Two Curtains
In Baum’s Oz, Toto removes the screen between us and the truth—“a little old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face, who seemed to be as much surprised as they were.” Toto who, Baum tells us, “made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings”—a relentless sun and wind that stole the red from Auntie Em’s features so that, when Dorothy first arrived, “Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart.”
Toto pulls the curtain open and poof!, the enormous powerful head of the wizard vanishes; poof! to Dorothy’s childhood, poof! to puffed up father figures. Poof, of course, to the Technicolor of Oz. The curtain has revealed the gray behind it, and to this endless grayness she must return.
Em awaits her, awaits that child’s laugh that cracks her heart, only the sound never reaches her ears. Does Em dance around the bed? Yes! Dorothy peeks out of mostly closed eyes to see her Em twirling into a W[1] Does she get it then? Does she see the real trap, the real witch stealing her life force? If she does, she doesn’t reveal it to anyone. But she knows.
She grows up gray, Toto and Em turn to gray dust, and one day she awakens in Phoenix, Arizona, as Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s Psycho. She’s met Sam, more dead than alive, buried under the debt of his father and the alimony owed an ex-wife. That first opened curtain taught her to settle—and now, in such men, resides her hope for happiness. She steals $40,000 for Sam; she flees Phoenix on a psychotic drive, propelled by a never-satisfied void first glimpsed when the man in her dreams turned out to be a balding grey-haired humbug and Em turned out to be the witch who wanted to be in her shoes.
In that parlor of the Bates Motel, our grown-up Dorothy returns to that child’s dark dream. The stuffed birds, the haunted house, a disembodied voice, a mummified mother, a peep hole and, of course, Norman, clinging to that past like a little boy to his mother. Norman allows her this glimpse into the psychotic night, one that drives away the everyday, that forces upon her the truth of where she’s headed. Norman saves her. She steps into the cleansing promised by that baptismal shower.
And Norman—Marion’s mirrored Self disguised as Mother—fully reveals her to us, himself to her.
As she turns in response to the feel and SOUND of the shower curtain being torn aside. A look of pure horror erupts in her face. A low terrible groan begins to rise up out of her throat. A hand comes into the shot. The hand holds an enormous bread knife. The flint of the blade shatters the screen to an almost total, silver blankness. [2]
Two curtains, each one pulled back, revealing a lie. The first uncovered the ugly truths of her world and then sent her back to live with them; and the second showed her that the promised escape offered by boys in parlors disguises yet another trap, cutting her out of the world.
[1]Bonnie Friedman’s “Relinquishing Oz: Every Girl’s Anti-Adventure Story” makes this connection between Em and Witch. She also says the ruby red slippers are a vagina.
[2]Stefano, Joseph. “Psycho.” (Screen play). 1 Dec 1959.