimate season, and the results are deeply affecting. It is in this fourth season that we realize just how much of a horror story we’ve been seeing. This is the stuff of nightmares, where our feeble grips upon not only our own relationships but also our very understandings of reality are exposed for the frail and brittle things they are. There are few losses that weren’t accompanied by the haunting fear that all of this could have been avoided if only a few words or actions had been chosen differently.

If you don’t want to have things spoiled, then skip these next few paragraphs, but to say what I’ve come to say I have to reveal what happens to the Bates family. While spending time in a mental institute, Norman – whose psychosis is rapidly progressing – learns that his mother has married Sheriff Romero. When he confronts her about it, a spike is driven into the heart of any hopes the three of them had for a happy ending. Romero, fearful for Norma’s life, tries to get her to accept the reality of Norman’s mental instability, but the result only causes their relationship to unravel. Then, back at home with her son, Norma drifts off to sleep after tearful confessions, regretful longings, and hopeful dreams, not realizing that her son would then open up their home’s gas valves in a murder/suicide attempt. His plan is stopped midway by Romero, who stops the gas before Norman is killed, but is unable to revive Norma. Faced with the reality that he killed his own mother, Norman retreats almost completely into his psychotic delusions.

The way that story is handled is much of the reason the story works so well. From concept to execution, the focus is completely undiluted. Every actor is fully committed, every story beat proceeds organically from the one before it, and the inevitably tragic result packs the exact emotional punch a show like this one requires. The scene where Norman desperately tries to get the lifeless stare of his mother’s corpse to respond to him by commanding over and over, “Look at me, Mother!” is one of the show’s most haunting and provocative moments.

The Final (Shower) Curtain

With Norma now deceased – but in a manner deliberately different from her death in Hitchcock’s film – Bates Motel was freed up in season 5 to do what no one would have thought wise to attempt: they remade Psycho as a season of television. The challenge ever before them was to evoke the same iconic beats while still telling their own distinct story.

Thankfully, the creative team behind Bates Motel had been preparing for such a task since the beginning, and the results are highly satisfying. Marion Crane makes an appearance (and takes a shower), but the show once again proved that it could utilize audience expectations and narrative familiarity to disarm anyone who felt too self-assured that they knew where the story was heading. The destinies of Romero, Dylan, Emma, and – of course – Norman are played out in a rich, rewarding story that capitalizes on Norman’s unique duality (in that Norman’s alternate personality is an actress we’ve already spent four seasons with) to craft moments that are tragic, frightening, and unforgettable.

With this lengthy expose, I offer my sincerest congratulations to the creative team behind Bates Motel for a wonderfully focused, entertaining, and thrilling reimagining of the Psycho narrative. They have succeeded in following their story’s potential down new and exciting roads, into deeper and darker woods, where a flock of harmless stuffed birds bear frightening witness to the fragile illusion of life and its relationships.

We all have vacancies to fill: some of us looking for love, or for peace, or for the warmth and tenderness of a mother’s care. But if we are not careful, we will wind up looking for the living among the dead and finding ourselves clinging to corpses of the way we wish things were rather than checking ourselves out of our own private traps. It can be maddening to linger there for too long, but as Norman Bates once observed, “We all go a little mad sometimes.”