The mark of a classic is that it is an inexhaustible experience, a refutation of Einstein’s definition of madness: seeing a great movie or listening to a great piece of music over and over, one has reason to expect different results and one gets them. That’s one of the things that makes it a privilege and a delight to write about movies appearing in revival. So it is with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which played two weekends ago at IFC Center in its ongoing retrospective of his films. On the occasion of this new screening, we ran my my capsule review of it in the magazine again, and I’m grateful to the editors of New York magazine’s Approval Matrix for taking note of the piece in their current issue: “Brody boldly but delusionally states that Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ has a happy ending.”
I confess: I disagree with both adverbs. I don’t think there’s anything bold about calling the ending happy, especially since I hedge that so-called happiness within the very tight limits “of health restored and crime punished.” In those terms, it’s not delusional but merely lucid to say so—and the point is proved in the lovely still, from the end of the film, with which the Matrix illustrates the entry. Of course, to consider the film’s mortal conclusion truly and fully happy is a joke worthy of The New Yorker’s own Charles Addams, but it’s worth considering, in light of the jibe (despicable me), the tone of the movie’s ending, what it says about happiness according to Hitchcock, and how it reflects Hitchcock’s over-all sense of life, and, for that matter, of death. (I’m not going to worry about spoilers or about exposition, assuming that everyone has seen it.)
“Vertigo” is built on three parentheses that open at the start of the movie and close at its end:
- The suspicion of crime: The first shot of the movie is of a man being pursued by the police and chased over the rooftops of San Francisco by an officer and by a plainclothes detective (James Stewart), who misses his leap and is hanging onto a gutter for dear life. (The officer, attempting to help, falls to his death.)
- Mental illness: As the detective, John (Scottie) Ferguson, tells his erstwhile fiancé and good friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), “I have acrophobia, which gives me vertigo, and I get dizzy.”
- Sexual desire: Scottie’s rescue entailed physical trauma, which leaves him using a cane and bound in a corset that comes off just as he’s asked by a college friend, Gavin Elster, to do some detective work, which, of course, is a plot—the plot that sets the movie’s plot in motion. Scottie is asked to keep an eye on Elster’s wife—actually, of course, his mistress, who is dolled up to resemble his wife, and who impersonates someone in the grips of a mental illness that plays out like a family curse; her act (including her seduction of Scottie) is a part of Elster’s plan to murder his actual wife.
All three of these parentheses close at the end of the movie, with its crude and partial justice (a woman who is an accomplice to murder, albeit not its master plotter, ends up dead) and its psychological cure (Scottie loses his acrophobia and his vertigo). As for desire, the woman who dies is Scottie’s beloved, and with her death, his sexual desire—which made him an accomplice, albeit an unwitting one, to the same murder—vanishes into memory. As happy endings go, it’s an ironic one (and I’m surprised that my own shadow of irony went unnoticed), with its tragic contrast—one of an utterly classical pedigree—between the points of view of man and of God.
For Hitchcock, the merest stuff of existence brings inevitable punishment. To exist is to be punished, and, therefore, in God’s just universe, to be guilty—as in the movie that Hitchcock made just prior to “Vertigo,” “The Wrong Man,” in which the protagonist, though innocent of the crime of which he’s wrongly accused, is nonetheless guilty of something. (His appearance of guilt marks, rather, the sin of pride: the belief that one can guard against misfortune through good intentions and good planning). In “Vertigo,” Scottie is, first of all, guilty of not jumping as well as the regular police officer who preceded him across the abyss—the physical man who does his job modestly. Scottie is, rather, is a man out of a place, a lawyer who, dreaming of political power, holds a job for which he’s not quite physically apt. He’s also guilty of an immoderate lust—the plot runs on his old friend Elster’s accurate assumption that Scottie will be quite as turned on by Elster’s mistress as Elster is. (The answer is, more so: he’s so turned on by “Madeleine,” the simulacrum of Elster’s wife, that he doesn’t hesitate to cuckold his friend).
Like Hitchcock himself, Scottie is something of a fetishist; he’s turned on not just by her general beauty but by the particulars of her porcelain blondness and of her severe fashion. And like the viewer himself, Scottie is taken in by the melodramatic acting-out of gothic mumbo-jumbo about the curse of Carlotta Valdes. Kim Novak, as Madeleine, is delivering a terribly overblown performance of an absurd “script,” the one that Elster concocted to lure Scottie to the mission bell tower where the murder plot is to be put into action. In fact, Hitchcock is suggesting that Kim Novak isn’t much more of an actress than Judy Barton—that she even is, in effect, Judy Barton, a country girl who, under the guidance of a master manipulator such as Elster, gets roped into a plot to play platinum blonde and alabaster temptress, and that he himself is Elster, the behind-the-scenes plotter who ropes viewers in (and even turns them on) with a hokey plot and a country girl wearing a lot of makeup.
Lately I’ve written about filmmakers who consider that love and friendship are different things and who give priority to sexual desire as the basis for a relationship, and my prime example is Hitchcock (as in a scene from “Rear Window”). “Vertigo” provides an even sadder view of the same idea, in Scottie’s thwarted connection to Midge, a smart and capable woman who has everything Scottie needs but doesn’t turn him on. So, when Scottie is in the process of transforming the shopgirl Judy into the object of his desire and she implores him, “Couldn’t you like me, just me, the way I am?,” Scottie’s unspoken thought is, “I don’t like you; I like Midge, but I might love you.” The way she is isn’t anything special, not in Scottie’s world of accomplishments and interests. Judy doesn’t seem to have a better mind or more distinctive abilities or talents than the average young woman—she is the average young woman, but one who radiates a powerful, iridescent allure when she’s dressed the right way and made up the right way and when the light and Scottie’s eye (or the camera-eye) catch her the right way. That’s the strange truth about movie actors: the skill takes a back seat to grace, to a metaphysical gift. “Vertigo” is one of the great movies about movies, and about Hitchcock’s own way with them.
By the movie’s end, Scottie has seen behind Elster’s fourth wall no less surely than viewers have figured out that they’ve been had by Hitchcock’s narrative trickery, but neither Scottie nor viewers can get over the image of the false Madeleine into whom Judy was twice transformed, once by Elster and once by Scottie himself. The theatrical illusion remains an unshakeable reality, the eye remains an implacable engine of desire, but what the eye desires, penetrates, and is possessed by is the soul itself, the profoundest mystery of all. Without that mystery—without the sense that the eye is the gateway between two souls, the dam that bursts and breaks down the barrier between two souls—Hitchcock would be the mere showman that his erstwhile detractors mistook him for.
At the outset, Scottie attempts to overcome his vertigo through moderate and incremental steps, and Midge tells him that, according to a doctor, the vertigo will be cured only by a comparably great shock (one comparable to Scottie’s having narrowly escaped death and having seen his colleague fall and die). At the end of the movie, he gets a shock—he realizes that Madeleine is a made-up being, that Judy wasn’t merely his simulacrum of Madeleine but was one and the same, that he had been taken in not by his own obsession but by her, that he was not the master of the game but its pawn, that he was duped by Judy and by Elster. He has the shock of recognizing that the sardonic remarks of the local judge regarding his unfortunate failings were entirely accurate, that his lust had in fact made him an unwitting accomplice to murder.
He sees Judy fall to her death, but seeing that fall isn’t what cures him of his vertigo. He has already had the shock of realizing that his lust had turned him unwittingly evil—thus he is cured even before he gets to the bell tower, and is propelled up the steps, powered by righteous anger, not to cure himself but to prove himself already cured. He is cured of his acrophobia and of his vertigo, but not of his desire or of his memory—of an illusion and a pleasure that he’ll never be able to lose or to recreate except there. He’s finally free to get on with his life; at the moment that he regains his future, he’s swallowed up in his past. That’s the free fall, the famous dolly zoom in the tower staircase, in which he’s caught; it’s the visual metaphor that captures man’s fate. So, please allow me my irony of suggesting that the movie has a truly happy ending: the revelation of unhappy truth. Scottie returns to the world in love not with a dead woman but with the image of a dead woman; he is in danger of becoming a real-life cinecrophile. The best he can hope for is another metavisual shock. Happily, the movies, new and old, keep providing them.
P.S. The most controversial entry in my recent all-time ten-best list is Hitchcock’s “Marnie”; it’s the film in which the filmmaker finally realized his ideal of feminine appearance and performance and faced his own obsessional consequences.
P.P.S. My review of “Vertigo” included an error that slipped through uncaught, and I’m grateful to the reader Velda Cornelius for catching it and writing in to let me know: Barbara Bel Geddes plays not a “designer” but an illustrator. The downside of familiarity is imprecision.
