Vertigo

I was thirteen and had already seen The Birds (I found its long melodramatic set-up boring) and Spellbound (which, true to the title, transfixed me with its psychological mysteries and eerie atmosphere). Iknew that Hitchcock movies generally had mysteries, that they were full ofsuspense and tension. However, when Madelaine fell off that tower, as far as Iknew the movie was over. I hoped it wasn’t – I was eagerly anticipating somesort of surprise or further revelation, and was so wrapped up in itsfeverish atmosphere that I didn’t want it to end. And, sure enough, it didn’t.

I watched the movie with a younger audience as well; in highschool the cross-country coach would often play classic films during thelunchbreak. This usually didn’t go over well, and this time was no exception – mypeers sniggered at the plot holes and the older style of acting, and grewrestless at Hitch’s glacial pace during the “following” scenes. I was theirage, of course, but in high school I loved this movie perhaps more than anyother – its only close competitors were Lawrenceof Arabia, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver and on most days, itoutpaced them all. Like Taxi Driver,it had an adolescent intensity and a deeply subjective point of view (whatteenager doesn’t think they’re the center of the universe?).

However, that subjectivity subtly shifts throughout andwatching the film again today I’m struck by how quietly aware the screenplayand direction are of other perspectives. Driving around with Scotty as hefollows his friend’s wife, floating along with Bernard Herrmann’s hypnoticscore, we find ourselves immersed in a trancelike identification with Scotty’sgaze. And yet frequently Hitchcock lingers on Scotty’s unfortunate femalefriend Midge, most memorably when she tries to paint herself into Scotty’s lovelife and ends up feeling foolish. We view Madeleine as a mystery but later,when we learn she’s Judy, we go back and watch the movie, trying to tease outwhere performance ends and personality begins. Where can we see thefrightened actress peeking through the façade of the icy blonde?

And of course, halfway through the movie, Hitchcock pullsthe curtain altogether. It’s an interesting move, and I still wonder what thefilm would play like if the story took a different tack. How would we viewScotty’s grooming of Judy if we didn’t know she who she really was? Or what iflittle clues had been planted, so that we suspected her identity (the flashbackfollows a scene which very convincingly dispels any suggestion of continuity)but couldn’t quite figure out how this was the same woman Scotty had fallen inlove with? All intriguing possibilities, but the boldness of this stroke givesthe film a tantalizing ambiguity, complicating its subjectivity.

As in Psycho, wehave switched the character we identify with. In Psycho the switch happens relatively early in the film, so we canmake a complete break and mentally shift gears, startling as it is. In Vertigo, however, we’ve basicallyalready watched an entire movie and we can’t totally abandon Scotty. This structure is very unusual; I can’t think of many others films which end their plot but continue their story, eventually inventing a new plot to carry the weight. Vertigo effectively concludes after an hour and fifteen minutes – this iswhy I sensed, with some anxiety on first viewing, that the movie could end atany point. Yet it keeps going. Nothing prepares us for that continuity (nothingaccept our expectations that Hollywood films will emotionally resolvethemselves) and this gives the rest of the movie a kind of uneasy, freefloatingfragility.

By the hour-and-a-half mark, we’ve soared free from the constraints of amechanical plot – or inverting that understanding, we’re being sucked into awhirlpool in which emotional intensity grinds up the narrative boat carrying us across the churning water. Judy’s letter gives us another narrative hook – now we havesomething to anticipate – but its shock and the film’s accumulated emotionalbaggage keep us from getting too involved in any “plot”: now the film is purecharacter. Indeed, when the film concludes a second time it hasn’t emotionallyresolved anything. It has “solved”the plot – now Scotty knows the truth, and Judy is dead so their relationshiphas nowhere else to go (her death has a random, what-else-do-we-do-now? feel asif it’s anticipating the violent endings of so many sixties films).

Yet at this point we don’t really care about the plotanymore. Indeed, notice how nobody brings up the police or Gavin or poorMadeleine except inasmuch as she served as a catalyst for their personaltraumas. The law and morality are not at stake, what’s at stake is thecharacters’ psychological well-being. This can never be resolved, except bydeath. To the extent the movie has a consistent arc from beginning to end, it’sScotty’s agoraphobia, but this is one of Hitchcock’s most transparentMacGuffins to the point that it doesn’t even serve as an audience hook after awhile. Most people wouldn’t even remember that by film’s end Scotty is “cured”of the problem that assailed him in the first scene. Yes, there he is standingatop the bell tower, looking down without fear. Whoopdedoo – he’s just lost thelove of his life. Again.

The movie is remarkable for both mystifying and demystifyingwomen. We are as subject to Scotty’s yearning awe for Madeleine as he is:Hitchcock presents her from afar, the voyeur’s perspective, and even when she’sin a bathrobe in Scotty’s apartment she’s cool and distant, the ultimateHollywood glamour queen. Occasionally, Scotty leers at her, as if they’ve justbeen to bed but they haven’t – he merely changed her clothes and tucked her inafter she “fell” into the San Francisco Bay. Scotty’s persona in relation toMadeleine and Judy is complex - he sees himself as Madeleine's protector and Judy's Svengali but he's a victim in the first case and a dupe in the second. While feeling the pain of his own loss and confusion, he doesn't seem to notice the suffering he causes in others.

Scotty adores the ideal and seems to be indifferent to thereal person underneath (he’s apparently satisfied by Judy’s cosmetic changes asif making love to Madeleine’s body is equivalent to restoring her soul). Thisis why the revelation of Judy’s identity is so brilliant – on the surface we’dexpect it to make us sympathize more with Scotty, knowing that he had the woolpulled over his eyes, but instead it makes his behavior seem stranger and morecontrolling. Because we know Madeleine lives, that indeed she’s right underScotty's nose, we’re less inclined to pity his obsessive need to reshape reality.Hitchcock, as ever, brilliantly knows how to guide the audience’s attention: wemay congratulate ourselves for breaking the spell and discovering the idealizedwoman’s humanity but how often do we think about the fact that she’s anaccomplice to murder? We have merely switched or complicated our subjectiveviewpoint – we haven’t discovered an objective one.

When thinking about Scotty’s obsessive, overpowering desiresand frustrations, a few literary antecedents come to mind. One is Fitzgerald’sGatsby: "Can't repeat the past?...Why of course you can!" Yet Scotty is no naive, almost childlike believer ala Gatsby - he knows the pain, and the permanence, of loss and failure. That's why the other literary figure is Kierkegaardwith his veneration of the “knight of faith.” Here he is in Fear and Loathing: "I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible." If Scotty believes in God, he never lets on; Hitchcock's universe is full of Catholic guilt but without its opposite - the atmosphere is charged with a kind of spirituality but no divine being, and Hitch's God is like Bergman's, either absent or malevolently offscreen. Yet Scotty does believes wholeheartedly in the absurd, not intellectually but intuitively. This is why he keeps making Judy over and over, superficially that it won't really transform her into Madeleine, yet somehow believing deep down that it will.

And, astonishingly, Judy does "transform" into the real Madeleine - had Hitchcock thrown out the letter-writing scene (as he almost did; it wasn't in the novel and he second-guessed himself in post-production) the revelation of the necklace would have seemed even more like a sort of transubstantiation, as if through elaborate ritual a spirit had been reawakened. In another sense, since Judy was the real one all along, this is the scene in which Madeleine finally dies, or rather ceases to exist - ceases to ever have existed. The struggle on the stairway is striking in part because for once there's no music playing; the demystification is complete and we're left only with the stark lighting and Scotty's sneering, shouting vocal delivery. The trance is broken. Yet even knowing what we know, we keep coming back to Vertigo, and keep falling under its spell. That's because in a sense, at least when it comes to movies, Gatsby and Scotty are right: you can repeat the past. Our knowledge transforms what we see, yet the visceral pull remains, and once again we find ourselves gliding after a spirit. Because Scotty believes in the myth of Madeleine, for the moment the truth of the lie, the reality of the myth, remains. Judy's reality emerges, but it does not destroy Scotty's.

If cinema teaches us anything, it's this: there is no such thing as false consciousness.