But these reflections bring Vertigo down to “depressing” reality. The view that reality is a downer redeemable only by “exalted seeing” is the basis for James Harvey’s disparagement of 1950s American realism in his book. Implicit in Harvey’s praise of Vertigo and Lolita is a retreat from politics and the possibility of social progress. Rather than expose oneself to the daunting problems that come with trying to change the world, accept the world as it is with the help of exalted seeing or “aesthetic bliss.” Naturally, works of art seen as providing this service would be above moral or logical nitpicking.
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John (Scottie) Ferguson (James Stewart) is in love with the impersonation of a fiction. Judy Barton (Kim Novak) is in love with the man in love with her impersonation. These are the protagonists of what some commentators consider one of the greatest love stories in the annals of art, director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo.
Novelist and critic John Banville, for example, reviewing a new Hitchcock biography by Edward White in the April 2021 The New Republic, concludes by urging readers not persuaded of the director’s genius to “Watch Vertigo again, and be convinced” (“Uncanny Man,” pp. 50-52). However, in my experience, Vertigo does not hold up under renewed viewing – at least not as an immortal love story. It comes across as a very different tale.
Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) hires John Ferguson to be an unwitting accessory to the murder of his wealthy wife Madeleine, which he plans to disguise as a suicide. In hiring John to follow and observe the woman he presents as his wife, who he describes as behaving as though under a spell, Elster counts on this retired police detective and onetime lawyer – a background that would otherwise imply a skeptical, if not jaded, outlook – not to make any independent inquiries to confirm what Elster, a mere acquaintance from long-ago college days, tells him about her. John might have learned, as we do later, that the real Mrs. Elster lived in the country and seldom came to San Francisco, where most of the story takes place.
Vertigo teases us with such improbabilities, along with nasty details. Elster has perfect control over his two pawns, but as the master behind the scenes, Hitchcock gives us a sporting chance to keep our wits about us.
So, rather than checking the information Elster gives him, John is content to add to it, consulting an authority on San Francisco’s colorful past (Konstantin Shayne) about the woman whose grave the fictional Madeleine visits, Carlotta Valdes, an abandoned mistress deprived of her child who went from sad to mad before killing herself 100 years earlier. Later, Elster feeds John the additional information that Carlotta is Madeleine’s great-grandmother, reinforcing the idea that her spirit has possessed her descendant, who is now the same age Carlotta was at her death (26) but who reportedly knows nothing of her, though she regularly visits not only her grave, but her portrait in the art museum and the “great house,” now a hotel, built for Carlotta by her lover. Beneath Madeleine Elster’s cool blond exterior lives the fiery Latin soul of the dark Carlotta Valdes.
Judy Barton’s lack of social status – a mere shopgirl before Elster selects her for the part of Madeleine – and resulting vulnerability links her to Carlotta in actuality. Her Madeleine character inherits Carlotta’s romantic allure. John Ferguson’s part is to reenact Carlotta’s bereavement and madness.
After the real Madeleine’s plunge from the bell tower of the San Juan Bautista mission (taking no chances, Elster breaks her neck before flingng her from the belfry), which John is unable to prevent because he is subject to vertigo, and after an inquest at which the coroner (Henry Jones) insinuates endlessly, as in a nightmare, that John is to blame for the death no matter what other witnesses have said, John spends several months in a mental hospital in a catatonic state induced by guilt and loss. Though San Francisco is her family home, no family member or friend of the real Madeleine raises questions about her alleged suicide.
Again taking no chances, Elster leaves the country and the film, ditching Judy. Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), John’s hardworking, long-suffering, pretty, down-to-earth, and overprotective girlfriend, also exits, finally admitting defeat after tending the unreachable John in the hospital. Midge ends up alone – a happier fate than Vertigo allows its other women.
When John, who has a pension and an independent income, tracks down Judy Barton one year after the murder, he offers to be her sugar daddy and does end up repeating what Gavin Elster did, making her over as Madeleine Elster, or at least as that Madeleine’s physical double, minus her haunting history and character. That must be what John is alluding to when he tells her angrily in the final scene that Elster made her over better. Her Madeleine character was not of this world, whereas Judy herself is only a shopgirl from Salina, Kansas, which is why John, like Elster before him, feels entitled to take over her life.
It turns out that the real accomplices, if not alter egos, are the two men. Gavin Elster uses Judy Barton to get rid of his wife. John gets rid of Judy after discovering that she duped him. When she, so careful until then, makes the inexplicable slip of putting on Carlotta’s necklace, which she got to keep, he is onto the whole scheme. He is enraged with her, not only for using him to cover up a murder but also for humiliating him by causing him to fall in love with another man’s fiction. The one time he gave himself up to love, and it was a fake!
In his fury he precipitates Judy’s death. Without letting on that he knows, he drives her down the coast, back to the mission, with a mad gleam in his eye – like Johnnie Aysgarth in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1940) or John Ballantine in Spellbound (1945), only this John means business – and bullies a full confession out of her as he drives her up the stairs to the bell tower. He becomes a tough, cynical cop badgering a suspect – everything he was not earlier. Then, in the belfry, a nun, unwitting agent of retribution, emerges from the shadows as they kiss to drive the terrified Judy over the edge. Mission accomplished, the perfect murder completed, the real and the false Madeleine disposed of, Liebestod. And, a final irony, vertigo conquered! Now John has reason to feel guilty.
Wife-killing is a staple in Hitchcock’s American oeuvre. Vertigo is the seventh film to feature it, following Rebecca (1940), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial M for Murder (1954) and Rear Window (1954). It would be the eighth if Hitchcock had stayed faithful to the novel on which Suspicion is based. In Rebecca, the nasty, unfaithful title character’s death results from a fall during a quarrel with her husband that turns physical. In Notorious, the heroine is rescued just in time to prevent the poison, administered in small daily doses by her husband and mother-in-law, from killing her.
Vertigo has been celebrated, in the most fulsome terms, as a masterpiece, the masterfully told story of a grand romantic obsession and Hitchcock’s crowning achievement:
Vertigo is not without its dark humor, but it is intensely, almost shockingly, romantic: like bereft Heathcliff in the second half of Wuthering Heights, shell-shocked Scottie pleads with his lost love to haunt him. And once she does return from the dead – her kiss obliterating time and space as [composer Bernard] Herrmann works variations on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde – the film’s own current resurrection [its 1996 restoration] becomes secondary. When its drama is distilled to overwhelming desire (and the desire to be desired), when its narrative is vaporized [!] by the force of mutual (and mutually exclusive) longings, Vertigo could cast its spell from a nine-inch black-and-white TV set.1
Having conceded that Vertigo’s narrative is implausible, Hoberman then says the narrative doesn’t matter, or matters only to the “literal-minded.”
The late critic James Harvey asks:
Could anyone, reseeing this film (as most of us have by now), watch the first half of it, with its all-out romanticism, for signs of the fakery behind it, for clues to Judy’s counterfeit or to Gavin Elster’s coaching and control, instead of entering into the enchantment, giving yourself up to it fully and without significant reserve? . . . It may be, in some sense, the most romantic film of all. It’s the defiance of its romanticism that makes it finally so powerful and lingering – and maybe even unique. In prototypical romantic “texts” like Wuthering Heights and Peter Ibbetson, both book film and versions, the romantic passion survives death. In Vertigo it survives disbelief.2
Vertigo, in other words, is a test of us. Are we passionate romantics or cold, shallow rationalists? Do we have a proper reverence for mystery and the filmmaker’s art?
Sentimental Over Humbert Humbert
This line of interpretation recalls novelist and critic Edmund White’s view of Vladimir Nabokov’s contemporaneous Lolita (1955), another triangle tale of love and betrayal, as the “supreme novel of love in the twentieth century.”3 As with Vertigo, such a view – such special pleading – has the advantage of steamrolling moral issues together with questions of plausibility.
Nabokov himself is more direct. In his afterword to the novel, he says Lolita “has no moral in tow,” no lesson to teach. What should make the novel’s theme unobjectionable to anyone, he implies, is his treatment of it, which aims at “aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
Higher states of being, where tenderness and kindness need no urging, where the moral commandments connected with our normal fallen state are unnecessary. The reader open to experiencing aesthetic bliss in a work of fiction knows better than to root around for a moral. Lolita, too, is a test of us.
Given that aesthetic bliss is like a state of grace or the state of being in love, those who read the novel as a love story are not, after all, so far from Nabokov’s intent. Love is love even if, like the novelist, one “disagrees” with Humbert Humbert about “nymphets” as the supreme erotic object. Emily Mortimer, daughter of the late dramatist, screenwriter and mystery novelist John Mortimer, who created the barrister detective Rumpole of the Bailey, wrote an essay in the March 2, 2021, New York Times Book Review arguing for Lolita as a great love story. The essay prompted a rebuttal from a woman who had lived the experience.
James Harvey believed that the directors he admired, Hitchcock above all, sought “from and through their actors … higher reaches of imagining than the psychological insight” (p. 425), which he associated with directors such as Elia Kazan. The acting of James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo lifts us to the plane of aesthetic bliss, Harvey says. After quoting Humbert Humbert’s rapt, minutely detailed description of his Lolita’s tennis serve – Humbert’s use of the possessive testifying, “of course,” to the genuineness of his love for her – Harvey concludes his book, “In one way or another, this sort of exalted seeing is what actors at their best both ask from us and give us” (p. 427).
But Humbert’s way of seeing or, less euphemistically, savoring Lolita negates her. In fact, Humbert, his own Gavin Elster, revels in the idea of recognizing, in a seemingly ordinary prepubescent 11-year-old American schoolgirl (who becomes his totally dependent stepdaughter), the supreme erotic object – a nymphet – his to possess because the “demoniac” spirit he divines in her invites it. His description of Lolita’s tennis serve notes her “pristine armpit,” a tantalizing allusion to another pristine part.
Lolita allows the middle-aged Humbert finally to recapture the fleeting delight he tasted as a boy turned 13 with his younger cousin Annabel, soon to be snatched away forever by typhus. Having waited so long and endured so much before happening on another such creature, Humbert is anxious to make the most of his little paramour before she outgrows nymphethood. Like the fictionalized Madeleine Elster, the fictionalized Dolores Haze (Lolita’s actual name) exists outside of time yet under threat of being reclaimed by it.
Humbert’s dream turns to nightmare when Lolita plots and runs away with Clare Quilty, who then must pay with his life, not only for her betrayal and his part in it, but also for presuming to put himself, the pervert and maker of pornographic films, on the same level as Humbert, the enraptured “nympholept.” Humbert would agree emphatically with those who see his relationship with Lolita as a love story for the ages – that’s how he justifies it to himself. However, even when he finally tracks down the 16-year-old married and pregnant Lolita and offers to make amends by rescuing her from her squalid existence, despite his repugnance for the mess her body has become to him (only true love could inspire this, says Edmund White), he is still inventing a Lolita, repulsive rather than delectable, who can afford him an exalted view of himself.
Vehemently as he would disagree, Humbert’s exalted way of seeing Lolita is as objectifying and depersonalizing as any “vulgar” view of women – or as John Ferguson’s use of Judy Barton to resurrect the image of herself as the lost Madeleine.
Not unlike Lolita, Judy Barton represents a European’s idea of the alluring, amoral, ordinary American female (vacuous yet precociously knowing, in Lolita’s case). Judy cares only about being loved and well cared for. It is not only that John Ferguson repeats what Gavin Elster did in making her over, but that Judy herself repeats her previous behavior, going along with whatever a male protector asks of her, leading to her own death in the end.
Judy’s incipient terror at being turned back into Madeleine, possible evidence of a guilty conscience, invites our sympathy when under the movie’s spell – a sympathy uncomplicated by any recollection of scenes between the plotters leading up to the murder, and one that makes Judy’s impending death more powerful while sparing us emotional complicity in the workings of eye-for-an-eye justice. Our sympathy can then return to John, who has lost his great love once again, this time for real.
However, reseeing Vertigo and knowing its plot twist in advance, I was impatient with the hackneyed, heavy-handed romanticism and could not understand how anyone would not be. One thing that did strike me was Midge’s copy of the portrait of Carlotta Valdes, with Midge’s face in place of Carlotta’s. Midge is an advertising illustrator who once aspired to be a painter, a real artist. Had she stayed true to her high ambition, she might have starved, but she might also have kept a hold over John. When he sees the portrait and realizes she has been following him following Madeleine in her somnambulist rounds, he is not amused and leaves in a huff. He sees only ridicule, an insult to the exalted part he has assumed.
For maximum impact, the portrait is shown to us only after John exits, just as the revelation of Elster’s scheme had been. When we see it, we may realize, once the shock passes, how easily the blond Midge could be transformed into the blond Madeleine. Remove Midge’s horn-rimmed glasses and replace her bright-eyed look with one of vacant mystery, and voila! (She would have to change the way she talks, too.) After all, the distance between Judy Barton and her Madeleine character is at least as great as that between Madeleine and Midge. As it is, the mock portrait foreshadows the truly nasty shock John receives. One has to wonder if Hitchcock is not making a comment here both about John, who needs to have his imagination juiced by another man’s fiction in order to “fall in love,” and about how easy it is for a master director to work an audience – as easily as Gavin Elster works John – because we collude in our own deception. Hitchcock, as in other films, seems to mock our credulity.
In any case, Vertigo does not convince me that John actually loves Judy’s Madeleine or that Judy actually loves John. I can believe that she comes to love her power over John Ferguson, her ability to play him, lead him around, hook him into the drama she is playing. She does it as Madeleine Elster and cannot resist trying the greater feat of working the same magic as herself, without Elster’s guiding hand. Of course, John does not give her the chance.
As an accomplice to a particularly cold-blooded, vicious, and apparently motiveless murder, Judy plays her part to the hilt. In a scene with John among the ancient redwoods, she traces her life span, in a kind of trance, between the dated rings of a cross-sectioned tree. “Here I was born – and there I died.” Addressing the tree, she says, “It was only a moment for you. You took no notice.” Then, still “entranced,” she vanishes, albeit briefly, among the giant trees. Harvey, who quotes these lines (p. 34), calls the scene “among the movie’s most dangerously hyperbolic.” But not if considered as part of a performance whose climax will be a shattering fake suicide/actual murder.
John’s love for Judy’s Madeleine is also self-love. I can believe that John believes himself in love with the beautiful young actress playing up to him, and him alone, literally an audience of one. He sees himself as the great lover fated to save this otherwise doomed descendant of the legendary Carlotta Valdes. (D. H. Lawrence has some wonderful flourishes on this kind of male fantasy in “The Theatre” chapter of his travel book Twilight in Italy.) Here is a chance both to redeem himself and to earn the love of a beautiful otherworldly woman. This is what the “hardheaded Scot” (as Elster cunningly calls him) has been saving himself for his whole life.
Never having experienced love, John’s hunger and expectations are great. Madeleine also has the allure for him, as he and Elster have for Judy, as her lover had for Carlotta, of belonging to a higher class – a beautiful haunted woman who drives a Jaguar sedan, an exotic car in those days. John’s car is the sensible mid-priced DeSoto.
I can also believe John feels guilty for her “death” – he retired from the police force because his partner fell to his death trying to rescue him after vertigo had rendered John helpless (as the film’s opening shows), and the coroner at Madeleine’s inquest lays it on thick – and so he clings desperately to her memory.
But these reflections bring Vertigo down to “depressing” reality. The view that reality is a downer redeemable only by “exalted seeing” is the basis for James Harvey’s disparagement of 1950s American realism in his book. Implicit in Harvey’s praise of Vertigo and Lolita is a retreat from politics and the possibility of social progress. Rather than expose oneself to the daunting problems that come with trying to change the world, accept the world as it is with the help of exalted seeing or “aesthetic bliss.” Naturally, works of art seen as providing this service would be above moral or logical nitpicking.
For me, however, Vertigo is a classic of overreaching, a work that tries to make its lead characters both great, self-abandoning romantics we can identify with and self-absorbed, self-deluding common clay we can feel superior to. Not even a master director and his able collaborators can pull that one off.
In his next picture, Hitchcock was more modest. In North by Northwest (1959), he piles on the absurdities as a joke – and still keeps up the suspense and sense of threat. The fact that the heroine (Eva Marie Saint) coolly sets up the hero (Cary Grant) to be killed is not too bothersome, partly because the villain’s scheme to do him in is so laughably elaborate – a joke on how heroes always manage to survive because villains, artist egomaniacs that they are, are never satisfied simply to kill them but must try to do so in a suitably diabolical way. This villain’s assassins include crop-dusters and knife-throwers. We can believe in this hero and heroine falling in love – to the extent we are expected to believe anything in the film. To question it – to take it for more than a convention – would be unfair.
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Unless otherwise indicated, all images are screenshots from the films.
Works Cited
Hoberman, The Magic Hour: Film at Fin de Siecle (Temple University Press, 2003).
James Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties (Knopf, 2001).
Edmund White, The Burning Library (Knopf Doubleday, 1994).
The new Hitchcock biography John Banville reviewed is Edward White, The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock (W.W. Norton, 2021).
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the films.
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