Vertigo : Behind the mirror 1 Vertigo, subjects Vertigo is a suspense film. Yes. but not only. I will raise the theory that, deep bellow, the film has many ideas. Let the skeptic say: What do you mean ideas? And why make a big deal of a suspense movie? My answer: The ideas in Vertigo come from the world of Philosophy. Skeptic: Philosophy in a suspense film? How can this be? My answer: I will give an example. In the second part of the film we see a man obsessed to an extent that borders on insanity. He wants to transform Judy into Madeleine. I have a question: why? Skeptic: What do I mean why? No reason. He is obsessed. He wants to bring back the girl he lost. So what? My answer: But this means just answering by I dont know. I dont know is not an answer for me. And nor is no reason an answer. Skeptic: How do you know what the reason is? And how do you know that you are right? My answer: I do not know that I am right. There is no such a thing. I make a model. Other should judge if my model seems to be founded on firm ground. A theory or a model is good if everything falls into place and you can explain every little details, however insignificant. 1
Skeptic: but if it cant be known that your model is right, why make it? My answer: because in this way you discuss moral questions, philosophical questions and so on. We become smarter and and look inside our persona and compare it to the characters in the movie. We learn something from a good film. It clearly gives us pleasure. And understanding what is behind the film just makes thi plesure stronger. Finding a a good model for the film is nice. Lets say that my skeptic; saw films of Bergman and Fellini. The skeptic may complain: In The seventh seal I did not understand anything. Nor in 81/2 which was worse. To me it seems that I understood everything in Vertigo. It was interesting and I watched it. In 81/2 I left in the middle of the film. My answer: 8/12 requires effort to understand but its possible. I understand every second of 81/2. And what seems a collection of unclear scenes is anything but. For me the film is crystal clear. Skeptic: You claim Vertigo is a philosophical film. If so, what philosophy does it represent? My answer: The theories of Kant on morality, the Pygmalion effect, and the theory of Frued and Lacan. Kant said that using a person as a tool, is against the categorical imperative of his morality theory. To put it simply: its a sin. You should not use another person as a tool. This happens in the film. Scottie is used as a tool. The director makes us feel that a person is using another person as a tool. Because, for example, Elster keeps invading the space of Scottie. Because what he says on Madeleine does not makes sense. Because Scottie fails to go up the tower to save Madeleine. He is a perfect tool because of his fear of heights. A perfect victim. Skeptic: So the fear of heights has a reason and the later behavior has a reason? My answer: yes. Skeptic what are the reasons? My answer: well, read the next subsection. 2 Traumas The first scene shows Scottie hanging from the gutter up many stories in the air. Because of his fear of heights his partner was killed. We do not see him get rescued, and its even unclear that this can be done. This why many critic 2
say that the film is a dream by Scottie. An unfortunate speculation that has no basis in Vertigo. So the first fall is of the partner of Scottie. We later see two more falls. The fake fall of Madeleine is his second traumatic fall. After the second fall Scoottie is completely broken. He becomes catatonic. And the true fall of Judy at the end? This is not a trauma. This is the cure. So now let us answer the question: why is he afraid of heights anyway? And morover, why did I not find a single critics that explains why he is afraid of height? In my opinion because they did not adopt a clear model. The main philosophers represented in the film are Frued and Lacan. The skeptic can say: why are you saying philosophy? They were psychologist. Well, the ideas of both these brave humans are highly controversial. Till today. Thus I treat their ideas as a philosophical theory. That speaks on the subconscious, and the way you develop as children in the first 6 years of our lives. The following is a serious reason to give them the title of philosophers. Kant said: when you do something, you should ask yourself: Would everyone be better off if everyone were to act in the same way? His Categorical imperative. There is a big difficulty here. This works only if people are rational. In the 18 century in Europe they thought so, in the so called age of reason. Voltaire is associated with this stream of thought. It was Nietzsche, a rebel philosopher that questioned the basics. Religion, Descartes and Kant taught us that things are good or evil. In Christianity evil things are called sins. Nietzsche wrote a book called Beyond good and evil. So he broke all conventions before him. The morality of Descartes. The logic of the age of enlightenment. Forcing logic on us is an evil thing to do. This is a mistake. Nietzsche said. Because we are not rational beings. We are not rational by nature. Jesus and Descartes made us machines without creativity. Jesus and Descartes, are the trouble (said Nietzsche). The catholic religion that puts all the blame on us, is a diminishing force. The rule of logic of Descartes and the followers, makes people a herd of un-thinkers. We should aspire to be a superhuman. A man that holds and acts in his own rules. His own morality. In his opinion, we are simply not rational. But we have many instinct. We are born with an urge for power. The wars in the 20 century indicate that he was right. Against the nihilism that may come from his ideas (and Nietzsche was strictly against nihilism) he said that we should find our comfort in art. Artists are not regular people in his eyes. In fact, they deserve special right. In the film The seventh seal we have a manager of a group of actors. 3
In this film we meet death in the form of a human wearing all black. Death manifested as a human, was a big novelty for its time. The manager goes to sleep on a tree, that later turns out to be The tree of life. Death comes and starts to cut the tree, namely kill the manager. Then the manager quotes Nietzsche and asks: No concession for artists? Death says No! and kills him. Nietzsche said: do not use this terrible terms good and evil. Just say if something is correct for you or incorrect for you. Like in the time of the Greeks. Frued went further. He does present us as what he called territorial people. People that by nature will fight against each other. But there is something worse. We are dominated by the subconscious. Our nature is always to seek pleasures. This is the reason to our lives. We are dominated by our libido (sexual urges). And we are not even aware of this. The urges emanate from our subconscious. Hence, we cant defend against these urges. Now, this does not seat well with Kant. With the age of enlightenment. So, is this not a philosophical answer? Of course it is. They say to Kant, What you said will not work because you do not know humans deeply enough. Humans are not rational. Frued said that as a baby from age 0 to 6 you have to pass 6 stages. If you are afraid of heights it means, simply that you failed to go through one of the stages. The most famous two are the anal and the oral stages. A person that failed to go through the anal stage will be stingy and fixated. If you fail to pass the gentile stage, that comes after the oral and anal, you can get addictive to a goal or commodity says Frued. Also, if you fail to go via this stage you will have troubles with making decision. Its like you did not become adult. Scottie is super addictive to make Judy into Madeleine. Scottie is super hesitant (see how strongly he argues against taking the case). Scottie can not even decide what his name is. He says: he can be called Scottie or Johny and both are OK. This is ambivalence, He first was practicing Law. Then became a policeman. Then left this and became a detective. He cant decide what he wants to do. Ambivalence. How does he allow himself to break two cardinal rules that he must have believed in? He falls in love with another mens wife. This must have been regarded as a great sin in 1958, and probably Scottie, the hesitant has a big trouble and is filled with guilt about it. He also breaks what he promised to do when you follow someone: He met the object he was following. He met Madeleine. Breaking the ethics once more. If he has morality, it is very shaky and hesitant. Does he believe in his ethics or does he not? This director has a habit of making the hero look bad. From the German cinema, he took the idea that a film is better if not only the main protagonist is flawed, but also the evil character is attractive. Like Elster is. Another example is presented 4
in North by North West Maybe the most dominating example. In that films the hero is a person that wont. grow up. Depends on his mother and his marriages do not last. In North by North West the evil protagonist has very attractive persona. Exactly as the character of Rear Window in which the hero wont marry Grace Kelly. This director did many films on infantile heroes. At one time Scottie becomes unable to decide on anything. He becomes almost catatonic. He is a Hamlet-like creature that is never sure what to do. I am highly simplifying, but the symptoms of Scottie are clearly marked by a failure to go via the genital stage. Obsession and ambivalence. Is it not perfectly fitting of Scottie? And his fear of hight? We later see that it is a symbol of impotence. If you are not interested in the answer to the question Why must Scottie turn Judy to Madeleine (and no I have not answered that yet) it is simply that you do not see what is that is the heart of the film. Its like you never saw Vertigo. Its as cruel as that. Why is Scottie alone? In the films of Alfred Hitchcock if a male is not married he is infantile. Why wont he marry Midge? According to Frued he did not go through the stage that makes you an adult. The genital stage. That brings puberty. It all fits. This is why Midge tells him when he visits Scottie: mommy is here. When he tries to overcome his fear of heights, he falls to the hand of his mother Midge. Helpless. He is a helpless child that did not grow up due to failure of crossing the genital stage. Frued said that we are conditioned to think of sex as something indecent. Hence in our dreams we will not dream on sex directly, but rather substitute the phallic with a snake or a rope. or a gun, or something similar. Our libido (sex drive) is the one that drives our persona. We look for pleasure. And because of our education that sex is dirty, we do it via symbols. The tower is therefore a phallic symbol. The fear of heights: He can not climb the phallic tower. Not being able to erect the tower (fear of heights) clearly means he is impotent. This is the problem. He has deep psychological barriers. In psychoanalysis they say that to overcome a trauma, you need to re-live it. Because of his impotency, Madeleine died. And he is transforming Judy to Madeleine is his try to re-live the trauma so he can get cured. As simple as that. A Psychoanalysis cure. At the end he says proudly: I overcame my fear The psychoanalysis he went through finished in success. Scottie not being aware of why he is doing so falls also well into the theory of Frued. He says I dont know why am I doing it (transforming Judy to 5
Madeleine). Its his subconscious leading him here. So he is not aware. But the internal force that brings him to do what he does is too strong to contain. Does the film have vaginal symbols? Well, yes. Water appears again and again, and is considered a vaginal symbol. Changing sex to symbols, to make it less dirty, is called sublimation. 3 Pygmalion and also Lacan There are too many philosophical questions the film deals with to discuss them all. The Greek mythology philosophical idea of Pygmalion. Scottie is creating a new woman in his image. I will not discuss it here but this is certainly was discussed for many many years in philosophy. And since the film does not speak on Pygmalion effect but shows this effect, the film is philosophical. But a full analysis will be too long. Lacan took the ideas of Freud and developed them further. I will now give a shallow summary of the ideas of Lacan that are way more suited to analyze Vertigo then the ideas of Freud. Lacn also spoke of the development of a child. An important stage of a child is The mirror stage that happens roughly when the child is 1 year old. At first a baby thinks he is the center of the universe. But he does not related hi arm legs etc with himself. At this stage the baby is fully united with his mother. When the baby looks at himself in the mirror The baby now understands he is one piece. See echo in the film. Scottie wants to re-create Madeleine s look with Judy. His desire to make her into his (his completely wrong fantasy on) Madeleine is called a fetish. This is define in two ways that both fit: a course of action to which one has an excessive and irrational commitment. And also: a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc. Here we get to the mirror stage. In front of the store s mirror, their images are doubled as they argue about his demands to remake her. He sees both of them in the mirror. He got to a stage that he knows what he wants to do and nobody will stop him. The mirror make them one baby. But ts not real at this point. Scottie does not know Judy is amdlaine. True but nor are the ideas of a baby looking at the mirror true (according to Lecan). Seeing his body as one gives the baby a pleasure. But this pleasure is an illusion. The truth that the baby thinks he learned on himself is completely false. He still does not control all his body or make a difference between his body and the world. Here we as babies grow a trauma that we will need to fight off for the rest of our lives (says Lacan). The baby thinks that he and his mother are one unit. Lacan calls this stage The imaginary 6
order. An Scottie and Judy both in the mirror is still and imaginary order. The next step is the symbolic order. The apearance of the father. The apperance of the rules of society. These things come between the (imaginary) full bond of the baby and his mather. The baby has to accept the rules of his father and of society. The exraction from the imaginary order isa big trauma. Here we find Freud and Lacan speaking on the forbidden. About the Oedipal complex, the wish to kill his father. The baby develops (according thto Frued and Lacan) a fear of castretion. The first step of the super-ego that tells us what is right and what is wrong. At that stage the bbaby develops the subconscious. The baby tries to repress the new fearful things that he learned. Tries to forget them. But they are not forgotten. They just go to the subconscious. From now, all his life will try a person to return to the stage that never existed: the imaginary order. Society cant give a cure against the trauma. So we try all our lives to return to something that never existed. But this is what Scottie does. He and Madlaine never existed as a pair. Scottie is trying to bring back the imaginary (that never existed) order. He is not diffrent in that from all of us. His case is just very specific. Our attempt to get back to the imaginary order can be posed in a wish to illusions that are dangerous. We invent desires. Our wishes are desires only when they go beyond what we need and beyond the wish of love. The desire is not for something that we need. It goes way above that. And that desire is always to someone other than yourself. Lacan called our unrealistic desire The little object a. Something that we wish but do not need. Its an imaginary thing. Then Lacan talks about the gaze (look) a central issue in Vertigo and says that if we look too closely on our little object a, which is always ideal, we may find that it is not ideal at all. The little object a is nothing but a screen. Its like the screen that hides the Wizard of Oz that when lifted shows that there is no Wizard. We can have a little object a. But to try and fulfil the fantasy will be destructive because in reality its not what we imagine at all. Lacan also put more emphasis of sublimation of death than of sex. We are afraid to talk death so we go for sublimation. The dream of Scottie fits here well. And we have death here. The death of Madeleine. Not being able to cope with the death, the subconscious takes hold on Scottie. His urge is too strong. But reviving Madeleine, is his little object a. A big mistake. A fantasy he never should have fulfilled. When he tries, it has disastrous consequences Alfred Hitchcock easily explains that what Scottie wants is disastrous. Because after all its necrophilia. Scottie wants to bring a dead woman to life, and then have sex with her. 7
Alfred Hitchcock achieves this also by editing that skips to the future. Madeleine tries to commit suicide by jumping into the San Francisco bay. Scottie saves her. Then a cut. She is in his house wearing a robe. She was unconscious throughout. So how did she get into the robe? Are we to believe that a person inclined to necrophilia did not take advantage of this girl when she was dead (unconscious)? So by bringing Madeleine from the dead and making her love him again he fulfills this very dangerous little object a of his. As Lacan predicted, disaster strikes. Judy dies. This time for real. Many say that the second part is a mirror image of the first part. Lines are said backward in the second part compared to the first. Like too late no versus: No, too late. Talking about gaze, the shots are mostly point of view shot. The point of view of Scottie. This relates to the main question: Using point of view shots make us identify with Scottie. This is the way our mind works. A well established known tool. We are not aware of that. We do not feel the manipulation because its not cognitive. We cant do anything against it. 4 Tools In this film Alfred Hitchcock has a full strategy that includes camera movements, use of colors, and several other tools. The colors used are pale pale green (the color of the dress of Madeleine when Scottie meets her first) which is a symbol of death. A famous story is that Alfred Hitchcock asked for a pillow to be green. The department of tools did not understand: why is it so important for the pillow to be green? This shows how much Alfred Hitchcock planned the colors here. The red color is used as a symbol of emotions and life. In the dream (nightmare more like it) Scottie dreams that he is the one who is falling. In Psychology this is called transference. Unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. In this case his horror of the fall of Madeleine is redirected to himself. He falls and not Madeleine. In part of the dream the colors go from dark to red and dark to red. Again and again. But when he starts falling in the dream, to his death, Scottie is completely green. His face is shown in green. The color of death. An interesting scene happens when Madeleine starts walking to Scottie after being totally transformed. We see this pale green light at first. But when she enters the room it goes away. She is alive. Cinema is a language. Pasaloni called it a poetic language. 8
How do you say in cinema closing a cycle? In fact, is a cycle closed in the film? Certainly yes. Scottie looses Madeleine and then we go forward, not only Madeleine appears again, but we go back for a split second to the tower, the place she died. Closing a cycle in its full meaning. A famous 360 degree camera movement happens after Scottie finally makes Judy into Madeleine. While the camera does the 360 move, the room changes to the the place of the Mission San Juan Batista stable. The place of Scottie failed to save Madeleine. The camera makes a circle and the films ends a circle. Cinema language at its best. Now that the change is done, he has to recreate the trauma, and then conquer the impotence and grow up and stops being afraid of heights. There are so many other hints. Madeleine sounds similar to the medallion she wears. The film is filled with such things. Besides Midge, we have a symbol of the mother that disappears. Madeleine disappears when they around the very old trees (as a loss of a mother). And such tricks and quotation are all around the film. And by the way: how do you say fear of height in cinema language? Apparently its the director that invented that: you pull the camera backward and you then also do a zoom in. This shows fear of height or at least disorientation so well, just because the director is so good. So, exactly like a commercial, Vertigo sells us a product. Philosophical ideas. And the issue is that we are defenseless against these ideas affecting us. This is a true philosophical film that sells many philosophical ideas, and used cinematic tools to do so. A philosophical film is born. I rest my case 9