The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Obsessed with "Vertigo"

Authors(s): Lawrence Shaffer
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 383-397
Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089565
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Lawrence Shaffer
Obsessed with Vertigo
ARTcan
IS only
OURbe supernaturalism. Forghostus
the appearance of the god: us theexappearance
machina. As of the
a film passes (blindly, unseen) through the projector, it passes
through its landscapes and we pass through them with it. So a film
passes away?in place. Film mimes the passing of our lives, or how
we pass through them?which is the same thing. This evanescence
makes every film an elegy. But only Vertigo is an elegy for itself.
Only Vertigo haunts us while we watch it. (And then, long after
ward, Vertigo is moving . . . still.)
Vertigo goes all the way, blinding its eye on the thorn of its rose.
We can measure its extremity by comparing it to the more limited
ambition of Rear Window. This film, too, centers on the "avail
able" "wandering" eye (words Vertigo's Scottie Ferguson uses to
describe himself), here represented and depersonalized by window
and lens. Through these, Jeffries, the Cyclopean entomologist in
all of us, spies on the beehive world of apartments across his
courtyard. Unlike Vertigo, Rear Window focuses exclusively on
looking and has nothing to say about looks. It simply explores the
gap between the passive power of sight (content to cross reel space
only) and active commitment to a real world of "relationships."
Less simpleminded, Vertigo sees a metaphysical dilemma created
by the very act of looking?that the mind selectively idealizes
appearances and commits itself to those "looks" with no possibil
ity of any lasting, stable accommodation between reality and ideal
ity. Vertigo sees this commitment as the beginning not the end of
our problems, prompted as it is by the false expectation that
appearances truly reflect some dependable state of things.
Because Jeffries has no interest in any kind of real penetration
through his window, the problem of the fulfillment of expecta
tions aroused by "looks" doesn't arise. Jeffries undergoes no Pas
sion. He remains a detached eyeball pressed against the window of
life's Curiosity Shop, until the invasion of reality from the other
side of his window. Unlike Vertigo, reality doesn't leave the hero
with less but more than meets the eye. Jeffries' desire that life

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 The Massachusetts Review

imitate fiction is more than fulfilled. Where Scottie suffers through

a Zenoesque pursuit of his Grecian urn goddess, Jeffries is pursued
by his goddess from the privileged sanctuary of his photo-lined
chamber, already graced by her solicitous presence. Nor, despite
her proximity, is she anything less than the Vogue ideal she seems
to be. The crucial distinction between Jeffries' and Scottie's eye is
that Jeffries' is more than content to keep its distance. Jeffries sits
comfortably distant from the center of the other characters' worlds
even as he sits comfortably at the center of Rear Window's. But
where Rear Window's eye is almost always on Jeffries, or on
Jeffries seeing, Vertigo's enters the world around Scottie, seeing it
as an ideally beautiful, mysteriously meaningful world which
Scottie, tortuously astray in, fails to make his own.
As the murderous salesman, the main object of Jeffries' surveil
lance, advances toward him not from the end of Jeffries' gaze but
threateningly from within his own room ("camera"), Jeffries
futilely "shoots" at him with his flashbulbs. This may be the
cleverest demonstration in cinema of the epiphenomenal impo
tence of sight, of its sympathetic magic reelism, the visual world as
irrelevant to the skull beneath its skin. But, again, Rear Window
fails to make this asymmetry crucial. More important it doesn't
even touch on the gap between the visual world as an ideal and the
impossibility of that world being substantiated, sustained, cashed
in. When Jeffries finally turns from his window, there is the
goddess, as real as she is reel, waiting for him.
Vertigo is plotted along a curve of recurrences, reversals, and
recognitions. Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), a San Francisco
detective, is forced to retire after developing acrophobia. He
becomes "available Ferguson," a self-described "wanderer." An
old school chum, Gavin Elster, asks Scottie to follow his wife,
Madeleine (Kim Novak), who believes she is "possessed" by her
great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. Carlotta had committed sui
cide and Elster is afraid that Madeleine will follow suit. Scottie
follows Madeleine to various mysterious sites, connected by Made
leine's obsession with Carlotta. Ultimately, he saves her from an
attempted suicide in the Bay. He falls in love with her as, appar
ently, Madeleine does with him. In counterpoint to all this is the
common-sense appearance, and counsel, of Scottie's old girlfriend,
Midge, a designer of brassiere ads. Midge embodies what Scottie is
not looking for and only succeeds in driving him further toward
Madeleine.
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 Obsessed with Vertigo

In an attempt to reassure Madeleine that she is not going mad,

Scottie takes her to the actual mission that she had described as a
recurrent motif in her dreams. But once there Madeleine rushes up
the stairwell and throws herself from the bell tower. Scottie's
acrophobia prevents him from following and saving her. After the
inquest he suffers a mental collapse and, in a catatonic state, spends
an indeterminate period in a sanitorium. He finally recovers suffi
ciently to leave. Haunted by the memory of Madeleine, he begins to
revisit the various sites associated with her. One day he sees a
banal-looking working class girl, Judy Barton (also played by Kim
Novak), who nevertheless bears a striking facial resemblance to
Madeleine. After their first meeting, we (but not Scottie) discover
that Judy had been Elster's mistress, paid by him to play the role of
Madeleine as the crux of Elster's scheme to murder his wife, the real
Madeleine. The body seen by Scottie through an aperture in the
stairwell wall, hurtling down from the bell tower, was not "Made
leine" but Elster's wife, to whom Judy bore a close physical
resemblance. Elster had learned of Scottie's acrophobia and knew
he'd be unable to follow Judy to the top of the bell tower. Ignorant
of the truth, Scottie persuades Judy to let him "make her up" as
Madeleine. The transformation is completely successful as Judy
even begins to slip back into Madeleine's way of talking and
behaving. But then Judy makes the mistake of wearing a necklace
that Scottie had seen in a portrait of Carlotta. He now sees through
the hoax but manages to conceal what he knows. He takes Judy
back to the scene of the crime and, as he drags her up the stairwell,
forces her to confess Elster's scheme. Conquering his acrophobia
he reaches the top where, startled by a nun who had "heard voices,"
Judy steps back and falls to her death. A devastated Scottie looks
down in shock and despair as the film ends.
Such an account, like x-rays of one's beloved, does little to
explain the film's effect. And for the same "superficial" reason?
missing is the skin-deep (screen-deep) distinction of "looks" that
yet makes a metaphysical difference (metaphysical in that the value
attached to "looks" cannot be explained by their literal descrip
tion). Vertigo haunts us because, more poignantly than any other
film, it shows how "looks" haunt our lives?lives that are kaleido
scopes of superimposed slides, through which we fall, wander, lose
ourselves. No heart of the matter, only a bleeding eye.
When Judy Barton first appears, her facial resemblance to Made
leine offers a hope that somehow something of what Scottie has
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 The Massachusetts Review

lost might be salvaged. But then our discovery that Madeleine was
Judy instantly deflates Vertigo's whole romantic premise, which
the first half of the film had so lovingly developed. This revelation
seems worse than if the camera had suddenly pulled back to
include Hitchcock in the frame directing Kim Novak, because it is
the internal integrity of the fiction itself that has been destroyed.
There seems nothing in the film now worth salvaging. But then, as
we keep watching Judy, the integrity of appearances reasserts itself.
For despite our new knowledge, we simply cannot see Judy as
Madeleine, no more than in looking back we can re-see Madeleine
as Judy. Given that they are, in fact, identical?not only are they
the same character but the same actress plays them?this irreversi
ble configuration is a stunning demonstration of how "looks"
determine identity in this superficial world of ours. "Madeleine"
remains intact, she remains real, a real ghost. Her autonomy as an
image is only confirmed by Judy's duplication of her in the trans
formation scene. Since just a final touch, like a single dab in a
Seurat painting that makes a tip of a nose suddenly materialize, can
make Madeleine re-materialize out of Judy?the artiface of "make
up" as definitive of identity as the structural essence of make-up?
it is shockingly clear that ideals of love and beauty walk the
skin-thin line of appearances. When Scottie transforms Judy into
Madeleine, he thinks he has created a fictional representation of the
real thing. We know he has created a literal "re-presentation" of
what was a fiction to begin with. The illusion of Madeleine's
reality and the reality of Madeleine's illusion are one and the same
appearance.
As Judy walks toward Scottie, her hair "back" in Madeleine's
style as the final detail that makes her once more Madeleine's
"possession," her face luminous with the knowledge that now
Scottie will love her, there is only one other moment in cinema that
can compare with it in its recognition of how much depends on the
razor's edge of "looks." And that is the recognition scene at the end
of City Lights between Charlie and the blind flower girl who can
"see now." The two moments are inverse, however. What the
flower girl can now see is the gap between what her benefactor
should have looked like and the impoverished reality. What Scottie
sees is the closing of the gap between the ideal and the real. Senses
reeling, he sees himself with Madeleine, as they were, in the old
livery stable at San Juan Bautista just before his failure to prevent
her death. As Judy's room "turns" under the superimposed slide of
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 Obsessed with Vertigo

the past?turns in place like a carousel?a dazed Scottie holds fast

to his vision recaptured. His trompe l'oeil is not just an impersona
tion but a personification, which he desperately embraces. It is
only when Madeleine is revealed as a trompe l'oeil that Scottie
rejects Judy. Judy's appearance can be changed to duplicate Made
leine's but Madeleine must really exist to begin with!
That she doesn't is the ultimate "vertigo" of the film?in our
Escher world there is no stable reference point, no home base. This
was the point of Vertigo's prologue, a close-up of the eyes and lips
of an anonymous female face, the eyes shifting right and left, the
lips an ambiguous portal, undependable in a double sense as both
the physical and verbal focus of love. A vertiginous spiral into the
bottomless depths of her eyes forecasts the metaphysical labyrinth
of the film. That the face is any female face underscores the
exchangeability of appearances. Scottie had been looking for a
"key" that would unlock the secret of Madeleine's apparent delu
sion. There is no key because there is no secret. Or, rather, the secret
is only a script, for which no Rosetta Stone is necessary.
When Scottie carefully transcribes the information on Carlotta's
tombstone which, a moment before, Judy/Madeleine had pre
tended to be obsessively preoccupied with, he is, unknowingly,
recording a factual detail in a work of pure fiction, recording the
real within the reel, the very signature of film. He is traveling
Gavin Elster's maze, which only looks as real as if it were. As it
stands it is all "make up," even the hard datum of Carlotta's
tombstone (which Hitchcock "planted" in the cemetery garden of
the Mission Dolores), even Judy herself, because these "real toads"
are still in Elster's imaginary garden, still ploys within the context
of his fabulation. The marvelous ambience of "Madeleine's sites,"
the false clues in Elster's script, turns out not to be any real property
of the cemetery garden, picture gallery, redwood forest, old livery
stable, florist shop, etc. For Scottie these become sheer stage flats?
deadwood?when Madeleine is reduced to a "Midge-like"
explanation.
Vertigo might seem to be about romantic expectation reduced to
ash, but the reverse is equally apparent, that the mundane can be
capable of some kind of ideal expansion. The difference is that the
mundane is primary; the ideal can only be made up out of the
make-up of the ordinary. Each side of Vertigo's Janus face is,
however, equally an appearance; lives develop in an external world
of displaceable "looks" rather than in a durable, dependable one of
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 The Massachusetts Review

"inner" substance. Yet looks not only retain their frightening hold
on us even when displaced, their grip becomes stronger in time.
Vertigo is conceived relentlessly in terms of spatial and color
motifs, and the sole reason is to show how looks have this awesome
authority. No film has ever used its settings?religious, natural,
whatever?in such purely aesthetic terms. Vertigo's look is so
beautiful precisely to charge looks with crucial importance. Life is
only worth obsessive hope and despair if it looks like art.
At the center of Vertigo's labyrinth is an apparition. Madeleine
is a hologram with no penetrable interior. All that matters is what
she seems to be. If her words turn out to be "lines," why we are all,
as Shakespeare and Pirandello saw, dramatis personae. In the scene
where she stands before the grave of Carlotta, who is supposedly
possessing her, only Madeleine the fiction believes this. Beneath
appearances there is only Judy, who is empty, who is really just
giving an impression of being possessed, really just projecting a
"figure." The only possession, it turns out, is Judy's by her role.
She is possessed by the look and manner, the style of Madeleine,
not, of course, by the Carlotta delusion that is the content of
Madeleine's behavior. Judy is like the Jack Nicholson character in
Five Easy Pieces, who after playing a Chopin piece "movingly"
insists it may have sounded that way but he really felt nothing.
Vertigo pushes the "image gap" to its phenomenal limit: appear
ances are everything because, tautologically, they alone can only be
what they seem. Madeleine doesn't just seem mysterious, she is. It's
only Judy who isn't. If Scottie weren't an absolute idealist, he
might be able to displace the disillusionment of Madeleine reduced
to Judy with the wonder of the illusion?Judy transcending
herself?of Judy appearing to be Madeleine. It is never appearan
ces that confuse matters, only what might be behind them.
So Vertigo's despairing answer to Duncan's chilling "There's
no art to find the mind's construction in the face" is that the surface
cannot bear all that weight, cannot be held all that accountable.
Scottie is doomed when he insists on Madeleine really being the
ideal she seems to be. In the end his only hope is to accept Judy in
the role of Madeleine, to love her just for appearances' sake. Judy
can only be like Madeleine because Madeleine, the ideal, does not,
cannot exist in any event.
On her side, Judy, in play-acting Madeleine, can only settle for
what it feels like to be Madeleine. Not being this phantasm, she
must miss the substance of a necessary history, an inevitable fate.

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 Obsessed with Vertigo

Vertigo makes this empty yearning, the occupational hazard of

actors as they recite lines and move amongst the facades of mise-en
scenes, seem universal. The feeling of detachment from one's
"personal" life, as if it were a photograph album, an arbitrary
fiction with no internal necessity, is common experience in a world
constantly translated into images of itself. Identity is not an abso
lute matter of being but a relative status of re-presentation. (When
Scottie and Judy first meet, Judy attempts to prove who she is by
showing him old photos of herself and her family.)
Scottie is doomed because he cannot settle for "feels like" and
"looks like." Unlike the artist, unlike the film-maker, for him the
Greek statue must really be what it seems to personify, be animistic
not just animated ("projected"). Judy, in the process of being
alchemized back into Madeleine (again, artiface as our supernatu
ralism; no transubstantiation, just a simulacrum) complains to
Scottie, "You don't even want to touch me." She's right, because
touching Judy would bring Scottie no closer to the image that is
Madeleine.
Vertigo, then, shows us the infinite distance between site and
sight, yet all that separates the two are appearances, which have no
dimension at all. This vision of the world as mirage is even more
hellish than the reductive ending of The Maltese Falcon, when,
after Sydney Greenstreet and the others have stared dejectedly at the
bare "black bird," unenhanced by the bejeweled genealogy Green
street had tabulated for it, Bogart nevertheless is still able to see it as
the stuff dreams are made of. Vertigo begins by actually conceding
the bejeweled falcon and ends with the bare stuff it was made of,
demonstrating in the process how superficial the difference is! All
it takes for "stuff" to become dreams are appearances. This makes
appearances crucial as the sole repositories of romantic/aesthetic
idealism. Which in turn makes life vertiginous because appearan
ces are very changeable, ungraspable stuff. How they are made
up?"make up" in all its senses?is at the very heart, and heart
sickness, of Vertigo. Primary is the elaborate scenario constructed
by Gavin Elster (who assures Scottie he is not "making it up"!).
Identical with the first half of the film, it is deconstructed in the
second. Elster creates Vertigo's world as Iago does Othello's, but,
however cynically, he works in the opposite direction, toward
romantic possibility. We owe as much to him as to Greenstreet's
Kaspar Gutman or even Prospero. But unlike Prospero Elster is
not godlike, he is only the artist as god. He creates no miracles, ex
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 The Massachusetts Review

nihilo, only art, out of what he is given. What he starts with is (1)
the "ordinary" Judy Barton (2) various sites in and around San
Francisco. The "Madeleine" persona he conceives for Judy?what
he makes up out of her make-up (and to do this Elster had to
imagine greatly, had to see the potential for Madeleine in Judy)?
and the story he screen-writes for her that selects and connects the
secluded sites of backstreet flower shop, church garden cemetery,
antiquated mansion, unfrequented picture gallery, historic mis
sion with preserved livery stable from a by-gone era, forest of giant
redwoods, and a bank of the Bay close to Golden Gate Bridge (and
across from Jamesian pillars known as the "Portals of the Past")
conspire to form the Romantic Idyll of the first half of Vertigo.
(Add to these the richly brocaded, mirrored interior of Ernie's
restaurant, where Scottie catches his first privileged glimpse of
Madeleine?in medal-stamped profile?and the Argosy Book
Shop, a richly storied antiquarian treasure trove where the Carlotta
legend is perpetuated in the dim shadows of the late afternoon?we
see "Pop" turn his shop lights on only after Scottie has left.)
It is not so much Madeleine and her sites that are so haunting
but their loss. And their loss wouldn't be haunting if by loss were
meant their discrediting, for then nothing will have been lost. But
the great triumph of Vertigo is to show that the flimsiness of
appearances (deceptive, malleable, perishable, reproducible, above
all insubstantial?masklike, except they mask nothing) does
nothing to undermine their awesome effect. The deepest impres
sions of beauty and significance depend on mere facades, with no
substantive reality behind, beyond, inside, or anywhere apart from
them. This object/subject lesson of how superficial the visible
world is and yet how deeply it can impress us?how, only skin
deep, it yet can seem to contain our aesthetic/romantic ideals?is
identical with Vertigo itself, identical with the screen-thin reelity of
film. It is precisely the flimsiness of light and shadow, our screen
version of Plato's allegory of the cave, that haunts us so; the
substantial, the durable, the unchanging never could. We are only
haunted by what isn't really there?only by a trick of the light.
Vertigo reflexively uses the experience of watching it as a metaphor
for how we can know the skull beneath the skin yet still be taken in.
As Hamlet, although he has just cynically instructed Yorick's skull
to "tell your lady to paint an inch thick," yet jumps into Ophelia's
grave, embraces her corpse, and reasserts his love, so does Scottie,
even when the hoax has been exposed, declare to Judy, the "skull"
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 Obsessed with Vertigo

beneath Madeleine's skin, "I loved you so, Madeleine." No matter

how often one sees Vertigo, the Grecian urn made up by the first
half of the film remains unshattered by foreknowledge of its make
up, revealed in the second half. One never sees Judy in Madeleine,
only, in the final moments, a bare trace of Madeleine in Judy.
So the amazing sleight-of-hand Vertigo manages is that it
reveals its first half to have been illusory but not delusionary. The
revelation that its wondrous aspect wasn't for real leaves us where
we are at any moment that we remind ourselves that Vertigo isn't
for real. It doesn't change anything. The first half still haunts us as
the potentially "fictional" world around us. If the first half hadn't
been "made up," that is if the suicide of Madeleine had been real
and Judy made to function legitimately merely as a reminder of
Madeleine?the film would be far less poignant. On the other
hand if Madeleine were merely a fantasy Scottie had been lured
into, nothing would be lost except Scottie's investment in it?a
tragedy for Scottie but one that would hardly involve us so deeply.
That is the way Scottie sees it. He sees himself as more destitute
than when he thought he had lost Madeleine; he has been deprived
of having lost Madeleine. Since she never existed, he cannot be
haunted by her ghost (Heathcliff's consolation after the death of
Cathy). But we are (and, ultimately, Scottie too when he says, "I
loved you so, Madeleine"). For us the Madeleine image of the first
half of Vertigo remains?as an afterimage. It haunts us just the
way paintings, novels, and films do, however we know they were
"made up."
When Scottie, after leaving the sanitorium, begins revisiting the
haunts associated with Madeleine, those associations, animistic
ally as it were, continue to fill her sites with her presence. After his
discovery that "Madeleine" never existed, a whole world is de
idealized along with her. (One thinks of the vanishing point that
ends Blow-Up, another film where fictional possibilities crystal
ize?in Stendhal's sense?around a mysterious female persona,
only to be reduced to "pointilliste" dots on photographic blow
ups, as if the effect of Seurat's Grand Jatte were to be explained by a
description of his pointilliste technique.) At first we share Scottie's
desolation. It is essential to try to understand more fully just what
we feel has been lost and what the film gives back to us, if only in
retrospect. Though Vertigo is monomaniacally concerned with
looks, in both verbal and nominal senses, it never stares itself in the
face. The cross it crucifies itself on is not, strictly, facial physiog
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 The Massachusetts Review

nomy! The first half of the film gives us a gradually expanding

darkroom development of an image?endowed, invested, storied,
associated. What we see is the progressive materialization of a
Greek statue?its make-up, but not yet, of course, how it was made
up and certainly not yet how it will be re-made up. The statue does
not materialize simpliciter but as the object of a particular point
of-view, one clearly fascinated by the mystery it is supposedly
trying to solve.
As we get to know Scottie's beholding eye better and better, it
becomes obvious why we cannot be shown his stripping the sup
posedly unconscious Madeleine of her wet clothes after her suicide
attempt. Stripping his ideal is the last thing Scottie could be
conceived of doing and it would be ludicrous to try to depict him
doing it. All we ever see of Madeleine is her ideal aspect?nothing
whatsoever of the "base" stuff this marvelous image will later be
reduced to. Everything to do with her is an echo of romantic art and
literature: profile, legend, bearing, dress, coiffure, flowers, church
graveyard, Cocteau-like dreams of mirror-lined corridors, portrait
of a dead ancestor, giant redwood forest, bell tower, resemblances,
coincidences, sudden appearances and disappearances, gnomic
references to death, to fate, to the past, to anything and everything
not literally present, not quotidian, not self-evident, not readily
explainable. Everything that is the opposite of Midge's eyeglasses
(Midge's attempt to open Scottie's eyes by superimposing a render
ing of her bespectacled face over a portrait of Carlotta only con
trasts her and Madeleine more unfavorably and confirms the valid
ity of Scottie's quest). Midge's spectacles demystify in two direc
tions, her eyes and the world. If the literal-minded clarity they
represent can be generalized as "science," then all they oppose is
"art." In contrast to the way Midge "looks," Madeleine's gaze has
an abstracted look, the look statues have.
If there is one scene that capsulizes the difference between Judy
and Madeleine, it is the redwood forest scene. In aiilm strip all the
frames are simultaneously present. In the redwood forest scene,
Madeleine puts her ghostly finger on the perspective available
from any frame in our film-strip lives. On a cross-section of one of
the trees, showing the various widths of its circumference at certain
key moments in history, she passes her hand across the fractional
segment representing the brief passage of her life. "It was only a
moment for you . . . you took no notice," she murmurs. This
moment, when she notices the moment that is her life?Scottie's,

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 Obsessed with Vertigo

ours, everyone's?is a kind of "frieze frame" holding the passage of

the entire film. The eerie loops of Madeleine's prescience, her
seemingly oracular awareness of past and future, of mortality and
fatality, are both the self-fulfilling prophecy of Elster's script and
the pre-programmed, telescoping loops of the film itself, its seem
ingly autonomous progression of images containing in their own
instant appearance and disappearance both Vertigo's figured urn
and ash. Knowing the cynical "make up" of the redwood forest
scene in no way reduces its effect, in no way compromises its
appearance. Madeleine's hand, voice, face make everything around
her, even brute nature, her setting, her cyclorama, her "design." A
work of art, she also makes the world art.
So one way of describing the loss we share with Scottie when he
loses Madeleine is the world as art, the statue in the garden. Passing
from childhood to adulthood, we have been well-prepared for both
the ideal and its loss. Vertigo has been waiting for us, all of us
conditioned, first, by our childhood picture books and then later by
film. We bring to it our strong inclination to live in a world of
aesthetic preconception and preoccupation, the world of Keats and
Shelley, Proust and Poe, Debussy and the Pre-Raphaelites. For
such incurables, Vertigo projects our most compelling daydream:
privileged access to the living statue of the god within "aesthetic"
settings?flower shop, church graveyard, picture gallery,
"haunted" mansion, bay, forest, fireplace. Madeleine is like the
genius loci of these sites. They are publicly empty but emotively
full; they are imbued with the mystery of her intention. Scottie
loves not only the look of Madeleine but the story of Madeleine,
which makes the world a mysteriously meaningful network of
correspondences, precisely what works of fiction are, what film is,
what Vertigo supremely is.
Madeleine creates a world for Scottie that, however really point
less, seems charged with potential signification at every point, as
yet another clue in her picture puzzle. That nothing is extraneous
in this world is identical with their being nothing in Vertigo that
isn't part of its internal cross-referencing. A striking example is
Madeleine's apparitional appearance in a window of the McKit
trick Hotel, once a mansion built for Carlotta, which is later
echoed but with a difference by Judy's earthy, totally unmysterious
opening of her window in the Empire Hotel. As Madeleine pos
sessed by Carlotta, Judy had told Scottie, "I remember a room. I sit
alone . . . always alone. ..." But this applies to her own solitary
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 The Massachusetts Review

existence as well (and, further, to Scottie's). The film is full of such

dual references to Madeleine and Judy, out of whose drab existence
the colorful tapestry of Madeleine's has been woven, much as the
exotica of dreams derives from the everyday. Vertigo's poignancy
comes from its revealing the roots from which the ideal flowers.
The many references to death in Madeleine's story are insepar
able from the film's love/art motif. From Keats's Grecian urn to
Wagner's Tristan and Isolde to Poe's "The Oval Portrait" (in
which the exhausted sitter dies just as her portrait is finished) to
Swann's Way (in which Odette's portrait "prepares" Swann to love
her) to Preminger's Laura (in which the detective?compare
Scottie?falls in love with a dead woman he has never met through
the portrait that apotheosizes her) to Rodin's The Kiss, death?in
the sense of Pompeiian commemoration?is the only way love and
beauty can be preserved. What would otherwise be lost "remains."
Scottie is attracted to Madeleine's association with death because it
represents a kind of tomb-effigy stasis, the ultimate antidote to
change, transience, separation. The lure is not escape into oblivion
but love "frieze-framed" against its oblivion in time. Madeleine's
preoccupation with death further aestheticizes her, further makes
her a living statue. The association is with the lovers on Keats's
urn.
But Madeleine really does die, not once but three times and each
time in a more drastic sense. Each of the "deaths" is unbearable in a
different way, but all demonstrate the frightful risk of living in a
world where appearances are crucial. Madeleine's supposed sui
cide shows, through Scottie's mental collapse, how the dreamlike
idyll of the first half of the film that had seemed to take place
around Madeleine as a general condition of the world was in fact
sheerly an extension of her particular mortal appearance, now
vanished. However bogus the Carlotta conceit, it had two real
effects: it greatly added to Madeleine's appearance whatever it was
that so alluringly distinguished her from Midge; and it triggered
Madeleine's supposed suicide. Madeleine's "second death," the
discovery that she existed only as a persona of Judy's?Judy coaxed
and coached to act out some inspired image of herself (as Kim
Novak was by Hitchcock)?is the most demoralizing wound in the
film, a dagger thrust not only to Scottie's but to its own romantic
idealism. Not just because it exposes "Madeleine" as a fabrication
but, more fundamentally, demonstrates that the same network of
appearances could express both a legitimate and a fake Madeleine!
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 Obsessed with Vertigo

Not a single frame of the first half of Vertigo would look different if
Madeleine had turned out to be real. Again, the awful admission is
that what counts is not some invisible underlying reality, or ulti
mate truth or substance, or internal motivation or intention, but
just what things look like. Not only, for example, did the spirit of
Carlotta not inhabit "Madeleine" but there wasn't even any con
viction in "Madeleine's" mind to that effect?Judy, as Madeleine,
simply acted as if she was "possessed" Conversely, just the superfi
ciality of appearances makes an absolute difference. What makes
Madeleine such a "difference" is simply Elster's inspired casting,
screen play, and set design?precisely the elements that make
Vertigo such a "difference."
The third and most crucial death of "Madeleine" is the death of
Judy. Of the three this is the only literal death and after it there is
not even the possibility of any more "make up." But her death also
makes us aware of what we have lost in her, and our dawning
realization that perhaps her death is even more insupportable than
the two deaths of Madeleine suggests what urn the film gives back
to us out of its ashes. This is not to minimize the loss of Madeleine,
a loss that is the equivalent of lights up and empty screen. Scottie is
left only with the banal Judy as actor, stage, and play. But the
positive residue of Vertigo is that the whole wondrous fabric of the
film did, in fact?with Elster as her evil genius?spring from her.
Judy turned out to be such stuff as ideal appearances are made of.
That is why her death finally brings the film to its knees. The loss
of her ordinary reality is even more disastrous than that of Made
leine's ideality. For what really should be mourned is the death of
the possibility of the "appearance" that was Madeleine. Indeed
Scottie seems just a step away from this realization?that after all it
was Judy who projected the ideal that was Madeleine?when he
says to her, "I loved you so, Madeleine."
Nevertheless, it is Judy as the Madeleine persona that over
whelms the film. Scottie finds himself unable to let the idea of
Madeleine die even as he consigns her to oblivion. In being pos
sessed by the indelible impression made by the supposedly "illu
sive" first half of the film, Scottie reflects us. No reductive explana
tion of Madeleine can erase our original impression of her, just as
no awareness of Madeleine's really being Kim Novak can. Illusions
as appearances are real after all. Madeleine remains real in the
earlier time frames of Vertigo) her "illusion" persists no matter
how many times we see the film.

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 The Massachusetts Review

Scottie's conflating of Judy and Madeleine in "I loved you so,

Madeleine" comprehends all of Vertigo's strands. Through Judy's
reality he speaks to Madeleine's persistingreelity, the "possession"
of the present by the past, of Judy by Madeleine. In Judy he has,
forcibly, been made aware of the skull beneath the image, but the
image remains. And it is the indelibility of that image, not any
aberration of Scottie's, that makes it impossible to see Judy and
Madeleine as identical. Scottie's "confusion" both fuses and dis
tinguishes the ordinary and the ideal. In this sense it salvages the
Romantic Idyll and so the whole film. It means that changes in fact
or understanding in the succeeding time frames of our lives do not
invalidate the apparent facts or supposed understandings out of
which they evolve. The past remains a phantom[b] reality within
the present. It maintains a perspective of its own regardless of any
present perspective.
In this way Vertigo takes away the wish-fulfillment of fairy tale
and leaves us with the broader perspective of art. Art is our super
naturalism. JNo real possession has taken place, only a reel haunt
ing of two lovers by the "make up" of their past. The apotheosis of
Judy back into Madeleine brings Elster's original creation full
circle, and both testify to how idealization makes life desirable but
untenable. For reality cannot sustain its idealization. Vertigo's
entire reel/real dialectic hinges on Judy's transformation, but the
balance is impossibly precarious. Neither Scottie nor Judy can
sustain her conflicting embodiment. When Judy pleads for some
minimal recognition as Judy, Scottie does say, "Judy, it's you too.
There's something in you." He doesn't mean Madeleine, he means
there's some kind of potentiality in Judy. But Scottie seems willing
to respond to this possibility only if Judy can still harbor the ghost
of Madeleine. Her wearing of Carlotta's necklace goes too far?
makes her Madeleine while exorcising Madeleine's ghost. Scottie is
then forced to see that it was only the ordinary flesh of Judy's
make-up that was used to make up the precious gold metal of his
statue.
Judy's death ends the whole argument. The circle of intertwin
ing impersonation and personification is finally and fatally
broken. A moment before, Scottie was perhaps being persuaded to
accept Judy as encompassing Madeleine, but he would have had to
accept his ideal as just an appearance. Otherwise, he cannot take
Judy at face value because he cannot help thinking of her except as
a counterfeit, even though she is the original she is supposedly
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 Obsessed with Vertigo

counterfeiting! The problem is that Judy as Madeleine places

everything on the same level of appearances, anathema to an
uncompromising idealist like Scottie. Madeleine must exist "natu
rally," not as a fabrication, even though the appearance?the
effect?is identical.
But Judy dies, so we're not sure whether Scottie would or
wouldn't have accepted her. We do know that Vertigo has no
choice but to accept a non-transcendental world, in which the
appearance of the goddess (Madeleine) and the appearance of the
goddess (Judy) are one and the same (Judy). Vertigo's insufferably
open-eyed conclusion, at the cost of its vision, can only come out of
the ashes of Scottie's romantic idealism. The empirical reelism of
Vertigo is the film's salvage but not its salvation. Vertigo certainly
doesn't make us feel that it has rescued itself from Scottie's defeat.
All film haunts us because the incessant displacement of its
images exposes the uncertainty, the ghostlike nature of our lives.
But no other film focuses so relentlessly on this displacement as its
central theme. No other film leaves us with such an acute feeling of
loss. Our only remedy, however self-defeating, not available to
Scottie, is that provided by the circularity of film itself. There,
moving still within its loops?"still" life?Madeleine can be
found again, however lost again.

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