Alfred Hitchcock | Vertigo / 1958

on edge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor (screenplay, based on a fiction by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Vertigo / 1958

 

For years I have put off writing about Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, not because I have nothing to say about it, but because I have so much! As I've noted elsewhere, the first time I saw this film at a small Manchester, Iowa theater in 1958, I was only eleven years of age. The film whirled around me like a mysterious, inexplicable virago. I was literally made dizzy by the film and felt sickened at what I had just witnessed; and I remember, as it ended, going into men's room on the second floor of the movie house, thinking to myself, "I am too young to see this film." Immediately, I went downstairs once more and saw the movie all over again!

     Since that first viewing, I have seen the movie perhaps 50 times, both on television and in theaters, on DVDs and computer screens. Only on the latter, did the movie suffer.

     Even as a child I realized this film was about a romantic obsession—an obsession for a woman (Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton) dreamily played by Kim Novak, and an obsession, perhaps even more importantly, by the director for a city of San Francisco. Just as the film's structure functions as a kind of double helix—the coil appears in the credits, shifting at moments into a pattern very much like Crick and Watson's later representation of DNA, and again in Madeline Elster's hairdo, modeled from the painting of Carlotta Valdes at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and in the rose symbolizing Scottie's descent into madness—in which everything that happens in the first part reoccurs in a slightly different form in the second; so too do these two obsessions weave around each other, the same woman appearing slightly different in the second part and the city changing from a magical world of lights (both sunlit and artificial) to a darker world of restaurants and a night drive to Mission San Juan Bautista.

     The two parts of the film are played out in almost oppositional worlds, the first the story of a glamorously beautiful woman, traveling in a kind haze through the sun-filled streets of the beautiful city and environs with Scottie (James Stewart) following and later joining her almost as if they were tourists, Hitchcock taking his audience along for the tour. 

      It is a slow story of developing love—lushly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's Wagnerian-like score—which ends tragically as the suicidal Madeleine Elster seems to jump from the tower of the Mission to her death, from which Scottie has been unable to save her because of his vertigo.

     The film then turns to Scottie's inquest ("Coroner: He did nothing. The law has little to say on things left undone.") and his descent into a deep depression, a kind of madness that even his chipper and loyal friend Midge Wood (the wonderful Barbara Bel Geddes) cannot help him to escape.       

     The second roll of the helix begins with Scottie's accidental encounter with a young woman who looks somewhat like Madeleine. But this young woman is dressed atrociously, her hair hanging in tasteless bangs. She works as a shop clerk. And there is little mysterious about her as she reports in her flat American accent her background, her hometown, and even providing her would-be offender with her driver's license. 

      It has always struck me that if Judy had been made over by Gavin Elster into such a beautiful woman in the first part, why would she have chosen to revert to Judy Barton in the second? And reportedly—I have not read the article nor have knowledge of its existence except for a message board posting on the IMDb site for the film—Claude Chabrol, writing on Vertigo, claimed that she is not the same woman, but another whom Scottie makes over to look like Madeleine.

     Yet, obviously, that does not account for the letter of admission she writes to Scottie before tearing it up, nor her possession of the jewelry previously worn by Madeline, nor her verbal admission on the tower of the Mission near the end of the film. And that reading misses the point. While everything in the second part is the same, it has the same genetic make-up of the first. Everything has changed, which gives the viewer the slightly sickening sensation that things are not right.      

     Indeed, they are not right. For by acting as Madeleine, Judy has helped in the murder of Gavin Elster's real wife. She is a murderess first, but also a cheat, a liar, even a kind of whore for allowing Scottie to dress and coif her as someone else:

 

            Judy: If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, 

                     will you love me?

           Scottie: Yes. Yes.

           Judy: All right. All right then, I'll do it. I don't care anymore about me.

 

     In Hitchcock's patterning of the human DNA, we recognize the potential for humans to be two beings, to have the capabilities of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Although Scottie has throughout this second half of the film been seeking his past, in recreating Judy into her former being he has also symbolically taken away her current life, which gets played out into the final incident where he forces her to return to Mission San Juan Bautista and, overcoming his dizziness (not only his vertigo but the confusion of his thinking) forcibly grabs her, demanding the truth:   

 

          Scottie:  And then what did he do? Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? 

                       Did he tell you  exactly what to do, what to say? You were a very 

                       apt pupil too, weren't you? You were a very apt pupil! Well, why 

                       did you pick on me? Why me?

 

    The sudden appearance of a mission nun so startles Judy, filled obviously with guilt, that she rushes to the edge, actualizing her previous performance of death.

 

   Again, Scottie has not been a true murderer, but this time, he is the direct cause. It is he who has forced her to return to the sight of the first murder and to confront her participation in it. And we know, in his almost existentialist pose at the edge of the roof—standing on the very edge of the abyss, hands out in despair of having no control over the events he has just witnessed—that even if he escapes the accusations of murder, he will never escape his anguish and guilt. In short, we can describe, at least metaphorically speaking, Scottie's act as one of revenge—growing out a kind of fatal disappointment in the woman behind Madeleine Elster—as a murder of love.

 

Los Angeles, February 25, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (February 2012).