Scenic Routes - Psycho

Let's start the semester off with some extra credit.

The media critique site The AV Club has an ongoing series of essays entitled "Scenic Routes." Here an overview of what the essay series sets out to accomplish:

 "Asked to explain what makes a movie work, Howard Hawks reportedly defined the formula as “three good scenes, no bad scenes.” Or at least that’s the catchy sound-bite version—the citation for that remark on his Wikipedia page leads to an interview in which he actually says, “If I can make about five good scenes and not annoy the audience, it’s an awfully good picture.” In truth, the precise ratio of awesome to rancid doesn’t really matter, so long as we give Hawks credit for recognizing, long before the advent of home-video made random access possible, that we don’t experience most movies as irreducible entities, but as a series of discrete moments. Whether the film as a whole succeeds or fails can be almost immaterial. I’m sure Nicholas Ray’s 1951 film Flying Leathernecks is a better movie than the 1990 Jeff Goldblum thriller Mister Frost, for example, but I once completely forgot that I’d seen the former, whereas the latter, which I’m pretty sure kind of sucked, will stay with me ’til death on the basis of a single casually chilling conversation: the opening scene, as I recall. So welcome to Scenic Routes, which will be an ongoing exploration of cinema’s most memorable individual sequences: the sublime, the exasperating, the iconic, the ineffable."

One of the essay's I'd like you to read focuses on Psycho.  You can find it here. Give it a read. Afterwards, participate in an online discussion in the comments below. Follow the rules for online discussion - thoughtful, honest, kind, curious, etc. Check back multiple times to give yourself to react to the reactions of your peers.