Staff Writer
By JULIET PEREZ
Bates Motel is a TV series made by the cable network A&E, it consists of 5 full seasons and 50 episodes. The show is inspired by the very popular movie “Psycho” by Alfred Hitchcock, and the novel written by Robert Bloch. The show is mainly about a mother and a son, Norma and Norman Bates, as they live their lives while Norman struggles with DID. The show is supposedly supposed to depict the events prior to the events in the movie “Psycho”, and Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga both do an excellent job at portraying the characters.
I would say that the show is more intended for an older, more mature audience just because there are a lot of things in the show that maybe shouldn’t be exposed to children, but I will say that I watched the show for the first time in 8th grade. I first came across the show when it was on Netflix, and I believe it was after I had finished watching American Horror Story, so it’s not the same but it is similar to AHS, mostly because both are horror/thriller. The only difference between the two is that Bates Motel does portray life in a realistic way. While AHS has witches, ghosts, aliens, etc., Bates Motel highlights real-world issues like mental illness, emotional incest, sexual abuse, broken families, neglect, and so much more. The effect this show has had on me is helping me understand more about what actual people go through, although the show is pretty intense and I doubt anyone has ever gone through the exact same experience as Norman Bates, I know that real people have gone through similar things depicted in the show.
The show begins with Norma buying a motel for the two in a different city to escape their past. This includes Norman killing his abusive father, however, Norman doesn’t know that he killed him and actually believes Norma killed him due to his DID. He has these blackouts when he is killing people where he hallucinates “mother” doing it, the identity is Norma just a more psycho version of her, this causes him to avoid any responsibility of killing his victims and genuinely believing that Norma killed them. It’s probably one of my favorite aspects of the show because it’s so fascinating how Norman’s brain works, at certain points they get so bad and he begins to dress like Norma by putting her clothes on and acting like her. Although Norma believed that moving would change things in Norman, he of course ends up killing more people.
In all honesty, I feel like Norma is responsible for Norman’s problems and her character is incredibly frustrating, she KNEW her son was a killer and she didn’t want to get him help. I believe that she too has a mental illness which makes her incapable of being a good mother for Norman no matter how much she thinks she is protecting him. Norma had such a shitty life filled with years of sexual abuse from both her brother and ex-husband, which led to her being unable to ever learn proper boundaries or know what a family looks like. She treats Norman almost like a husband, from letting Norman sleep in the same bed as her even as an adult, constantly telling him that no one will love him as much as she does and that it’s only ever gonna be them two, she keeps him at an uncomfortable proximity his whole life, and the more she does this it creates this uncomfortable weird relationship between them. This leads to Norman also not being able to learn boundaries and it starts to create these weird tension between them. In season 5, the “mother” personality even admits that Norman is in love with Norma.
The incestuous nature of their relationship is definitely there and it is actually a pretty big theme in the show, he is jealous of the men in her life, he likes sleeping in the same bed as her, and in a hallucination of “mother”, he even kisses her. He even convinces himself that in his DID episodes, she only kills the women he kills because she is jealous of them and wants him to herself. It’s so unsettling a lot of the time because it seems like Norma is aware of Norman’s little “crush” and feeds into it by purposely making him jealous and then getting pissed off when he acts like he isn’t.
I mention the relationship between them because it is the main plot of the show, although there are many other subplots, the show does an amazing job at highlighting the dynamic between the two and how it affects people and events that happen in the show. There are so many more aspects and characters in the show that make it worth watching, and although the first season might be a little slow the rest is so good and exciting especially if you’re into murder/thriller shows.