Vertigo | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Released in 1958, Vertigo is often singled out as Alfred Hitchcock's most important film. The film combined a complex storyline with equally complex cinematography. Vertigo debuted Hitchcock's now famous combination of forward zoom and reverse tracking. His unique zoom and tracking method along with other creative and technical complexities of the film exerted a tremendous influence on an entire generation of filmmakers, especially the French New Wave. Vertigo's presence is felt in films as diverse as Jules et Jim (1961), High Anxiety (1977), Body Double (1984), and Twelve Monkeys (1995). Vertigo was unavailable for decades because its rights, along with those of four other films, were left by Hitchcock as a legacy to his daughter. Vertigo and the other four films were re-released in 1984 to much popular and critical acclaim. Because the films are so popular as well as creatively and technically complex, Hitchcock's films complicate the distinction between high and low art.

Vertigo is a complex psychological thriller—it opens with San Francisco police detective Scottie Ferguson's letting a fellow officer fall to his death during a rooftop chase of a suspect. After the accident, Ferguson is hired by an old friend to investigate the friend's wife, Madeleine, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of a turn-ofthe-century belle, Carlotta. Madeleine reenacts Carlotta's suicide by jumping off a mission bell tower while Scottie stands by helplessly, paralyzed by his vertigo. The remainder of the film details Scottie's nervous breakdown and his discovery of a woman named Judy who uncannily resembles Madeleine. Scottie recreates Madeleine in Judy, forcing Judy to adopt Madeleine's makeup, clothing, hairstyle, and speech. When Scottie realizes he has been the dupe of a complex murder plot he attempts to cure himself of his vertigo by revisiting the scene of Madeleine's death. Able to conquer his vertigo, Scottie is nevertheless unable to save Judy, who falls to her death.

The overwhelming critical and popular response to Vertigo's re-release raises the question of why the film is such a vital text for film criticism and theory. The film itself has been interpreted in a variety of ways: as an allegorical tale of man's descent into the underworld in search of a lost love; as a psychological parable of guilt, obsession, and repression; and as an experiment in generic collage, drawing on the generic conventions of realism, fantasy, and the women's film. Together with Rear Window, Vertigo has often been discussed as a document of late 1950s culture, as a portrayal of the alienation and rootlessness of the 1950s, as well as of the constructions of 1950s femininity. It is these latter issues—the representation of women and the relationships among power, sexuality, and gender—which have garnered the most critical attention.

Hitchcock is frequently understood as a misogynist whose films entice audiences to participate in sadistic fantasies about women (such as Scottie's efforts to make over Judy into Madeleine, despite Judy's plea that he love her the way she is). Certainly Hitchcock's films are both fascinated by and horrified by women's (potential) power. Hitchcock's films can also be read, however, as exposures of the mechanisms of patriarchy—Vertigo can be read, for example, as a critique of the ways in which femininity in our culture is largely a masquerade and a male construct.

Hitchcock's films are central to film theory and feminist criticism because they are all about scopophilia—voyeurism, fetishism, and the interrelated questions of epistemology, identification, and spectatorship. One of the most important essays of feminist film criticism, Laura Mulvey's 1974 essay "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," uses readings of Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo to argue that classic Hollywood movies inevitably transform women into passive objects of male voyeurism and sadism. Mulvey's essay also claims that Hitchcock's female characters both represent and assuage male spectators' anxieties and desires, while female spectators are trapped into a masochistic identification with the female victims on screen. Later feminist film critics also turned to Vertigo as a central text. Tania Modleski, for example, uses Vertigo to elaborate upon the notion of the female spectator. She argues that identification is a more complex mechanism than heretofore considered and suggests that the female spectator is implicated in a split position, identifying with both the passive female object and the active male subject. Hitchcock himself seems to suggest this position, when, in a pivotal scene in the movie, we see things from Judy's point of view as well as Scottie's. Indeed, it is Vertigo's multiple points of view, and hence of knowledge and of identification, that suggests that the movie's appeal lies in its very ambivalence toward women and their potential to upset the male spectator's position.

Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York, Methuen, 1988.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen, Vol. 16, No. 3., 1975, 6-18.

Sloan, Jane. Alfred Hitchcock: A Guide to References and Resources. New York, G. K. Hall, 1993.

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