L13FC: Vertigo

I must respectfully disagree with this interpretation of Scottie, who I believe to represent, not the director, but the moviegoer. Like Jeff from “Rear Window (1954),” Scottie has become a voyeur through an accident that restricts his participation in life. Their difference is that Jeff spies on actual life, and can therefore enter into the drama and perhaps change the fate of the characters. Scottie, on the other hand, is viewing a fiction, a manufactured story that is unalterable. He is prevented from entering the story by a wall of reality that stands between him and the lie he has gullibly accepted as truth. He is a man watching a movie that is being played out in real space and time. After the death of the character with whom he has fallen in love, he sees the actress who played that character in the street, but she is in another role now, perhaps her real self, perhaps another character. Like many moviegoers who demand their favorite actors repeat familiar roles, he becomes obsessed with dressing her up as the character he has presumed to be real and now presumes to be dead. But he is immobilized by his condition and, although he initially believes he has entered a real situation, he eventually discovers it to be nothing but a twist in the plot, and he as the voyeur who is always the observer, never the participant, can do nothing to avert the final tragedy.

One of the things that has always bothered me in this film is the proliferation of process shots in the several sequences in which Scottie follows the girl through the San Francisco area in his car. After several viewings over this last month, I have a theory that explains why Hitchcock might have applied this ugly technique to these tedious scenes. There are two alternating set-ups. Scottie’s point of view from the car’s interior shows a crisp view of the street though the front windshield. The reverse shot shows Scotties big head obscuring much of the bleary rear-projection of the street outside the rear window. Perhaps the director intends that crisp image in front of Scottie as the movie he is watching, and the muddied image behind his head as the fading reality he is leaving behind.

Another thing I must disagree with is the claim that the film is imbued with a Catholic guilt. First, except for the fact that a church is used as the location for the crime, there is no mention Catholicism in the film. Second, the guilt Scottie suffers is not a religious guilt, but a Freudian guilt, which he address in his visits, not to a priest, but to a psychiatrist. Because it is commonly believed that Hitchcock was a guilt-ridden Catholic, many critics have unfairly imposed this personality trait upon many of his characters, even when there is no substantiation in doing so. Another critical fallacy is that just because Hitchcock was obsessed with Grace Kelly and some other of his blond leading ladies, that Scottie’s obsession with the Kim Novak character was an expression of his own obsession with his actresses. For one thing, the nature of Scottie’s obsession is not the Director-Actress syndrome, which requires some degree of consensual participation, not necessarily sexual, but the non-consensual relationship between the anonymous man in the movie theatre with the erotic images on the screen. Hitchcock finally addressed his own obsessions in “Marnie,” when he was working with “Tippi” Hedren, an actress toward whom he had lost control of his suppressed feelings during the filming of their previous film, “The Birds.” While filming “Vertigo,” he was indifferent to Novak, to whom he was not attracted. As I mentioned earlier, this is a film about the obsession moviegoers have with their movie stars, quite a different thing than the relationships between actresses and their directors.

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