Vertigo

In Saul Bass' famous opening credits to Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958), whirling Moire-patterned vortices fill the screen, tilting and rotating like deep-space galaxies in fields of super-saturated color. The camera moves toward and through these spiralling figures, cosmically strange and enigmatic, and the patterns, populating the brain of a woman whose mask-like face (in huge and abstract close-up) inaugarates the film, have tghe peculiar property of being both immense and menacing as well tiny and gem-like. Everything in "Vertigo" is cut from the same cloth: the film is both massive, grave, and imperial as well as petty and,even, in some ways, dated. "Vertigo" is an elaborate exposition of Freud's theory of "abreaction," a questionable psychoanalytical doctrine first announced in 1893 -- the idea is that by bringing into the forefront of consciousness a trauma that has been repressed, the victim of that injury will relive the pain and distress of the event and, somehow, achieve dominion over fears and desires that would otherwise control that person from their grave in the unconscious. At least three intersecting narratives rely on "abreaction" or cathartic effects associated with that psychic process: Scotty, the traumatized detective, seeks to free the mysterious, enraptured Madeline Elster from the ghost of Carlotta Valdez that is haunting her (and Valdez' possession of Madeline is itself posited as a result of emotional forces not properly abreacted in the dead woman); later, Scotty remakes poor Judy Barton into the dead Madeline and drags her to the fatal tower at San Juan Bautista to "free her from the past" and, thereby, free himself; the city of San Francisco is itself envisioned as a beautiful maiden, slumbering in a dream of the past -- and the film's sensuous landscapes seem, in part, an attempt to imagine some kind of separation between the present-day and history that threatens to overwhelm, even drown, the present in the ambience of the last century. The concept of a dubious freedom from responsibility and from the female lure of nostalgia motivates several important speeches in the picture: the murderous Elster says that he wants to be free of the gloomy and morbid past involving the suicide of his wife in San Francisco -- the murderer exits the film to Europe to which he presumably escapes scot-free. The antiquarian bookseller remarks that people were free in old-time San Francisco -- a man could simply abandon a woman who had borne his child. (It is ambiguous whether the antiquarian, who may be homosexual, is amused by this concept, wishful, or merely stating a fact.) Elster announces this motif when he gives Scotty the assignment of tracking his beautiful and doomed wife -- saying that he longs for the freedom of the old city obsessively portrayed in lithographs on his wall. Except for the murderer's escape to Europe -- all other attempts at achieving freedom, particularly through Freudian abreaction result in death and, in the two most notable cases, death by falling. Three times figures are visualized plunging away from the camera, their fall metaphorically representing a descent from the present-day foreground into a lethal and deadly past. Vertigo, in part, refers to the feeling that we have that the past is always nearby, ready to erupt into the present with deadly consequences, or, in the film's peculiar vertical psycho-geography, opening a abyss into which wanderers might fall to their deaths. The past is a deep, gloomy well, an open grave into which people gaze, unable, it seems, to look away. (And Hitchcock's film, I think, peers deeply into the past of American literature -- doesn't the name Madeline Elster remind us of Madeline Usher and the motif of a dead woman resurrected by her obsessed lover in the form of another woman derives, via French idolatry of E. A. Poe reflected in the novel "D'entre les morts" adapted into film, from "Ligeia".) Seen in isolation from the director's other films, "Vertigo" although spectacularly beautiful, would probably seem small, peculiar, lethargically paced and intensely improbable -- in fact, this was generally the response of critics to the picture when it was first shown. But taken in the context of Hitchcock's life-work, the film assumes a kind of moody grandeur -- it summarizes various obsessions that motivate the director's best films, reflects on those leit motifs, and presents them in the most unadorned and, yet, brilliant form. In this respect, the film is both huge and tiny -- it is locked within Hitchcock's own morbid notions of guilt and fate and sexual desire and, yet, expands to provide a kind of synoptic key to all of the rest of the Englishman's films. In particular, the movie glosses Hitchcock's continuous concern with voyeurism, with the sexuality of seeing, and with the viewer's implication in scotophiliac deviance, the perversity of the gaze. "Vertigo" is shot in VistaVision and the film's signature mise-en-scene couples Jimmy Stewart peering intently through the windshield of his car with point-of-view forward-tracking shots through that windshield --the elongated shape of the windshield mirrors the aspect-ratio of the film; we seem to see a movie projected against the inside of the car's windshield, an effect that Hitchcock appears to nurture in many of his films -- the director's rear-projection is often very unconvincing and exteriors seem often to be plastered tightly against background surfaces of his images. (This technical feature or deficit has the effect of making the outside seem to be something indifferently projected against the inside of someone's point-of-view). Jimmy Stewart's strangely luminous eyes suggest that looking itself is a kind of martyrdom -- in "Vertigo," seeing is drowning, a kind of immersion that enforces vision: once you look you can not look away and, therefore, the Stewart's eyes seeem to be somehow stapled open, pinioned into a stare, his eyelids amputated --look for this effect in the scene where Stewart, for instance, stares at Kim Novak's brunette hair and perceives that it must be dyed blonde in imitation of Madeline Elster's coiffeur. This unblinking stare reflects the camera's impassive perspective, the eye of God. Hitchcock's technique suggests that the camera is a surrogate for the glare of the super-ego, a condemnatory force exhibited in the nun that emerges from the darkness of the mission, the cynical coroner at the inquest, and, in a kinder, gentler form, in Barbara Bel Geddes as Scotty's spurned love-interest with her tautly engineered underwear, cheerful forced smile and owlish glasses, the super-ego's final judgement uttered at the end as the implacable tower at San Juan Batistta, a great upthrust pillar of white plaster, perforated with dark arches, a rational and immense structure embodying a deadly destiny. Hitchcock softens the film's structure of doom with the green light flooding the last couple reels of the movie, a color that signifies Scotty's mad ambition to revive the dead Madeline, to make her Sequoia Sempervirens, "Sequoia Evergreen," immortal like the sequoia that Madeline and Scotty see in the glade of Muir Wood. And, though it is surely accidental, Kim Novak as Judy Barton seems warm, vibrant, but also vaguely Asiatic and archaic, her high cheekbones and immense almond-shaped eyes circumscribed with dark make-up like the face of an Egyptian goddess, one of those beautiful matrons buried under a painted wooden plaque of her features at the cemetery in the lost city of Fayum. Remember this line: "One alone can wander. Two together are always going somewhere."