Do I Still Love 1958's Vertigo?
1958 Paramount Pictures
Directedby: Alfred Hitchcock; Written by: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor (based upon the novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileau)
Starring: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, and Henry Jones
Music by: Bernard Herrmann
MPAA Rating: PG; Running Time: 128 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 10/10
Detective John "Scottie" Ferguson chases a suspect across city rooftops through the San Francisco night. He loses his footing and clings to a ledge, looking down from a great height to suddenly discover he has severe acrophobia. His fear of heights is so severe, the ground seems to be racing both toward and away from him, and as he struggles to maintain his grip, a fellow officer falls to their death while trying to save him. The traumatic experience is enough to cause the aging bachelor to retire early, as he is, as he says, "a man of independent means." However, Scottie is soon sucked back into investigative work. An old college acquaintance asks Scottie to keeps tabs on his wife, Madeleine, who has been behaving abnormally, and following a strange ritual of wandering to certain locations around the city. Madeleine's husband's theory for why his wife is acting strangely seems absurd.. He believes she's been possessed by the spirit of her long-deceased grandmother, Carlotta, who committed suicide many years before. At least, Scottie thinks this explanation is absurd, until he realizes that, though Madeleine consistently visits Carlotta's grave, she herself never knew her grandmother's true identity. Things come to a head when Scottie follows Madeleine to the banks of San Francisco Bay beneath the Golden Gate Bridge...and Madeleine jumps in.
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| About as memorable an image as cinema has conjured |
Scottie dives in and saves Madeleine, then makes the fateful decision to bring her back to his apartment, despite the fact the she's unconscious. When Madeleine wakes, she and Scottie begin an awkward conversation that soon becomes strangely charged. When she returns to thank Scottie the next day, the two strike up a friendship that soon turns romantic, as Scottie determines to get to the bottom of what really haunts Madeleine. Despite Scottie's best efforts, though, the depths of Madeleine's darkness extend far below his reach, and tragedy strikes, sending Scottie into a near catatonic depression from which there seems no escape. Even his best friend and clearly still attracted ex-fiancée, Midge, can't seem to bring Scottie back to the world of the living...until the inexplicable happens. While wandering the streets, Scottie sees a familiar face...one that looks just like Madeleine's.
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| What's a Hitchcock film without a moment of voyeurism? |
It's easy to see why Vertigo appealed to me. The lush visuals, hypnotic atmosphere, and dark themes fit all my interests. From a young age, ever since, for some unknown reason, the 1st grade librarian decided it would be a good idea to read a grotesquely illustrated version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death to my class, I'd been attracted to the macabre. However, while most of my peers were terrified of gruesome imagery, I found that the only thing that truly scared me was the horror of ideas. Watching a hulking killer chase after and murder teens would have others hiding behind the couch, but I found my terror lying in bed that night, trying to imagine what was going on in the killer's head. The idea of what he might of been thinking was far scarier to me than watching him actually carry out those thoughts. Maybe that's why I found Vertigo so terrifying. It's full of pitch black ideas. However, so much time has passed since that first viewing now, and I've seen thousands of films in that span. Up until this past week, I hadn't watched Vertigo in over a decade. Is it still my favorite film?
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| Ideas are the bridges between our minds |
Hitchcock sets an immediate tone with Vertigo's opening credits. An uncomfortably too-close black-and-white close-up of a woman's face soon reveals the film's title in her eye, as the screen suddenly tints red, and the camera moves through her eye into bewildering spiral shapes. This is set to Bernard Herrmann's hypnotic score, which builds from a ticking harp arpeggio to the film's massive orchestral theme, a swelling minor key melody which brings to mind a vast, unknowable, Lovecraftian landscape. We're then immediate thrown into the rooftop action, leading to the only thing that dates this film: the special effects for someone falling off a roof look a little silly in 2022...but they also looked silly back in 2001. They definitely don't detract from the film.
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| The "vertigo" effect, though, is still disorienting and terrifying |
Jimmy Stewart's Scottie is thus introduced to us as quite a vulnerable character. He's gone from a fearless, if aging cop, to someone who can't make it to the second rung on a stepladder without looking down and growing dizzy to incapacitation. His only real friend appears to be the pining Midge, and yet we learn, despite the fact that she still obviously has feelings for Scottie, she was the one who long before broke of the engagement with him. We're never told why, one the film's many great subtleties, and I've always thought that perhaps she saw some hidden, incomprehensible darkness in him, to which she didn't want to bind herself.
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Not the Jimmy Stewart you want to see when you're standing on a
ledge |
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| Is the present just a reflection of the past? |
From this moment you're either sucked into Vertigo's world, or this movie just isn't for you. Hitchcock seduces the viewer, just as Scottie is seduced by the very idea of Kim Novak's Madeleine. Gavin's wife really does appear to be possessed by Carlotta, who Scottie finds was taken to the city long before from a small Catholic mission. The wealthy San Franciscan who took her from her home made her his mistress, impregnated her, took the child, and then left her on the street, where she slowly went mad before taking her own life. According to Gavin, and unbeknownst to Madeleine, Carlotta is Madeleine's grandmother. In a haunting, atmospheric sequence, Scottie follows Madeleine around San Francisco to a series of locations that would have been important to Carlotta. Frame after beautiful, haunting frame seems to confirm Gavin's suspicions that his wife is haunted by a ghost from the past.
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| Though in these sequences, she's mostly haunted by Scottie. |
I'm not sure how well these sequences would work with lesser actors. My experience with Jimmy Stewart to this point had mostly been confined to Westerns and Frank Capra films. Admittedly, I love Westerns and Frank Capra films, but the younger Stewart in those films generally embodied either the absolute moral good, or someone who learns to embody the absolute moral good. This is not that Jimmy Stewart. Perhaps drawing some darkness from his voluntary service in WWII, which bisects his career, and where Stewart saw real combat, or perhaps simply drawing from a considerable life lived by that point, the family man Stewart portrays a character here who, while not quite sinister, is certainly darker and more "off" than your average film protagonist. Despite Scottie's "off-kilter" nature, Stewart is still able to inject his uniquely likeable, relatable nature into the role, which combines with Hitchcock's direction and Kim Novak's spellbinding performance to make it quite easy to be as swept away by Madeleine as Scottie is. As Madeleine, Novak gives, in my opinion, one of the best acting performances in history. She's playing so many different parts, stacking so many layers, that it's really up to viewer interpretation as to who Madeleine really is when the credits roll.
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| Enigmatic in every way |
During these gauzy, dream-like sequences, Madeleine, as stated above, jumps into the San Francisco Bay, and Scottie dives in to save her. And this is where I will begin to spoil the movie. If you haven't seen Vertigo before
GO WATCH VERTIGO NOW
!!!SPOILERS BEGIN!!!
!!!SPOILERS BEGIN!!!
It's at this point in the film that repeat viewings start to pay off in dividends, which only furthers my belief that Vertigo is the greatest film ever made. Yes, first spoiler: 21 years after my first viewing, I still love Vertigo more than ever. Now back to the film.
Not wanting to involve the police, Scottie takes Madeleine back to his apartment, where she awakens, and he makes up a story about sightseeing near the bridge, so that she won't know that he was following her. The thing is, Madeleine awakens in Scottie's bed, completely nude. Madeleine's clothes are hanging in Scottie's kitchen, but if this isn't your first viewing, you know that "Madeleine" isn't Gavin's wife at all, or even Madeleine, but an actress who's been paid to play her. If you were able to pay full attention to dialogue on your previous viewings, you also know that Kim Novak's character was also Gavin's mistress, and that Gavin left her behind halfway through the film, after throwing his wife off the previously mentioned Catholic Mission's tower, tricking Scottie, whose vertigo prevented him from climbing the tower steps, into thinking that the "Madeleine" he knew, possessed by either madness or the tortured spirit of her grandmother, leapt from the top of the tower to her death. I illustrate all of this now to draw attention to just how much complexity Novak has to bring to each moment of the film, and particularly in "Madeleine"'s first meeting with Scottie, long before her "death."
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| While it's certainly less exotic, The Tower would have also been an apt title for the film. I'm glad it's called Vertigo. |
On the surface, Novak has to be a slightly disoriented married woman, who is waking up nude in a stranger's bed, with no memory of how she got there. Beneath that is a woman named Judy who came to the west coast from Salina, Kansas, met a wealthy man, Gavin, and was convinced by him to impersonate his wife to a private investigator so that she and Gavin could eventually run away together. But beneath that is a San Francisco Bay's worth of ambiguity, particularly in where the performance begins and ends. For instance, since Judy wasn't really the haunted Madeleine, attempting to take her life in San Francisco Bay, she was conscious when she jumped in, KNOWING that Scottie was right behind her to jump in to save her. Since that's what actually happened, was she CONSCIOUS when Scottie took her back to his apartment? Was she conscious when Scottie took off her clothing and carried her to his bed? Had she already created a narrative in her head of who Scottie was as a person, after KNOWING that he had been following her for days? Did she even know if the final step in Gavin's plan involved murder? And perhaps most tantalizing of all, has Judy, whether through losing herself in her own performance, or through some spiritual transfer, somehow been possessed by the spirit of Carlotta, who was a very real person who took her own life years before?
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| Where does the performance begin and end? |
We know that Judy does indeed quickly fall in love with Scottie, and knowing all of the above, this leads to even more tantalizing questions. What the hell happened to Judy in Kansas? Why is she so attracted to Scottie's paternal, yet haunted and obsessive nature? Does the way Gavin uses her drive her into Scottie's protective and caring arms? Does the way he tries save "Madeleine" from Carlotta ignite something within her? Whatever it is, it's so strong that moments before Judy climbs the tower to fake her death, she breaks character to an unknowing Scottie to tell him "this isn't the way this was supposed to happen!" If the contrast of Scottie's care to Gavin's using her is why she fell in love with Scottie in the first place, then how much more tragic does that make the second half of the film?
After Gavin's wife is found dead below the tower, Scottie drives home in a blackout state, ends up in court, and is found innocent of any wrongdoing. He then becomes so depressed, he ends up at a mental health clinic in a catatonic state, where he has horrific nightmares. In one of my favorite moments of the film, Hitchcock enters Scottie's sleeping mind to reveal his terrifying thoughts, as he sees himself falling endlessly into darkness, after, in a moment that sends chills down my spine every time I see it, he reimagines previous events in the film with a smirking, near demonic Carlotta watching approvingly.
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| Get behind me, Satan! |
Whether Carlotta is a present, malevolent force in the film, or just a referenced historical figure, she is Vertigo's symbol of inescapable fate. Scottie and Judy are doomed, and even when they could be free together, the overwhelming power of the past eventually destroys them and takes Judy into the beyond.
This second half of the film is most certainly the more controversial. As
Judy returns to her regular San Francisco life, and Gavin runs off to
Europe, Scottie eventually gains enough mental stability to return home.
Gavin makes no more appearances in the film, but it's now interesting to
think about his statement of how wished he lived in the early San
Francisco, where there was, "Color, excitement, power, freedom" a subtle
hint at his diabolic nature that's called back to later in the film.
As Scottie revisits old haunts, he runs into Judy, who plays dumb, but
most certainly must have wanted Scottie to find her. She claims that she
has never met Scottie before and has no idea who Madeleine is. Scottie
seems to believe her, but still wants to have dinner with her. As he
leaves so that she can get ready, Hitchcock does something he could pull
off better than anyone: reveal absolutely everything to the viewer, and
yet by doing so, ramp up the tension even more. Will Scottie figure out
what the viewer now knows? Will he discover that Judy really was his
"Madeleine?"
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| I don't know how many times Novak practiced this face she makes when "Madeleine" says she is going mad, but she deserves a lifetime achievement award for it. |
The is where the moral complexity of the film ascends to the highest tiers. Scottie begins to obsessively makeover Judy to look like Madeleine. It's bizarre, controlling, and abhorrent, but at the same time, he is only obsessed with recreating Madeleine because Judy deceived him into believing that the "Madeleine" he thought he knew existed. Judy continuously protests Scottie's commands that she change her style of dress, makeup, and the color and style of her hair, and yet she does it because she wants to be with the Scottie she fell in love with when he believed she was someone she was not. There are an absurd amount of layers here that are impossible to analyze on first viewing, and that they all bind together so well upon rewatch is a testament to the absolute perfection of this film.
Vertigo's most haunting scene, and for all intents and purposes, its climax, occurs when Judy has finally completed her makeover back to "Madeleine." She puts on the finishing touch of pinning her hair back just so in the bathroom, as Bernard Herrman's piece, "Scene D'Amour," beings, and Scottie waits anxiously in the living room, lit only by moonlight, and the ghostly green neon of a nearby outdoor sign. As the terrifying magnificence of Herrmann's score swells, Madeleine and maybe to even some degree, Carlotta, is resurrected, walks through a green verdant mist toward Scottie as they embrace, the score crashes again and again in orchestral waves, they kiss, and the camera spins around them, backdrop subtly changing to the mission stable where they'd last kissed before Madeleine's fall. It's romantic in the classical sense. It's beautiful. It's horrifying.
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Look at those shadows! Judy, Madeleine, and Carlotta
together! |
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| What I'd like to do to this movie |
The film's final section then works as a coda. The reunited Scottie and "Madeleine" appear overjoyed to be in each other's company again. All is well, finally, until Judy gets too sentimental. As the two are preparing for a date out at the restaurant where Scottie first saw her, Judy puts on a necklace she wore before as Madeleine. This is also a piece that, coincidentally and quite symbolically, once belonged to Carlotta. Scottie, ever the detective, notices the familiar necklace, the past coming back as an inescapable anchor to infinite doom, and suddenly realizes that everything he has believed was a lie. He drives past the restaurant and tells Judy there's somewhere else he wants to go, which turns out to be the mission tower, the original scene of the crime. He violently forces Judy to climb the steps with him, to both finally cure his acrophobia, and to angrily confront her.
Stewart is as menacing here as he's ever been in his career, as far from George Bailey as possible as he spits out the truth he's deduced like venom. Novak is equally brilliant, as she backs up the steps terrified, crying, unable to deny the truth as reality comes crumbling around the both of them. Carlotta gave her lover what he wanted and then he left her, just as Gavin left Judy, and just as Scottie appears to be rejecting Judy now. As cathartic and righteous as Scottie's revelation is for him and to some degree, the audience, it is catastrophic for Judy. It is astonishing how much hurt Stewart is able to coax from the lines
"And then what did he do? Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do, what to say? You were a very apt pupil too, weren't you? You were a very apt pupil! Why did you pick on me! Why me?!"
As the two reach the top of the tower, the blister is drained, Scottie's fear of heights and the resulting vertigo is cured, and now Scottie and Judy stand alone far above the shapeless night...but the third cycle is not yet complete. As the two kiss one final time in the cauldron of their opposing emotions, a dark, horrific form rises up from the stairs like a demonic specter of the past and a terrified Judy screams and stumbles off the tower to her death.
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| Don't tell me this isn't a horror film |
The figure turns out to be a nun, who heard Scottie and Madeleine shouting. "God have mercy!" she says. Scottie walks to the edge of the tower and looks down, as Hitchock's camera pulls back.
THE END.
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Vertigo is about a hell of a lot more than psychological obsession.
It is about the ghosts of the past, and whether anyone can ever truly
escape them. It is about the performances we all put on for one another,
where those performances end, and where the real begins, if the real even
exists at all. This film is a dark dream that can never be fully unpacked.
It is full of terrifying ideas, some too dangerous to ponder.
It is my favorite film ever made.
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If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I don't intend for
following entries to be this long, though I must admit, I do go on.
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