Have A Great Summer, Norma Bates!
When Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) says, in Psycho, that "A boy's best friend is his mother," the viewer is supposed to be put off, discomfited, and depending on how active her imagination is, scandalized about what exactly he might mean by the word "friend." I mean, the dude apparently has no other contact with the outside world at all; what are these two weirdos getting up to in that creepy old house? But now that Bates Motel exists, it all makes sense: if you knew Norma Bates, wouldn't you want to be her best friend?!
Oh sure, Norma (Vera Farmiga) has her faults, all of which were catalogued in the season finale: she has a hard time managing her rage (viz "Screw off, shithead!"), she's distrustful, she's impulsive (girl, don't ask your kid to get you a gun...), she's inconsistent (...and then try to take umbrage that he has the kind of job that would require him to have a gun). And, yes, she might be a little too attached to her son Norman (Freddie Highmore) in a way that she should possibly be discussing with her shrink (Hiro Kanagawa), but at least last night we found out why: with Norma's admission to Norman that, during her childhood, she was repeatedly raped by her brother, a crucial piece of Norma's backstory fell into place. Given that, and the fact that her two sons ended up a petty criminal and a multiple murderer, Norma's actually doing pretty well.
Seriously, how psyched must Vera Farmiga have been every day to show up to work on the Bates set? For starters, it's in Canada, so she could start her mornings with a delicious Tim Hortons Maple Dip donut. And from there, she got to dig her teeth all the way in to a role with a lot more dimension than the one she was actually Oscar-nominated for. Though I was an early Farmiga detractor after seeing her in The Departed and Up In The Air, I fell deeply and seriously in love with Farmiga, and her naturalistic acting style, in her tremendous directorial debut, Higher Ground, and though legitimately crazy Norma doesn't have that much in common with Ground's spiritually conflicted Corinne, I think the two could actually hang: Norma would offer Corinne a place to stay away from her stifling husband, and Corinne would help Norma hide a body -- you know, whichever body happened to be hanging around at the time.
What makes Norma so magnetic -- other than that she's crazy -- is that her desperate pursuit of her own survival is totally unpredictable. Will she go to the authorities this time? Will she employ extralegal methods to solve her various very big problems? Will she allow herself to rely on one or both of her sons? When and why will she try to sex her way out of a scrape? And speaking of sex: since we saw her get into bed with Norman last week, when and under what circumstances is she finally going to close the deal with him?
Highmore plays a different kind of crazy person, of course, but at least he had the Psycho Norman as a template to work from. Farmiga had the much harder job of creating a character we easily believe could have warped him so badly that he'd end up committing psychosexual murders but still be so compelling and charismatic that he wouldn't want to get away from her even if he could. I don't want to get away from her either and I am going to miss her like mad until the show comes back.
Update: Rich Juzwiak just posted a supercut of Norma's best freakouts. It's very important that you watch.