If you believe the plurality of professional critics, then Hitchcock’s Vertigo is the greatest film ever made. Does it warrant such premier standing? If so, we should expect plenty of deeper meanings and artistic significance.
Sounds like a job for Movies Up Close. In this essay, I’ll provide an in depth explanation so that viewers out there can better appreciate this quirky cinematic enigma. My thesis is that Vertigo proposes and examines a modern societal condition in which our understandings of reality have been distorted by reckless, power-hungry elites—a condition that exposes us to obsession, rage, and self-destruction.
I. The Shipbuilder
I’ll start with an obligatory plot summary. Detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) is a retiring San Francisco cop. As he wraps up his career, he receives a strange request from an old college friend and current shipbuilding tycoon, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore). Elster wants Scottie to investigate the recent strange behavior of his wife, Madeleine. He worries in particular that she may be channeling the spirit of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide long ago.
But this exposition turns out to be an elaborate hoax. Unbeknownst to Scottie, Elster has actually hired a woman named Judy Barton (Kim Novak) to play Madeleine during the investigation. This is because Elster plans to murder his real wife and make off with her fortune, and he deduces that if Scottie, a credible witness, believes that she killed herself, he’ll get away with the crime unsuspected. So he hires Judy to convince Scottie that the suicidal Carlotta really is possessing her. Plus, he arranges the murder in such a way that Scottie, due to his pathologic fear of heights, can’t find out the truth.
His plan succeeds. But things get messy along the way, because Scottie develops romantic feelings for “Madeleine,” unaware that she’s merely a character of Elster’s creation. Her staged death consequently devastates him, and he requires an extended stay in a mental hospital.
Things get even crazier after his release. Still reeling from his beloved’s supposed suicide, he spots Judy on the street out of character and notices her striking resemblance to “Madeleine.” Not realizing that she’s the very same woman, he asks her to dinner and begins dating her. Their relationship, however, proves acrimonious and ugly, as Scottie soon urges Judy to alter herself to more closely resemble her former part. He finally realizes the truth and confronts Judy in rage and despair. But a nun startles her into taking a false step, and she plummets to her death.
The end.
This bizarre narrative is, let’s face it, highly unsatisfying. For starters, the primary villain, Elster, pays no price for his crimes. He causes the death of two women and the emotional wreckage of an innocent man (and arguably the emotional wreckage of another woman, but we’ll get to that later), yet he absconds with a shipbuilding fortune and never accounts for the devastation he leaves behind.
Even more unsettling, the movie’s dialogue implies that Elster’s behavior is commonplace among those with vast resources. Recall Elster’s early remark that he envies “the power and the freedom” of Gold Rush-era businessmen. This initially seems like harmless nostalgia. But later, a kindly shopkeeper illustrates the darker side to these words, describing how San Francisco elites used to have “the power and the freedom” to discard poor women like garbage. The echoing of the phrase foreshadows Elster’s true motives: he longs to wield his wealth with total unaccountability, even at the potentially deadly expense of others.
And, discouragingly, he succeeds in doing just that. Despite his early lament about lacking freedom relative to his predecessors, Elster still commits deadly, callous crimes with no consequences at all. While laws and norms of 1950’s America may discourage such behavior, Elster circumvents these obstacles by engaging in the deception we’ve detailed.
With enough money, it seems, anything remains possible. Consider an early scene in which Scottie sees “Madeleine” enter a motel. He tries to follow her inside, but the motel owner swears that, despite what he has just seen, no one has recently entered the building. Soon thereafter, Scottie realizes in confusion that “Madeleine’s” car is gone. It’s an eerie, unsettling moment, and it seems to lighten Scottie’s early dismissal of Elster’s theory about Carlotta Valdes.
In retrospect, though, there’s only one plausible explanation: Elster paid off the motel owner to lie to Scottie. Not only is Scottie’s investigative subject on Elster’s payroll; his witnesses are, too.
The episode therefore illustrates just how far Elster is willing—and, more importantly, able—to go to sell his sham ghost story to Scottie. In fact, based on incidents like this one, it’s not exaggerating to say that the entire reality that Scottie experiences throughout most of Vertigo is liable to be fraudulent. If the sweet, elderly motel owner was paid off, was the shopkeeper, too? Was the curator at the museum? With someone like Gavin Elster involved, everything and everyone is suspect.
Now for the pivot. How many Elsters, then, are currently scheming in our own world, screwing with our very realities for the sake of expanding their “power” and “freedom”? In post-WWII America, are we all just living in scrambled worlds fabricated by the Elsters of our day? This frightening thought is the artistic premise of Vertigo.
Elster truly is a symbolic “shipbuilder”: a constructor of realities aboard which others have to navigate life. And surely he has real world counterparts. I won’t name names, but I’m sure you can think of some 2022 parallels who operate with similar tactics, building the perceptions and illusions on which the rest of us float, unsuspecting.
But what is it like to live on a ship built by a shady elitist? How does it feel to live aboard a fake reality? That’s where Hitchcock is primarily concerned. Elster disappears from the narrative for a reason: he’s boring. Vertigo isn’t about shipbuilders; it’s about the people on those ships, navigating through waters of distortion and deceit. Vertigo is about us.
II. A Modern Quixote
It’s clear that the symptom of vertigo in the movie symbolizes the emotional disorientation that results from Elster’s scheming. Scottie harbors the diagnosis of acrophobia throughout his investigation for Elster, during which, as we’ve described, he lives in an unreliable, often fraudulent reality. And he’s “cured” only when the details of Elster’s crime come into focus late in the movie. (In addition, recall that Scottie first experiences vertigo while chasing a criminal who, like Elster, gets away.)
But, again, what is it like to have “vertigo”—to live and love in a world of illusion?
Well, at the beginning of the movie, Scottie is folksy and jovial. Even the recent death of his partner in the field has only shaken, not depressed him. He spends time goofing around with his friend and erstwhile fiancée, Midge, and in fact, their opening banter suggests an eventual romantic happy ending. After all, Midge doesn’t hide her feelings for him, and he playfully hems and haws, never contradicting or rejecting her. Perhaps having retired, Scottie realizes that Midge is his future. She knows him well, cares for him deeply, and balances out his occasional immaturity.
But no. Immediately after this promising opening, Elster enters the picture, and Scottie’s personality accordingly begins a progressive decline toward rage and mania. The vehicle, of course, is his obsession with “Madeleine,” the beautiful subject of his new investigation. Something about Judy’s portrayal of Elster’s wife enchants him, causing him to forget all about Midge—and every other good thing in his life.
What accounts for “Madeleine’s” spellbinding quality? It isn’t physical beauty, since when Judy later reappears out of character, she doesn’t satisfy Scottie. Rather, it seems that “Madeleine’s” mysterious—and fictional—elegance and torment comprise her appeal. As Scottie becomes intrigued by the fantastical tale of Carlotta Valdes and her influence from beyond the grave, his attraction to “Madeleine” correspondingly grows.
Thus, it appears that Scottie is ultimately hoodwinked by the allure of the exotic and extraordinary. After all, with such an otherworldly mystery unfolding, of what interest is a regular life as a retiring cop? Of what interest is a regular woman like Midge?
Elster knows this allure. He has sprinkled his fictional Madeleine with all with the right touches: her delicate, forlorn intonation; affected whimsy; glamorous jewelry, clothing, and hair; predilection for romantic historical landmarks; and linkage with a foreign-sounding ancestor. When Scottie falls “in love,” these, truly, are the objects of his love. Late in the movie, Judy pleads with Scottie to accept her for her own self, to forget Madeleine and simply be happy. But her begging falls on deaf ears: Scottie is obsessed with a fantasy, not a reality.
Now another pivot. Doesn’t the appeal of fantasy—so central to modern culture—impact all of us? For instance, we may root for Scottie to tie the knot with Midge, but I venture that many of us know a Midge (or a male version of Midge) and find ourselves, despite what reason might dictate, longing for a more extraordinary partner. A more intriguing partner. Perhaps we’ve become, like Scottie, obsessed by the fantastical images crafted for and distributed to us by our own elites. By the Elsters of our day.
Consider that when Vertigo was released, the cultural distribution of fantastical, glamorous imagery had recently undergone a radical change. The percentage of American households with a television reached 50% in 1955. Vertigo was released in 1958. Perhaps Hitchcock was one of the first artists to perceive and comment on the seismic—and potentially dangerous—psychological effects of mass consuming these alluring entertainments.
After all, Don Quixote was tilting at windmills after a few chivalrous books. Imagine what he would have done with Game of Thrones. Maybe Vertigo is the Don Quixote of the screen era.
And what about Judy? She agrees to play a part and pays dearly for it—both psychologically and, eventually, with her life. Having once entered the role of Madeleine, she finds herself doomed to play it forever, because her audience, Scottie, won’t have it any other way. Her character has become her reality: the performer’s nightmare. Fitting, then, that she meets the same fate—falling from the bell tower—as the woman she played and the woman who “possessed” her character. (Also remember that Carlotta supposedly grew up afraid of strict nuns, and a nun scares Judy to her death in the ending scene.)
So not only do the deceived suffer amidst all of these glamorous stories and images; the deceivers suffer, too. And surely this applies not only to professional performers. Who among us hasn’t “played a part” for someone’s approval? After all, with so much fantasy guiding our culture now, expectations often exceed the possibilities of reality. We’re expected to deceive. Judy’s miserable experience highlights the pitfalls of fulfilling that expectation.
End of Part 1
Continue to Part 2, where we’ll cover the meanings of Vertigo‘s color symbolism and notorious dream sequence.
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