Buried in studies of a nature
more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by
that sweet word alone – by Ligeia – that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the
image of her who is no more.
Edgar Allen
Poe, Ligeia.
In
2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was
elevated to the top of Sight and Sound’s
poll of the greatest films of all time, finally unseating Welles’ Citizen Kane from the perch it had
maintained with peculiar tenacity since 1962.
This represented the culmination of a critical reappraisal which had been
a long time in the making. Vertigo drew mixed critical reaction on
its initial release, and did tepid box office comparative to Hitchcock’s
previous hits. Hitch’s ownership kept it
out of circulation for a decade, so its critical stature only began to gather
real momentum when it re-emerged for distribution in 1983.
Nowadays,
Vertigo is considered as integral a
part of the cannon – both of Hitchcock and cinema generally – as it comes. Nevertheless, there remains a certain
minority not entirely persuaded by Vertigo. I recall a friend many years ago who just
couldn’t get into it, despite being a big film buff and admirer of most
Hitchcock pictures. His problem was with
the credibility of the plot. In
fairness, there is no denying that on a literal level, the resolution of Vertigo’s mystery is almost impossible
to swallow, or “devilishly far-fetched” as Bosley Crowther put it back in the
day. One might also wonder at
Hitchcock’s peculiar decision to depart from the original novel and reveal the
story’s twist two thirds of the way through, rather than at the end. It is probably this logical straining of the
plot which prompted critic Tom Shone – in his 2004 book Blockbuster – to argue that “Hitchcock is a director who delights
in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming shine, and so the Sight and Sound team praise the one film
of his in which this is not the case – it’s all loose ends and lopsided angles,
its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure.”
Vertigo is a film of two distinct parts,
each ending with the fall (or apparent fall in the first) of Kim Novak’s
character from the bell tower of the Mission San Juan Bautista. In the first part, the audience, like
Stewart’s character John “Scotty” Ferguson, is enraptured and deceived. In the second, the dream is gradually
decoded, and everything is different.
Ferguson, sympathetic in the first half, becomes a domineering bully and
fetishist; Novak, so remarkable as the haunted society woman Madeleine, is a little more exaggerated,
and consequently less convincing, in her performance as the earthier working-class
Judy. The great spell of the first half
– its hypnotic sense of surrender to waking dreams and the ghostly persistence
of the past – has to give way in the climax to a rational explanation, to the
mechanics of plot. For this reason,
dissatisfaction with Vertigo – the
sense of its “loose ends and lopsided angles” – tends to be focused on this
second half of the picture.
Nevertheless,
even if we grant this criticism of Vertigo’s
strained plot, I still think it’s a pretty strong candidate for the Sight and Sound title - bearing in mind
of course how subjective and chimerical the notion that any film could be the
greatest of all time. Nobody has ever
denied that Vertigo is immaculately
directed and acted, but this is only a component of its distinction and
greatness – there is an extra quality to Vertigo,
something that transcends its magisterial craftsmanship as much as it does any
logical contortions of the plot. The
only metaphor that springs immediately to mind to get at this is the illusory “Madeleine
Elster” that Ferguson falls desperately in love with. There are certain blunt, obvious reasons why
somebody might fall in love with Madeleine
- Kim Novak being a straight eleven on most scorecards. (I’m going to put “Madeleine” in italics to
avoid more tortured locutions like Judy
as Madeleine as Carlotta.) But Madeleine is more than simply a
ravishingly beautiful woman – she offers Ferguson something which is simultaneously
far more intoxicating and terrifying than mere surface glamour, however abundant. Madeline
is haunted by the presence of another woman, the tragic Carlotta Valdes, who is
herself a being of mutable facets: first the
beautiful Carlotta, then the sad Carlotta,
and finally the mad Carlotta. Madeleine
is a mystery, a sleepwalker down a darkened corridor of broken mirrors and
dream fragments, a woman struggling to assert her identity against some
supernatural current that pulls her into the past, into the cold fixity of an
old painting, to a premature engagement with the darkest place at the end of
the corridor. She is a presence through
which the primal forces and mysteries of sex, death, dream and time assert themselves. It’s little wonder Scottie had it so bad.
Little wonder,
too, that we have had it so bad for Vertigo
over the years. Like Madeleine, the surface beauty of its
craftsmanship is elevated by the sense that it is haunted by other presences
and endless subterranean corridors, by the uncanny sensation of something which
we know but cannot precisely articulate.
Woven around its familiar structure as a suspense/mystery story, Vertigo has a peculiarly dreamlike and
literary quality – it’s infused with poetry even in its most incidental
details, and becomes over repeated viewings one of those oddly labyrinthine
movies where every motif and idea recurs and repeats throughout in different
forms. The effect is like the image
which appears in the opening credits and later in Scottie’s nightmare – the
figure falling into a spiral, the spiral in Kim Novak’s hair, the spiral of the
past recurring in the present. Vertigo has the thematic richness and
aesthetic consistency of a great novel – or at least it seems to. How much of its suggestive power we can
ascribe to the source novel (D’entre les
morts, literally “from among the dead”, by Pierre Boileu and Pierre
Aryraud, which I haven’t read), how much to Hitchcock and his esteemed
collaborators, and how to our own imaginations, I cannot say. Movies are made in a pressurised scramble to
catch the light of a single day, and then linger with us for lifetimes. The following essay is an attempt to untangle
why Vertigo casts such a potent and
enduring spell over filmmakers and film lovers.
Some of the echoes and resonances I find in it are doubtless intentional
to its authors, some accidental, and others peculiar to my own viewing
sensibility. It seems apt enough that we
bring something of our imagination to bear on Vertigo, as it is a film in which we see the whole world, its
haunted San Francisco, through the enchanted and disordered eyes of its
protagonist, Scotty Ferguson.
To rehash Vertigo’s familiar plot for reference:
John “Scotty” Ferguson is a San Francisco detective who discovers during a
rooftop chase that he suffers from acrophobia.
Feeling guilt over the colleague who fell to his death trying to save
him, and a sense of inadequacy owing to his spells of vertigo, Scottie quits
the force and takes solace with his friend and one-time fiancé Midge. At a loose end, he finds himself reluctantly
employed by old college acquaintance Gavin Elster, now married into a shipping
fortune, to follow his wife Madeleine.
Elster claims that his wife has become possessed by a long dead woman –
Carlotta Valdes – and wants to know more about Madeleine’s daytime activities before involving doctors. Following Madeleine,
Scotty discovers a woman apparently in a trance, endlessly revisiting a handful
of historical San Francisco locations of some particular emotional
resonance. These include Carlotta
Valdes’ gravesite at the Mission Dolores (in reality the oldest surviving
structure in San Fran), and the art museum at the California Palace of the
Legion of Honor where Madeleine
studies a portrait of Carlotta. Madeleine appears to be modelling
herself after the figure in the portrait by carrying a bouquet of roses and
fashioning the back of her hair into a tight, spiral-like bun.
Having saved Madeleine from an apparent suicide bid
in San Francisco Bay, she and Scottie begin a tentative relationship. The clock, however, is ticking. Carlotta Valdes committed suicide at 26, the
same age Madeleine is now, and we
have a strong sense that Madeleine is
melting into Carlotta, and history destined to repeat itself. Scottie, however, believes that Madeleine can be saved, and the mystery
of her apparent possession explained rationally. Central to solving this mystery are Madeleine’s frequent dreams of an 18th
century Spanish monastery whose church has a large bell tower. This location seems to be the key, the locus
around which the spiral turns. Realizing
that these dreams are of a real place, the Mission San Juan Bautisa, Scottie
takes her there, hoping that its tangible reality will finally overwhelm her
delusions of possession. However, the
opposite results: having made a last avowal of her love, Madeleine runs into the church.
Scottie attempts to follow her up the spiral staircase of the bell tower
but is prevented from doing so by attacks of vertigo, and he watches helplessly
as Madeleine plunges to her death
from the top. In a sense, we have
returned to the beginning of the film, Scottie’s vertigo being the inadvertent
cause of somebody’s death, with the toll of grief and guilt more severe this
time around as it was the woman he loved.
We now move
into the second section of the film.
Scottie, grief-stricken to the point of madness, has become like Madeleine in the first: a ghostly figure,
haunted by the past, endlessly returning to San Francisco locations of an
obsessive personal significance. During
his wanderings he encounters a brunette, Judy Barton, who bears an uncanny
resemblance to Madeleine. Despite the physical resemblance, Judy is a
working girl from Salina, Kansas, who is earthier and more overtly sexual than Madeleine. In the aforementioned bizarre reveal, the
audience is immediately let in on the whole of the plot: Judy was employed by
Gavin Elster to impersonate his wife.
The Madeleine Scottie fell in
love with was a fiction, the Carlotta Valdes story an elaborate (painfully so,
to Vertigo’s detractors) ruse to
secure a witness for Madeleine Elster’s supposed suicide, in reality a bait and
switch murder carried out by Gavin for cold hard cash. However, in the midst of maintaining the Madeleine illusion, Judy really did fall
in love with Scottie, and so decides to indulge his courtship in the hope that
he might fall in love with her for who she really is. This, however, proves to be painful and
demanding, as Scottie is obsessively devoted to the idea of bringing Madeleine back to life to every last
detail. With meticulous care and often
tyrannical coercion, he makes Judy over as Madeleine,
changing her wardrobe and hair, and finally adding the last crucial detail: the
pinned spiral in the hair. With
everything in place, we have one of the cinema’s great raptures: the apotheosis
of romantic passion and perverse fetishism as Hitchcock’s camera wheels
gracefully around the couple, around the increasingly ambiguous hero who has
attained his impious goal, the impervious blonde goddess who represents a
symbol of unattainability in life, and becomes literally so in death.
The rapture is
short-lived. A piece of jewellery gives
Judy away, Scottie begins to suspect the truth, and we circle back to the bell
tower of the Mission San Juan, where Scottie overcomes his acrophobia and
forces Judy to confess. The sudden
appearance of a nun startles Judy, causing her to slip over the edge and thus
repeat the film’s inescapably tragedy. Vertigo concludes with Scottie, standing
in the bell tower, thrice grief-stricken and guilt-ridden, seemingly trapped in
a cycle of reliving the same tragedy, over and over, round and around.
Some of the
most common thematic resonances drawn from Vertigo
centre on the relationship of Scottie to Madeleine/Judy,
and particularly Scottie’s remodelling of the latter into the former in the
second part, so I’m going to look at them briefly before exploring the film’s
literary and mythical qualities. In a
general sense, Scottie’s fetishistic obsession with Madeleine reminds us of the tendency of people to fall in love with
idealizations, images, or narrow ideas of people, rather than with the
imperfections, complexities, and day to day variability of the full
person. Love of a strongly romantic or
sexual character tends to be the love of an idealization, or a particular
ardour engendered by the image. For the person enthralled by this type of
passion, the idealization and the image exist in a realm exalted above the
everyday reality in which the object of desire exists as a fully-fleshed out
person. This is the predicament Judy
finds herself in; she wants Scottie to love her for her real personality, but
he remains obsessively enthralled by the fantasy of Madeleine which she and Gavin Elster created to sucker him. (Another question raised here relates to
identity: did Scottie fall in love in Judy because it was her appearance and
personality moulded to become Madeleine,
or only with the performance and fantasy of
Madeleine? Are the two – the person
and the outward persona adopted – so easily separable?)
Scottie’s
recreation of Madeleine has most
frequently been associated with the characteristic fetishes and feminine ideals
of Hitchcock himself. The director’s
recurring penchant for the reserved, cultivated blonde has been described by
Trauffant as “the paradox between the inner fire and the cool surface.” Hitch himself expressed this duality in
somewhat more blunt terms: “We’re after
the drawing-room type, the real ladies who become whores when they’re in the
bedroom.” (Source: Style on Film: Vertigo.) This fairly typical masculine
desire to embody Madonna and whore in a single person – outwardly repressed,
privately wanton – goes some way towards understanding the duality between Vertigo’s blonde and brunette
incarnations of the same woman, and the distinct styles of dress and types of
sexuality embodied by Madeleine and
Judy Barton. Madeleine’s characteristic dress is the grey suit – subdued, tight
in a manner restrictive rather than sensual, almost severe but elegant in its
understated simplicity. The overall
sense of restriction, moderation, and control is completed by the final detail
in Scottie’s recreation of Madeleine –
the pinning up of the hair at the back.
This clearly represents Hitchcock’s ideal – the sexuality made all the
more alluring by being understated, hidden beneath the cold, business-like
surface. In contrast, when we first
encounter Judy Barton she wears a lustrously green outfit that emphasizes the
natural shape of her body, with (unusually for the time) no bra. This is the opposite of the restrictive,
subdued sexuality represented by Madeleine;
in her somewhat forced working gal tones, Novak’s Judy tells Scottie: “I’ve
been on blind dates before – to tell you the truth, I’ve been picked up
before.” It’s this earthier, more
natural woman that fails to excite Scottie, as he remains enthralled by the fantasy
of the artificial Madeleine, the
woman who is becoming a painting, a work of art. In a an interesting piece of life-imitating
art, Kim Novak had to be cajoled in the grey suit by her director, just as Judy
must be coerced into it by Scottie.
It’s thus not
difficult to see Vertigo as a perhaps
inadvertent glimpse into the darker corners of its director’s psychology, and a
study in general of the subjugation and mistreatment of women. Although some of the details remain
contested, Hitchcock’s preoccupation with his personal blonde ideal seems to
have become utterly unhealthy by the time of his relationship with Tippi
Hedren. The intersection between Scottie
as an only intermittently sympathetic bully in the second half of Vertigo, and Hitchcock’s apparently
obsessive, domineering, and abusive relationship with Tippi Hedren is a
fascinating subject, but it is an aspect of Vertigo
so well-trodden elsewhere that I’m not going to dwell on it in this essay.
Pygmalion by Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1786, Musee National du Chateau et des Trianons, wikipedia.
Modern stories
which have a certain resonance and archetypal power frequently have analogues
with much older myths. This, at least,
is certainly the case with Vertigo. The most obvious mythic precursor is the
story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus
loses his beloved, and goes into the Underworld to reclaim her from the world
of the dead. His music so charms
Persephone that he is allowed to bring Eurydice back to the upper world, with
one condition: Orpheus must walk ahead of his bride, and not look back until
such time as they have regained the land of the living. Orpheus is careless, however, and loses his
beloved for the second time, this time forever.
Vertigo recapitulates this
classic double-punch tragedy: Scottie loses (or appears to lose) Madeleine to death, but then
miraculously gets her back. His own
actions, however, ultimately lead to the real and permanent loss of his
beloved. The prohibition against looking back seems particularly apt in
relation to Vertigo’s primary theme
of the inescapable return of the past in the present. Scottie’s tragedy is that when he finds Judy,
he has the woman he loved, and her love for him was the one thing about Madeleine which wasn’t counterfeit. But he is haunted by the past, and must look
back, first in the re-creation of Madeleine,
and then in the return to the Mission San Juan Bautisa, where what was the
first time an illusion becomes reality, and he must lose Judy/Madeleine forever.
Scottie also
recalls Pygmalion and Oedipus. Pygmalion
was the Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory – Galatea – so perfect that he fell in love with her. Pygmalion prays to Aphrodite for a woman as
beautiful as his statue, and upon returning home and kissing Galatea, finds
that the dead ivory has become living flesh, and the idealized work of art a
real woman. This myth differs from Vertigo both in its happy ending, and in
another crucial element: Scottie falls in love with a work of art which he has
not created himself, but which is rather a creation of Gavin Elster’s
dramaturgy and Judy Barton’s acting.
Nevertheless, Vertigo reflects
and inverts the uncanny transformation of the Pygmalion myth: Madeleine is a real woman in the process
of being absorbed into a painting and the chill of history, and Judy a real
woman who Scottie cannot love until he transforms into a work of artifice. Oedipus, on the other hand, is often called
literature’s very first detective. He resembles Scottie in the sense that his tenacity in solving the riddle of his own parentage and identity is ultimately his undoing - cracking the case brings him nothing but profound suffering.
continued shortly
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