The Moral and Spiritual Topography of Vertigo
Neither the therapeutic complacency of Spellbound nor the therapeutic agitation of Vertigo can question the essential grounds on which the “triumph of the therapeutic” is wrought—the primacy of a historical unchanging, indeed a historically transcendent, unconscious. Indeed, in this sense, Vertigo’s therapeutic pessimism only confirms the essential claims it seems to question; the triumph of the therapeutic may be called into question, but the essential conceptual structure that underlies its social hegemony—the “terror before the abyss of the self” that Adorno describes and Vertigo literalizes—is not. But this critique, while important to bear in mind, is also limited: In the name of historical specificity, it bulldozes into oblivion the historicity of the gesture it claims to question. To understand both Spellbound and Vertigo as historically specific acts is to inquire in not only about the historical blinders of Vertigo but also its powers of historical insight. Swimming against the mainstream, Hitchcock crafts a critique of American therapeutic culture as startling and passionate as those that were to follow his in the 1960s and the early 1970s.
—Jonathan Freedman, “From Spellbound to Vertigo: Alfred Hitchcock and Therapeutic Culture in America” (96)
But the mirror of possibility is not an ordinary mirror, it must be used with the utmost precaution. For of this mirror, it is true in the highest sense that it is a false mirror.
—Søren Kierkegaard1
IN HIS INCISIVE ANALYSIS OF Spellbound and Vertigo, Jonathan Freedman contends that as Alfred Hitchcock advanced from the psychological shallowness of Spellbound (1945) to the psychological depths of Vertigo (1958) he took full advantage of the rapid institutionalization of psychology in American society during the postwar years to develop not only a relevant and compelling psychological drama, but also a devastating critique of what Philip Rieff soon thereafter called “the emergence of psychological man” in his influential work, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (329–57). In fact, as Freedman suggests, Hitchcock was a moralist in his own right in Vertigo insofar as he illustrates through images, as much as through words, the poverty of American institutional and popular psychology when faced with serious moral questions and fateful moral choices. However, Hitchcock’s insights extend beyond a critique of the manifest content of what Rieff would later call “therapeutic culture” toward a moral psychology that is reminiscent of the crisis psychology of European intellectuals such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud. Indeed, Hitchcock depicts in Vertigo the crisis of individuals afflicted by the ills of both a dying ascetic culture and an emergent remissive culture in a startlingly synoptic and effective manner across a variety of topics—individual freedom, despair, eroticism, and interpersonal domination, among others. However, Hitchcock concentrates on the inner crisis of a remissive, therapeutic culture, a culture which in Rieff’s formulation has “nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being” (Triumph of the Therapeutic 13). He analyzes the fate of individuals in a world of too many freedoms, rather than studying the defeats of those who inhabit a symbolic and social world with too few options. He prefers to describe the deficits of the self in a culture with a dearth of spiritual and moral demands, rather than the inner conflicts of one with too many. Even so, Hitchcock portrays a world in transition that is laced with contradictions and ironies: a protagonist who fears moral heights, but is blind to the spiritual topography of everything about him; a femme fatale who is socially constructed by males and deadly to herself; a culture that is saturated with psychological references but which is incapable of understanding psychic ills; even a cyclical conception of time that is, in the first version, represented as transparently false and then, in the second version, re-presented as symptomatically true.
The best analytical entry point into Vertigo is through the abundant references to psychology. As Freedman points out, these begin with the first full scene of the film in which Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) consoles former police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) over the circumstances surrounding the onset of his vertigo, which was triggered by his own near fatal accident during a rooftop chase that caused the death of a uniformed officer, as depicted in the opening scene.2 Invoking therapeutic language, Midge explains to her guilt-ridden, former fiancé that “the doctors explained it to you. It wasn’t your fault.” Shortly thereafter, Midge explains that she has also consulted with her own doctor, who has in so many words said that “you’ve got it [vertigo] and there’s no losing it. … Only another emotional shock will do it and probably won’t.” In short order, not taking Midge seriously, Scottie proclaims that he “won’t crack up,” and then proceeds to do precisely that, symptomatically fainting into the arms of Midge as he attempts to execute his own self-help therapy by climbing the steps of a kitchen height chair, while looking “up and down,” just prior to experiencing a paralyzing flashback to his rooftop trauma.
Similar therapeutic clichés and dead-ends are encountered later in the film under the auspices of the official psychiatric establishment, which, as Freedman notes, “fares little better” in its curative efforts (88). The narrative of the first half of the film draws to a close with Scottie believing (and the viewer being led to believe) that his vertigo has prevented him from saving (the false) Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), whom he believes to be the real wife of his old college acquaintance, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), from suicide, as he falls into a depressive catatonic state. Once again, Midge is present to help execute a therapy, but this time under the guidance of expert advice. Midge informs the catatonic Scottie, in what is the beginning of an ironic yet serious monologue, which presages the failure of this and all professional therapies, that “the lady in musical therapy” has prescribed Mozart as “the broom that sweeps the cobwebs clean.” In the next scene, the pattern of therapeutic failure is once again made clear in an exchange between Midge and the nameless psychiatrist in charge of Scottie’s case, who tells her that Scottie is “suffering from acute melancholia, together with a guilt complex … he blames himself for what happened to the woman.” After Midge responds that “I can give you one thing—he was in love with that woman and still is” and inquires about how long it will “take to pull him out of this,” the doctor’s response becomes even more hopeless and banal: “Well, it’s hard to say. At least six months, perhaps a year. It really could depend on him.” At this point, Midge prepares to exit the doctor’s office and the film and, by implication, Scottie’s life with her response, “And you know something, doctor, I don’t think Mozart is going to help at all.” The last camera shot of Midge’s lonely exit down the barren hospital corridor accents not only the failure of all professional therapies but also, as Freedman states, “the power madness exerts over Scottie for the rest of the film” (90). Indeed, the two points are inseparable: no therapy can adequately address the nightmare specter that haunts Scottie.
No therapy can offer a cure for Scottie’s madness because the specter haunting his nightmare is, as we learn in the dream sequence that leads to his madness, a terrifying image of his own death. In this dream sequence, Scottie superimposes his own fears onto the imagined fears of Madeleine (i.e., the false Madeleine Elster) as the dream concludes with Scottie’s disembodied head and body plunging toward the grave of Madeleine’s supposed great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. No therapeutic technique can offer a solution to this nightmare because the twentieth-century therapeutic thought-world, which is itself symptomatically depicted in Vertigo, is by its very nature simply incapable of addressing such extraordinary problems, of which the greatest is death.
Prior to the rise of the therapeutic thought-world, the extraordinary problems of the human condition were addressed within the context of religious and philosophical systems that were predicated on unconditional communal commitments and less practical forms of coping with such problems than we have grown to expect today. The rise of a therapeutic thought-world has changed all of this. In American, European, and other postindustrial societies, the triumph of the therapeutic has meant the defeat of older moralities of self-denial based on the assumption that the path to individual perfection is through submission to doctrines of communal purpose and adherence to narratives of spiritual ascent. And it has meant the victory of moralities of self-affirmation that proclaim the sovereignty of the self, which have broken the historic link between mandatory membership in the community and a therapeutic sense of well-being. Whatever the costs in terms of human suffering of earlier “commitment therapies,” the development of a full-blown therapeutic culture in the twentieth century with all of its shortcomings is presciently and symptomatically depicted in Vertigo” (66–78). Just as no stand-alone therapeutic technique can heal Scottie’s fractured existence, so therapeutic culture has proven incapable of mending what Rieff has called “the brokenness of existence,” which is another way of referring to what has “been called the problem of nothingness, of the void, of nonbeing” that the religious and philosophical thought-worlds of the past have all addressed (Feeling Intellect 314). In short, Scottie’s existence is irremediably broken because he finds himself trapped within the enormity of the present without spiritual guidance and with no symbolic resources at his disposal on which to rely.
Figure 12.1. Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) leaving sanitarium.
The cultural and psychological complexity of Vertigo is not initially apparent. In fact, Vertigo can easily be read as the last of the classic noir films with Scottie Ferguson as the last in a long lineage of American noir protagonists with progressively decreasing powers of agency that begins with the inestimable Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and continues through the likes of the doomed Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Ole ‘Swede’ Andreson (Burt Lancaster) in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), and Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum) in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947). Nonetheless, even if Vertigo is read as a noir film, it highlights the triumph of psychological thinking in the 1950s.
“The issue of destiny in noirs,” according to Robert Pippin, “is largely framed in psychological or social or existential terms, and the relevant possibilities are severely constricted. The standard picture is of people ‘trapped’ either (somewhat paradoxically) by themselves (by whom they have become), or by an anonymous and autonomous social order or societal machine, or by a vast purposeless play of uncontrollable fortune, chance” (11). In the first half of Vertigo, Scottie appears to be “trapped” by an inexorable fate when he is hired by Gavin to follow his apparently suicidal wife, Madeleine (who is supposedly possessed by the spirit of her dead great grandmother, Carlotta), falls in love with her, and then watches helplessly, paralyzed with vertigo, as she seemingly jumps to her death at the Mission San Juan Bautista. In the film’s second half, we quickly learn, of course, that Gavin has masterminded the murder of his real wife by using the femme fatale Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak also plays Judy Barton) as a stand-in for his wife and that he has intentionally exploited Scottie’s psychological condition. But, significantly, the revelation of the murderous actions of Gavin rapidly recede into the background of the film as Scottie’s obsession with the re-creation of Madeleine through Judy and (on learning of the deception) his fateful effort to break “free of the past” by returning to the scene of the crime, move to the forefront of the narrative. That is, Vertigo represents the dubious triumph of psychology at the end of the classic noir period. The fate of the protagonist is framed entirely in terms of psychological entrapment.
Theoretically, Scottie does have one chance: he is by vocation a detective who prides himself on his analytic abilities. But, as Freedman notes, where Hitchcock played a decisive role with Spellbound in making “the process of the psychoanalytic cure … fully available as a narrative resource for the Hollywood cinema only when its central activity—the discovery or recovery of the meaning of a past event—was translated into the homologous narrative of the detective plot,” with Vertigo Hitchcock subverts and severs this link (83). Unlike Dr. Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) in Spellbound, Scottie does not cure himself or anyone else upon solving the mystery of the terrible deception perpetrated on him by Gavin Elster (Woolfolk, 129–37). Indeed, Scottie, if anything, is presented as a parody of the analytic attitude made famous by Freud (as seen, for instance, when Scottie is seated on the all-too-obvious symbol of the analyst’s couch in the opening “fainting scene” with Midge). Initially, Scottie is skeptical of Elster’s story about Madeleine’s possession by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, responding that Gavin should “take her to the nearest psychiatrist, or psychologist, or neurologist, or psychoan … or maybe just the plain family doctor. I’d have him look at you too.” But even with this response, we know that Scottie is no master of analysis because it is evident how thoroughly he is imbued with an uncritical psychological worldview and, therefore, vulnerable to being taken in by Gavin’s preposterous tale. The first weakness foreshadows the second weakness. Accordingly, Scottie is then, as planned, seduced by Elster’s elaborate scheme with Madeleine at the erotic center of the plot, as he desperately searches for “the key” to Madeleine’s feigned madness. In the end, Scottie “has indeed solved the crime, but he has done the very opposite of curing himself,” as Freedman argues, thus severing the parallel between detective work and psychological analysis (94).
In addition to the fact that the psychological problems of Vertigo are much more profound than those of Spellbound, Scottie is represented as having limited analytical skills because he is anything but a model of psychological maturity. In fact, Scottie falls far short of the analytic attitude that Freud advocated and Rieff describes as necessary for surviving with a sense of self intact in a therapeutic age:
To reserve the capacity for neutrality between choices, even while making them, as required by this new science of moral management, produces a strain no less great than choosing itself. The analytic capacity demands a rare skill: to entertain multiple perspectives upon oneself, and even upon beloved others. A high level of control is necessary in order to shift from one perspective to another, so to soften the demands upon oneself in all the major situations of life—love, parenthood, friendship, work, and citizenship. Such conscious fluidity of commitment is not easily attained. In fact, the attainment of psychological manhood is more difficult than any of the older versions of maturity; that manhood is no longer protected by a fantasy of having arrived at some resting place where security, reassurance, and trust reside, like gods in their heavens. The best one can say for oneself in life is that one has not been taken in, even by that “normal psychosis,” love. (Triumph 66–78)
By this measure, Scottie is a case study in immaturity—at first glance, a man approaching middle-age, who is unmarried and without children, yet maternally attached to his former college girlfriend; retired early from his profession because of a trauma induced case of vertigo; and “taken in” by an old acquaintance who sets him up to be “taken in” by a carefully contrived femme fatale. In short, Scottie is, if nothing else, a model of psychological vulnerability and adolescence.
That Scottie is no master of psychological analysis and unaware of his own deeper problems is made clear from the opening scene of the film with Midge overtly depicted as both the former fiancé of Scottie and a maternal figure to him. Later, this association is made even more explicit when Midge tells a catatonic Scottie at the sanitarium that “Mother’s here. You’re not lost.” That is, from the first full scene of the movie forward, we, as viewers, are given plenty of reasons to suspect that Scottie’s problems did not begin with the rooftop trauma that triggered his vertigo. In addition to the opening banter about Midge’s “love life” and the revelation that she broke off their engagement after only three weeks, Midge’s troubled glance over her glasses during the exchange signals that she knows that something is awry with Scottie. To begin with, she is obviously in love with Scottie, but Scottie seems incapable of understanding and returning that love. One does not have to be Freud to figure out that Scottie has most likely come up against the incest taboo in his intimate life. Midge’s maternal image has inhibited his erotic response. Whether Midge was maternal from the beginning of the relationship, or she assumed that role later in response to Scottie’s immaturity, is a critical question that can be inferred only as the film unfolds. But it appears that Scottie is a classic case of arrested development and suffering from a deep-seated psychic conflict.
According to this reading, Scottie’s hysterical episodes brought on by his acrophobia are a symptom of an unresolved repressed conflict from his past. In Freud’s classic formulation, “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (7). On the surface, Scottie’s acrophobic episodes are directly related to his rooftop trauma; however, he reveals in the opening scene with Midge that it was during the rooftop incident that he found out that he had the condition. In other words, Scottie implies that his vertigo preceded the incident—that it had been latent and deep seated, even unconscious. He is depicted as time-bound, unable to escape from something in his past. Likewise, much of the content and structure of Vertigo emphasizes the time-bound nature of human experience and, especially, mental disturbance, once again evoking the classic model of reminiscence. However, Madeleine’s trance-like states, unconscious visits to historical and cultural locales, and apparent possession by the spirit of her dead great grandmother are all, of course, fabricated. They are parodies of reminiscence. On the other hand, Scottie’s attempts to recreate and recapture the image of Madeleine in Judy in the second half of the film are clearly an authentic, desperate exercise in reminiscence, a sort of acting out of his reminiscence of Madeleine. But Scottie’s acting out of his reminiscence of Madeleine may be read in at least two ways.
In the first, and less convincing, reading, Scottie’s attempts to recreate Madeleine point back to his original erotic response to her as an act of liberation from the crippling inhibitions of the past. Beginning with the spectacularly choreographed and mirrored scene in Ernie’s restaurant, and then continuing with the rescue of Madeleine from her plunge into San Francisco Bay and the embrace at Seal Bay with the crescendo of crashing waves in the background, Scottie’s attraction to the false Madeleine may be seen as a paradigm of romantic love in which he is finally able to fall in love with a woman, but only because she conforms to a set of very specific criteria and a series of obstacles enhance his passion.3 Specifically, Madeleine conforms to certain upper-class standards of beauty and taste (e.g., her restrained, physical poise and conservative suit and hair), comes from a social background above Scottie’s, and she is married. In addition, Madeleine’s madness creates yet another obstacle that must be overcome, as Scottie desperately searches for “the key” that would allow her to escape from the past. After losing Madeleine through the apparent suicide, Scottie is only then able to recapture his original romantic experience and erotic response by remaking Judy, an obviously unsophisticated, working-class young woman from Kansas, into Madeleine (unknowingly in the same manner as Gavin Elster). In this reading, Scottie’s romantic reminiscence with Madeleine/Judy, however colored with obsession and gross insensitivity, is an attempt to escape once again from the neurotic conflicts of the past and to leave behind his guilt over Madeleine’s apparent death. The fact that these efforts end in the disaster of Madeleine/Judy’s real death does not gainsay the point that Scottie’s problems may be interpreted as manifestations of psychic conflicts past and present associated with the neuroses of a dying ascetic culture.
Yet, there is abundant evidence to support the contention that Scottie’s deeper problem is not psychic conflict but depression, that his difficulties concern a failure of self-definition rather than an inner conflict between individual desires and the moral demands of society. According to Alain Ehrenberg, depression is the successor to neurosis in a therapeutic age characterized by the relaxation of moral demands and greater tolerance toward the self:
Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviours, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves. These new norms brought with them a sense that the responsibility for our existence lies not only within us but also within the collective between-us. … Depression is the opposite of this paradigm. Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure. The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself. (4)
Scottie certainly does not appear to be in conflict with conventional norms, such as those defining marriage, sexual identity, and social class. In fact, Scottie’s erotic interest in Madeleine is notable for his lack of concern with class barriers and her supposed marriage to Gavin. However, Scottie is a self-described “free man” who repeatedly characterizes himself as “wandering” and “wandering about,” after his departure from the police force. Initially, these references to freedom and wandering seem to be of little significance, but they take on added significance as they are repeated and the narrative of Scottie’s life comes into focus.
This narrative is bivalent, it unfolds at two levels—the first is a narrative of aimless freedom; the second is a narrative of what may be called transgressive freedom. The first narrative begins, as so much else does in the film, with the opening scene of Midge and Scottie when Scottie declares that tomorrow he will be a “free man” because the corset which he has been wearing for his injured back will come off. Aside from throwing off the obvious gender identity confusion and Midge’s utilitarian approach to sexuality (she is busy designing a “cantilevered” brazier), this is also Scottie’s un-self-conscious declaration of freedom from his mundane life, his apparently unconscious openness and vulnerability to what Kierkegaard called unlimited possibility—specifically, a life lacking in necessity, ungrounded in a personal synthesis of necessity and possibility, in which “everything is possible” (170). As this narrative unfolds, Scottie tells Gavin, then Madeleine, and then Midge in succession that he spends his time “wandering.” But this narrative of aimless freedom also unfolds as much visually as verbally, beginning with the mirrored scene in Ernie’s, and then continuing with the very next, second mirrored scene in the Podesta Baldocchi Flower Shop. In both of these scenes, Scottie catches surreptitious, reflected glimpses of the poised and beautiful Madeleine—artificially created images, as we soon find out. In addition, both scenes are devoid of any self-reflection on Scottie’s part. Scottie’s voyeuristic gaze is grounded in no self-awareness, no self-knowledge, let alone any knowledge of who Madeleine is as a person. Both scenes offer brilliant visual representations of Kierkegaard’s false “mirror of possibility” (170).
Both Scottie and Madeleine are defined by Scottie’s voyeuristic gaze, which in turn is controlled by Gavin, who in his role as Pygmalion has transformed the ordinary Judy into the extraordinary Madeleine. Under Gavin’s direction, Madeleine/Judy is able to exploit Scottie’s voyeuristic tendencies and secure his unintended role in the scheme to murder his wife and inherit her fortune. Scottie’s very lack of self-identity and deficiency of agency allow the execution of Gavin’s fantastic scheme to be successful. Without Scottie’s vulnerability and voyeuristic tendencies, Madeleine’s plunge into San Francisco Bay would not have resulted in Scottie taking the supposedly unconscious Madeleine back to his flat, removing her wet clothes, and placing her into his bed. Indeed, the entire scene in Scottie’s flat is effective precisely because it forces the viewer to consider exactly what has transpired and fully reveals Scottie’s voyeurism and, in the hindsight of later revelations, his susceptibility to erotic manipulation. Furthermore, it sets up the next, critical “wandering” scene outside Scottie’s flat in which Scottie suggests to Madeleine that they go wandering together. In this scene, it becomes clear that Scottie’s pursuit of possibility initially goes astray in what Kierkegaard describes as “the wishful, yearning form,” at the same time that this pursuit grows increasingly fantastic because he imagines that he can save Madeleine from possession by the suicidal spirit of her dead grandmother (170). In his aimless freedom, Scottie attempts to avoid the necessity of becoming a responsible agent by escaping into an impossible romanticism, which serves to fend off the depression that must inevitably ensue once that fantastic romanticism collapses.
Madeleine’s staged suicide triggers Scottie’s depression, what Ehrenberg calls “the tragedy of inadequacy”:
In the same way that neurosis threatened the individual divided by his conflicts, torn between the allowed and the forbidden, depression threatens the individual apparently freed from his taboos but certainly torn between the possible and the impossible. If neurosis is the tragedy of guilt, depression is the tragedy of inadequacy. It is the familiar shadow of a person without a guide, tired of going forward to achieve the self and tempted to sustain himself through products and behaviors. (11)
For Scottie, the tragedy of his inadequacy prior to his depression takes the form of his vertiginous dis-ease, which is perhaps best understood as not so much a fear of falling as a fear of moral heights. In Ehrenberg’s language, Scottie fails “to measure up.” That is, Scottie suffers from a dread of moral and spiritual ascent. He prefers to remain a psychological adolescent in an age of psychological adulthood who sustains himself through ambivalent “wanderings” and an impossible romanticism, which keep him focused on the immediate horizon.
Scottie’s ambivalent, wandering life after the onset of his vertigo comes into even clearer focus under the second narrative of transgressive freedom, which is introduced in the second full scene when Scottie meets Gavin in his executive office at his wife’s ship building company. At this meeting, Gavin provides important clues to a much darker side of existence to which Scottie is unconsciously attracted in his references to a painting of San Francisco on his office wall depicting the city before it had “changed.” According to Gavin, this old San Francisco was a city of “color,” “excitement,” “power,” and “freedom.” In an apparently innocent remark, Gavin informs Scottie that he “would like to have lived then.” But Gavin’s references take on much more sinister connotations a few scenes later, when Scottie and Midge visit the Argosy Bookstore run by Pop Leibel (Konstantin Shayne) to learn about the story of Carlotta Valdes, only to find out that the old San Francisco of Gavin’s imagination was a city in which rich and powerful men dominated women and could discard them at will. With reference to Carlotta, they learn that she had gone mad after a rich and powerful man had taken her in and then “threw her away,” while keeping their child (Carlotta’s grandmother). When Pop Leibel informs Scottie and Midge that a “man could do that in those days,” the repeated references to freedom suddenly become much more ambiguous and bivalent. At this point, the viewer learns that freedom can take the form of aimless wandering, but that it can also become criminal, that freedom can be remissive, but that it can also grow transgressive.
In Scottie’s case, he begins to move from remissive to transgressive freedom once he recovers from his depressive breakdown and attempts to remake the newly discovered Judy into Madeleine. After recovering, Scottie initially sights Madeleine’s 1957 Jaguar Mk.VIII, and then retraces his voyeuristic visits to Ernie’s, the Legion of Honor Museum, and the Podesta Baldocchi Flower Shop before spotting Judy outside the Empire Hotel, thereby repeating the classic symptomatic pattern of reminiscence discussed earlier. However, once Scottie discovers Judy at the Empire Hotel, this classic pattern is radically altered, even broken. To begin with, Hitchcock employs the established noir technique of a flashback: upon being discovered, Judy composes a letter to Scottie revealing that he has been the victim of Gavin’s plot and that she has fallen in love with him (and then destroys the letter), thus revealing to the viewer, but not to Scottie, the truth about the deception. This unusual plot device serves to raise not only the dramatic tension, but also to accent the fact that Scottie’s dominance and control of Judy commences before he learns the truth about Gavin’s exploitation of him and Judy’s role in this exploitation. More important, Scottie’s ignorance and the viewer’s knowledge of the crime allow the viewer to understand that Scottie begins his Pygmalion imitation of Gavin prior to learning of Gavin’s makeover of Judy into Madeleine.
Scottie’s forced makeover of Judy into the image of Madeleine may be represented as the actions of a desperate man, but these actions also reveal a pattern of exploitation that becomes increasingly severe as Scottie descends into a world of primordial possibility. Instead of accepting Judy as an irreducible individual, Scottie strips her of every last shred of self-respect as he badgers her into conforming to his ideal of romantic perfection. Indeed, the only scene shown from Judy’s perspective occurs the morning after he establishes initial contact as the two of them walk along the San Francisco waterfront, when Judy still has some hope that she will be able to make Scottie love her for herself. But this is a forlorn hope, as Scottie proceeds to enact a strange version of the “crystallization” theory of love, according to which, in the words of Ortega, “we fall in love when our imagination projects non-existent perfections onto another person” (22). In Scottie’s case, the projections are conscious and take on material reality as the clothes, shoes, jewelry, hair, and makeup of Madeleine are imposed upon Judy in the vain hope that he can repeat or circle back to the past in order to make a new beginning. But Judy’s eyes, more than anything else, betray the futility of Scottie’s efforts. Even though she may look like Madeleine, her eyes reveal that she is still the same insecure Judy. Judy cannot be inwardly remade, turned into something that she is not.
Spiraling circles are everywhere in Vertigo and are closely linked at points with images of eyes. Indeed, the film opens with a closeup of Kim Novak’s eyes, apparently portraying Madeleine, followed by a series of spiraling geometric images and then another eye closeup. Both the eye and circle motifs are reminiscent of the opening of Emerson’s essay “Circles”: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end” (212). However, Hitchcock’s circles are anything but the circles of Emerson defining the horizon of some new beginning. For Emerson, “our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning” (212). For Hitchcock, the circle is an image of futility. There are no new beginnings for either Scottie or Judy.
In order to signal that there are no new beginnings, Hitchcock’s circles spiral figuratively and sometimes literally downward: Scottie’s surveillance of Madeleine leads him in disturbing downward circles through the streets of San Francisco; the bell tower stairs of the Mission San Juan Bautista form a dizzying spiral; his nightmares are filled with images of downward spiraling falls; the retracing of his voyeuristic visits to Ernie’s, the Legion of Honor, and the Podesta Flower Shop lead to the beginning of the second, fatal relationship with Madeleine/Judy; Judy’s fatal fall at the close of the film repeats the psychologically fatal plunge of Madeleine and brings Scottie full circle. More generally, as Scottie “looks up” and “looks down,” his vertigo takes the form of a dizzying downward spiral as he is terror stricken by the abyss that opens up at his feet and from which he is incapable of looking away, let alone up. Of course, Scottie imagines that he has escaped from the futile circularity and terrifying dizziness of his life once he has consummated his relationship with the recreated Madeleine. Indeed, the bedazzling 360-degree kiss scene bathed in the blue-green light of Judy’s hotel room is supposed to signify for Scottie the circle of a new beginning, the anima of a new life. But the very experience of stripping Judy of her identity and dressing her up as Madeleine has only prepared him to delve more deeply into the abyss of possibilities that he has opened up, which, in Kierkegaard’s words, he now approaches with “anguished dread” (170).
Once Scottie is directly confronted with the elaborate fraud that has been perpetrated against him, upon discovering one of Madeleine/Judy’s “souvenirs of a killing”—the necklace—he heads straight down Highway 101 to the Mission San Juan Bautista in pursuit of yet another Emersonian end with a new beginning. Just as Scottie had imagined that he could break free of the past in his embrace of the transformed Judy, so he now imagines that he and Judy can “both be free” by going “back into the past once more” and returning to the scene of the crime, where he proceeds to drag Judy forcefully up the spiral stair case of the mission bell tower. In taking advantage of his “second chance,” Scottie in effect stops wandering and resolves his ambivalence, but at a very high moral cost: the climb up the bell tower is no vertical spiritual ascent, but rather a spiritual descent. For the first time he is able to overcome his vertigo, the “tragedy of his inadequacy,” but only by identifying downward with the transgressive figure of Gavin. Scottie solves the crime and temporarily cures himself, but only at the cost of consciously recognizing how closely he has emulated Gavin, in the absence of other guides. Hence, the emphatic and angry tone of Scottie’s rhetorical comments to Madeleine/Judy comes from a very personal, even intimate, knowledge of Gavin’s transgressions. They have shared the same erotic object and engaged in a sort of erotic competition that Gavin has won and Scottie has lost. “He made you over just like I made you over. Only better … you were a very apt pupil, too, weren’t you?” Likewise, Judy has also lost, and Scottie cannot resist reminding her that “with all of his wife’s money and all that freedom and that power” that Judy has been “ditched.” In a world of transgressive freedom, there are only winners and losers, and Scottie now recognizes how much he desires to be a winner. But in reducing Judy to nothing, just as his predecessor Gavin has done, Scottie sets her up to be scared out of her wits by an imagined apparition and fall to her death, thereby ensuring that one final circle of futility will throw him into a definitive, irrevocable despair.
1. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death, 170.
2. Freedman, “From Spellbound to Vertigo,” 88–89. The analysis of the next few pages draws heavily from Freedman’s argument. I am indebted to him for his keen insights into the links between therapeutic culture and Vertigo.
3. See the classic text by Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. M. Belgion (New York: Harper & Row, revised and augmented edition, 1974).
Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria. Trans. J. Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud. Basic Books, n.d.
de Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Trans. M. Belgion. New York: Harper & Row, revised and augmented edition, 1974.
Ehrenberg, Alain. The Weariness of the Self. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2010.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Intro. by I. Edman. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1951.
Freedman, Jonathan. “From Spellbound to Vertigo: Alfred Hitchcock and Therapeutic Culture in America.” Hitchcock’s America, ed. by J. Freedman and R. Millington. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death. Trans. with intro. and notes by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968.
Ortega Y Gasset, José. On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme. Trans. T. Talbot. New York: Meridian Book, World Publishing, 1957.
Pippin, Robert. Fatalism in American Film Noir. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
Rieff, Philip. The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings. Ed. and with intro. by J. Imber. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.
———. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 3rd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979.
———. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Woolfolk, Alan. “Depth Psychology on the Surface.” Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adapter. Eds. R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.