Perhaps the prestigious film magazine Sight and Sound did a disservice to Vertigo by proclaiming it the greatest film of the last century. The intimidating effect of such an announcement sent reviewers scurrying to reexamine the Hitchcock masterpiece fearing they had missed something. Some suggested a close reading is necessary to disclose the film’s hidden meanings, as if it concealed an aesthetic lodestone. Hitchcock has often been accused of not understanding his own films because he simply regarded them as fait accompli and didn’t comment on them analytically.
Vertigo has no hidden social or psychological revelations. Its uneven, implausible storyline was often justly criticized prior to its current deification. And yet, the film is disturbing for the casual nonchalance that inhabits the beautiful simplicity of its screen imagery. Vertigo bridges the seemingly insurmountable gap between fanciful 1930s-’40s romances and the current pervasive notion of cinema as the purveyor of a realism that relishes the distaff side of human nature. Vertigo is not easily dismissed. It creates its own myth—a surrealistic fantasy world steeped in aberrational romanticism, deceptively disguised in realistic trappings yet quietly intruding on the imagined psychosexual illusions of our private psyche.
It is one of the most beautiful movies ever made, moving in a dreamlike, romantic haze through a plot that at first seems to lead nowhere. Hitchcock created a beautifully contrived pattern of murder, so jarringly effective that our emotional focus remains off center—until the final shock is delivered.
Two seemingly haunted characters inhabit their own dream worlds. Scotty (James Stewart) is afraid of heights; he is hired to follow the enigmatic Madeleine (Kim Novak) who fears an inherited death wish. Eventually they wander some of the most beautiful stretches of the San Francisco Bay area in a dream world for two. They pause at the timeless sequoia woods; she gazes at a portrait of her doomed ancestress at the art gallery; she jumps off the San Juan Bautista Mission tower. Hitchcock introduces a series of disturbing psychological surprises for which the viewer is only partially prepared.
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Recovering from a nervous breakdown, Scotty revisits the places he shared with Madeleine, imagining he sees her again in similarly dressed women. The film becomes more unsettling as this unexpected turn of events develops with morbid intensity. As Hitchcock evokes an increasingly intense response for the mourning Scotty, we are not prepared nor can we fathom why we also miss Madeleine. Scotty’s obsession becomes as hauntingly circuitous as his lovely, winding pursuit of memory through San Francisco.
Rhik Samadder’s superb article on Vertigo in the Guardian strikes at the film’s heart, citing Scotty’s unsettling response as a subliminal aspect of primal tragedy, “the grip of the past on our unconscious, dark tendrils that snake down through centuries, the curse of ancestral hurts,” Orpheus pursuing Euridice in the underworld. Samadder tackles the inexpressible magic of the film’s sudden turn of events in poetic analysis that uncomfortably mirrors the viewer’s own unsettling reactions to this sudden shift into a new emotional focus.
When Scotty bumps into Judy, we know it is Kim Novak playing a dual role, but he realizes this simple girl’s resemblance to Madeleine can only offer skin-deep comfort (for which we too are empathetically grateful). How could this very ordinary girl from Kansas (she shows him her driver’s license) be his Euridice? It would be easy to assume it’s all a Hitchcock jest when we are casually informed that she is indeed that same Madeleine—and an accessory to a murder.
In the famous makeover of Judy into Madeleine, we are yet to be convinced that Scotty’s obsessive transformation can be other than a costume change. We are happy at his efforts. As the sequences develop uneventfully, we are not yet prepared for the final shock. As the film reaches one of those rare moments in great cinema that are grasped only obliquely, our fascination becomes uncomfortably inexpressible. The fully made-over Judy remains commonplace but she resists the final touch to her hairstyle. “We tried it but it just doesn’t suit me.” She steps into the bathroom to adjust her hair. What emerges after a long wait is not Judy but Madeleine, bathed in a hazy, fantastic green light with all the emotion, longing and tenderness that fills the Madeleine world we have missed. She is with us again.
The shock is enormous. Samadder brilliantly alludes to the mystery of Vertigo’s inner life as elusive, like visiting a “butterfly garden, in which we all wave our own nets.” The inexpressible truth is that our conscious emotional perception defies our attempts at logic. Scotty has accomplished something we cannot. He has literally brought a lost beloved back from the dead. Hitchcock laid it all before us without artifice but with the unique truth of cinema.
