The Other as Image: Vertigo and the Reflection of Desire

“Courage also destroys giddiness at abysses; and where does man not stand at an abyss? Is seeing itself not—seeing abysses?”
-Nietzsche

“Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.”
-E.M Cioran

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the desiring gaze, the gaze that dreams not only of power but also salvation, transforms and reshapes that which it sees. The film shows a kind of seeing that is not seeing. The protagonist suffers not because of what he does not see, but because what he sees is not real, as it is only the reflection of his desires. The Other is literally created, given an identity, through seeing it, while the actual identity of the Other is destroyed. When the protagonist of Vertigo sees a woman, he engages only with her image, and so she exists only as an image. The desiring gaze, in particular, creates the object of the desire, and therefore eliminates the actual object by replacing it with the object that corresponds to its desire. Vertigo is a movie about seeing; and about a certain kind of blindness as well.

James Stewart plays Scottie, a retired detective. He is asked to follow the wife, named Madeleine, of a rich and powerful friend, Gavin, who believes she has been possessed by a dead woman from the past. Gavin claims she becomes like “someone I didn’t know. She even walked a different way.” Scottie decides to take the job, and begins to follow her everywhere she goes. Unknown to Scottie, the whole story is a lie, and Madeleine is being impersonated by Judy (Kim Novak) so that Gavin can murder his wife by faking her suicide.

So Scottie follows Madeleine, always watching but never seen in return, on her errands and wanderings. Hitchcock provides many point of view shots for Scottie, and Madeleine is almost always seen from behind or in profile. There is not one single shot in the film from Madeleine/Judy’s point of view. Aside from being adorned with Hitchcock’s usual objects of fascination (blonde hair and grey suits), Madeleine never speaks. She is a silent, moving image of desire for Scottie. Hitchcock even goes so far as to associate her visually with a woman in a painting, the dead woman she is supposedly possessed by, Carlotta Valdez. In the early portions of the film she exists only as an image.

Interestingly, there is another woman in Scottie’s life: Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). Scotty rarely looks at Midge when he talks to her, yet she is clearly infatuated with him. When Scottie enters her apartment and asks her questions regarding his case, she complains that he never says anything like “you look wonderful.” In fact, he never comments on her appearance at all. Midge asks Scottie jealously, “Is she pretty?” Scottie’s watching of Madeleine is in marked contrast to his inability to “see” Midge.

When Madeleine attempts suicide by jumping into the ocean, and Scotty saves her, it appears on the surface that she becomes a real person at last, or at least something more than an image. When Scottie emerges with Madeleine from the water, he takes her home, and not to her husband. When she awakes, nude and in Scottie’s bed, she says her first words in the movie, almost fifty minutes in. Nothing she says will matter, however, since Scottie has already constructed her identity for her. And even though he has touched her before (and removed her clothes) the first true contact he has with Madeleine, accidentally touching her hand when reaching for a cup, is a shock to Scottie. For him, the image of his desire has come to life. So begins the romance.

While Scottie finally makes contact with the woman he has been following, she isn’t Madeleine. In fact, Madeleine ceases to exist at this point, both literally and figuratively. When Scottie fishes her out of the sea, and emerges with her in his arms, he has produced the corporeal object that corresponds to his desires. Not coincidentally, it is at this point that Judy begins to truly pretend to be Madeleine, as she acts as if she is falling in love with him. The complexity of the situation deepens, however, as Judy begins to fall in love with Scotty for real.

For the first time viewer of Vertigo, the story up to this point seems much like a fairly conventional (if adulterous) romance/ghost story. The truth, clear at the end of the film, is that Scottie has been tricked, and has fallen for an illusion. As if he is trapped in a movie (as, indeed, he is) Scottie participates in a situation where nothing is real, and no one is who they pretend to be. His love for Madeleine is directed toward a woman who does not really exist, and he is still only in love with an image.

When the trap springs, and “Madeleine” dies, Scottie is distraught to the point of being catatonic. He is a fallen man, tossed out of paradise, and he begins to rebuild his life, but he retains the memory of this imaginary woman who represents a perfect love. In a famous dream sequence Scottie falls through a grave to his death. To add to the religious metaphors, Scottie is accused by a judge of being negligent and responsible for Madeleine’s death. The rest of the film takes place after the fall, and Scottie is saddled with guilt for Madeleine’s death.

Initially, Scottie is easily reminded of Madeleine. He sees glimpses of her everywhere. His gaze is once again reconstructing his desires; he is seeing what he wants to see. A blonde woman in a grey suit excites his imagination, as he thinks for a moment that Madeleine has come back from the dead. After several more false starts, Scottie sees Judy, the woman who pretended to be Madeleine, on a sidewalk. She is clad in garish colors, with dark hair and a misguided hair style. She is, alas, imperfect, and Hitchcock toys with his audience when he provokes us to think that Ms. Novak doesn’t look as she should. (It is a well documented fact that Hitchcock insisted that Novak not wear a bra in these scenes. The numerous mentions of bras and corsets throughout the film, contrasted with Judy’s choice to not wear a bra, make for a subtle feminist commentary in the film.) Scottie is, of course, unaware of her real identity, but he sees Madeleine in Judy, and he pursues her doggedly. When he looks at her, he doesn’t see Judy, he sees Madeleine, and the subsequent transformations he forces her through are actually a dramatization after the fact, as the real transformation already occurred when he looked at her the first time. Judy asks him, “Do I really look like her?” For Scottie, looking like her is enough to be her.

Scottie is still haunted by bad dreams, reenacting again and again Madeleine’s death. Judy, for her part, is also haunted by memories of love. She gazes longingly at her grey suit in the closet, obviously wishing to put it on again. She writes a letter and confesses to the whole charade, but she tears it up and resolves to continue to let Scottie believe Madeleine existed so that he might begin to love her as she really is. She responds to the perfection he sees in her, and she sacrifices her identity for his love, for her own desires. Hitchcock, no feminist, doesn’t see Judy as the victim, and those who claim Vertigo as a feminist text might want to consider that she is the woman as betrayer in the tradition of Eve. She creates the initial lie, and she surrenders to the next one partially in order to bask in the perfection that Scottie sees in her. She too fails to see, if only momentarily.

After a period of rather prosaic and dispirited courting, Scottie begins to transform Judy into Madeleine, or, at least, into the image of Madeleine. Since Madeleine was only an image to begin with, he effectively recreates her. He buys her the grey suit, and dies her hair blonde. Judy initially resists his attempts to remake her. Distraught, she says she knows that she reminds him of Madeleine, but “not even that very much.” Judy, too, has fallen from the ideal romance portrayed at the beginning of the film. Her motivation to change for Scottie is not only in response to his love, but in order to regain the imagined perfection of their initial courtship. She is more conflicted than Scottie perhaps, because some part of her wants to hold on to reality, and she desires for him to love her as she really is. At one point she accuses him of not wanting to touch her. Scottie denies it, but he looks away from her as well. It becomes clear at this point that Scottie cannot accept real love, precisely because it is real, and imperfect. He cannot touch it, or look at it, because he dreams of perfection, and reality only gives rise to despair for him. Finally, she gives in, and says, “If I let you change me…will you love me?” After the makeover, in an astonishing scene, Judy emerges from the bathroom as an exact copy of Madeleine (therefore as Madeleine), bathed in green light. When Scottie kisses her the camera rotates and transports him to the mission where Madeleine died. This is his only and only moment of redemption, and it is an illusion.

Judy’s lie is discovered when she puts on a piece of jewelry identical to the jewelry worn by Carlotta in the painting, and Scottie recognizes it. In highly ironic fashion, Judy is found out only because she goes too far in becoming Madeleine, in becoming the image. Scottie, so willing to accept the lie before, begins to see Madeleine as the image she is when Judy puts on the necklace. In an effort to exorcise the past, Scottie takes Judy to the mission where Madeleine died to reenact her death.

Why Scottie makes Judy do this is perhaps the crucial point of the film. He all but pushes her off the tower himself, something Jimmy Stewart would never be allowed to do, but the meaning is clear: he means to kill her in order to maker her transformation into Madeleine complete. The necklace punctures the illusion, but Scottie persists in following through to the end. She has to die in order to finally be Madeleine, since Judy’s actual existence can only be imperfect, no matter how exact a counterfeit she is. That she is actually killed by blind chance in the form of a nun, a representative of God, only heightens the tragedy. Scottie’s dreams of perfection necessarily entail despair, because perfection can only exist as the image, and can never exist in reality. When Madeleine threatens to become real she must be destroyed. If she lives, with Scottie knowing the truth, then the illusion will be destroyed, and Scottie will see. So when Judy is found out he has to kill her in order to make her transformation complete.

The pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer shunned the romantic music of Beethoven. Much like the music of Beethoven, Bernard Herrmann’s beautiful swirling score for Vertigo embodies dramatic romance and obsession. Schopenhauer argued that the Will to life in men, represented by conflict and heartache, leads inevitably to disaster, because it only finds existence in constant war with itself. Man is doomed to conflict because that is his nature. The only cure, he felt, was to retire from the Will, and to engage in what he called a will-less knowing. The best way to do this was through the quiet contemplation of precise and orderly music, such as Bach, or, in some cases, Mozart. Midge tells Scottie, after Madeleine’s death, that “Mozart’s the boy for you.” At the beginning of the film, in Midge’s apartment, Scottie turns off in disgust music that sounds like the epitome of what Schopenhauer described. Scottie is a tragic character because he is driven by forces outside his control, represented by Herrmann’s score. His doom is his inability to subdue his passion. The subject of Vertigo is the very romance of the movies themselves, and of the power of the images they present. The face of a woman on screen is perfect precisely because it offers the audience nothing but the image, and we are free to imagine it as perfect. As André Bazin wrote, “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires.”

The great tragedy of Vertigo is not that Scottie painfully attempts to recreate perfection, it’s that the perfection itself was always a lie. Scottie’s final lonely moments show a man bereft of all hope. Atop the bell tower, gazing down on Judy’s body, he suggestively turns his palms outward. Besides representing a gesture of final resignation, it also suggests that even to the end Scottie cannot touch the perfection he searches for. One would like to claim that now Scottie can see, but it’s unclear whether this is the case. Perhaps the death of Judy allows his illusions to persist, as they must for him to even go on living. Before the recent restoration, the film was to end immediately after the Universal logo, with Herrmann’s score finally ending with a sinister version of the romantic main theme of the film. The lights in the theater were then to come on, and the audience would then walk out of the theater, as if waking from a dream.