Book Review: “Haunted by Vertigo”
At 64, Hitchcock’s greatest achievement still holds us spellbound.
Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now, edited by Sidney Gottlieb and Donal Martin (John Libbey Publishing, Ltd.)
IN 2012, AFTER A STEADY CLIMB UP THE RANKING LADDER, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) seized the number one spot in Sight and Sound’s “100 Greatest Films Ever Made” poll. Quibble with such lists all you want—that’s what they’re there for—a new book has arrived right on time to stump on behalf of the film for the poll’s 2022 update: Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now.
Enough words to fill San Francisco Bay have already been written about what many argue is Hitchcock’s finest achievement. What more can possibly be said? Turns out, quite a lot—provided your guides are two individuals uniquely qualified to lead the conversation. The co-editors of this book are media studies professor Sidney Gottlieb, an elder statesman among Hitchcock scholars who edits the Hitchcock Annual and has produced a shelf-full of Hitchcock-related books that are all essential reading and Donal Martin, filmmaker and host of two international film conferences on Vertigo in Dublin, Ireland. The highlights of those events are distilled into a collection of eleven gemlike essays that talk to each other in one orchestrated—yet at other times, seemingly unplanned, and therefore additionally delightful—conversation.
“Io Recognised by Her Father” by Victor Honoré Janssens (public domain).
Classics professor Mark Padilla has carved out a fascinating niche in the field of reception studies by identifying parallels between Greek mythology and Hitchcock’s films. His article “Reading Vertigo Through the Myth of Io and Argos” assures us that there’s no evidence that the director or his collaborators consciously drew on that tale from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Nevertheless, by the third paragraph, I was sold. The correspondences between the myth and the movie seem more than coincidental. Here’s just one: Argos was a “monstrous, hundred-eyed shepherd” installed by the god Jupiter to watch over Io, whose beauty he obscured by turning her into a brilliant white heifer. Padilla comments that it’s “difficult to overestimate the importance of Scottie's role in Vertigo as a watcher-guardian, and Hitchcock weaves this motif deeply into his cinematic design. Argos guards a naiad whose outer shape is a heifer, while Scottie follows a car named after an animal—the jaguar—and it contains a transformed woman inside as its driver.” While Padilla scrupulously avoids stepping into the quicksand of asserting any literary influence, he gleefully trots out example after example of affinities that, in total, argue compellingly for Io-Argos as source material for the film. That’s where a haunting takes place: if Hitchcock and company didn’t write that myth into the story, how did it get there?
Padilla’s classical comparisons are more than mere intellectual exercises. They make well-known stories fresh again, opening up our eyes to immortal traditions and deep currents—an aspect of Jung’s collective unconscious—that great artists routinely tap into, but which casual audience members may overlook. By noting such parallels—while avoiding the literalist urge to demand “smoking gun” signs of influence—we can become Great Observers. Remaining in the mystery, we’re well-placed to bask in the wonder of a masterwork. If we’re lucky, that enchantment can spill over into life itself.
Scottie (James Stewart) hangs above a forced perspective chasm. (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment)
By contrast, the next chapter in Haunted by Vertigo is of, well, practical concern: how did Hitchcock achieve some of his most spectacular visual moments without breaking the bank? Janet Bergstrom explores the seemingly lost art of practical (i.e. non-digital) effects in “Hitchcock After Murnau: The Influence of Perspectival Shooting in Vertigo.” A consummate technician, the director took pride in building environments that were as economical—spatially and fiscally—as they were realistic. Often, these productions involved the use of forced perspective, blending life-sized elements with miniatures to create an impression of great volume and depth. It was a technique that captured his fascination at Germany’s famed Ufa studios outside Berlin, where he observed F. W. Murnau at work on The Last Laugh (1924). According to Bergstrom, “It was Murnau’s unprecedented use of forced perspective that left the most enduring impression on him.” Decades later, Hitchcock could still recall the names of the art directors who worked under Murnau, speaking reverently of them and their craft. However, he tended to talk about the German influence in rather general terms, and we’re left to surmise the particulars for ourselves. Bergstrom’s research puts some fresh meat back on those scant bones.
Bergstrom wisely lets Hitchcock alone for a moment and, instead, analyzes Murnau’s development of the bustling street scene outside the film’s hotel from conceptual drawings through construction and finally to the onscreen results, supported by never-before-published drafting sketches and still photos of the set in progress. While perspectival shooting had been in use for some time, The Last Laugh was the most ambitious and complex application of the technique till then. A small army of engineers and craftsmen were marshaled to design, build and operate a bustling urban environment that included skyscrapers and building facades, cars, mannequins, dolls and paper cutouts of varying sizes, all descending from the largest in front to the smallest in the rear. The complex choreography of automobile traffic and other moving parts was managed via hidden wires.
An American journalist visiting the studio noted that “the architects are not forced to hurriedly lay out the sets at the last moment, but rather develop them concurrently with the progress of the continuity. These plans, in fact, form a part of the working script.” Hitchcock adopted that practice, bringing department heads into script sessions, using their insights to add substance to the script and, in turn, buying them time to more thoughtfully go about their business. In my other life as a creative director in advertising, I consciously try to imitate Hitchcock in this regard, bringing writers, designers and animators to the table as early as possible to help shape the strategy and creative brief. Invariably, it makes for a more airtight, effective, profitable campaign. Come to think of it, I can’t imagine an industry that wouldn’t benefit from more of this kind of thinking. We’d all probably end up sending a lot less junk to Goodwill.
Bergstrom notes that Vertigo is replete with perspectival shots that unrealistically distort the onscreen image to expressionistic effect. To convey a sense of the perilous height of the six-or-so story building that Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) dangles from in the opening scene, the angles had to be exaggerated. According to art director Henry Bumstead, the crew tried shooting downward from a bridge between the two buildings, but the depth effect wasn’t terrifying enough. Consequently, they had to cheat the perspective:
“I think that building, full sized, would have been about 50 stories high. Then I realized that I had to do a forced perspective… So that set up the whole deal for the picture [the believability of Scottie's incapacitating vertigo]. It got the effect that Hitch wanted, and he was very pleased with it.” (Brackets Bergstrom’s.)
Bergstrom goes on to discuss the forced perspective of other iconic scenes, such as the overhead shot of the tower at Mission San Juan Bautista, composited from a matte painting and location filming. All of these constructions and hybrid sets were purpose-built, as Bumstead put it, “for the camera”—that is, Hitchcock’s sets were constructed for the sole delectation of a single glass lens. Sometimes, as with the tower shot, these forced perspectives look manifestly odd. At other times, as with the opening rooftop scene, their physical unlikeliness registers subliminally, if at all. Either way, there’s a “weirding” effect at work—a disconnect between the terrifying, dizzy sense of height and a just-out-of-reach awareness that this can’t be happening. It’s a dream, caught on film. Thus, Hitchcock emulated Edgar Allan Poe, whose writing, as the director put it, has “such a hallucinatory logic that one has the impression that this same story can happen to you tomorrow." Forced perspective was one tool he used to achieve those aims.
It seems to me that Murnau's sets were a particularly German solution to a cinematic problem. They were of a piece with the culture that created a railway system to which passengers could set their exquisitely-designed watches. (I’m reminded of Orson Welles' comparison of a Hollywood movie studio with a toy railroad—a very American thing to say.) Today, Hollywood filmmakers solve creative problems using a mindset inspired by their neighbors up in Silicon Valley—digital media. A critique of those methods belongs in a separate article, but it’s easy to see how their tools of choice are culturally-driven. This raises some interesting questions: Now that filmmaking is increasingly dispersed from these creative centers, what cultural contexts are driving—or could be better utilized to drive—the creative and technological choices of filmmakers in Lafayette, Lagos or Lima? What kinds of approaches might local audiences best respond to?
Corseted Scottie tentatively ascends the stepladder. (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment)
Digital playback technology allows obsessives (read: me) to scrutinize cult films like Vertigo and The Shining frame by frame and in higher definition than audiences might have experienced when these movies were first screened. The ability to examine the tiniest, most fleeting details in a scene has unleashed a wave of fresh interpretations ranging from brilliant insights to wackadoodle pet theories. (Yes, Room 237, I’m looking at you, with a heart full of love.) Into this melee comes Robert Belton, wielding Occam’s razor.
Belton frames up the discussion with a look at D. A. Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which advocates for “writerly” approaches to Hitchcock’s films that allow for freer, more inventive, interpretations. I, too, enjoy such an open approach and welcome such writing in this magazine. However, with great interpretive freedom comes great intellectual responsibility, and he identifies two mental shortcuts that we’re wise to at least be able to spot, if not avoid. Simply by articulating these biases, he helps inoculate critical writing and discourse against woolly thinking. Eye-openingly, he goes further to describe a few “canonical” interpretations of Vertigo that fall prey to these heuristic moves and which therefore invite reappraisal.
The first of those mental habits is confirmation bias, which comes up a lot in conversations about current public and political discourse. This occurs when one forms an opinion based on an interesting connection between two things, and then goes on to actively seek further support for the idea while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. (We’ve all done this.)
One commonly held theory about Vertigo is that Scottie’s acrophobia is a symptom of castration anxiety. While corseted and waving a wooden cane about, his fall from the yellow stepladder into Midge’s motherly arms is cited as evidence of supposed impotence. Belton, however, sees evidence of confirmation bias in that theory:
“If his corset is a remedy for symbolic impotence, then why does Scottie experience impotence while wearing one? Why does he conspicuously balance and brandish his phallic cane during much of the scene prior to his fall? … The movement of the cane imitates the stages of penile tumescence…. Symbolically, at least, this is not impotence.”
If Scottie is in danger of flying out of Midge’s window, so, perhaps, are some long-held theories about what his ailment signifies.
Not one to leave us, er, hanging, Belton offers some alternative readings of Scottie’s illness. Noting that his vertigo can be triggered in the presence of “anybody’s motherliness” (Midge, and, I’d suggest, Madeleine, after he falls in love with her—which could explain why, tragically, he’s unable to ascend the Mission tower on the first try), he asks, “Could it be that in the absence of a motherly character, Scottie experiences no castration anxiety and that this description of his character is overdetermined?”
The second mental shortcut is known as the availability heuristic. “A classic example involves subjects drastically overestimating the worldwide rate of airplane accidents after a crash is covered in the news,” writes Belton. Thus, students of French decadent poetry may see Baudelaire in Scottie, while American gothic horror scholars will see Poe. Yes, classicists may see Ovid. These positions aren’t necessarily wrong, but they do need to be handled with care. (I can hardly stop thinking about Dennis Perry’s Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror and Mark Padilla’s Classical Myth in Alfred Hitchcock's Wrong Man and Grace Kelly Films.) However, Belton suggests that we imagine a “viewer who knows nothing about Baudelaire, Poe” and the others. “That information is unavailable to them and will not figure in their interpretation of the film. Interpretation is thus based on a complex interactive and subjective process involving what is in the film and what we notice and ascribe meaning to.”
If Padilla’s connections between Vertigo and the myth of Io and Argos appear simultaneously fantastic and convincing, that’s because he does the work to build a solid case. He also slathers on caveats like sunscreen on a Saharan sunbather to make clear that he’s pointing out affinities, not allusions.
Hitchcock himself primed the audience with additional information to help guide their interpretation. For example, he explained to Truffaut that, while waiting for Judy to come out of the bathroom following her transformation back into Madeleine, Scottie got an erection. Equipped with that knowledge, we’ll never be able to unsee the “angular shot of Scottie waiting in an armchair, [whose] projecting right knee seems like a grotesque phallus.”
Scottie’s arousal upon Judy’s final transformation is, well, manifest. (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment)
Confirmation bias can sneak into any school of film theory. The theory itself may not be flawed, but if one critical approach holds sway the conversation, it can end up, in a sense, controlling what one sees in a film, to the exclusion of other, equally valid, points of view. Haunted by Vertigo ends with two back-to-back chapters that revisit male gaze theory to offer some attenuating comments on it. Sidney Gottlieb’s “The Variety of Gazes in Vertigo” complements—and takes care not to contradict—Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), which describes the male gaze, in his words, as “an emblem of patriarchal power over women, a look that controls women, objectifies and fixates them, and configures them as passive images for men.” This conception of the male gaze has come to dominate a lot of discussion about mainstream filmmaking and film watching—and it’s workable as far as it goes. Gottlieb argues that “we are going to need a bigger theory than that… to account for what we see here and elsewhere in Vertigo.”
His “bigger theory” calls attention “to the many other kinds of gazes in Vertigo… that are central to the structure, drama, and meaning of the film; [that] convey far more than assertions of male power, control, and problematic desire and anxiety; and [that] alert us to important dimensions of cinematic artistry and complex characterization and analysis that might otherwise be overlooked or underestimated.… There is much more to Hitchcock’s optics than one kind of gaze.”
While Gottlieb identifies several kinds of gazes, his aim isn’t necessarily to create a lexicon of looks, but rather, to draw attention to their multifarious qualities. A look can be active, interactive, expressive, assertive and performative. In Hitchcock’s words, “a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person really thinks or feels.” Thus, while it’s true that San Francisco supplies the film’s geography, as Gottlieb writes, “the real and ever-changing landscape of Vertigo is the face, and in particular the face as the bearer of looks that convey what lies behind and beneath.” He expands on ten or so different kinds of looks:
The interrogative look
The look of recognition
The observed look
The look beyond the physical world of the present
The gaze at inner worlds
The look elsewhere
The tranced or traumatized gaze
Directional gazes
The downward look
The averted look
The reciprocated or mutually engaged look
Gottlieb further notes that William Rothman has “extensively cataloged and analyzed Hitchcock’s career-long use of a variety of murderous gazes.” Additionally, Vertigo’s shooting script calls for “numerous specific directions” including “looks of mystery, embarrassment, accusation, sadness, regret, fear, determination” and more. At one point in the script, Judy is directed to look at Scottie “with a new spark of hope, [while] her eyes are almost willing him to kiss her.”
Vertigo has been cited as a prime example of the often-invasive deployment of the male gaze. It’s poetic, therefore, that in this very same film, Gottlieb finds so much more on offer. He makes clear that “as the film was being planned and the design orchestrated, how the characters look was a central concern—as a subject, expressive technique, visual motive, and locus of the drama.” The words “see,” “stare,” “look,” “watch,” “eye,” “eyes,” and “wide-eyed” tally up to 532 of the script’s total word count. I’m moved to a deeper appreciation of the performances by the lead actors for delivering up such a wealth of variegated feelings and meanings using just their eyes.
The Look has what many would call a magical or mystical dimension. For example, traditional societies around the world still fear the Evil Eye. Such palpable energy finds its analog in cinema. Unfortunately, there seems to be an unwritten rule in some quarters that, just by commenting on these things, one’s credibility could end up on thin ice. Typically, we circumvent such dangers by bracketing the topic away in pseudo-objective, scientific-materialist language. Obviously, I disagree with the need for such a move and happily own that bias. With that in mind, I was thrilled to see Gottlieb approach this very territory. When Judy, now fully Madeleine, steps out of the bathroom to look directly at Scottie and us, he writes, “we too share the thrill of this magical, interactive, engaged moment.” Is he referring to mere “movie magic” or to something more transcendent, even occult? Since I don’t know his position on metaphysics, I’d lean toward a more quotidian understanding of his words. That said, earlier in the article, he quoted French director Robert Bresson: “To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.” Later, he elaborates on this binding quality. His poetic reference point is John Donne’s “The Exstasie,” along with
“…classical and Renaissance theories of vision that discuss it as a flow of particles from the physical world to our sensorium through the eyes, and thereby allow for poets like Donne and filmmakers like Hitchcock to present a reciprocated, mutual gaze as a real connection, an interanimation of souls, as it were. In Donne's poem, as two lovers look at each other, “our eye-beames twisted, and did thred / our eyes, upon one double string…. soe soule into the soule may flowe.”
True, the physics of those centuries-old theories have been overturned, yet, as Rear Window’s Stella once said, anyone “with half a brain who can get one eye open” can attest to the very real power of the gaze. It also comports with French philosopher Henri Bergson, who also argued for the tactility of the gaze, that “in pure perception we are actually placed outside ourselves; we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition.” (Matter and Memory, 75.)
By his own design, Gottlieb’s survey is intended to start a new conversation about the gaze, not end it by exhausting all the possibilities. I hope to see more discussion on the topic, as it can inspire fresh approaches to media production. Filmmakers who work in mainstream outlets may find a path toward evolving a more diverse and complex gaze system that adds richness to their storytelling and better represents the diversity of their audience. Imagine a comedy romp or courtroom drama that has a little something for everybody, gazewise.
Judy confronts her double, the real Madeleine Elster, for the only time in the movie. (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment)
In the final essay, Laura Mulvey herself steps in to comment on Hitchcock’s finest achievement in “The Metaphor of the Beautiful Automaton Reanimated: Artifice, Illusion, and Late Style in Vertigo.” Since her above-mentioned essay and subsequent follow-up work have deeply influenced the reception, if not perception of the film, her new pièce is surely de résistance. It’s fitting that she gets the last word in.
Her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has been interpreted, with, perhaps, a skosh of confirmation bias on the part of its readers, as a takedown of Vertigo for its depiction of male dominance. In this new essay, she clears the matter up. “I now see the film as an actual reflection on the very Freudian concepts of voyeurism and fetishism that I was attempting to analyze. Hitchcock had already, that is, visualized my argument: voyeurism, a key structure, according to Freud, of human sexual pleasure, had been unprecedentedly harnessed by the cinema’s luminous screen, and projected onto a particular and spectacularly luminous figuration of femininity.”
Moving on, Mulvey focuses on an adjacent topic of automatons, artifice and illusion. It couldn’t come at a better moment. Caught up as we are in virtual worlds characterized by ubiquitous screen time, social media, Zoom-mediated workplaces and artificial intelligence that’s increasingly inscribing upon us its values, it’s no coincidence that scientists are now taking seriously the possibility that the universe is either a computer simulation, a hologram or a video game. The distinction between art and artifice is no longer theoretical. It’s existential.
Her essay focuses on the “inorganic, fabricated woman who originates in the Greek myth of Pandora.” Angry at Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods, Zeus ordered the fabrication of a beautiful woman in a silvery gown, adorned with garlands, as a trap for him—artifice designed with intent to deceive and ensnare. She notes parallels between Pandora and Madeleine and adds: “Pandora inaugurates the legendary history of beautiful automata, the ancestor of the entrancing mechanical object, the cinema.”
And then she drives the point home: “As a self-reflexive film, a meditation on film spectatorship, Vertigo revolves around the figure of Madeleine as a personification of the cinema. The [beautiful automaton] and the cinema both fake the appearance of life in disguising the artifice through a seductive illusion.”
Though Mulvey doesn’t say so, one logical implication of this, then, is that cinema is not to be trusted—an outlook that’s consistent with Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward his industry of choice from the beginning. I’m reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s open-ended critique of mass media, The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), whose title implies a parallel between the female automaton and media, specifically advertising, radio and print. In fact, the title was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1923)—itself a dadaist spin on the beautiful automaton. McLuhan suggests that it’s too late to express outrage against modern media and that the only viable response is mockery and laughter. That’s an approach that Hitchcock would likely have agreed to. He can even be said to have endorsed it each week on his television show.
Haunted by Vertigo is required reading for anyone who admires Hitchcock’s late style masterpiece and it opens up new portals into the study of all of Hitchcock’s—or anyone’s—films. The texts of each essay are sophisticated and nuanced, and many of the ideas are complex—yet, across the board, the writing is clear, concise and convincing, written in plain English that eschews academic jargon. For that I salute the editors Gottlieb and Martin. Their generosity of spirit and the obvious care they’ve taken to shepherd these works to the finish line bears all the marks of a labor of love.
Vertigo is a ghost story. True, its seeming paranormal elements are brought back to terra firma in the storytelling, yet the bewitching remains. As stated in the book’s introduction, the film’s characters are haunted by figures onscreen and off and by each other. The film itself is haunted by cinematic and literary predecessors. Sixty-four years after its release, Vertigo continues to haunt the imaginations of new cohorts of fans, artists, musicians and filmmakers. In this way, the film lives far beyond the confines of its VistaVision frame and 128-minute runtime. As Haunted by Vertigo shows, Hitchcock’s masterwork is indeed, a supernatural phenomenon.
