Analytical Writing- BY:Joey Jackson

ANALYTICAL – Comparing and contrasting differences between the movie Psycho, and the book And Then There Were None

Psycho is a reference to someone that is psychopathic and tending to have characteristics of insanity and acting crazy. In the movie Psycho, we observed the psychopathic nature of Norman Bates. He looks like this ordinary guy that runs a small motel complex called The Bates Motel, which is home to him and his mother who he cares for and looks after very much. So we first see hints of his psychopathic nature when a tiresome lady who is weary from the guilt of stealing money looks for a place to spend the night and rest. So she decides to stay at the motel, and checks in with Norman to pay for her stay for the night, and we see that Norman has a strange and peculiar liking for this girl. We also see that after peeping on the girl, he gets a certain arousal and later while she is still showering, she is killed by an attacker that appears to be Normans mother. So after this incident, Norman talks to himself in an angry fashion about how his mother shouldn’t have killed her. He also has no problem cleaning up the bloody mess left by his “mother” and discarding of her body in a swamp. So we see the one of many telltale signs that Norman is indeed psychotic.

 And to sum up the movie a bit faster, we discover that Norman was indeed the killer. He dressed up in his dead mothers cloths, who we find to have been dead for many years from Norman killing her in an outrageous burst of anger for seeing his mom sleeping with another man, and showing her affection to someone other than her son. So because of this horrific event that even Norman couldn’t handle, he took on the personality of the momma’s boy that we clearly see in the beginning of the movie and his mother whom he killed in his earlier years. So as soon as the audience/reader learns of these events that have unfolded throughout the story, we can most defiantly make the conclusion that Norman Bates is psychotic along with another character from another story called And Then There Were None.

Justice wargrave is a very similar character in a story called And Then There Were None. He is also very much as psychotic as Norman because his story is about killing 10 people in a very precise series of events that were very well strategically planned way ahead then when this all happened. These people were no ordinary people either; they had some point in their lives committed a crime, and when put to trial they were found innocent. So the whole point of the story was that Justice Wargrave was going to take “justice” into his own hands because of the flaws in our legal system that allowed these guilty people to get away with their intolerable acts without any consequences. The psychotic thing though is that he liked doing this, he wanted to plan this very strategically and leave his legacy of the perfect murder and for his work to be studied and solved if even possible.

The two characters are very much alike, but most defiantly different in motive. The two characters were alike because they were both absolute psychopath’s. Justice Wargave enjoyed killing even when he was a boy, as did Norman bates or at least it was acceptable to him. I think though there were a lot more dissimilarity between the two. Norman Bates seemed to be more of a case of a mental breakdown from seeing his mom intimate with someone in bed. The event horrified him in a way that made him snap by killing both his mother and her lover. Because he himself didn’t realize he was capable of performing this, he took on another personality besides his own which was that of his mother in a strange and deranged way. He dressed like his mother by wearing her cloths and wig, while also preserving her corpse, which is why some of the characters in the story thought the killer was his mother and that something was going on that was too fishy between both him and his mom. So in his case I believe he was brought into psychopathy because he mentally couldn’t handle something and was pushed to a limit that broke him, while Justice Wargrave is a textbook psycho.

Justice Wargrave is a textbook psycho because he was ok in everything he did, and was completely dedicated to what he did. To him it seemed as something that was also a belief that should have been studied. Even though the book refers to him having these impulses at a young age, it looks like it was just something he believed in and that wasn’t out of the ordinary. I understand completely why he did everything he did, the only thing that makes him sane or not is the standards to which he solved his problem and how we would/should have. This is also true of all psychos, the thing that divides them from being sane or not to our standards is the manner in which they do, say, and believes in something.