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Vertigo
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Just how great is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo? Late 1997, I congregated with a
capacity audience in one of Melbourne's grand old theatres to watch the
re-release of this famous film. I imagined there were people like me who had
seen it many times before, mainly on video; people who'd read about it, taught
it, and written about it; and people who were probably seeing it for the first
time in their lives.
Whatever the composition of the audience, I
know I've rarely felt such keen collective anticipation and excitement as when
the lights went down that evening. This restored version of Vertigo, with enhanced colour on 70
millimetre film and its crystal clear rendering of Bernard Herrmann's immortal
music score, really does make the film almost scarily fresh and immediate. It
renders the mysteries of this film more palpable and profound than ever.
But before I try to come to terms with the
substance of Vertigo, a small,
cautionary word about this digitally restored version, whose blessings are
somewhat mixed. In order to re-work the
soundtrack, the restorers made the questionable decision to do away with the
original Foley track, constituting all the noise effects: footsteps, doorbells,
gun shots, atmospheric noises, and so on. Particularly in the opening scene,
where Scottie (James Stewart) experiences the rooftop trauma that gives him his
malady of vertigo, the beefed-up effects make it seem like you're watching a
John
Woo action movie.
In a later key scene, where Scottie and the
object of his obsession, Madeleine (Kim Novak), are in the woods, the restorers
have replaced the hushed, deathly silence of the original with a loud wall of
birdsong – presumably to make the scene more realistic in 1990s movie terms.
These tamperings are unforgivable, and I hope that if this same restoration
team ever makes it to Rear Window,
they do not destroy what is one of the most radical and effective soundtracks
of 1950s cinema. (If you want to learn about the debate on this restoration question,
I recommend above all The MacGuffin, originally
a magazine and now a website devoted to the work of Hitchcock, produced by the freelance Australian
critic-scholar Ken Mogg. Ken also wrote an indispensable introductory book, The Alfred Hitchcock Story; his ongoing
essays on Vertigo have been for me
the most searching and illuminating pieces in the vast body of literature on
this film, and my comments here reflect his influence.)
Vertigo is a remarkably
modern and contemporary film; in fact, it stands at a particularly privileged
moment in cinema history, between the decay of one kind of cinema and the birth
of another. In his twin-volume work on cinema, philosopher Gilles Deleuze talks
of how, at the end of the classical Hollywood period in the 1950s, hero-figures
started to behave in a particularly weird way. They become bogged down,
paralysed, obsessive and compulsive. The hitherto immediate links between their
thoughts and actions, and thus their ability to affect and change the world,
are broken or disabled. The new anti-hero of the movies can do no more than
gawk at his prey or the object of his desire. He moves as if underwater, or at
the periphery of some sluggish dream, unable to alter what unfolds before his
eyes. This scenario certainly describes Scottie in the first part of Vertigo, after he has been hired to
follow Madeleine on her mysterious rounds.
For this new kind of troubled movie hero that
Deleuze evokes, even the moment when he is suddenly propelled into the story
tends to be some kind of trap – a manipulation, a seduction. That's what happens in Vertigo when Scottie has to finally stop looking, and plunges
forward to rescue Madeleine from her apparent suicide attempt in San Francisco
Bay. But this event does not wake Scottie into daily reality – as represented
in the film by his feisty ex-girlfriend, Midge (played wonderfully by Barbara
Bel Geddes). Instead, it marks Scottie's descent into an even more pervasive,
dreamlike realm of inward fantasy.
The events in Vertigo, although they have a slow, ceremonial rhythm, proceed
swiftly, in deft psychological strokes: Scottie falls in love with Madeleine,
he watches her die as she falls from the top of a church bell tower; and then
he fixes upon Madeleine's seeming double, Judy (the next phase of Novak’s
double role), a woman whom he makes over in Madeleine's image. Even today,
literal-minded folk like to complain about the implausibility of this narrative
– someone once described it sneeringly as “a tall story about a pushover” – but,
in Vertigo, Hitchcock takes us way
beyond conventional dramatic verisimilitude, and into something far more potent
and haunting.
I have always been fascinated by the various
ways that people summarise the plot of this film – even before they have a stab at naming its central themes. In fact, formulating a plot synopsis
and making some preliminary attempt at analysing the film, saying what it's
about, are quite impossible to separate when approaching Vertigo. This is because it is so densely interwoven – and so
mysterious, suggestive, sometimes even cryptic. It is variously described as a film about a hysterical man trying
to bend a woman to fit his sick male fantasies; or about a failure, a man who
is afraid of falling in love. Jean
Douchet takes it as “Hitchcock's most overtly sexual film”, with its primal
imagery of towers and holes in the ground; he goes on to discuss a range of
erotic practices that he sees symbolised or suggested in it, from necrophilia
to sodomy and premature ejaculation. (1)
A wide variety of mythic figures have been
invoked by critics in their attempts to catch the resonance of this tragic and
deeply haunting story: Lucifer, Orpheus, Oedipus. Writers of a Surrealist bent (such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante
in a prescient review) have seen it as a fable about the possibility of communicating
with alternate worlds opened up by dream, fantasy and the ghosts of the past –
and that account captures something deeply true about Vertigo, namely its almost trance-like mood and rhythm, its oceanic
alternation of long, dreamy passages and sudden moments of alarm or revelation.
But the description of the film that I like
best comes from Ken Mogg: “As I see it, Vertigo is about an ordinary man … who clings too hard to life and suffers the
consequences. That is, he loses the
woman who for him represents 'eternity' … His resultant sense of weakness later
turns him into an obsessed neurotic, and that is what ultimately defeats him”.
Éric Rohmer wrote, at the time of the film's
first release in 1958, that “man is not the driving element” in this story, and
he was right in two senses: as an individual, and as a man, Scottie is
definitely not in control of the story that seduces him, sweeps him up and
drives him on. In fact, one of its
tragic ironies – and what makes it so different to the kind of optimistic,
heroic tales in movies today – is that the moment Scottie actually takes
control and overcomes his phobia, is the very moment he destroys and loses
everything.
Rohmer described the distinctive form and
shape of Vertigo well: “What was sleeping
awakens, and what was living simultaneously dies, and the hero, conquering his
vertigo, but for nothing, once again
finds only emptiness at his feet”. (3)
Many people have talked about the shape, or
rather the shapes, of Vertigo. This
is a film that returns constantly to the figure of the spiral – announced in
the superb graphics of Saul Bass's credits, and tracked through the spiral knot
in Novak's hairdo, in the imagery of a nightmare sequence, and in the famous
plunging view of a staircase. It is
also a film that seems to fold at the halfway mark, so that much of what
happens in the second part uncannily and symmetrically echoes details and incidents
from the first part. This gives the
film a perfect formal serenity, at the same time as it multiplies weird and
chilling effects of mood. Once again,
you can bring out a dozen concepts from the philosophical tool-box to explain
this feeling that the film creates in us: Nietzsche's eternal return, Freud's
return of the repressed, or Schopenhauer's idea of a Will manifested in the
implacable way of the world.
Aside: I don't think there can be any greater
tribute to the memory of James Stewart (who died in 1997) than the re-release
of Vertigo. He gives an
extraordinarily detailed and nuanced performance, acting with his entire body.
The very shape of that body in 1958 – thin, elongated, animated by a prickly
but contained nervous energy – is the perfect vehicle for this tormented and
rather unlovely character of Scottie. One blanches at the thought of how studio
executives in Hollywood today would flinch at the prospect of a major box
office star playing such a fundamentally charmless, obsessive neurotic as
Scottie.
And humourless, too: one of the key moments
in the film, as it knits its system of comparisons and echoes together, comes
when Midge shows Scottie her painting of Carlotta, the mysterious woman from
the past with whom Madeleine is obsessed – except that it has Midge's face
superimposed. She's ready to laugh,
and the audience I was with laughed – but Scottie resolutely refuses to see the
joke, as well as its reflection on his own obsession. And so he just leaves
Midge, walking out of her apartment for good.
Scottie is a dark and forbidding character. He starts off traumatised, modulates
into a state of more or less permanent unease, and then plummets headlong into
complete madness. I have elsewhere
delved into the theme of home in movies, and in Vertigo it's surely significant that you
don't see Scottie in his own home-space until well into the story, making him a
displaced, unsettled, wandering figure – and when you do finally see his pad,
it's immediately the stage for the playing out of his fantasies with Madeleine,
who has been just fished out of the river. This is a film that offers, very
gradually and patiently, the spectacle of a man crossing over the line into a
complex kind of insanity. We watch
him go down and down, deeper into that dark place of his own making.
But why can't we simply hate Scottie, why
don't we feel free to make some sweeping moral judgement on his sick behaviour?
I believe our ambivalence has something to do with that desperate holding on, that
yearning for eternity which Mogg evokes. We feel for Scottie’s melancholia, for
his madness, and for his deeply hopeless romanticism – for no Hitchcock film plumbs
the history and sensibility of Romanticism more profoundly than Vertigo.
A central part of the effect of this film is
that the fantasy which ensnares Scottie – the fantasy of old San Francisco and
the ripe legend of exotic Carlotta Valdes – also has the power to ensnare us; it is hard to even talk about the
film without granting this fantasy some potent truth, some privileged hold on
reality. Hitchcock pours all of his artistic power and craft resources into
making this fantasy come alive: in the scenes of Madeleine alone, in the museum
and the cemetery; in the lush habanera music of Bernard Herrmann; and
especially in the truly hallucinatory scene in which a room magically turns
around Scottie and Madeleine kissing, with the backdrop passing from present
day San Francisco to this imaginary, mythic, romantic past – and then back.
Yet, for all the potency of its
dream-imagery, fantasy tends to be a chimerical thing in Vertigo. Its source, its most vital part, always seems to be
elsewhere, displaced, already fallen into oblivion. People in the film repeatedly
evoke the glorious past, including a somewhat sinister history in which men
once had wealth, power and freedom. But no more, not today, in these rather
ghostly, near-empty streets of San Francisco.
In the main narrative line, Scottie chases a
woman, tries to hold her, love her, possess her: but she is always someone
other than who he thinks she is, someone other than who he wants her to be. Vertigo is a pitiless parable about
desire and illusion, about misrecognising or refusing to see the truth that is
in front of you. And yet what poetry and perfection in Hitchcock’s clear, cruel
vision!
The story is also a parable about control. A
filmmaker friend said to me that Vertigo could never be one of his favourite Hitchcock films, because of the way it
gives away its enigma well before the end, in a revelatory flashback that
belongs not to Scottie and his viewpoint, but to Judy, the second character
incarnated by Kim Novak. Some find this device clumsy and contrived. And indeed,
Judy's flashback does have the force of a transgression, a shock, a tear in the
narrative fabric.
I take it as a positive sign of Hitchcock's
modernity: in this bold stroke, he looks forward to the era of filmmakers like
Brian De Palma, who mix and switch the lines in a story, who pit different
points-of-view against each other in a jagged, disorienting way. But it isn’t
just a formal, cinematic game for Hitchcock (and nor is it for De Palma in Obsession [1976]): this tear irrevocably
marks Scottie's loss of control over the story, over the fantasy that is now possessing
him.
There is so much in Vertigo that artfully escapes our grasp – that mocks our own
illusion of control or mastery, our deductive power, as viewers. For instance
the villain in the film, Elster (Tom Helmore), a kind of demonic artist-figure
who sets the illusions up – what's his story, his story with Madeleine and then
with Judy? What drives him to do the extraordinarily detailed work that he
does? We'll never know. In a Sight and
Sound article on the re-release of Vertigo,
(4) the British critic Peter Wollen cites the rich opening lines of André
Breton's surrealist novel Nadja: “Perhaps
everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’” – knowing the lives that we
occupy and infect with our daily fantasies and projections, the stories and
illusions we set running in the dreamy interstices of the daily, real world. In Vertigo, the difficult business of
knowing yourself amounts to knowing whom you haunt – and knowing who, in turn,
is haunting you.
But this much I do know. To my initial
question – just how great is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo? – I am now prepared to give an answer. It is among the
greatest.
MORE Hitchcock: The Birds, Lifeboat, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Strangers on a Train, Family Plot, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious
1. Jean Douchet interviewed by Joël Magny,
“Alfred Hitchcock, from Christianity to Atheism”, Cinéma, no. 258 (June 1980) – my translation.
2. Ken Mogg, The Alfred Hitchcock Story (Titan Press, 2008); see also his “The
Fragments of the Mirror: Vertigo and
its Sources” on the website The MacGuffin.
3. Éric Rohmer (trans. Carol Volk), The Taste for Beauty (Cambridge
University Press, 1990), pp. 169, 171.
4. Peter Wollen, “Compulsion”, Sight and Sound, Vol. 7 No. 4 (April
1997), p. 14.
© Adrian Martin October 1997 |
