The Philosophical Hitchcock: "Vertigo" and the Anxieties of Unknowingness
144
The Philosophical Hitchcock: "Vertigo" and the Anxieties of Unknowingness
144Paperback(New Edition)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226668246 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2019 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Opening Credits
She is not a character in the film (perhaps as unknown as Madeleine/Judy will forever remain), and her identity and role in the film are never returned to, never explained. Whoever this woman is, she simply appears, to a repetitive, mysterious, and suspenseful theme, the first of several powerful roles played by Bernard Herrmann's music throughout the film. It is clear enough that we are asked to think about the task of "reading a face" by having the stars' names literally appear in print "on" the face. (We are signaled about the level of difficulty this involves by never being shown the whole face, as if to say we are never actually given what we need to achieve any confident "reading." Everything will be and will remain tentative, partial, and so provisional.) "James Stewart" appears over the woman's mouth (figure 1), and this fits his role to come. He is an explainer and persuader, or at least he tries to be. He thinks he can explain Madeleine's strange feelings of being inhabited by Carlotta, and he clearly believes that by explaining them (apparently as some sort of confused actual memory, jumbled around in a fantasy world), he can exorcise the feelings and the fragmented memories. His words will do that. This is a feature of his false sense of self-sufficiency. He will even try to cure himself of vertigo, despite what the doctors say, by climbing kitchen stools and ladders to practice getting used to heights, as if he has understood his vertigo and can fix it. He fails.
Then we see "Kim Novak" at the bridge of the nose, just under the eyes, which shift somewhat nervously, perhaps guiltily, before the name appears (figure 2). We want to know, but are not shown, what the unknown woman sees. Us? What prompts the darting eyes, and so what are we seeing when we look at her? This all also touches on a familiar theme of Hitchcock's: the parallelism between the characters trying to "read" each other and what we are doing in trying to read the film. (This is a theme given full treatment in Rear Window.) But a parallelism is not an identity. Nobody is more aware than Hitchcock that what we see on the screen are fictions made up by him and his team, designed to manipulate our reactions in various ways (as well as, if I am right, pose interpretive and philosophical questions). But he is also aware that he cannot have any desired effect unless his viewers are inspired to assess these fictional beings (they are fictional human beings, after all) and by such interpretation to try to anticipate what will happen, and reassess what they had believed when they learn something new. Reading the film and reading its characters are intertwined. Thus the face on which the credits appear is itself treated as if it were a screen (in both senses of the word), the screen on which credits normally appear.
It is also appropriate that we look at someone looking back at us (appropriate, given what we will see in detail, that this self-other interpretive dynamic is an interchange, never merely observational), and interesting that the eyes briefly look away as we look at them (an avoidance of the direct gaze of another, perhaps in fear or embarrassment or suspicion), and that that the substance of the film seems to emerge from inside the eye (figure 3), foregrounding the problem of trying to know what is inside by looking at the outside, and emphasizing the connections between the meaning of the film, what is inside, or beyond what we see on the screen, and reading, trying to understand the meaning of, what we see on a face, the inside of what is outside. The colors change to a screen suffused with red, often the color of passion in the film (as green is the color of mystery, the unknown), another nondiegetic moment that calls some brief attention to the narrator outside the film. And finally, it is appropriate that the dominant Saul Bass graphic symbols are spirals (figure 4), a circular motion around a fixed spot, like the obsession Scottie has with Madeleine, like the circular motion around the past that haunts him and eventually haunts Judy too, all connected to the vertiginous sensation of spinning. (The "haunted Madeleine" ruse is also a spiral, with Madeleine revolving always around Carlotta; Madeleine is supposed to be the return, the reincarnation, of her great-grandmother.)
So, if we are at all attentive in the first few seconds, we should be quite puzzled, since the question that we suggested above, one that could frame an attempt to understand the film at a more ambitious, philosophical level, immediately arises here. Why are we shown a close-up of half a face, and then led on what appears to be a specifically choreographed tour of her mouth, nose, and eyes, on which the credits emerge? What is the point of opening the film this way? (One of the ironies of the scene is that, contrary to the usual results of a second or third viewing of the film, our return to this opening is even more puzzling, because we will have learned the woman shown is not a character in the film.)
We can at least say, though, that the puzzlement, or our not (actually, never) knowing "who this woman is," is itself significant, because it reminds us of a specific dimension of unknowingness throughout Hitchcock's great films. In his films we are constantly encountering people who are not who they say they are, creating the context that I am calling "unknowingness." Sometimes people are using aliases, like Marion Crane in Psycho and the title character in Marnie, or people simply pretend to be someone else, like Gregory Peck's character in Spellbound (because he cannot remember who he really is). And, of course, there is Judy pretending to be Madeleine Elster in Vertigo. In one case, in North by Northwest, a man pretends to be someone he believes exists, but who is fictional. Roger Thornhill is taken to be, then pretends to be, George Kaplan. (The Thornhill case is filled with more humor than most. We have a character who fits our description of Hitchcock's world. After the UN murder, he escapes and tries to hide "who he really is" from everyone. His glib, wise-cracking attitude is a manifestation of that attempt throughout. But when he is hiding his identity on a train, he thinks he succeeds by putting on a pathetically inadequate "disguise" — a pair of sunglasses, which does nothing to hide the distinctively gorgeous face "behind" the glasses. As Eve Kendall points out soon after they sit together, "It's a nice face.") More often, we encounter characters who are not the kind of person they pretend to be and are often taken to be in their community. Two paradigmatic cases of this are Norman Bates in Psycho and Uncle Charles, Joseph Cotten's character, in Shadow of a Doubt. But Alicia, Ingrid Bergman's character in Notorious, is not who she pretends to be, as part of infiltrating a neo-Nazi group, and, it turns out, is also not who all others (and probably the viewers, well into the film) take her to be, a promiscuous "tramp," with no principles. And Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is not who she pretends to be when she first meets Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest.
And in some cases, we see characters who do not intend to deceive or impersonate, but who are still not who they give others to believe they are, or who even turn out to be not the person or the kind of person they believe they are. They are unknowing in a specific sense; they are self-deceived. Guy Haynes (Farley Granger) in Strangers on a Train hides from himself how much his desire to marry the senator's daughter is tied to his desperate ambition to leave his small town and its tedium. (His willingness to do almost anything to free himself from his horrid wife may have given Bruno some reason to believe he would cooperate in the plot.) Jeff (James Stewart) in Rear Window has no access to his inability to establish any lasting commitments in his life. His self-representation to Lisa is sincere (as essentially, necessarily, a war and action photographer) but untrue. (No one is "necessarily" any one role in life.) And in the paradigmatic case of such self-deceived unknowingness, we have Scottie in Vertigo, whose self-deceit is far too complicated to allow a telegraphic summary formulation. The anxieties and ironies of Hitchcockian unknowingness reach a kind of culmination in Vertigo, so it is perhaps appropriate that the film begins with a reference to a person who is never identified.
CHAPTER 2
The Opening Chase
The movie proper begins with a hand grasping a ladder railing and a person pulling himself up onto a roof, up from the depths to a great height, followed by a uniformed policeman, and then followed by a detective who, we learn soon afterward, is Scottie Ferguson. So we begin with another archetypal Hitchcockian theme, the pursuit or chase; and with its suggestion of a pursuer, the policeman, himself pursued (by Scottie), we get a foreshadowing of a familiar structure in Hitchcock's world. So, in North by Northwest, Thornhill is pursuing the fictional Kaplan, but is himself pursued by the henchmen of Vandamm (James Mason), who are themselves pursued by an American spy service. This is another particular kind of unknowingness related to the active-passive theme. One thinks of oneself as pursuer, or something like the subject running the show, and is actually pursued, an object of pursuit. In Vertigo, at the beginning of the film, Scottie thinks he is pursuing, following, Madeleine, but he is actually being led by her, and "behind" it all is Elster.
When Scottie falls, and manages to hang on by grabbing a rain gutter, the policeman comes back for him and, on a very steeply inclined roof, quite selflessly tries to help Scottie by telling him, twice, "Grab my hand." It is not entirely clear how he could help Scottie, since his grip with his other hand hardly seems secure or firm. In fact, that hand seems to have no grip at all on the Spanish tiles of the roof. When Scottie looks down (plate 1), Hitchcock uses the zoom-forward-while-pulling-the-camera-back shot that he uses throughout the film to suggest Scottie's vertigo, caused, he learns for the first time, by a fear of heights, and in this case that seems to paralyze him. He freezes, and does not communicate with the policeman or try to extend his hand, and the policeman falls to his death.
I have already noted the significance of Scottie's inability to respond to this offer of help. As we will see, this first sign of his inability to acknowledge his dependence has something to do with his living alone, with his loneliness, with the less-than-intimate friendship he has with Midge, and ultimately with the enormous complexities of his relationship to Judy/Madeleine, especially when he assumes control of her remaking in the last third of the film. And many commentators have been puzzled by how desperate Scottie's situation is, even how inexplicable his finally being rescued must be. We have been shown no other policemen, and from what we are shown of the policeman's attempt to help, it is hard to imagine how anyone could get a secure enough grip on anything in time to save the rapidly weakening Scottie.
But clearly the most important element introduced is the vertigo itself, especially since this beginning is one part of the major frame of the story. It begins in life-threatening vertigo on a high building, and ends with Scottie "cured" of his vertigo, looking down from another height, the mission where Judy has slipped and fallen. Given our theme, the obvious question raised is whether he has learned, or come to understand something, has freed himself from the burden of unknowingness perhaps, and thereby no longer has the dizzying uncertainty of vertigo, assuming that could be one meaning of the ailment. And, of course, if so, what has he come to know? Obviously of crucial importance are what it means (beyond the simply pathological sense) that he has vertigo and what it means that he is cured, freed from it. So is the general theme of heights and depths, a theme that touches on class and gender hierarchies, as we will see. Perhaps the most important note we can make about the vertigo is that one explanation of vertigo relevant to the film takes up the question, Any reasonable person would be nervous and cautious, even quite afraid, at great heights, so what accounts for the paralyzing and dizzying physical effects of the person who suffers from vertigo? A possible answer is that the unease stems from both a fear of falling and, at the same time, a fear of letting go, a fear of one's own attraction to death. So Scottie can be said to be suspended, as our dramatic first experience of him reveals, between both an attachment to and a melancholic detachment from his own life. Whether this turns out to be useful in understanding later episodes, and especially the ending, remains to be seen. It would also not be a stretch, if this diagnosis of vertigo is plausible, to connect that dynamic to something quite relevant to the alone and relatively aloof Scottie: the desire to fall in love, and the fear of falling in love.
But the term "vertigo" is multiply determined and its role in the film could sustain several complementary interpretive directions. The sheer density of interpretive possibilities, for the characters and for us, is also vertiginous, as is the state of unknowingness itself, as is the anxiety that one might not be oneself, might be "haunted," with all the metaphorical possibilities that implies, by another person or an older version of oneself, a "ghost" that keeps recurring even though one thinks it has been left behind, exorcised.
CHAPTER 3
Introducing Midge
The mise-en-scène shifts dramatically in the first scene after the chase and fall, from darkness and danger to a bright, sunny, very cluttered apartment (plate 2), with a panoramic view of San Francisco (the apartment is on Telegraph Hill, overlooking Russian Hill) out of a large window. A vast amount of thematic and cinematic material is densely packed into this opening in the apartment of Scottie's friend, Midge, and it repays close attention. A petite blonde woman in a yellow sweater who, we learn, is a longtime friend of Scottie's from their college days and beyond, Midge (a commercial artist working on advertising for ladies' underwear), is drawing at a drafting table. She stays seated for most of the scene, drawing while she and Scottie talk. (Later we learn that John Ferguson is "Scottie" to most of his associates and "John" or "Johnny" to his "close friends." In the film Midge is the only one who calls him "Johnny" or "Johnny-O," but since everyone else calls him "Scottie," I will follow that convention except when speaking from Midge's point of view. It is of course significant that he has several names, and that Madeleine/Judy calls him "Scottie.") James Stewart, in a brown suit, is trying to balance a cane on his finger. Some classical music (it is J. C. Bach) is playing softly in the background. He is not very good at the balancing; the cane falls and he cries out in pain, reenacting in a strange, comic way the fall and scream we have just heard. He can't "balance" (so we are also reminded of his general vertigo problem, and so what his "lack of balance" might mean in some larger sense). The pain is caused by his injury, and he is wearing a back brace while recuperating. The shift to the apartment is abrupt not only because of the striking contrast between night and day, outside and inside, danger and peacefulness, but because the tone of the conversation and the action is now quite lighthearted, jovial, even though we soon learn that Scottie, a man who looks to be in his late forties or early fifties (Stewart was forty-nine in 1957), has just ended the only career he has ever known (he resigned from the force, worried that his vertigo could return at a crucial moment, an ominous foreshadowing since it will), and we learn that in his sleep he often sees the falling policeman and reexperiences his inability to accept his help, although he speeds right by that issue. We sense, vaguely to be sure, some sort of dissociation.
There are also clear references to Rear Window, made four years earlier, also starring James Stewart. The Stewart character is unmarried again, and in both cases not just by chance but because of some reluctance, because of some failure to connect with others, figured by their immobility. He is not as immobilized as he was as Jeff in Rear Window, where he had a whole leg in a cast, but he is in what he refers to as a "corset" (he does not call it a "back brace" or "back support") that restricts his freedom of movement, and these immobilizings in both films seem to figure for us some psychological constriction. Both movies begin with conversations about getting free of what is immobilizing Stewart's character, which, in both cases, is internal. The same problems caused by both the cast and the corset are noted, especially, in both openings, the inability to "scratch where it itches," perhaps also a limitation of some more general significance. So the "twinning" of Jeff and Scottie foregrounds the problem of this constriction or limitation, all in a way, I think it is fair to say, we the viewers are being asked to consider.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Philosophical Hitchcock"
by .
Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.