VERTIGO essay

 Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock

Many film critics and viewers have dubbed Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo a cinematic masterpiece, some even enshrining it as the highest achievement ever attained in American film. A complex and essentially philosophical meditation on love and mortality, Hitchcock’s Vertigo is an effective film because it delivers poignant visual (and audio) symbols for corresponding, profound and hitherto ineffable themes which are articulated eloquently within the structure of a narrative film. These themes deal with the most dramatic and crucial aspects of human existence and Hitchcock’s harmonious composition unifies the film’s myriad thematic dichotomies (which give the film its suspense and tension) within the film-maker’s aesthetic, thus demonstrating art itself as a unifying principle for the ambiguities, contradictions, and chaos-inspiring aspects of existentialism and metaphysics.

Though the plot and structure of Vertigo are not essentially linear, the story’s emotional arc provides amply where the seeming disfigurements or ambiguities of the plot are vague or difficult to follow with ease. The "vertigo" theme, for example, is immediately dislodged from its literal, well-understood connotations of "the fear of heights" and into more ambiguous and sinister connotations from the film’s opening credits. When the camera reveals a woman’s face in increments: a black mask with nervous eyes, the audience plunges with an uncertain fear as this image gives way to the "inner-eye" which then spirals into vertigo.

The first active scene of the movie reinforces this feeling of inner dread as the audience watches Scottie clinging for his life as a doomed policeman who is trying to help him from the collapsing gutter of a skyscraper, plummets to his death. This initial scene sets up a feeling of emotional "vertigo" in the audience: they are desperate for Scotty to be saved and fear he will fall, horrified and simultaneously relieved when it is the unknown policemen who falls instead. This feeling of attraction/repulsion is the cornerstone motif in Hitchcock’s Vertigo; in effect symbolizing the existential paradigm of human existence: a simultaneous longing for life and death, for love and solitude, for happiness and melancholy, for the future and the past, and for the known and the unknown.

This central motif factors into the visual logic of the movie as well as in its dialogue, plot, and mood. The titular "Vertigo" in fact marks a kind of overall symbol for the conflicting inner-drives of human beings and the outer world as well, which is also full of contradictory impulses and ambiguity. A "fear of heights" is then understood to be the fear of anything which produces a feeling of conflict or any dilemma, whether real or imagined, that causes attraction and repulsion all at once. This is also a metaphysical theme, showing the dual longing for transcendent reality and the fear of transcendence; the longing for eternity and the longing for annihilation. Also, a key twin drive which is represented by the "vertigo" symbol is the will toward truth and the will toward deception.

These dual and conflicting impulses are portrayed by Hitchcock as endemic to life itself: that is, life, relationships, individuality, love, longing— all impulses tend toward vertigo: int is sense, also, Hitchcock brings the dual and conflicting drives of cynicism and romanticism under the spinning umbrella of "vertigo" as well. Throughout the film, Scotty is figuratively and literally "hanging over" an abyss, whether it is a physical abyss as in the opening accident scene, or the emotional abyss of his attraction and repulsion toward Madeline, or the abyss of his career, his life, or his very sensory perceptions. Another abyss is the abyss of memory, which claims Scotty as he fights to recreate Madeline after her apparent suicide.

However, the most elemental and deeply resonant theme of attraction and repulsion represented in Vertigo is the longing for and fear of death, which underlies nearly every scene in the movie. Scotty’s initial attraction for Madeline occurs after she undergoes a false death; his fascination is deepened when he finds she has an identification with the dead woman Carlotta, and his desperate love reaches its highest pitch when he believes Madeline is dead. His construction of her "twin" is a ritualistically enacted and symbolically projected longing for death, just as his resolution to solve the mystery of Madeline represents his longing toward order, rationality, and life. The dual drives toward death and life are given fine explication in the scene near the Sequoia trees:

Then the camera pans to a fallen tee with its rings exposed, symbolizing the centuries that have come and gone while neither of the characters were living. It is a scene which merges the will to life as represented by Madeline’s dialogue with the ubiquity of death, symbolized by living things: trees whose antiquity magnifies the mortality of the story’s main characters. When Madeline touches the rings of the fallen tree, she says "...here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you, you took no notice."

While the audience is confronting this obvious symbolic indication of human mortality,the visuals on the screen also offer an intensely romantic vision of a primeval forest, of idealized nature and there is a palpable sexual attraction between the characters, an obvious sense of heightened emotion; in short, life is extended through the subtext of the character’s relationship and the forest scenery while death is overtly presented — simultaneously— through the symbolic use of the tree-rings and the melancholy dialogue. Again, a "vertigo" is sent through the viewer who, like Scotty, like Madeline, like anyone tries to make sense out of these co-existing and seemingly mutually exclusive impulses.

After Madeline’s devastating death, Scotty’s character undergoes a radical alteration, again, such rapid character transformation (as well as external conditions) serve to establish "reality" as fleeting, as in motion, as a raging sea and self-identity a small cargo carried on the waves. The once practical and logical Scotty becomes lost (as was Madeline, formerly) in a self-imposed dreamworld, the world of an obsessive melancholic dreamer, one who is absorbed in the past. When he begins to develop a relationship with Judy, desiring her to replicate Madeline to the last detail, the shift from pragmatist to dreamer is complete. Thus, the attraction/repulsion theme is brought to an all-encompassing crescendo. Even the bits of seemingly trivial dialogue convey the sense of inner-fragmentation, of inner conflict and ambiguity:

                          Scotty: Will you have dinner with me?

                          Judy: Dinner and what else?

                          Scotty: Just dinner.  We could see a lot of each other.

                          Judy: Why? Because I remind you of her? That’s not very complementary. And nothing else?

                          Scotty: No.

The sense of attraction/repulsion instigates, in the audience, a simultaneous desire to see Judy and Scotty happily together while also instigating a desire in the audience for the mystery to be solved, which will likely implicate Judy in a crime and thus destroy the love between her and Scotty. The longing for justice is thus split between to equal recipients (who happen to be the same people): the lovers, and the man of law and the woman who has broken the law. As unsettling as this state is, the film continues to provide ample visual cues of deep romanticism and exalted idealism, including the famous "kiss" scene when Hitchcock then lets the camera ‘intrude" as intimate as possible in this key, symbolic moment, getting so close the audience participates in the kiss and is thus initiated into the film’s most poignant and profound thematic textures: that which reveals the act of creation (and sexuality) as the unifying power for all the disparate thread the film has to that point represented. Later, when it appears he has solved the mystery of Judy and Madeline, his "moment of clarity" is subsumed under a violent rage with bombastic, frankly sexual double-entendre:

This closing scene recalls the opening scene when Scotty was saved but the policemen who tried to help him fell to his death. In this way, Hitchcock firmly and at long last brings unity to the preceding madness of opposites, unifying them under the symmetry and aesthetic harmony of art; thus, Vertigo demonstrates the essentialness of art and confirms the film-maker’s obligation to reach aesthetic, if not philosophical, or moral unity.

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