"One final thing I have to do, and then I'll be free of the past." - Scottie Ferguson
This state of being, this stage of love in which no one else--nothing else--matters but the object of one's emotional and physical desire, is one I'd felt before, but not with such depth and severity. Perhaps you've felt it, too. It's that stage in which passion reigns unchecked by reason, before you are clearheaded enough to think whether the person whom you love is right for you. This passion is selfish, obsessive, dangerous. It possesses you. It permits you to dream an illusory world and then sustains that world to the exclusion of all else. It's the passion that John Scottie Ferguson felt for Madeleine Elster, a figment of his own heart, in Alfred Hitchcock's most celebrated work, Vertigo. For all its problems--its justly maligned sexism and patriarchy, its vile study of the male gaze and the female as object--Vertigo deserves the attention it has so belatedly received. As a paced meditation on obsessive passion, and the treacherous illusion by which that passion may consume us, it is one of the best films ever made.
Reviewing a film like Vertigo is an invitation to criticism, I realize. Like all great art, it solicits a multitude of interpretations. But art elevated to the level of praise it now receives--having taken down that perennial favorite of the critical establishment, Citizen Kane, in the 2012 Sight & Sound Poll, for one--becomes nearly impossible to interpret to anyone's satisfaction. No doubt film schools require students to view Vertigo repeatedly, to dissect Midge's awkward advances to Scottie (that portrait!), to write whole dissertations on the animated nightmare that lapses Scottie into months of shock. My untrained eye no doubt missed some innovative uses of light or other such topics of relentless study in those classrooms.
But I did find in Vertigo an accessible vision of human love, loss, and despair. To me, this is a story about a detective, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), who up until we meet him lived a life of dominated by reason. Criminals ran across rooftops, police chased after them, and eventually justice and the good guys won. Men and women in love, like Scottie and his erstwhile financée, Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), rationally weighed their future together and, if found wanting, broke off their engagement. 1+1=2. I doubt Scottie had experienced any great depth of feeling before he dangled from the rooftops above San Francisco (itself, along with the beautiful and wild Bay Area, a character in the film). Why else would he believe that acrophobia could be cured so simply with a regimen of taller and taller stepstools? As a disorder, he felt, his vertigo would pass if treated rationally. But emotion, as Foucault warned, can elude such a modernist attempt at "treatment."
And Scottie almost certainly never felt passion prior to his first glimpse of the impostor Madeleline Elster (Kim Novak) within the blood-red walls of Ernie's. This woman was an untouchable totem. Her husband, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), hired his old acquaintance Scottie to tail Madeleine, ostensibly to resolve whether the ghost of Carlotta Valdes had possessed his wife's body. Scottie, of course, considered this scenario preposterous. It didn't fit into his discrete plan of reality. But Gavin knew this about Scottie, and leveraged the detective's faith in reason and fear of heights into his plan to kill his real wife, glimpsed only briefly later in the film. I'd hope that, with a clearer head, he would have realized that it's a bad idea to date a married woman, or one with an odd attraction to a dead woman. The ghost story, however, clothed "Madeleine" in an allure that facilitated Scottie's dizzying descent, his vertiginous fall, into passion. This play on words seems a little too cute, but maybe Hitchcock counted on his audience to overlook it. Scottie's vertigo was both real--a fear of heights--and metaphorical--a fear of passion, resulting from his secure and comfortable life of reason.
But Scottie fell for Gavin's scheme, and so adopted Gavin's prepared illusion that was Madeleine Elster. I've read some reviews (not many, as I didn't want others' interpretations to influence my own in this review) that assume this woman was really named Judy Barton, the identity she presented to Scottie as her genuine one later in the film. But why should we assume this? Gavin hired her to act a part. And she continued to act once Scottie appeared at her door in the Empire Hotel, feigning lack of recognition and an oddly Southern-tinged Kansas accent. The real woman behind these masks does appear. She's the one whose flashback of the murder of the real Madeleine Elster reveals the film's gravitational shift and her authentic love for Scottie.
For sake of discussion, I think we can call her "Judy," but I'd like to think that she was more complex of a character than the object Gavin and Scottie verbally and physically throw about in so gross a fashion. I want to know more about her. Was Judy, like Scottie, a woman who had never felt the intoxicating power of true passion until their Romantic embrace by the sea? And I intentionally mean Romantic here, in addition to romantic. As hammy as this old-fashioned scene may appear, with its crashing waves and orchestral climaxes, it serves as a stark counterpoint to the first discussion between Scottie and Midge. In this latter sequence, Scottie is the embodiment of the Modern, a creature of science and reason. But at the seaside, he and Judy are possessed by the Romantic. Nature echoes their mutual passion, and all reason is banished. Did passion frenzy Judy to such an extent that it overrode her own reason, as it had for Scottie? Could this vertiginous state account for why she gave Scottie the patriarchal license to remake her to fit his illusion of "Madeleine"? I can only hope for this to be the case, as it's probably more likely that Hitchcock played into the postwar era's negative and sexist vision of the hapless female. I'd like to recover the film from such a context, though, considering its masterful portrayal of a universal human emotion.
Once possessed, if not by Carlotta or any other spirit but passion, both Scottie and Judy boarded the runaway train toward their tragic ends. Their lives and love were illusions. Powerful emotions can sustain even the most fantastic of worlds. Unchecked emotions are what blind political idealists in their tunnel vision for utopian schemes. Indulged emotions account for cognitive dissonance, why some people just can't seem to face the inherent conflict between what they want and what is. It was this cognitive dissonance, and the comfort it provided, that characterized both Scottie and Judy after her spectral transformation within a cloud of green into a "Madeleine"-zed Judy. In the Hitchcockian universe, though, it was perhaps inevitable that the detective wrongly conspired against would awaken to his injustice. The harmonization of his dissonance began when he saw Judy wearing Carlotta's necklace, and his passion transmuted into an animalistic furor that is almost too difficult to watch. He berates, batters, and throws Judy, who herself was stunned and mortified to have been unmasked as the impostor "Madeleine," to and up the bell tower to--accomplish what, exactly? Kill her? No, that doesn't seem right. He loved her, and she loved him. Confusion reigned. Anger. The collision of worlds. The epistemic closure of Scottie's cognitive dissonance and the suspense with which it filled both him and Judy set them on edge, just enough for a spectral image of a nun to frighten Judy--us--into falling. What horror, what an end.
I barely touched on Vertigo's other cinematic elements: the vividness of color, for instance, in the heavy brown panels of Gavin's office, the felicific rainbow of the flower market, the sinister boldness of deep blue in Scottie's nightmare. Or the surreal camera angles: the unsettling closeness of frightened eyes locked on us during the opening titles; the Escher-esque diagonal descent of the bell tower, flanked by nuns running in and Scottie running out; the gaze upward into Midge's judgmental face at the sanatorium, capturing her unrequited love for Scottie. These effects mark cinema at its finest, as they show me a world that I'm probably not creative enough to perceive when I read a book or listen to music.
With this film, Hitchcock induced in me (and hopefully you, too) such breathless, palpitating suspense that we should all be possessed by passion, and feel vertigo as it dissolves into despair. Good art allows us to see a reflection of our own experiences, like my passion for Leigh as I waited for a train in the cold. Great art moves us to relive it, to feel it again. And Vertigo is as close to great art as I expect to find.
My Rating: A Cinematic Achievement, 9 out of 10
