Bates Motel: Primer and Homebase

[eevilalice]

Welcome to the homebase for the A&E series, Bates Motel. Each week you'll find a thread for the newest episode, so we can discuss its twists and horrors together.

First, a primer.


Bates Motel is a modern day prequel to Hitchcock's Psycho, centering on Norman and his mother, Norma, as they move to the titular motel in a coastal Oregon town. Norma is hoping for a new start for herself and Norman after her husband's death, and buying and running the run-down motel is her plan. Of course, there are plenty of unforeseen complications, especially since the town has a touch of Twin Peaks strangeness and corruption to it.

I know what you're thinking. A Psycho prequel? Really? Two things should convince you to give the show a shot: its pedigree and its cast. Among others, the series is (executive) produced by Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Kerry Ehrin (Friday Night Lights). It both builds intrigue and mysteries while creating complex characters. And then it scares the crap out of you.

Cast/Characters (As of Season 2)

Vera Farmiga plays Norma Bates.



She's high-strung, cloying, yet honestly put-upon and sincerely caring. She's smart but vulnerable at times. You may not be able to stand her at all, and you may deeply sympathize with her, all within one episode.

Freddie Highmore plays Norman Bates.



Like Norma, you might feel sorry for Norman or be terrified or horribly creeped out by him in the space of a breath. Often he's simply a normal teenage boy by all appearances, crushing on girls, wanting his own space, sneaking out late at night. Buuut then there's the blackouts and weird stuff he keeps under his bed...

Max Thieriot plays Dylan Massett.



Dylan is Norma's other, older son, and Norman's half-brother. He's more of an outsider, and drifts into town and into their lives against Norma's wishes. He clashes with the family, especially when he urges Norman to live his own life, but he proves indispensable, too.

Olivia Cooke plays Emma Decody.



Emma is a smart, inquisitive girl in Norman's class who quickly develops an interest in him. She has cystic fibrosis and sees Norman's own strange health issues and outsider-y status as something akin to hers.

Nestor Carbonell plays Sheriff Alex Romero.



As sheriff, Romero and Norma butt heads as she struggles to accomplish what she wants with the motel and deals with, er, other complications. Given the town's penchant for ongoing shady activities, Romero is someone who is tough to read.


You can stream Season 1 episodes on Netflix, Amazon, and at the A&E site.

The second season begins Monday, March 3rd! Episodes air at 9/8c 10/9c.

Comments

Re: 2.04 Check-Out

[eevilalice]

Nope, that's where the episode ended.

This episode was a lot about being on the inside or outside (or feeling that way). Emma points out how close she's been with Norma, Norman, and Dylan when she asks what's going on (and later she notes that Norma won't like Cody), but Norman ends up telling Cody more than he does her. Dylan of course understands why he's been on the "outside" of the family his whole life, but I thought it was interesting that he hints at what Norman doesn't know about himself--something Norma confided in Dylan. I suppose you could also extend the inside/outside theme to Norma and White Pine Bay society. And, ultimately, Norman goes so inside he internalizes and becomes Norma.

"The truth" seems to be the dividing line for who's inside and who feels left out (who knows it and who doesn't) and also prevents people from seeing truth (in the case of Dylan). I thought this episode was really heart-wrenching all around (except for the nice contrast of Emma and Gunner, which is still mixed up in Emma's different view of her mortality).

I feel bad for both Norma AND Dylan. We've been living with the idea of what happened to Norma since the season one finale. But this is literally the day after Dylan's learned who Caleb really is. He's lived his life feeling excluded from this family without knowing why (and now we know why, although we might have guessed). He meets a family member he's never known about who confirms his view of his mother and is, as Dylan says, nicer to him than Norma generally is (this episode, when Norma's at her most tender, tucking Dylan in, he's passed out and doesn't witness her tenderness). He gets this bomb dropped on him, but when he sees Caleb again, after he says "You had sex with my mother," note that after that he says, "You MADE her have sex with you." Note also that this is the way that Norma first expressed things to Norman when she told him. Then there's this weird thing where Caleb is genuinely surprised to hear Dylan say he's his son and proclaims that it wasn't "exactly" like that, and Norma got pregnant by her high school boyfriend, whom she married. Dylan asks if he's calling his mother a liar, and Caleb says no. He gives him the money back, which indeed makes it at least seem like he wasn't grifting him.

Later when Norma asks to talk (something Dylan had asked to do before), it reads to Dylan like another instance of Norma thinking about herself as she asks him not to make things harder for her than they already are. She tells him to be strong and put it behind him, which is the Norma way of dealing with things. To be fair, it does feel here like she's not expressing how big a deal this is for him or not understanding why he can't "put it away" as she's had to do all these years. When Norma brings up that Caleb is a bad person and just wanted money, of course it's the perfect opportunity for Dylan to rationalize that he's not since he gave the money back (honestly, I'm still not sure why Caleb did or if this was partially his intent or if he just wanted to wash his hands of everything, surprised that Norma told and/or has a different way of seeing things).

In the final confrontation, Dylan does seem to be sticking with Caleb's version of the story to start, calling it Norma's "mess." She reiterates that she was raped, and he says Caleb has a different version. Norma says that's because Caleb didn't know; she never told anyone. And this is the moment when Dylan asks why she had him, which is heart-stopping. He lays out the theory that she "got knocked up" by Caleb (and this wording neither contests or affirms that he believes he raped her) and let her boyfriend think it was his so she could get out of the house (to escape her father or her father AND Caleb?). He feels he was used before he was even born; to him, this is behavior typical of Norma. In a phrase we've heard before during this episode, Norma says it "wasn't like that" and tearfully explains how young and powerless she was, and Dylan tears up too. I noticed that she's not denying the basic premise of what Dylan has said, just the idea of maliciously, selfishly using him. And of course that it was neither Dylan's fault nor hers. Dylan storms out, upset, before we know what he thinks now. Basically, I think he's fucked up and confused, and I get that.

So, yeah, it's a tragedy all around. I see them both as victims in this--Norma says it herself.

I feel like there are A LOT of scenes with Norma getting dressed and one of her sons walking in, hm?

Katy Perry's "Roar": priceless.

Re: 2.04 Check-Out

[selenak]

re: Norman telling Cody more than he tells Emma: I wonder whether this is because he already has a bit of a Madonna/Whore complex, i.e. Emma is GOOD with capital letters, therefore he can't tell her anything about the Dylan-Norma-Caleb revelations, whereas he sees Cody as a bad girl?

You make a good case for Dylan (and also the timing, i.e. it's still not 24 hours of finding out for him). I would like to point out, though, that in terms of Caleb being nicer to him than Norma generally is that this is a two way road. Obviously Norma must have started it back in Dylan's childhood, but when we first see them interact on the show in s1, it is Dylan who is dealing out the insults and making the accusations (while Norma counters with passive-aggressiveness and sometimes open hostility, but most of their early s1 scenes typically go: Dylan: strolls in, makes insullt, usually either about Norma's sex life or her clinginess with Norman; Norma: seethes, snaps back. She doesn't initialize). When they change their behaviour towards each other mid season after Shelby and the revelaton about Sam Bates, it is, again, a two way road: both of them start to treat the other differently. Norma starts conversations with Dylan, Dylan tries to help by bringing guests to the motel, neither of them pokes at the other, and it culminates with her openly asking him for help in the form of teaching her how to use a gun and the gun lesson, which is probably their closest moment to date. What I'm getting at here is that while I think Dylan's early s1 default mode of insulting Norma was probably the result of wanting attention (and even negative attention is attention) and figuring out this was one way to get it from her as a teenager, it still makes "he's been nicer to me than you ever were" a bit disingenious. Dylan didn't call Caleb a whore or told him he was crazy or insinuated Caleb must have killed his spouse during those two conversations they had before the big reveal. (Just as a point of comparison, Christine could probably describe Norma as one of the nicest people in the town based on their three or so encounters - during none of which she's seen Norma in attack mode, or Norma in possessive manipulative mode with Norman, nor Norma rejecting emotional overtures - because there were no situations yet where Norma would showcase her darker side, and because Christine has been consistently nice to Norma during those few encounters.) So for Dylan to compare Caleb's and Norma's behavior towards him, leaving aside "two or three meetings versus a life time", he'd have had to stroll into Caleb's motel room, declare he's moving in complete with sexual insult and barely veiled threat that he knows there is something fishy about the death of Caleb's hypothetical late spouse and he'll tell that to the local authorities.

Moving away from Dylan for a moment, and on to Caleb, do I think the fatherhood factor was news to him? Entirely possible, especially if Norma, as she later says, didn't tell him back then. It's also entirely possible he convinced himself she wanted to have sex with him; a lot of rapists do. But if Norma was 13 when it started (which is the age she names in her conversation with Norman), there is no way Caleb, who doesn't strike me as mentally handicapped, would have been unaware that she wasn't in a position to give meaningful consent even under the best of circumstances, which theirs were not. (I'm reminded of Samantha Greimer, Roman Polanski's victim, also 13 when she got raped, who when describing the whole encounter said she does believe he didn't think of it as rape. But she's equally clear on that this was exactly what it was.) And the phrase he himself used to describe young Norma to Dylan in their bar conversation - "a trusting little girl" - doesn't even sound as if he has mentally cast her as Lolita.

Re: the "why did you have me?" In retrospect, two things are very striking to me there - on the one hand, Dylan's self loathing expressed by the question, but on the other, also that the question reveals he thinks of Norma as she is now, an adult woman capable to make informed choices and to think things through (well, in a Norma way), to make calculations. It is understandable because most children (adult or not) do that, they cast their parents as adults a generation older because that was their experience. But when Norma got pregnant, she was a panicked teenager in a horrible situation with absolutely no one's help. Younger than Norman or Bradley. But until he's had more time to process, I suppose, he won't be able to consider that.