A Study of Possession

A Review of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)

"One final thing I have to do, and then I'll be free of the past." - Scottie Ferguson

The sharp chill of the icy wind whipped about me as I stood motionless on the CTA Red Line platform at Addison. Christmas shoppers, commuters, bundled teenagers crowded in groups for warmth. Everything about me had a grey sheen, sapped of vitality. But I didn't care, and am surprised to even remember such details. I was in love--not just in love, but impassioned, a heightened state of focus inward and numbness to the world outside. I don't doubt that, had I not been on my way somewhere (as it happened, to the Chicago Historical Museum to research my dissertation), I could have frozen in joy.

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.

Walton; or, The Early Modern Humanist

A Review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

"You throw a torch into a pile of buildings; and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend!" - Captain Robert Walton, to Frankenstein's Monster, Volume III, Chapter VII

The conflict within young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's mind is readily apparent throughout her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Here at once was a highly educated and privileged eighteen-year-old woman; a passionate Romantic; a British conservative; a liberal feminist; a lover of Percy Bysshe Shelley; a daughter of two famous (or infamous, to many) public intellectuals; and a mother who suffered the death of a child. All of these identities intertwined to produce a very human writer and her equally human novel, about the very human Victor Frankenstein and his equally human Monster, in what most observers rightfully identify as a classic Gothic novel and founding text of modern imaginative fiction. It's odd to feel this way, but I really don't think Mary intended a clear, cogent message with her "ghost story." If there is an ultimate theme, it's the assertion of humanity amid the ambiguity of modern (here, early industrial) life. But I see this message in pretty much everything, so like all good art, maybe Frankenstein simply reflects back a thoughtfully distorted image of our own current selves. At any rate, it deserves a place among the best of fiction--literary, genre, or otherwise.