In 2012, Vertigo dethroned Citizen Kane in Sight & Sound’s critics’ poll
to claim the title of greatest film of all time.
Six decades after it came out, Alfred Hitchcock’s film is so enduring
because it reveals the deeper link between what we fear and what we desire --
and it’s also about the dark obsessions at the heart of cinema itself.
The film’s title refers to Scottie’s fear of heights.
[I have acrophobia, which gives me vertigo,
and I get dizzy.]
But the film is also about other kinds of falling feelings:
falling in love, and having a death wish.
And Vertigo replicates Scottie’s off-balance, falling feeling in us --
through plot twists, dolly zooms,
and the ending that completely throws us for a loop.
We asked Film Professor Julian Cornell to help illuminate what Vertigo is really
about:
[I think Vertigo is one of those films that really gets in your head,
because it talks about the connection between death and desire.
And it talks about the way that we don’t even
understand sometimes in ourselves
what motivates us, and how often fear is at the heart of our motivations.]
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True to its name, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo leaves us feeling a little dizzy.
By the end, retired detective Scottie discovers that the Madeleine he was madly in love with
never existed --
a woman named Judy was just pretending to be her,
to help pull off the murder of the real Madeleine Elster,
whom we never meet in the film.
[I was the tool and you were the victim of Gavin Elster's plan to murder his wife.
He chose me to play the part because I looked like her.]
All this time Scottie has been haunted by the memory of what he thought he saw --
Madeleine committing suicide at the Mission San Juan Bautista,
when in fact what he saw was Madeleine’s husband throwing down
the dead body of the wife he’d already killed.
After Scottie discovers the truth, he wants to recreate his experience
of this faked suicide.
[I need you to be Madeleine for a while.
And when it’s done, we’ll both be free.]
He decides to climb the stairs of the bell tower
to the place where the fake suicide went down.
Amazingly, Scottie does make it to the top.
[I made it.]
But as Scottie and Judy kiss and make up,
a nun startles her and she falls from the bell tower to her death,
[Screams]
echoing the demise of the real Madeleine.
The ending brings the story full circle
because Vertigo starts with Scottie slipping
during a rooftop chase and clinging to a rain gutter --
when a policeman tries to help him,
Scottie is indirectly responsible for the man’s death.
So what are we supposed to make of all the convoluted reveals
and strange repetitions we see?
Early in the film Scottie’s friend Gavin Elster
asks Scottie to follow his wife, Madeleine.
So from the start of their relationship, Scottie is observing Madeleine from afar
rather than interacting with her.
The bright colors and soft focus as Scottie watches Madeleine
give these scenes a dreamlike quality,
as if there’s something unreal about how he’s seeing her.
Madeleine often goes to see the portrait of her great grandmother, Carlotta,
and we see her looking at the painting while Scottie looks at her.
So the parallel, the way Scottie gazes at Madeleine
as if she’s a work of art,
hints to the audience that this Madeleine herself
is an artistic creation, just like that painting.
We find out later that the Madeleine we’ve come to know with Scottie
is a fake persona created by Judy --
and this whole fictional personality is built around Scottie,
designed to draw him in.
While Scottie is following Madeleine, she jumps into the San Francisco Bay,
feigning a suicide attempt.
Scottie completely undresses her and tucks her into his bed.
We expect her to be a little freaked out when she wakes up with a total stranger.
But instead she’s grateful.
[I’m glad you didn’t take me home.
I wouldn’t have known you.]
From what we’ve seen so far, Scottie strikes us less as the hero
and more as a damsel in distress type himself --
incidentally, that might remind us a little of another Jimmy Stewart character
in a Hitchcock classic.
So given Scottie’s weakness, it’s a turn on for him
to meet this troubled woman with a patchy memory
who needs Scottie to rescue her.
[Don’t leave me.
Stay with me.]
[All the time.]
He wants to be a courageous, desirable man, and Madeleine makes him feel like one.
[My name’s John Ferguson.]
[Good, strong name.]
If we wanted to get Jungian about it, we might even interpret Madeleine
as Scottie’s anima.
Carl Jung theorized that each man has an anima --
a feminine unconscious or inner self made up of the more “feminine” qualities
that the man lacks in his normal behavior.
Madeleine is really Scottie’s ideal woman.
[Don’t you think it’s kind of a waste for the two of us --]
[To wander separately?]
When this fictional woman dies,
Scottie feels like he’s lost an essential part of himself.
It’s telling that Scottie is head over heels for Madeleine
but can’t seem to hit it off with any of the real women he meets.
He’s not attracted to his ex-fiancée Midge, who’s an independent working woman.
And maybe that’s because unlike Madeleine, Midge isn’t at all mysterious or unknowable.
[What's this doohickey?]
[It's a brassiere!
You know about those things, you're a big boy now.]
Midge’s stability and normalcy make Scottie view her as maternal figure,
even though she’s clearly much younger than him.
[You’re not lost.
Mother is here.]
Then when Scottie meets Judy, he’s not interested in who she really is,
either.
Madeleine’s professional neutral clothing, platinum hair, and natural makeup
made her a blank slate for Scottie to project onto.
But Judy wears bright colors and garish makeup,
reflecting a stronger sense of self.
Scottie has to neutralize her appearance and transform her into Madeleine
to be able to feel something for her.
[You’re looking for the suit that she wore, for me.
You want me to be dressed like her.]
It's striking though that Scottie isn’t doing this all on his own --
Judy is participating in this process.
Vertigo observes that the overwhelming need for male validation
makes women willing to change themselves.
Judy is miserable as Scottie tries to make her over.
[Won't you like me just the way I am?]
But she agrees because she wants to be loved.
[Will you love me?]
[Yes.
Yes.]
[Alright then I’ll do it.
I don’t care anymore about me.]
She has to turn herself into a male fantasy to get this approval.
Through these interactions, the film is getting at
how this male need to alter and control women
can destroy a woman’s sense of self,
even as she feels compelled to enable what’s happening.
[You identify with Jimmy Stewart’s character and you identify with his perceptions
and you want him to achieve his goals.
You want Scottie and Madeleine to be together and to fall in love.
And then in the second half of the film, he begins to take apart your feelings about
him.
Hitchcock begins to make us feel uncomfortable with someone we’ve identified with.]
It’s hard not to feel as well that Hitchcock is being a little self-reflective here.
Judy’s metamorphosis into Madeleine could symbolize the way
a director controls the performance of an actress.
[He made you over just like I made you over, only better.
Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words.]
Hitchcock himself was known for his precision as a director,
[Slowly, slowly, and slowly.]
and of course, for casting cold, stylish blondes.
It’s as if Scottie is crafting the so-called “Hitchcock Blonde”
right in front of our eyes.
So the director seems perfectly willing to observe himself
and his own possible perversity with the unflinching honesty
he brings to all psychologies onscreen.
Whatever he may have thought about the morality of it,
the subtext of Vertigo suggests that he’s aware of this twisted male-female
dynamic
and how interconnected it is with creating cinema and art.
[Did he train you?
Did he rehearse you?
Did he tell you exactly what to do, what to say?]
Judy’s a fallen woman -- she’s broken away
from how respectable women are supposed to behave --
after all, she helped orchestrate another woman’s murder.
And Vertigo’s last scene makes her “fallen woman” status literal,
as she falls off the bell tower.
Judy’s not the only fallen woman in the film.
There’s also Carlotta, who we never meet but hear a lot about.
Earlier in the film we learn that Carlotta’s husband cast her aside
and separated her from their child,
so she was destitute before eventually killing herself.
[So he kept the child and threw her away.
You know men could do that in those days.
They had the power and the freedom.]
It’s clear that men are still exploiting their power over women in this story.
Near the end, Judy implicitly links herself to Carlotta
when she chooses to wear Carlotta's necklace --
this is what makes Scottie realize that she was pretending to be Madeleine.
And in the end Judy’s fate is similar to Carlotta’s.
So all of these instances suggest that male power and dominance is so destructive,
it actually kills women.
And the “fallen woman” is truly a victim.
Meanwhile, the nun who frightens Judy in the final scene
appears like a dark, threatening presence.
She represents chastity and religion -- so these forces, too,
seem to be an enemy threatening the safety of this vulnerable woman.
[God have mercy.]
Acrophobia, or the fear of heights, is sometimes interpreted as a fear
that we’ll jump to our deaths.
In other words, we can greatly desire what we also most fear.
Scottie’s acrophobia symbolizes that he’s torn
between a death wish and a will to live.
[If you think about our own desires and our own fears,
we can’t even acknowledge them and they make us uncomfortable.
And he’s showing you this by this portrayal of this character, Scottie.]
Vertigo suggests that maybe what we call love is a kind of death wish, too.
Part of what draws Scottie to Madeleine is that she’s attracted to death like he
is.
[There’s someone within me and she says I must die.]
She feels that mysterious pull to fall or to jump.
[Why did you jump?
What was there inside that told you to jump?]
Madeleine might even be the embodiment of death,
since she’s supposedly possessed by Carlotta’s ghost.
[Do you believe that someone out of the past, someone dead,
can enter and take possession of a living being?]
So Scottie’s infatuation with Madeleine is really an infatuation with death itself.
[And when I come to the end of the corridor, there is nothing but darkness.
And I know when I walk into the darkness, I'll die.]
Hitchcock represents the aura of death around Madeleine and Judy with the color green.
When Scottie and Madeleine visit the sequoia forest,
green seems to symbolize an eternal life.
[Their true name is Sequoia sempervirens -- always green, ever living.]
But this “ever living” quality actually suggests
a kind of ghostliness.
The first time Scottie sees the fake Madeleine she’s wearing a green stole
and later driving a green car.
Meanwhile, Judy’s wearing green when Scottie sees her for the first time --
the resemblance making him feel like he’s just seen a ghost.
And the light from the sign outside Judy’s building
makes her bedroom glow eerily green.
When Judy becomes Madeleine for Scottie, she steps into a tower of green light
and appears ethereal, not quite there.
And they kiss against a solid green backdrop.
This scene marks her transition from a living person into a dead thing,
as Scottie has resurrected the ghost of Madeleine.
In a conversation with François Truffaut, Hitchcock confirmed that this scene
is about the desire to love a dead thing.
[You have a man creating a sex image that he can’t go to bed with her
until he’s got her back to the thing he wants to go to bed with.
Or metaphorically, indulged in a form of necrophilia.
That’s what it really was.]
[lt should be back from your face and pinned at the neck.
I told her that. l told you that.]
[When she came back from having her hair made blonde,
and it wasn't up,
This means she has stripped but won't take her knickers off.]
So the moment that Scottie falls in love with Judy
is also the moment he fully “kills” her true identity,
as she submits to what he wants and recreates a ghost for him.
Vertigo has a theme of falling backward into our own pasts and memories.
[One final thing I have to do, then I’ll be free of the past.]
Scottie embodies Freud’s idea of repetition compulsion --
the tendency to repeat, relive, or regularly dream about a traumatic event
after it’s over.
When the policeman falls in the first scene of the movie,
Scottie looks down from where he’s hanging and sees him splayed on the sidewalk,
with his limbs in a kind of spiral shape.
This traumatic experience hangs over Scottie for the rest of the film.
He sees voids and spirals all over the place,
which remind him of the sight of the policeman’s body
and his experience of hanging off that building
fearing he's going to fall.
In the museum scene, he notices that Carlotta’s and Madeleine’s hairdos
have the same spiral shape.
Then his view looking down the bell tower stairs
appears like another empty void,
and his nightmare of Madeleine’s grave
reflects the same fear of falling into empty space.
Ultimately the film doesn’t tell us what we’re supposed to do
with these fears and obsessions that come from our pasts.
Early on, Midge suggests that the only cure for Scottie's fear of heights
is another traumatic incident.
[Midge, what’d you mean "there’s no losing it?"]
[What?]
[The -- the acrophobia.]
[I asked my doctor.
He said that only another emotional shock could do it and probably wouldn’t.]
So climbing the bell tower stairs at the end
is Scottie’s attempt to re-enact his trauma from the beginning.
[You’re my second chance, Judy.]
And it works -- his vertigo is cured -- but at a high price --
Judy is sacrificed, and Scottie has become a lot like Elster the wife-killer.
So just confronting our fears doesn’t truly solve
their underlying psychological causes,
which we’d be better off trying to understand
instead of just trying to eliminate this surface problem.
In the last scene, Scottie finds himself back where he started at the beginning --
looking down from a great height at someone's dead body.
So because he hasn’t looked deep enough within himself,
his cycle hasn’t been broken.
[It's a cliche to say that Vertigo is the best film every made --
I don't know whether it is or isn't.
But it's clearly one of the most interesting movies ever made.]
60 years after its release, Vertigo continues to resonate and send us reeling.
As we keep trying to understand more and more layers of this movie,
we play it over in our heads --
and in that way, we leave Vertigo feeling a lot like Scottie.
[One doesn't often get a second chance.
I want to stop being haunted.]
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