Updated 7/11/10

Does this image ring a bell?

True Blood is alluding to Janet Leigh’s iconographic scream in Alfred Hitchcock’s, Psycho, the first psychoanalytical thriller.

That’s because True Blood is full of psycho serial killers: René, Amy, Maryann, Eggs, Steve, Luke, Lorena, Franklin Mott, and Bill.

Maxine called Hoyt Norman Bates, but she was wrong. In True Blood, it is Bill Compton who is Norman Bates.

To begin with, Bill has a creepy dilapidated house of horrors on a hill, just like Norman.

And the beautiful blond woman he’s interested in lives just across the field, just like Norman.

There’s a big old dead tree, a tree with two branches stretched out like arms outside of her house. Not too different from the one that was in Sookie’s front yard.

People seem to die all around him, and he has mother issues. Boy does he have mother issues, just like Norman. The words used to describe Norman’s mother, when she was still alive, could equally be said of Bill’s, “She was a clinging demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world.”

Of course Norman Bates keeps his dead mother alive only in his head while Bill’s is kept alive, like all vampires, by magic.

Norman keeps his dead mother’s body in his house.

Bill’s mother kept dead bodies in the house.

His ward does, too, for that matter. It seems to be a family trait. Does Bill have any bodies stashed away, making him even more Norman-like?

If Bill is psycho like Norman, it is his mother that triggers his murderous rage. We know that he hates her and resents her for giving him life, for make no mistake, that’s what she did. Lorena conferred life on Bill, not death. He acknowledged that he would have been dead within a day if he had not found Lorena. There is no way he would have made it 20 miles back home to Bon Temps without her. It is not life that Bill wishes for. It is his death that Lorena stole from him.

To understand the how Bill sees Lorena, we have to remember that vampires don’t view age the same way we do. Pam can’t judge human ages the same way we can’t judge vampire ages. Vampires seem to be able to though. Jessica has been characterized as a baby vamp. Bill, in his dream, on his knees, three years a vampire, with his mother constantly hovering over him, was a toddler, and Pam, judging from her sarcasm, eye rolling, and interaction with Lafayette, is a teen at 100 years old. So, if vampires see the internal age of the vampire instead of the frozen image we do, when Bill looks at his mother, he sees the same thing that Godric did, an old vampire.

Probably something closer to the way that Gran or Olivia look than this:

That is why he lashes out at elderly women when he’s enraged by Lorena. The first time we saw this was when Bill was reminded of his family by Mayor Norris and of Lorena by Andy’s interest in his wrought iron toaster. Soon after those two events, Sookie finds Gran dead, stabbed over fifty times with a knife and nearly decapitated.

René has no association with a knife, committing all of his murders with his belt. However, the night that someone cut the screen to enter Sookie’s room and stab Gran, Bill was shown in his flashback cutting his way into Lorena’s cabin with one that looked to be about 14-16 inches long, about the size that would have been used to murder Gran.

Make no mistake, René did not kill Adele Stackhouse. Bill did and subsequently implanted a false memory of the crime into René’s head. There are several clues to what happened in René’s memory. The first and most obvious being that his memory does not coincide with the actual crime scene. In René’s mind, Adele fell face down.

You might think that was done to conceal the identity of the stand-in that was used, but we are shown the actor’s face clearly throughout the scene.

Bill also murdered Olivia. As he approached her house, this is what he was remembering:

When he entered, this is what he recalled.

When he approached Lorena’s cabin, starving and in pain his upper arm and left breast were bleeding. Gus and Cooter cut him in the same places renewing that old painful memory.

Notice the gaping hole in Bill’s chest.

So Bill was reliving his last human moments, dirty, hungry, and hurting, when he found the same thing in Olivia’s house that he found in Lorena’s, food, which he fell on eagerly and devoured.

But you thought that Bill just took a little blood, cleaned Olivia up, put a fresh nightgown on her, bandaged her wounds, inserted her oxygen tube, and glamoured her, right?

Didn’t you pay attention to the video about how to survive a werewolf attack? Staying hydrated is of primary importance. In fact, in the video, Bill, confronting four wolves and ripping Louie’s ear off, is the poster boy for a well fed vampire.

If three healthy hydrated vampires can drain Destiny just to fulfill their daily nutritional requirements, what would a starving vampire do to a little old lady in poor health, even assuming that he didn’t give her a heart attack?

The issue becomes, if Bill killed Olivia, how did we see him glamour her? The answer is that Sookie is narrating the show. She only knows what Bill at some point in the future will tell her about the incident, and we know what a liar Bill is.

We think Bill glamoured Olivia because that’s what he told Sookie he did.

The clues are there for those not willing to buy into Bill’s version of the event. In addition to the attack instruction manual, there is Rene’s false memory of Gran’s murder. Notice the cane back chairs. These are the dining room chairs. Bill is as confused about human eating areas as Pam is about human ages because they are meaningless to him now. Also note image that looks like a glass of red wine on the table. That is not wine, it’s syrup, but it represents Gran in Bill’s mind. She is just a vessel that contains his food.

Bill makes the same mistake at Olivia’s house, confusing the dining room and kitchen. Her dining room table is in the breakfast room, and the breakfast table is in the dining room.* To get oriented, Olivia is standing in her living room. Behind her you can see the edge of the piano on the left and the table on the right with the change of flooring from carpet to linoleum.

The problem is that isn’t her breakfast table. It is the larger, nicer dining room table with a decorative centerpiece. Take a close look at that basket. Click on the second image to see the larger size. The basket has a red design in the shape of a wine glass. It corresponds to the image that looks like a glass of wine on Gran’s table, and tells us what Bill really sees when he looks at Olivia. She is the vessel that he intends to drink from. When Olivia walks by the basket and turns asking Bill what he would like to eat, he attacks.

The smaller messy breakfast table with dirty dishes and the detritus of daily life isn’t in the breakfast room. It’s behind the sofa in the otherwise pristine combined living and dining space. Bill’s lack of discernment when it comes to dining spaces has once again caused him to put the furniture in the wrong rooms. We are only given a glimpse of this table after Bill has glamoured us and after he has drained Olivia. Notice the empty glass on the table. Olivia is now an empty vessel because Bill has drained her. Not coincidentally, after he drains Sookie, an empty glass appears on her bedside table at the hospital.

Bill didn’t just leave behind an empty glass, he also apparently left a cleaned plate.* See it on the wall over Bill’s shoulder? It was not there before.

The screencap below isn’t definitive, but in the show, there is a clear view of the whole area with no plate to be seen as Olivia leads Bill to the kitchen.

Bill drained the glass and cleaned the plate when he killed Olivia recalling his last human meal at Lorena’s when he did the same thing.

Added:

One of the interpretations of Psycho is that Norman’s house represents his id, ego, and superego. Mother lives upstairs in the superego, Norman is usually seen on the first floor representing the rational ego, and the basement represents the id. When Norman moves Mother from upstairs to the basement he is reinforcing the strong connection between the id and the superego. This coincides with the True Blood analysis I did identifying Lorena as Bill’s superego.  In fact, Russell’s house could be equated with Norman’s. Lorena spends much more time with Bill upstairs in the superego part of house. Russell spends most time with him on the first floor, the ego, which is what he represents, and Lorena ends up in the slave quarters, Bill’s id.

*Thanks to Enjoying and Sunny Nala for their detailed observations of Olivia’s house
**This post is based on Sunny Nala’s ideas about what really happened to Gran and Olivia.
***Screencaps courtesy of truebloodnet.com andDaydreaming.
****’Psycho’ is based a novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. The novel was based on the crimes of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Geincontinuing AB’s pattern of drawing from sources that have multiple iterations.

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