Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo” has reached what The Washington Post called in its reappraisal ‘Medicare age,’which got me thinking about my favorite movie — one that regularly appears on lists for the greatest, or one of the greatest, films to date. But is it, as The Post suggests, a story for our #MeToo times or rather a more complex tale of the human desire to project onto others our own dreams, fears and desires?
To answer this question, I’ll have to discuss the film’s sinuous plot, so readers might want to see the film first or again before reading further. On the other hand, the plot is laid bare in Wikipedia and no amount of reading the description will equal the experience of seeing the movie, particularly on a big screen. So you might just want to read on.
“Vertigo” stars James Stewart as Scottie Ferguson, a San Francisco former detective forced to retire from the police department when he develops vertigo after a fellow officer is killed trying to save him in a rooftop chase. At loose ends, Scottie is engaged by a former school chum, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), to tail Elster’s beautiful, suicidal wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), a woman haunted by the legacy of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdez, who was driven mad by the loss of her child, Madeleine’s grandmother, to her rich, abandoning lover.
Scottie tails the elegantly coiffed and coutured Madeleine from one fabulous San Francisco locale to another — amid the strains of Bernard Herrmann’s hypnotic score — until that moment when she throws herself into the bay, he rescues her and a tentative love affair begins. To prove to Madeleine that everything she dreams and fears can be explained in reality, Scottie takes her to the Mission San Juan Bautista, where Carlotta was once a convent schoolgirl. But an ambivalent Madeleine heads up the tower and, before a dizzy Scottie can reach her, leaps to her death.
The following inquest puts the blame on Scottie, who is plunged into a kind of catatonic depression from which even his pal Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) can’t rouse him. Nonetheless, he recovers his senses and returns to his old aimless ways. One day, he notices a shopgirl, Judy Barton (also Novak) who is as blowsy a brunette as Madeleine was a classy blonde. But the profile, the bone structure and the figure are the same, and Scottie pursues her.
It’s as this point that Hitchcock makes a choice that has bedeviled critics and viewers ever since: He gives away the plot. From Judy’s perspective, we see that she was hired by Elster, who was her lover, to help him make the murder of his wife look like a suicide. The real Madeleine was already dead of a broken neck in the arms of the murderous Elster at the top of the tower when Judy as Madeleine ran up the steps, knowing the vertigo-suffering Scottie could not follow. Elster flung the body to its “death,” then waited with Judy for the ensuing commotion to die down and snuck away. (Why the police wouldn’t immediately go to the top of the tower is never explained, as are some other plot impossibilities.)
Judy starts to pack her Madeleine clothes and leave a written confession for Scottie, then thinks the better of it and allows him to remake her once more as the Madeleine he knew. Soon the transformation and their apparent happiness are complete. But the devil is indeed in the details, and as she dons a necklace that belonged to Carlotta, Scottie suddenly realizes that the only way she could possess it is if she were pretending to be Madeleine.
Now he takes her back to the mission and, in one of cinema’s most terrifying and riveting scenes, forces her up to the top of the tower (lengthened by the film’s special effects) as she confesses her guilt — and her love for him. But it’s too late. Seeing the ghostly presence of a nun who heard voices, she steps out onto the ledge and falls to her death. Scottie follows her onto the ledge, his arms widening, his jacket and tie blowing. He is free of his vertigo at last, but at a terrible cost.
We tend to see everything in hindsight, and so we imagine that the film must have been recognized in its day with the critical and popular acclaim of today. But it was only in the 1980s that “Vertigo” began to get its due. Since then it has undergone a 1996 restoration by Westchester County, New York-based film restorer Robert A. Harris and served as the inspiration for other feature filmmakers and visual artists. It’s also been analyzed superbly by Fordham University Ph.D. and onetime Iona University professor Donald Spoto in his book “The Art of Alfred Hitchcock” (Anchor Books, revised 1992) and in Robin Wood’s “Hitchcock’s Films” (Paperback Library, 1970) and Dan Auiler’s “Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic” (St.Martin’s Press, 1998). It may also be remade as a vehicle for Robert Downey Jr.
In our own time, “Vertigo” has become a symbol of #MeToo as Judy pathetically — and ironically — lets Scottie remake her in the hopes that he will love her for herself. But while literature is rife with tales of men remaking women — Pygmalion and Galatea, Svengali and Trilby, Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle — the idea of a woman remaking a man is not lost on any woman who’s ever been privy to conversations with other women about their husbands. The difference is men have always had “the power and the freedom” to do as they wish with women — a sentiment expressed three times in the film, Spoto notes. Women’s ability to control men economically and emotionally has been less apparent, because until recently. women have not had the means to do so that men have had.
I think, however, it misses the point of the film to recast it in #MeToo terms, first because Judy is not some helpless shopgirl but a willing conspirator in murder out of greed, lust or both. That she really loves Scottie and that he remakes her even better than Elster did, again with her participation, are besides the point. Ultimately, “Vertigo” is the story of people in love with their idea of others, rather than the others themselves. As such the people are in love with themselves, with their own minds.
It’s something we do all the time as fans crushing on athletes, movie stars and royalty, as individuals seeking partners online, as spouses who wonder “whatever happened to the person I married?” Well, did you ever see that person as s/he was to begin with? Or did you see what you wanted to?
“Vertigo” is a great movie, because for all its supernatural overlay, it’s a stylish, very human story about the often tragic consequences of delusion and projection.