Love the Uncanny – Haunted by Vertigo - Hitchcock Masterpiece Then and Now
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A Book Review by Dávid Szőke.
The book’s eleven chapters approach the master’s film from broad, yet intersecting angles, allowing the reading and cinematic audience into the colourful patterns that weave the filmic narrative threads into a magnetically composite unity."
"Scottie, do you believe that someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take the possession of the living being?," asks Gavin Elster his friend, retired detective John "Scottie" Ferguson in Hitchcock’s classic film Vertigo (1958), before assigning Scottie with following his wife, who, he declares, is behaving strangely. Scottie has his own traumas to come to terms with: the audience witnesses in the opening sequences a rooftop chase, where a fellow policemen falls to his own death while trying to save Scottie’s life. Vertigo is a Freudian movie in the sense that it toys with the complexities of repetition, erotic obsession, the object/abject problem, and Freud’s conceptualization of the "uncanny," that is, our innermost fear that something terrible that is strangely familiar to and repressed by us, might come forward. In Vertigo, the uncanny takes form in Scottie’s fascination for the "femme fatale" who, he believes, is overpowered by her temptations to death, yet, after whose forged demise, he becomes entangled by his repetition compulsion. To adore the movie, one must recognize Hitchcock’s brilliance in visually capturing the frightfully dark and ambiguous terrains of the human mind.
Sidney Gottlieb and Donal Martin’s collection brings Hitchcock’s ideas on the (post)modern human condition and the frailties of our contemporary psyche closer to his viewers.
Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now (edited by Sidney Gottlieb and Donal Martin), one of the latest collection of studies, brings Hitchcock’s ideas on the postmodern human condition and the frailties of our contemporary psyche closer to his viewers.
The book’s eleven chapters approach the master’s film from broad, yet intersecting angles, allowing the reading and cinematic audience into the colourful patterns that weave the filmic narrative threads into a magnetically composite unity. By shedding light on the film’s metanarrative levels, its roots, structure, and impact, these writings put emphasis on how the film is haunted by modern life but also the way it keeps "haunting" its audience by inhabiting and possessing the imagination.
In "Reading Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo Through the Myth of Io and Argos," Mark W. Padilla identifies some key motifs of metamorphosis, including deception, infidelity, disguise, identity transformation, the phallocentric compulsions of the male gaze, which share some striking resemblances with Ovid’s work. In a remarkable comparative framework, Padilla reintroduces Hitchcock main characters with their classical "avatars" (Midge as Hera, Elster as Zeus, Judy as Madeleine and Carlotta as Io/Judy as Mercury, Scottie as Argos), connects the watchful and controlling eye in Hitchcock’s film to Argus’s observing Io, and finds parallel elements in the film’s use of color and design with the Ovid’s use of images.
It is well-known for film scholarship that while working on the silent drama The Blackguard (1925), Hitchcock studied carefully Murnau’s style of making The Last Laugh (1924), which experience had a lasting impact on his own technique. Janet Bergstrom examines how the possibilities of perspectival shooting that is rooted in the German cinematic expressionism and especially in Murnau’s oeuvre, resulted in two special shots, "the vertigo shot" and "the bell tower shot" in Hitchcock’s film. With the support of some fabulous set diagrams of The Last Laugh designed by decorators Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, Bergstrom presents us an invaluable account of details about the skills that were put to effect to achieve dramatic visuals through optical manipulation.
Like many other visual elements of the German cinematic expressionism, forced perspective serves for Murnau to lead the audience into the depths of emotional conflict. As Bergstrom argues, both the "vertigo shot" and the "bell tower shot" follows a similar path. Pointing beyond what can be defined as visually realistic, the design is created to mask meanings, eradicate superfluous narrative explanations, and make space for an uncanny perception of damaged psychic conditions.
In Mark Osteen’s "Versions of Vertigo: They Wake Up Screaming," the uncanny appears almost like an "Easter egg." Here, Osteen examines the Hitchcockian playing with the odd, the familiar and the disturbing, involving scenes and elements like Scottie’s nightmare, women doubles, reincarnation, and the ghostly presence of the past. As I have argued before, these are all defining motifs of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, yet Osteen convincingly demonstrates how they refashioned the classic noir genre in films like Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984), or Jonathan Demme’s Last Embrace (1979).
In "Hitchcock and Vertigo: French and Other Connections," Charles Barr focuses on four people, three of them being main icons of the French cinema, whose cinematic influence added a specific touch to Hitchcock’s style. Contemporary press releases tended to fuel the rivalry between Hitchcock and another master of suspense, the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot. Here, Barr revisits some of the key aspects between Hitchcock and Clouzot’s creative process, paying special attention to Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), a thriller full of claustrophobic interiors, twists, and tensions, which enraptured Hitchcock and inspired his more matured vision in his later work. This same reflexion goes for the film Obsession (1949), a British crime drama written from his own novel A Man About a Dog (1947) by Hitchcock’s co-writer on Vertigo, Alec Coppel, with an Elster-like central character devising the perfect murder of wife. For a complete adoration toward the way Vertigo impacted film history, one should appreciate the creative skills of the collaborative team behind the movie, which includes the Clouzot-film’s screenwriting duo, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Barr’s addition of Coppel, Boileau, and Narcejac to the corpus of discussion is fascinating not merely for the way the narrative devices of the literary texts (Le Diabolique itself was based on a novel by Boileau and Narcejac) incorporate themselves on the screen but also for the way the "paranoid anxieties" in these stories have adapted themselves to later filmic representations.
Barbara Straumann’s "Fatal Resemblances: Crossmapping Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Nabokov’s Lolita" provides a comparative analysis on Hitchcock and Nabokov’s fascination toward the male gaze. highlighting the metanarrative interplays between literature and film, whereby the audience is constantly aware of the self-reflexive aestheticism of the author, and their comparably different approaches to masculine agency. This is a particularly pivotal point in Hitchcock scholarship, since Hitchcock’s films have been many times targeted by feminist criticism after Laura Mulvey’s comment on the male look in every Hitchcock picture but particularly in Vertigo as an oscillation between voyeurism and fascination, the man being the bearer and the woman the image. By highlighting that Scottie is actually not the one who controls the scenario but the one who is drawn into the intricate web of mischiefs, Straumann puts a question mark on Mulvey’s argument, saying that Hitchcock, unlike Nabokov, distances himself from his obsessed male character.
Mulvey’s conceptualization of the male gaze in Vertigo is challenged by Gottlieb. Instead of swimming with the usual "one-dominant-gaze" notion, Gottlieb lists a wide variety of gazes, including the averted or mutually engaged look, in several scenes, arguing that paying attention to these might reinforce a pluralistic and a holistic approach…."
While Christine Sprengler concentrates on the impact of Vertigo on contemporary artists – in this case, Chamber Made Opera’s Phobia (2003) and Jean Curran’s The Vertigo Project (2018) -, highlighting the transmedial possibilities of the migration of meaning, Robert Belton uses D.A. Miller’s theory on the "too close reading," explaining how postmodern indeterminacy might thwart us from looking beyond meaningful details that might not necessarily comply with the main narrative.
Ned Schantz and Steven Jacobs employ Freud’s "unheimlich" (in English literally: "not from the home," "unhomely," "uncanny") for Vertigo from starkly opposite directions. While Schantz’s focus is on the masculine territory of hospitality (or the more-than-hospitable nature masculine eroticism), by employing John Urry’s conceptualisation of "the tourist gaze," Jacobs examines the San Francisco monuments as traveller locations of an "unheimlich" landscape haunted by the ghostly presence of the past.
Mulvey’s conceptualization of the male gaze in Vertigo is challenged by Gottlieb. Instead of swimming with the usual "one-dominant-gaze" notion, Gottlieb lists a wide variety of gazes, including the averted or mutually engaged look, in several scenes, arguing that paying attention to these might reinforce a pluralistic and a holistic approach, i.e. that materialized gazes are used in combination with many other filmic circumstances, thus, they require a more contextualized critical assessment. This view is even more underscored by Laura Mulvey’s concluding essay in the book. Although Mulvey does not disown her notion that Vertigo is about the troubled male unconscious, she sees Hitchcock’s work as a powerful analysis on Hitchcock’s employment of it as a symbol for the fallen nature of the human psyche from the real to the illusory, which results in the inorganic state of death.
The essays in this book clearly demonstrate how neglected Vertigo was upon and after its release and how clearly Hitchcock speaks through his films, and especially through Vertigo, to our postmodern world, where more recent manifestations of violence remind us on the crises of our human condition. His (self-)reflection on the male gaze, his (de)construction of the female body, and his complex treatment of "uncanny" effects, all add up to a controversial and widely debated masterpiece that equally disturbs and fascinates us.
Dávid Szőke holds a PhD from the University in Szeged in Hungary. He is currently researching counter narratives to antigypsyism in literature and culture at the Heidelberg University, Germany.
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