Take 3: Vertigo
Vertigo is a story of vantage points, and in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, there are a multitude to choose from. Vertigo belongs securely in its exalted #3 position on the list, not in small part due to Hitchcock’s ability to deftly jump from vision to vision, exploiting the best lynchpins of multiple genres while crafting a story of madness and control. Right from the opening sequence Hitchcock makes no effort to hide his intentions. The series of colorful, hypnotic, optical illusions is the war cry of someone intent on manipulating your vision, and yet the zigs and zags of the plot still work over the viewer’s expectations even after the forewarning.
We witness John “Scottie” Ferguson’s first trauma occur as he is dangling from the gutter of a tall San Francisco building when a cop attempting to save him plummets to his death. There’s nothing about the scene that indicates it could in any way be attributed to an action Scottie made, and yet he still suffers a shock related to his involvement in the incident, and the obligatory guilt complex of his responsibility in the man’s death. He quits the police force and commits himself to overcoming his fear of heights, but his friend Midge reminds him that the doctors’ believe only another emotional shock might pull him from the grips of acrophobia. Shortly after he quits his job, he’s approached by an old college friend, Gavin Elster, to do some private investigation into Elster’s wife Madeline’s mental state. He believes she has been possessed by a long dead relative, Carlotta Valdes, who killed herself after being ostracized by her husband.
So the impetus of our first act is established: Scottie and Madeline are both haunted by their pasts and it leaves them out of control of their actions. They are both walking a tightrope of privileged existences — each are occupationless and wealthy — and yet they cannot live the lives they’ve been gifted to their full potential because of external hang ups. Madeleine’s obsession with the past and with the sordid story of her Grandmother’s untimely suicide becomes her cross to bear, and a sad map to her future. Many of the characters we’ve met so far (Scottie, Madeleine, and Gavin) are fighting to shake the burdens of their histories and struggling to free themselves from the depressing depths of guilt and shame and destiny.
When Scottie and Madeleine visit the redwood forests, and Scottie states that they’re called “evergreens” because they will live forever, Madeleine becomes overwhelmed by how small her existence will be in comparison to the ancient trees — and thus the existential crises underlying each of the characters is brought into stunning clarity. That reminder of our own impermanence and insignificance is enough to throw anyone into a state of panic, but especially someone with an already established complex about death, as Scottie and Madeleine both have. In a way, the feeling of insignificance that comes with thinking about the vastness of life induces a specific kind of vertigo for many of us, the stomach dropping queasiness of what it means to be reduced to a single ring on the trunk in a universe defined by infinite time and space.
These are, however, the naval gazing, ho hum, concerns of the leisure classes — those who have been afforded the opportunity to worry about their place in history and the world at large. For many people, just establishing autonomy over their own life is an uphill battle. Scottie reminds us a few times throughout the movie that he is a man “of fairly independent means” and can do as he pleases, not worrying himself over finances, or a responsibility to family. That untethered existence affords Scottie a skewed viewpoint of the world around him, a trait he is unaware of and one that will be preyed upon by his adversaries, as it is a freedom that cannot be applied to any of the other major characters in the film, not even Gavin or Madeleine Elster.
Hitchcock demonstrates the discrepancy between Scottie’s reality and those around him until eventually that variance becomes the engine driving the plot forward as it becomes increasingly more literal. While watching this movie I had a keen sense that Hitchcock realized, like many advertisers are just now beginning to, that there was money to be made from training the camera on women as fully embodied people, with complex motives and a particularly specific set of anxieties. When we first meet Midge, played by the flawless Barbera Bel Geddis, she is working on an ad for a “gravity defying” bra, an indication that maybe the existential vertigo and disconnection to reality suffered by Madeleine and Scottie do not extend to her.
Midge is the picture of rationality, but she has a wry streak to her, a naughty-feeling ray of sunshine cutting through the dark free fall of Scottie and Madeleine into madness and depression. But what would it mean for Midge, as weightless and buoyant as she is, to hear the fate of Carlotta Valdes described with the addendum, “Men could throw women away in those days, and that’s what he did. He threw her away.”? Bearing in mind that the 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was ratified less than thirty years before Vertigo was released, it’s obvious that this was not a meaningless notion for both Midge and Madeleine.
This generation of women held a precarious, frightening, and precious new sovereignty over their lives, an existence Carlotta would never have known. When Scottie exclaims to Madeleine “Nobody possess you!” while the overwrought, symbolic, white crests of waves break on the rocks behind them, he could be referring to Carlotta (the ghost possessing her physically and spiritually) and he could be referring to her husband Gavin (who possess her in marriage). When he pulls her into his body and kisses her hard, he also seems to be stating his intent to possess her, an impulse he indulges to an extreme degree later in the film.
This not to say that men don’t face difficulties when it comes to their own perception of control and burden of masculinity. Gavin and Scottie actually share a lot of similarities in this regard. While Gavin takes advantage of Scottie’s acrophobia to plot the murder of his wife, that action is instigated by his desire to shake the shackles of his in-laws while still reaping the financial benefits of his marriage. It’s no coincidence that Gavin Elster is in the shipbuilding business, he creates vessels that allow him and others to float above the abyss — because if anything serves as representative of depths into the unknown it’s the wide, dark, ocean. From this angle, in the face of his own perceived encroachment on his liberties, Gavin resorts to despicable action.
There were many times when the image of Scottie falling from heights above the ground reminded me of Don Draper and the opening credits of Mad Men. I imagine that Scottie must have remained in the forefront of Matthew Weiner’s mind when he crafted a tragic hero of his own - who also longs for the old California days of lawlessness and fabricates a new identity in an attempt to shake a haunting past. Just like Draper, Scottie has a multitude of names each signifying different versions of himself (John, Johnny, Scottie) and eventually it’s revealed that the woman he’s fallen in love with was never Madeleine at all, but a pawn in Gavin’s scheme named Judy. I particularly loved the subtlety of the “Twelfth Night” sign in the background as Scottie continues to obsess over Judy / Madeleine (Judeleine?) — a significant homage to the Shakespearean play tackling similar tropes. All of these men are shocked by the discovery of their ineptitude to alter mortality, and as they tumble from a place of invincibility, they each become desperate to reestablish a belief in their own varying degrees of prepotency.
That broken illusion of control, and the intensifying effect of Madeleine’s apparent suicide, is what propels Scottie into his maniacal obsession with the women who was forced to play the role of Madeline by Gavin Elster. The cinematography doubles down on the illusion of perspective when it takes us down narrow alleys or hides major characters in shadow at crucial moments. The city of San Francisco is the perfect setting for a story about diverging fates, we’re riding shotgun as Scottie rolls up and down steep hills, sometimes gifted broad panoramas of outlying districts, sometimes limited to the singular image of Madeleine’s rear bumper.
I will avoid wading too far into uncharted theory seas, but I think a passing reference to Bentham’s Panopticon is warranted — at least to demonstrate that vision has always been linked to power, and that the high ground is sacred territory. When Scottie’s vision is skewed by the supposed death of Madeleine, he surrenders the high ground, and descends into insanity that drives him to possess the woman he previously sought to liberate. As he squeezes and suffocates Judy into playing Madeleine once again, he eventually learns the truth, and she too is left with the only one option, an illusion of choice, as Scottie forces her to take the leap he once feared he had driven her to.
More than once while watching the movie I was reminded of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and I found a quote that I think summarizes Scottie’s predicament rather aptly. He is a man caught between a drive toward purpose of existence and the burden of his insignificant reality, doomed to a fate of falling and re-elevation, a man who always had nowhere to go but down:
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
The struggle against vertigo is one that most of us will ford at some point in our lives in an attempt to make sense of our fragile, temporary, existence. Scottie and Judy lost that battle, both succumbing to the dizzying disequilibrium of altering, blurred, vantage points.
