vertigo (1958)
There are few opening shots as compelling as the hand, reaching up and grasping the rung of a ladder in the darkness. The disorienting chase over San Francisco rooftops in the night, and before we can establish anything about our scene, another hand reaches out to Jimmy Stewart, "Give me your hand". Over and over, this image of a hand, of fingers, reaching out, trying to touch something that it cannot know, plays out on the screen in front of us. In Vertigo, truths and lies, realities and fantasies, memories and dreams, seem to intermix within the masks our characters wear. They are deceptions, from Elster and Madeline weaving their intricate illusion for Scottie, to Scottie himself, playing the cards close to the chest, believing he is deceiving the one who is deceiving him. Hitchcock deceives his audience right along with him, leading us to believe we are watching a film about a ghostly apparition from the past possessing a living person. What is a conscious lie from one may be reality for another, what is felt deeply can never be washed away. As the film peels back its many layers, we see occupation and personality, the fragile human that embodies the ‘role’ that they are meant to play in life. A hard-boiled detective, an image of feminine magnetism, even a friend and confidant who never crosses the line. Yet, underneath all that, there’s a beating heart and a psyche that may harbor anything from secret pangs of romantic desire to dark ambitions for, as Hitchcock’s script reminds us over and over in poetic repetition, “power and freedom”. The phrase is repeated many times, just as the film’s key locations and that Bernard Herrmann score recur time and again, in the whirlpool of remembrance that is the mind.
“Just one final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be free of the past” muses Scottie in his relentless drive toward self-destruction, yet to Madeline before her own drive to self-destruction he utters in repetition, “there’s nothing you must do”. When Scottie is infatuated and blind with love and lust, Madeline need only be, and later, when his insatiable desires are unmet, there’s nothing she can do right. Everything must be altered to fit the ideal, the piece of the past our detective clings to as his overwhelming peak of desire. Just as his peak of terror, at seeing a man fall to his death due to his own weakness, or seeing the woman that he loved do the same, also haunt him and hang over him, inescapable and final. The detective is undone by the man within the detective, or rather the failings of the man, the vision of the goddess is undone by the woman within the goddess, or rather her ordinariness. Judy remarks, as Scottie waits for them that she’s ‘got [her] face on’. Scottie’s face is publicly humiliated by the judge and jury of the small county that houses the Mission San Juan Bautista, attacked and shamed for the weakness he hides from. If he’d been stronger maybe that man wouldn’t have died, if he’d overcome his guilt sooner maybe Madeline wouldn’t have died (or at least, for Scottie, in fact he may have caught Elster and Judy red-handed), and maybe if he’d learned to let go of his clinging to the past, finally, Judy might not have died. John Ferguson plays his part of the detective and follows, or is it Scottie who follows? Is it Johnny that falls in love or is it Scottie? Hitchcock wisely splits the role, and the women, into the two halves of our lead’s personality. Midge consistently refers to him as ‘Johnny’, playing the part of the mother, while Judy plays the part of Madeline, everything our Scottie desires. Scottie, the persona he’s developed to be strong, John, the weakness within. Madeline leads Scottie, Scottie follows, yet both play the false roles as ‘wanderers’ to the face of the other. They’re anything but, as the moves of both participants are being carefully orchestrated by Gavin Elster. Yet, somewhere deep inside the roles they play, the detective and the damsel, lie Judy and John, and they’re falling for each other all the time. When all is said and done, Judy also can’t let go of the past, perhaps she can’t forget Scottie? Scottie, triggered back into his detective brain by the sight of a clue to unravel the mystery and apprehend the murderer, remarks that she ‘Should never keep souvenirs of a killing’, yet it never crosses his mind that she was keeping souvenirs of him. All that time later, and Judy still keeps that grey suit hanging in her closet, a constant reminder of the days they once had. For Scottie and Madeline, or John and Judy, they could never let go of the past, and so they doom their future. The scars left by guilt multiply and overrun them. If one singular event rocks our foundations hard enough, we may never return to the people we used to be. In Vertigo, the loss of self is just as traumatic as the loss of the beloved, as the undercurrent pulls us deeper and deeper in the film’s final act, the lost selves fight to re-establish their place. We begin to wonder if our protagonist is desperate to see Madeline again or is he desperate to see Scottie?
Novak is a woman being psychologically dissected to the point where her true “self” is no longer evident. In the film, the personality of Novak’s character has been pared down to only the most essential elements that Scottie will find attractive, it is this cross-section of her personality that has been dubbed “Madeline” and set apart for us as a role that the Judy character is playing to clearly delineate between what Scottie sees as flaws in her personality and what he sees as erotically attractive. It is the idea that one need not deal with the imperfections, but can focus only on what is desirable that eventually becomes dangerous because it moves us to a point where the slightest imperfection becomes intensely unattractive. Just as the actress on the screen in any Hollywood feature film has been made-up to become the symbol of beauty, Judy’s transformation from her mundane Kansas self into the bewitching Madeline works in much the same way. The exact same body and mind can become multiple distinct people very easily, film actresses in particular. This leads to possibly Hitchcock’s most interesting use of Novak as a symbol of the Hollywood actress. Madeline is a symbol of perfection in Scottie’s eyes, she drives him wild with desire, so wild that he cannot be attracted to anyone else, including the same woman out of costume. Judy appears mediocre without the icy blonde hair and the damsel in distress adventure attached to her that the Madeline side of her personality had. We see Hollywood glamour, a glamour Hitchcock helped to create, and its effects on the modern individual; the unattainable desire that can never be met. Novak then becomes the trademark McGuffin to drive the plot, Scottie’s meltdown can then be seen as that of the Hollywood leading man suddenly losing his plot and “motivation”, having no more reason to exist on the screen. Vertigo stares deeply into the void of obsession, one which it never escapes from. It is a film which begins with a haunting question, a question of the past reaching into the present to take possession of the living and dominate their lives, and in the end, Hitchcock gives us our answer, a perfectly executed tragedy.
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