How I met Norman's mother

Iam not usually enthusiastic about having a camera aimed at me. Even when travelling in scenic places, I'd rather someone just took a candid shot instead of expecting me to grin moronically at a lens. Which in no way explains why, if you chanced to visit the Cinematheque Francaise museum in Paris on a particular Friday last month, you would have found me squatting next to Mrs Bates' skull and grinning moronically at a lens. And then doing it again, to get another angle; and then yet again, after checking the light settings and tut-tutting; all the while keeping an eye out for the museum police who frowned at photography on the premises.

But these were special circumstances. Mrs Bates is the shadowy protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which changed my life when I was 13, getting me thinking about cinema as art and seeking out analytical literature about movies. She makes her famous appearance in the film's climax, in a creaky (by today's standards) but unsettling scene in the basement, where we discover that Norman Bates's mother is not a living, domineering shrew but a long-dead, carefully preserved corpse.

If I had wanted my illusions to be just as well-preserved, I would have avoided going to the museum at all, so that I would know her only as she appears in the film. There was something both comical and poignant about seeing "her" in a glass cage at the Cinematheque. Bathed in yellow light, she stood out from a distance in the otherwise darkened room; the idea was presumably to make her look spooky, but it also drew attention to her as an exhibit, something that visitors could point and chortle at (or sit down next to and smile stupidly for a camera). Besides, she was unexpectedly small. (What was I expecting? A two-foot-tall skull with shark-like teeth?)

Viewing other artefacts in the museum - such as the starfish in the jar from Man Ray's 1928 film The Sea Star, and costumes from Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast - was just as ambivalent an experience. Props and objects that have immediate and vivid associations for a viewer can, when removed from their familiar contexts, become banal and smaller than life. Cocteau's film was in gorgeous black and white, but these costumes were in "real-world" colour, and they seemed garish, almost vulgar compared to the images from the film. There was a series of still photos from the Beauty and the Beast set, which showed the blandly handsome actor Jean Marais applying the layers of makeup that would transform him into the imperious, tragic Beast. For anyone who has been immersed in the otherworldly milieu of Cocteau's film, these stills are an exercise in demystification; with a movie like that, which gives the impression of having sprung fully formed from an alternate universe, you don't want to be reminded that it was shot by a cast and crew, that were probably doing mundane things like talking about the day's news or taking cigarette breaks in between shots.

Yet such experiences can also forge a new, more measured respect for the creative process - the processes by which everyday things can be transmuted into magic and art. Returning to Mrs Bates: here is this wrinkled little skull replica, not particularly authentic-looking or scary when you see it in isolation. Yet someone designed it keeping in mind a film's lighting and colour scheme, and the desired Grand Guignol-like effect of the climactic revelation. They arranged it just so, placing it in a chair that would swivel around dramatically; at the crucial moment a swinging lightbulb cast shadows over it, making the eye sockets seem alive and menacing; and the music score added to the effect of the scene.

And here she was over 50 years later, outside of the film, in a polychrome world, staring blankly at me from her glass home. It was a little deflating, but the sense of mystery wasn't completely gone. For a moment I fancied I could hear Mother's famous cackle from the film, and one of her many memorable lines: "They know I can't move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me."

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer