Vertigo, Released in 1958, Directed by
Alfred Hitchcock
What I know going in
I
have seen the film twice before and look forward to seeing it again.
Immediate reaction
Vertigo has a lot
in common with The Searchers. Both
were made by established Hollywood directors at the height of their powers, on
the surface both seem like straightforward entries in the director’s output,
and both feature lead performance by icons. Finally, also like The Searchers, Vertigo has a dark heart
that subverts what is ostensibly a typical mystery film and plants the seeds
for various ideas that would become major preoccupations of the New Hollywood
Era.
Things
start off pretty normally. John “Scotty” Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) is introduced
chasing a criminal across a series of San Francisco rooftops along with his
partner. Scotty slips, inducing the titular affliction, and his partner falls
to his death trying to save him. Cut to a few months later and Scotty is almost
fully healed and hanging out with ex-fiancée, current friend Midge, who drops a
few hints that she has mixed feeling about their current relationship status.
Scotty then gets a call from old college buddy Gavin Elster, who asks Scotty to
follow and observe his wife (Madeleine Elster) and insinuates that she is haunted
by the ghost of grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. This scene foreshadows one of the
main themes of the film, men fucking over and controlling women, when Gavin
reminisces about the San Francisco, and sets up that Scotty’s personality is
going to get the best of him. He lightly protests when Gavin asks this of him,
saying he’s retired, but you can see a hungry glimmer in Stewart’s eyes that
reveals he’s too intrigued to say no to this opportunity.
Eventually,
Scotty begins tracking Madeline and everything he sees seems to support Gavin’s
supernatural explanation. Scotty follows her to the San Francisco Bay and
rescues her after she falls (or JUMPS!) in. The two quickly become romantically
entwined after a ghostly walk through the redwood forest and strange/passionate
scene where Madeline confesses her fears of committing suicide and falls into
Scotty’s arms as ocean waves crash behind them (a nice, overtly sexual touch if
you ask me). Again, there is nothing incredibly weird at this point in the
film. By that point in Hollywood history there had been plenty of films about
private eyes getting wrapped in something too big and plenty of tales of
infidelity. There is some nice ambiguity about whether or not Madeline is truly
haunted or simply mad, but even if Vertigo
suddenly turned into a ghost story, it would only be original or off-beat
because it combined two different genres. What makes Vertigo a weird, psychologically disturbing film will come later
on.
Things
come to a head when Scotty takes Madeline to an old Mission that she has
described from a dream she had. She freaks out and seems to recall events that
Carlotta witnessed, runs up into the belfry, and throws herself off the ledge,
while Scotty looks on in horror, unable to do anything because of his vertigo.
The film could probably end after Madeline’s death without being totally
unsatisfying. It would be a pretty standard tale of an ex-cop getting involved
a torrid romance that ends in tragedy, but it would still be a functional film.
However, if Vertigo ended here, it
wouldn’t be the masterpiece we know today.
After
Madeline’s death, Scotty finds himself under investigation for what happened.
He is freed of all guilt, but only after the top officer gets in a few snipes
about his illness and his relationship with Madeline. This is where the film’s
diptych-like structure starts. Scotty finds himself haunted by thoughts of
Madeline (much like Madeline was supposedly haunted by the ghost of Carlotta),
and visits the exact same sites seen earlier in the film while he was tracking
her. The film then drops in one of the earliest examples of an attempt at
visually representing a hallucination or nightmare. I don’t think the effect
wholly works to day, but it is interesting precursor to the trip-like effects
in 2001 and Altered States. Scotty’s nightmare is, for me, the exact point
where Vertigo becomes something
unique and frightening. Scotty falls into a deep depression, again mirroring
Madeline’s madness, which he eventually overcomes in a few months’ time. Scotty
then randomly bumps into a girl who looks exactly like Madline, Judy. She is
introduced wearing green, much like Madeline (another element of the film
referencing itself). Scotty follows her up to her room and convinces her to go dinner
with him.
This
is when we get to the meat of the film. In a process that not only mirrors how
Gavin must have molded Judy, but also has an eerie resemblance to the way
directors mold actresses, Scotty slowly, but surely forces Judy to change her
appearance. This includes getting her the exact right apparel, dying her hair
platinum blond, and forcing her to pin it up in exactly the same shape as
Madeline. This transformation culminates in one of the greatest scenes in all
of cinema history. Judy steps out, and the light hits her in just the right way
so that she looks like a ghost. She and Scotty embrace, drenched in green
light, as the camera twirls marvelously around them. It also works as a callback to Scotty and
Madeline’s embrace by the ocean edge. I have no idea how the latter part of the
film played during its initial release. Stewart totally foregoes his typical
nice guy persona and acts like a controlling dick. Furthermore, there is a
hugely uncomfortable layer to these scenes when you consider Hitchcock’s
obsession with blonde it girls. I’m very interesting in learning what he
thought of the film. In addition, Madeline keeps laying these hints that what
Scotty is doing is crossing some terrible, metaphysical line.
-
Judy: If you change me, will that do it? If I
do what you tell me, will you love me?
-
Scotty Yes. Yes.
-
All right. All right then, I’ll do it. I don’t
care anymore about me.
-
Judy: Couldn't
you like me, just me the way I am? When we first started out, it was so good;
w-we had fun. And... and then you started in on the clothes. Well, I'll wear
the darn clothes if you want me to, if, if you'll just, just like me.
-
Scotty: The color of your hair…
-
Judy: Oh, no!
-
Scotty: Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.
With
these scenes, Vertigo also becomes a
film about films. Scotty becomes obsessed with recreating Madeline. He becomes
obsessed with someone who wasn’t real. He becomes obsessed with his image of
that person. This is the subversive heart of Vertigo, that no matter how much we want a fantasy, an image, an
idea, or a film to be real, it simply can’t, and to attempt otherwise is to
court tragedy. Scotty’s obsession with the unreal leads to Judy’s death and the
final piece in completing the film’s doomed diptych.
Random
notes:
-
I saw a lot of Mad Men in this rewatch of Vertigo.
The famous opening of a black outline falling is directly taken from a similar
design in Scotty’s nightmare. And one of the main themes of the show is the
rampant sexism of the era, which Vertigo deals
with through Gavin and Scotty’s dickish manipulation of Judy. Vertigo also has two characters (Gavin
and the book-store owner) lament the fact that women can’t be tossed aside as
easily as they used it.
-
I wouldn’t classify Vertigo as a noir, but it makes good use of the sun-dappled
exteriors of San Francisco nearly two decades before Chinatown made sunny L.A. seem like the most dangerous place on
earth. And, much like how Chinatown attempts
to grapple with the dark, secret history of L.A., Vertigo, with the story of Carlotta, delves into some of San Fran’s
hidden past.
-
A much later film, Mulholland Drive, owes a debt to Vertigo as well. That film’s themes of duality and shifting
identity seem directly inspired by Hitchcock’s uncomfortable masterpiece.
Further thoughts
One
thing I forgot to mention in my original piece was the backstory I imagined for
Judy. We don’t really learn about her history, except that she is from Salina,
Kansas. Solid information about her relation to Elster isn’t give either. It’s implied
that she was his mistress and decided to help him in his murderous quest due to
money and a power imbalance. The backstory I came up with involved Judy as
naïve Kansas girl, hoping to go west to Hollywood and break it big on the
silver screen! Once she gets there though, she can’t catch a break, and, on her
last dime, is contacted by Elster for a shadowy job. With no other way to make
money of her acting talent, she takes the job which launches her on her doomed
collision with Scotty. I don’t know why I thought this up, except that it fits
with the film’s twisted relation to Hollywood filmmaking.
An
aspect of the film I came to appreciate after reading through some of the
reviews was its second act change in perspective. During the first part of the
film, the camera is very focused on Scotty. It even literally adopts his point
of view several times, as can be seen in the sequences of him driving around
and tailing Madeline and her iconic introduction at Ernie’s. After Madeline’s
“death” however, there’s a switch in focus. After Scotty leaves Judy’s apartment,
the camera doesn’t follow him out the door, it stays with her (something that
has only happened 2 or 3 times throughout the film at this point). The film
then reveals its big mystery by having Judy flashback, write a letter, and
perform a voiceover narration. This is an incredibly important scene in the
film. Both Robert Cumbow (Parallax View) and Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review)
mention how this scene shifts audience sympathy away from Scotty and onto Judy,
and, as Hitchcock himself described, it turns standard surprise into suspense.
The letter scene shifts the question from “What will the twist be?” to “What
will Scotty do once he finds out Judy’s secret?”
Why is the film on this list?
It’s
ironic that the top film on this cinephile list is a warning sign to film fans
not to become to obsessed with their favorite art form, lest they find
themselves looking into the abyss of unreality like Scotty in Vertigo.
