Sunday Pages: "Vertigo"

A film by Alfred Hitchcock

Dear Reader,

This past week, I read 1974, the memoir by Francine Prose—her 35th book but first foray into the form. The new release is about her experiences in that eponymous year, when she was a young woman living in San Francisco and the girlfriend, for want of a better word, of Tony Russo, the radical antiwar hero who’d convinced his friend Daniel Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers. Prose is brilliant, an intimidatingly good writer, and the story she tells is riveting, so 1974 did not disappoint.

One of the cultural touchpoints Prose references throughout the book is Vertigo, the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock classic, memorably set in San Francisco. “I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Vertigo,” she writes. “Each time the film seemed to be saying something different, and I began to understand that it was saying many things. I stopped thinking that the film was solely about the absurd demands that men make on women, the obsessive fetishization of our hair, our clothes and shoes.” She then finishes a lengthy paragraph, and then adds a second, expounding on her understanding of Vertigo’s myriad meanings.

My first encounter with Vertigo came in a screenwriting class I took in college. This was in 1994—36 years after the film’s 1958 release, and 18 years before it would supplant Citizen Kane at No. 1 on the British Film Institute’s list of greatest movies of all time. The professor, who was about as old then as I am now, was a huge fan of the film. (I think he had a thing for Kim Novak, and who could blame him?) There were maybe 20 of us newbie cinephiles in the class, all of us sophisticated enough—or, if you prefer, pretentious enough—to appreciate the genius of Five Easy Pieces and get through 8 1/2 without falling asleep. We went to the library and eagerly screened the Hitchcock flick. All 20 of us had the same overall reaction: meh.

The plot is so outlandish, it makes The Da Vinci Code look like Rocky: the bougie husband of a reclusive shipping heiress hires an old college chum, an acrophobic detective, to follow his wife around the greater San Francisco area because he thinks she is being possessed by the spirit of her dead grandmother, a suicide; in actuality, said acrophobic detective is merely a pawn in a ridiculous but ultimately successful scheme engineered by said bougie husband to murder said reclusive heiress and inherit all her dough; a nun is somehow involved, and also a commercial artist who draws advertisements for women’s undergarments.

The much-ballyhooed title sequence and dream sequence were, and remain, hopelessly dated. And it didn’t take a Women’s Studies major to see that Vertigo is all about the male gaze—the creepy, if not rapey, male gaze. I didn’t like Scottie, our protagonist. Like, at all. The whole film, he’s either begging like a sad puppy or barking orders. Despite being played by the objectively beautiful Jimmy Stewart, with his dreamy baby blues, he gives off major incel vibes.

Yet there is Vertigo, #1 on the BFI list. Not only that, but Francine Prose, who has exceptional taste in artistic matters, loves it. What was I missing? So the night after I finished 1974, I watched Vertigo (either my second or third viewing, I can’t remember, but certainly the first in 25 years), determined to figure out—or, perhaps, given the source material, obsessed with figuring out—what the fuss was all about.

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Vertigo was clearly more personal to Hitchcock than, say, Rope or Dial “M” For Murder; he was devastated that it was a commercial failure. It goes without saying that the cinematography, the angles, the lighting, all of the bread-and-butter Hitchcockian stuff, is superb. Bernard Herrmann’s propulsive score is legendary. The acting is, to borrow a term from NFL beat writers describing Pat Mahomes and Josh Allen, elite. I don’t like Scottie, but I love Jimmy Stewart, who gives us a movie star master class. Barbara Bel Geddes is terrific. And Kim Novak—who plays a “shopgirl” playing an heiress playing the ghost of a spurned wife who went mad—is next-level good. But: best movie of all time? Really?

I get that the film is about obsession, and duality, and guilt, and loss, and second chances, and the mysteries of the human psyche that seemed so new and exciting in 1958, and San Francisco, and old money and new—and also how, to heal from his initial trauma, Scottie must experience a new trauma to reset the scales, as if psychological recovery were that linear, that easy. I get all of that.

My issue is that there is almost nothing in Vertigo that I accept at face value. I don’t believe any of it. (Spoiler alert.) I don’t believe two cops would leap across San Francisco rooftops, ahem, to catch a thief. I don’t believe Stewart’s John “Scottie” Ferguson was a detective in the first place. I don’t believe that a guy who had a brief college fling with Bel Geddes’s perky Midge would still be single all these years later (unless he was gay, but I don’t believe Scottie is gay). I don’t believe Scottie and Midge would have been in college at the same time, even allowing for the war. I don’t believe Gavin Elster, our bougie bad guy, couldn’t have come up with a way to off his wife that didn’t involve two other humans, one of whom is running curvaceously around San Francisco getting “picked up.” I don’t believe Scottie could follow the doomed Madeleine Elster for two days without her noticing. (I do believe he would be lousy at surveillance.) I don’t believe a bookstore owner would instantly know the tragic Carlotta Valdes story. I don’t believe the driving sequences. I don’t believe Madeleine would jump into the bay. I don’t believe she would feign unconsciousness for hours afterward, even as Scottie brings her home, strips her naked—her drying panties hang prominently in his kitchen, as proudly as Martha Alito flies the upside-down flag—and tucks her into his own bed. I don’t believe he would take a call from his villainous employer—and say “Hang on, Gavin” on top of it—while she was in the next room. I really don’t believe she would fall in love with him after all of that. I don’t believe he would rush into the affair without a single fleeting thought or pang of guilt for seducing his friend’s wife. I don’t believe he would run into Judy randomly on the street, I don’t believe she would agree to let him in her room, I don’t believe she would have dinner with him, and I certainly don’t believe she would allow him to dress her up and make her over to look like the murder accomplice she really is. I don’t believe the mission belltower isn’t locked in the middle of the night. And I don’t believe the nun would spook Judy into falling off the ledge. I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief when the cinematic situation calls for it, but I have my limits.

But is that maybe the point? Didn’t Hitchcock tell Novak that he didn’t care about the dialogue and the plot as much as how the finished product looked on the screen? So let’s discard, for the moment, the ridiculous storyline.

What is Vertigo even about, in that case? Like, what is it?

Film Colossus recently described the picture as “a cinematic exploration of the complexities of human identity and obsession, unraveled through a masterfully spun narrative.” In his 2018 review, Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian calls it an “unbearably sad, exquisitely macabre love story.” Roger Ebert says the film is “one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made,” and notes that Vertigo “is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art. It is about how Hitchcock used, feared and tried to control women.” Variety’s original 1958 review—not altogether positive—dismisses it as “prime though uneven Hitchcock.” The most accurate short synopsis I found was supplied by the wonderfully-named Bosley Crowther, who in the May 29, 1958 New York Times hails “Alfred Hitchcock’s latest mystery melodrama” as a film “all about how a dizzy fellow chases after a dizzy dame.” (Chef’s kiss, Mr. Crowther, wherever you are.)

Lots of people have lots of Vertigo theories—enough to make you dizzy. The Croatian film critic Koraljka Suton suggests, in a fascinating piece about the making of the film, “On one level, Vertigo is a clever story about the factuality of the unrelenting male gaze that dominates and dictates both our shared collective reality and the majority of the narratives we as a species create and willingly consume, but it should also be viewed as a clever deconstruction of it.” Stephen Handzo makes a compelling case that Scottie is gay and in love with Gavin Elster—but his argument, solid as it is, would be way more convincing if the film’s leading man were Cary Grant, another Hitchcock mainstay, and not the straight-arrow Stewart.

I’m partial to this theory by Valentino St. Germain:

I argue that Vertigo is nothing more than a case of midlife crises mixed with The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) all merging and brewing, in an endless loop, in the mind of a near comatose patient in a sanitarium for the wealthy. Walter Mitty is an escapist who daydreams himself into a world of fantasy many times a day. He lives with his overbearing mother and neither his fiancée and her mother nor his best friend respect him.

The only “real” scene in Vertigo is the plush sanitorium, minus the young Midge, everything else is a combination of dreams, nightmares and hallucinations. There is a reason why he keeps referring to his wealth in this film. How can a regular detective on pension be able to afford such an expensive private environment in seemingly a premium sanitarium (where they discuss the healing powers of Mozart)? He is not a detective; he is just fantasizing being one.

My first thought is that Vertigo is about nostalgia for a lost-and-gone-forever moment in history: American history generally, and San Francisco history specifically. This is why my Gen X film student cohort didn’t care for it, but our professor and Francine Prose, both born in the late 1940s, did. The events in the film take place in 1957 (which we know because Judy’s license was issued in 1954, and she’s been in California for three years). That’s the first year of Eisenhower’s second term, the zenith of the American middle class, and the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. That’s three years after Dien Bien Phu, when we swapped places with the French colonizers in Vietnam. That’s also the year that Buddy Holly released his first album—the flapping butterfly wing that changed popular music forever. Find me a five year period where there was more significant cultural change than 1957 to 1962! Vertigo is an allegory about a futile, Gatsbyan attempt to travel back to the recent past, to make things as they were (to make American great?) again—a patriarchal era when there were no women on juries, and nurses wore white uniforms and white hats, and avuncular doctors mansplained psychological disorders to female visitors. (What does the bookstore owner say about the 19th century tragic figure of Carlotta, whose husband took her child away—and who, in the film, is literally an icon? “You know, a man could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom.”)

Too, the actors inform how we view the film. Jimmy Stewart flew fighter planes in the Second World War, was in the military for decades, hated Communists, and was a lifelong staunch conservative. (Ironic, right, that the hero of the socialist fantasy that is It’s a Wonderful Life was a Goldwater/Reagan Republican IRL.) Meanwhile, Barbara Bel Geddes’s name was on the HUAC Hollywood blacklist—no wonder he’s not attracted to her! And Novak in 1957 was a true progressive and free spirit: she insisted on keeping her real last name, despite its foreign sound; she dared to show up on set ready to contribute creatively to the project, with actual ideas about her character, much to Hitchcock’s dismay; and her public romance with Sammy Davis, Jr. was deemed by Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn to be so detrimental to his studio’s interests that he threatened to break Davis’s legs if he didn’t end the relationship.

But all that feels flimsy. There has to be more to it than simple nostalgia. And how could Hitchcock have known in 1957 what the country would look like five years later?

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Letting the film marinate in my mind for a few days, I came up with a theory of my own. I can’t imagine someone hasn’t thought of this already, so apologies to whoever did, but I did come up with it myself. And here it is:

Vertigo is a poisoned Wizard of Oz.

Although this is Hitchcock’s fifth color film, Vertigo is the first where color plays a critical role, as it does, famously, in Wizard of Oz—specifically, as with the former, the colors green and red.

Green, and specifically emerald green, is all over Vertigo. Madeleine wears an emerald green dress the first time Scottie sees her at Ernie’s restaurant. Her Jaguar is green. He wears a green sweater at his apartment after pulling her from San Francisco Bay. Judy is wearing a tight green sweater the first time he sees her. The oversized neon light at the Empire Hotel, where Judy lives, is green (EM-pire, EM-erald, Auntie EM), the wallpaper in the hallway is green, and green light from the sign basks her room in an emerald glow. Red is presented as a contrast to green: the rich red wallpaper at Ernie’s, Judy’s hair, and, most significantly, the gemstones in the necklace worn by Carlotta (and Midge!) in the portrait painting, and Judy in real life. The traffic lights that play such a key role in their lazy car chase through San Francisco change from red to green and back again. (There is no Yellow Brick Road; there is a Golden Gate Bridge.)

Green, I submit, represents illusion, fantasy, and magic. The capital of Oz, after all, is the Emerald City. Any time we see green in Vertigo, it means the Scarecrowesque Scottie is drifting off into the vibrant world of his imagination. Red, on the other hand, grounds him, yanks him back to reality, makes his fantasy life screech to a stop, as if at a traffic light. Scottie finally pieces together Gavin Elster’s plan to murder his wife, and Judy’s role in the scheme, when he sees her wearing the red necklace. Like Dorothy, he is spat out of his vivid dream state and returned to the drabber real world. What’s red in The Wizard of Oz? The ruby slippers, which have the power to transport Dorothy home from her Technicolor fantasy world.

Speaking of home: Dorothy is from Kansas. Who else is from Kansas? Vertigo’s Judy. In a film in which we are given very few details about anyone’s backstory, she tells us twice that she is from Salina, Kansas—and shows Scottie her Kansas driver’s license to prove it. Judy’s full name is Judy Barton, which sounds an awful lot like Judy Garland, who, needless to say, plays Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz—just as Judy plays a character in Vertigo.

Alfred Hitchcock behind the camera is the Wizard behind the curtain. Midge is Glinda, with her strapless bras that work like magic. And when does Scottie’s phobia emerge? When he’s [sings] waaaayyy uppppp hiiiiiiiigh.

Even the swirl that is the film’s shorthand representation for Scottie’s vertigo looks like a tornado; the iconic silhouette of him falling down into the death spiral could just as easily be him being pulled up into the cone, like Dorothy was.

We’re clearly supposed to have The Wizard of Oz on the brain (unless we’re the Scarecrow or Eric Trump and don’t have one), but to what end? It’s not like Star Wars, where Leia is Dorothy, C3P0 is the Tin Man, Chewbacca is the Cowardly Lion, and R2D2 is Toto. It’s not neat like that.

What, then?

Is Scottie in Purgatory, as some have suggested, like Tony in those weird coma episodes in the last season of The Sopranos? Is his “vertigo” really a fear of going to hell for his sins? Is the film’s trial sequence an approximation of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates? And, by solving the convoluted crime—and thus curing his complaint—is he now ready to ascend? Is that why there’s a nun there, ready to clang the bell? (Every time a bell rings, remember, an angel gets his wings.)

Is Scottie insane, as the critic St. Germain suggests? So deep inside his own mind that he cannot tell fantasy from reality? Is he a repressed gay man, living chastely in the gay capital of the West Coast, obsessing over his own personal Judy Garland? Can both things be simultaneously true?

And what to make of the strange, unsatisfying ending? The shot of Scottie on the tower, looking fearlessly down, is weirdly short. Why? Is he really cured? Is this a happy ending or an ambivalent one? Why would a guy this obsessed with Judy-as-Madeleine be so outraged that she was in on the murder of a woman he didn’t know, had never met, had never even seen?

Francine Prose, unsurprisingly, is correct: “Each time the film seemed to be saying something different, and I began to understand that it was saying many things.” Possibilities swirl and spiral endlessly around. There seems to be no limit to how many ways the film can be interpreted.

The only thing I can say for sure about Vertigo—because Judy makes a point to relay this piece of information more than once—is that we’re not in Kansas anymore.

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ICYMI

Two excellent guests on The Five 8: Tom Carter spoke about Leonard Leo, and Michelle Williams, a speech and language pathologist, discussed misconceptions about President Biden’s stutter.

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Photo credit: Stewart and Novak in a still shot from Vertigo, via IMDB.

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ROUGH BEAST

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