Some notes on Vertigo (and Strangers on a Train)
[Editor's note. Towards the end of 2006, "Editor's Day" on this website ran some items about Vertigo (with a detour apropos the initial fairground sequence in Strangers on a Train).
I am putting those items up here. True, I now think that to
equate the film's Sequoia forest with what Camille Paglia
calls the 'chthonian' realm is not necessary - but that my
further comparison of the forest to Goethe's realm of 'the
Mothers' ('an eerie netherworld beyond space and time', in Paglia's
words) is valid enough. Such a transcendental notion of space and
time is exactly what Scottie (James Stewart) is pursuing in the
exquisite Madeleine (Kim Novak) as he seeks to break free of all that
ties him to the earth. (Cf certain characters in Poe.
And Mrs Moore in E.M. Forster's 'A Passage to India' - whose
experience in the Marabar Caves has been likened by Robin Wood to that
of Lydia Brenner in Hitchcock's The Birds
when she finds the dead farmer, Dan Fawcett. Paglia's BFI
monograph on that film puts the matter like this: 'both women have
confronted the ultimate chaos of existence, beyond space and time,
reason and language, love and hate'.)
Now to try and clarify further about
the (dark and gloomy) Sequoia forest ... In broad terms, it's
like the frozen Gabriel Valley in Spellbound, the arid prairie in North by Northwest, the stagnant swamp in Psycho, and the deserted art gallery in Torn Curtain.
Each provides a defining image of something that is negative, or
wrong-headed, or lacking, in the male protagonist. Call it
'anti-life' - though to visit such a place may be a necessary stage on
the protagonist's way, providing him with a wake-up call, a
turning-point. (But Norman Bates in Psycho is past redemption.) Note that for much of Vertigo Scottie seeks a sterile metaphysical solution to a life-problem that, if we are honest, perhaps only love can solve. Madeleine had been trying to tell him as much when she remarked, 'It's wrong to live alone.'
Also note that the art gallery in Torn Curtain
represents, inter alia, something that protagonist Michael Armstrong is
estranged from - as Richard Wormser's novelisation of Brian Moore's
screenplay makes clear. The implication is that scientist
Armstrong will try to overcome his one-sidedness when he returns home.
However, by no means do the readings I've just given of these scenes exhaust
their meanings in the films. I've been suggesting only what the
scenes have in common and how they work structurally. The
ur-Hitchcock film, or an abstract of all the films that represents
their essence, remains elusive. KM]
November 24 We discussed the moment from Vertigo
shown below, in which 'Madeleine Elster' pauses in the lobby
of Ernie's Restaurant, on our Yahoo group recently. Beside her is
a trompe l'oeil painting showing a child - but which, from a slightly
different angle, shows the child grown into a woman, and, from a
different angle again, the child become an aged, wizened crone!
(This information was provided by group member 'Charley' - whom I
thank.) Let's notice a few other things about the moment.
It is essentially a subjective shot from inside Scottie's
consciousness, as he watches (is aware of) Madeleine from the
Ernie's bar. The image is full of upright, vertical
objects, including the door jambs in the foreground and background, the
painting in its frame, and, below it, a single slender rose in a tall
vase. Not entirely accidental is the fact that the door jambs are
made of wood - redwood, which will figure in several other key scenes -
nor the fact that the walls themselves are a rich red, almost a blood red, thus doubly signifying 'life' (which is part of the very subject of Vertigo, where, however, it is never separable from 'death', something I'll come back to). Now notice the scene's several pendant
objects: the emerald below Madeleine's neck, the crystal chandelier,
the picture. Pendant objects are something else that recur
throughout the film, and, like the vertical objects, each time
subliminally remind us of the film's title and the moment at the start
when Scottie hung suspended from a rooftop (while we, the audience watched in a suspense
of our own ...). The actual colour-scheme of the moment shown
here has its further subtleties, not least the general artificiality of
it: remove Madeleine from the shot and the effect is stark and
unpleasant! Madeleine's emerald wrap (echoing the colour of her
pendant) is complemented (set off) by the pink rose; the latter,
in turn, is complemented (set off) by both the deep red of the wall and
by the rose's green leaves. The whole frame is an art-work,
itself full of works of art or lovingly crafted objects. (Not for
nothing will Scottie refer to how Gavin made
Judy over, into the false Madeleine ...) So what is going on
here? If you will, we are being given the entire film in
miniature! I'll do my best in the space remaining to indicate how
that is. Take the emphasis on art, artificiality, and, above all,
trompe l'oeil. That is the nature of Vertigo,
with its related emphasis on appearance-versus-reality. In the
original novel, the theme of 'art' is related especially to
the Scottie character (there is no Midge character), someone who is
'never quite the artist', though he would like to have been (cf Brandon
in Hitchcock's Rope).
That theme is being echoed here, in Scottie's yearning
consciousness. Again, the trompe l'oeil painting on the wall
speaks of ephemerality (and of the difference time and space make to
our perception ...), and this is related visually (i.e., in the film's
frame) to both
the pristine rose and to the exquisite 'Madeleine' herself.
In their all-too-fleeting beauty, they
are momentarily equated. Yet of course humans seek constantly to
overcome, or transcend, the ephemeral, to find, or create, truth and
beauty that endure. For a time (!), 'Madeleine'/Judy will
become
Scottie's art-object whom he tries desperately to 'make' and 'possess'
and to
'keep', especially as she herself seems to possess (the secret or 'key'
to) 'life' itself, to be the Eternal Feminine incarnated (cf the
title-character of Hitchcock's never-made Mary Rose).
How vertiginous! Now notice again that rose, Madeleine's
flower (cf the nosegay from Podesta's flower shop). Madeleine is
like Scottie's 'Rosebud' à la Citizen Kane
but also like the actual rosebud in the vase, which is 'perfect' for a
time (!) and then wil be replaced by another, which in turn will be
replaced, and so on. The rose's tall stem, with its dark green
leaves, may remind us of the tall Sequoias ('always green,
ever-living') in the forest scene, though, paradoxically, that scene is
very dark and 'chthonic', and altogether the inverse of the Ernie's scene. Significantly, 'Madeleine' (or rather Carlotta
speaking through her) is associated with the felled Sequoia ('Here I
was born and here I died') - whose cross-section with its rings is
itself an echo of the rose at Ernie's and all the other 'concentric
circles' imagery (the nosegay, for example). But also, in the same scene, she leans back against one of the massive
trunks of the growing trees, appealing to Scottie's, and her own,
yearning to transcend, to be 'free'. In turn, that whole
scene, and the one at Ernie's (where Scottie first sees 'Madeleine'), relate to Scottie's moment on the
rooftop, looking down
-
virtually at his own death. So the blood-red of the
walls at Ernie's may be a subliminal reminder of that 'death', yet the
Ernie's scene itself is all about 'life'. My conclusion (with
some indebtedness to Charles Barr): Scottie perched at the bar may
really be still back on the rooftop, or already falling off it, seeing
in a flash
what 'life' is - namely, 'colour, excitement, power, freedom', and
somehow beyond, yet incorporating, all those things, 'Madeleine' - but also that he must
now die. And
perhaps, next moment, after clinging to the roof, he had indeed
fallen, and the film
itself represents an illusion, a simulacrum, of perpetual 'life',
imagined in exquisite slow-motion
but really in a flash, inside Scottie's head, as he plummets into
pain and blood and darkness ...
December 1
I suggested last time that the red walls of Ernie's Restaurant imply
both life and death, harking back to the opening scene on a rooftop.
Of course, the action of falling off a roof is an ambiguous act
in itself - an image of death, obviously, but also, in terms of dream
imagery, of birth. Scottie was already a 'failure' when, in one
reading, he fell from the rooftop at the start of the film. (He
had hoped to become Chief of Police but somehow significant promotion
had eluded him.) Not surprisingly, then, the film has several
moments of 're-birthing', all of them connected with Scottie's 'dream
woman', Madeleine. The first is the very image we discussed last
time, in which 'Madeleine' emerges
from the dining room at Ernie's and pauses beside an image of a baby
and a newly-blooming rose. Her emerald wrap - the colour of the
ocean - is apt. Another image of 're-birthing' will occur when
Scottie rescues 'Madeleine' from San Francisco Bay. Another will
be when the made-over (by Scottie) Judy emerges,
as Madeleine, from her bathroom at the Empire Hotel into the same
emerald-green light, now redolent of mist and ghosts. So, coming
back to Ernie's Restaurant, there's a sense that its red walls are
womb-like. But Hitchcock is not finished. The sequence
effectively began in long-shot as the camera panned from Scottie to discover
'Madeleine' dining with Gavin; it will climax with 'Madeleine' alone in
close-up (see frame-capture below), then end on a dying fall as
'Madeleine' and Gavin exit past a full-length mirror that emphasises
Scottie's sense of already losing
this mysterious, beautiful woman. (The pay-off to this moment,
and several echoes of it, will be Scottie's line later, 'I do have you
now, don't I?') How artful this whole sequence is, and the close-up profile-shot of 'Madeleine' in particular! In Strangers on a Train
(1951), in the initial funfair sequence, Hitchcock had employed a
succession of small climaxes (e.g., a woman screaming in a river-cave)
to ready the audience for the eventual big
climax, the strangling of Miriam, seen reflected in a lens of her
glasses that had been knocked to the ground. That sequence was
essentially a suspense sequence. The climactic moment was lent additional impact by the exaggeration of the effect, by the sense that the inner meaning of the moment called for just this distortion from an everyday way-of-seeing. (Cf, say, the initial kiss in Rear Window, an effect achieved with a form of step-printing.) But the sequence in Vertigo
is, rather, a more purely aesthetic one, though the technique has
scarcely changed. The first climax had occurred when the camera
in long-shot discovered the bare-backed 'Madeleine' dining with
Gavin. The second occurs when 'Madeleine' pauses by the picture
and the rose, and we can briefly savour her fine bosom and all of the
beauty surrounding it - not least the rose which emblemises
that beauty (as Madeleine herself emblemises beauty and 'life').
But the moment is fleeting. The final climax is our, and
Scottie's, tantalising reward. In this glorious profile-shot
'Madeleine' is now seemingly only inches away from us, and her lips are
poised, waiting. The music climaxes. Hitchcock daringly
brings up the light on the red wall - a deliberate exaggeration that is
perfectly right - and it is as if the rose we had just seen is now blooming in its fullness.
(What a pity second-unit director Herbert Coleman used the
wrong lens for the supposedly matching shot that follows, after the
cut-away to Scottie. There is a momentary jarring. I suspect that
Hitchcock never fully forgave 'Herbie' for that!)
December 8 I was going to immediately add one more entry on Vertigo,
but shall defer it. I was going to talk about the 'chthonic',
i.e., netherworld, apect of the film, linked to the pernicious effect
of 'mothers' on male ambition, with acknowledgement to Camille Paglia's
brilliant book 'Sexual Personae'. But during the week I
corresponded with Michael Walker about Strangers on a Train
- which, incidentally, is another of Hitchcock's films with 'chthonic'
references (see frame-capture below) - and the sexual symbolism of
the first funfair scene. All that water, for one thing! It
was surely in Hitchcock's mind when, nearly twenty years later, he
was planning another film about a psychopathic murderer, Kaleidoscope,
which would have had its character living beside a harbour and
strangling a woman near a waterfall. Also, I suggested to
Michael that the 'Magic Isle' in Strangers
(where Bruno strangles Miriam) is a 'Lost Paradise' symbol, one of
whose extensions of sexual association is the bedroom.
Accordingly, when the murder is seen reflected in a lens of
Miriam's glasses (discussed here last week), it looks as if Bruno is
finally giving the flirtateous young woman her wish, i.e., gently
putting her to bed. (The image is also suitably watery-looking
and dark, suggesting drowning or the grave.) I then checked in the novel by Patricia Highsmith
(Chapter 12) and found that an incredible amount of the funfair
sequence has its origin there (though not, directly, the Tunnel of Love
episode). Here are some quotes from the novel, with brief
comments. (1) 'Now, on the train to Metcalf, he [Charley Bruno]
had direction. He had not felt so alive, so real and like other
people since he had gone to ... Quebec, full of castles [as a child
with his mother and father] ... because his paternal grandmother had
been dying ...' That's from the end of Chapter 11.
Brilliant, isn't it? Also, was it what clinched Hitchcock's
decision to set his next film, I Confess,
in Quebec? (2) '... He was taking it easy, not getting
excited. The merry-go-round played "Casey would waltz with the
strawberry blonde ..." Grinning, he turned to Miriam's red hair,
and their eyes met ...' Ah! That's
the significance of the tune heard in the film! (3) 'Miriam
and her friends entered a big lighted section where the bottom of the
ferris wheel was and a lot of concessions and sideshows. ...
There was a clang and a roar as someone sent the red arrow all the way
to the top with a sledge-hammer. He wouldn't mind killing Miriam
with a sledge-hammer, he thought. ...' Hmm, the ferociously set
mind of the psychopath! (Cf the scene in the film where Bruno
intently watches Guy play tennis.) The sexual symbolism of the
red arrow shooting upwards isn't in the film, but the general idea comes across all right. And there is other
phallic imagery (e.g., Miriam's ice-cream cone). (4) '...
Under the bright lights, he saw that Miriam was covered with
freckles. She looked increasingly loathsome, so he began not to
want to put his hands on her soft sticky-warm flesh. Well, he
still had the knife. A clean instrument.' Prolepses of Psycho
here (I shan't spell them out) and a definite hint that Bruno is gay.
(5) 'They were taking a rowboat. The prospect of a cool row
was delightful to Bruno. He engaged a boat, too. The lake
looked big and black ...' Bruno is indeed a cool customer, and
all the more charming for having these inner resources of his (an
ability to enjoy himself; his knowledge of rowing - like Melanie's in The Birds!).
Blackness is being emphasised - Bruno's colour in the film - for
Miriam's death is fast approaching. (6) 'He waited until
they had paddled past, then followed leisurely. A black mass drew
closer, pricked here and there with the spark of a match. The
island. It looked like a neckers' paradise. Maybe Miriam
would be at it again tonight, Bruno thought, giggling. ...' There
you are - the island as (an ironic) 'paradise'! And trust Bruno
to giggle - though that's not
something Robert Walker's non-effeminate performance allows into the
film. (7) 'His hands captured her throat ..., stifling its
abortive lift of surprise. He shook her. His body seemed to
harden like rock, and he heard his teeth crack. ... With a leg
behind her, he wrenched her backward, and they fell to the ground
together with no sound but of a brush of leaves. ...' And so to
bed! Aroused, but in silence, and softly! Now,
Hitchcock's film certainly took a lot from Highsmith's novel. But
it wasn't all a one-way thing. I noticed, for example, the
following. In Chapter 1, Bruno plunges out his cigarette in a pat
of butter (harking back to Mrs Van Hopper and her jar of cold cream in Rebecca).
In Chapter 2, Bruno asks Guy to choose a story: 'Which do you want, the
busted light socket in the bathroom or the carbon monoxide garage?'
(No prizes for knowing which Hitchcock film that latter is
citing!)
December 15 Speaking of netherworlds (see December 8, above), let's come back to Vertigo.
How to convey what the Sequoia forest scene, with its sombre
greens and blacks but also russets and late-afternoon sunlight, stands
for? Apart, that is, from just the life/death 'force' that is the
very subject of Vertigo, and
which I call Will (after Schopenhauer)? The scene is based
on a passing reference in Chapter Four of the Boileau and Narcejac
novel. One of its antecedents/analogues in Hitchcock is the
deserted mill in The Manxman (1928); another is the deserted art gallery in Torn Curtain (1966) - and there are several others (including the Tunnel of Love, with its water-wheel, in Strangers on a Train, as seen above). So, to repeat, what does the scene represent? For a start, it feels like the literal heart
of the film (the latter conceived as a body flowing with life), yet
something which people hardly give a thought to as they perform their
daily business. (Note: in Torn Curtain
the art gallery, which is likewise almost empty, invokes nothing less than the whole Graeco-Roman
heritage of Western civilisation.) But equally, the scene is a womb-image,
like the red-walled Ernie's Restaurant scene analysed here already
(e.g., on December 1, above). At the end of the forest scene,
Scottie and 'Madeleine' will emerge
into the sunlight - one of the film's many moments of 're-birthing'.
It is followed immediately by a scene that begins by featuring a
different kind of tree, i.e., not
a Sequoia, but a single wind-blasted Monterey pine on a clifftop, a
scene in which 'Madeleine' appears to think of commiting suicide - all
of which alludes to the 1944 'ghost' film The Uninvited,
in which the Gail Russell character seems set on
committing suicide as her mother had done before her. The image
of the sea here isn't fortuitous: the film is full of such imagery,
invoking what Freud called the 'oceanic feeling' of mystical
significance (though he himself could make little of it). Beyond
that again, the sea provides another life/death image: in The Uninvited,
there is actually a line, 'The sea is a place of life and death and
eternity, too.' And with its literal fluidity, the sea, too, is a
womb-image to match the others. Now a further word about
'Madeleine'. She represents what Goethe and then Jung called the
Eternal Feminine and, as such, is rather more an unattainable mother-ideal
than she is a lover-figure. Significantly, Scottie never makes
love to 'Madeleine' but only to Judy whom, though, he attempts
(successfully) to make over into
'Madeleine' - and then promptly loses. It is said that many -
all? - men seek a partner who resembles their mother. (Something
of this is in Hitchcock's early film The Lodger where, though, the dead mother's image is also the dead sister's, and the Ivor Novello character is arguably incapable of consumating love for the blonde look-alikes of his mother/sister and so has to kill them instead: another anticipation of Psycho,
the ultimate Hitchcock film about the all-powerful, all-forbidding
Mother - or Great Mother in Camille Paglia's archetype. Read on.)
Now, I've little space left in which to invoke Camille
Paglia's notion of 'the chthonian' (or 'the chthonic'), but which
the forest scene in Vertigo
seems to me to approach in its evocative power. So I'll just note
this. Western culture, writes Paglia in her book
'Sexual Personae' (1990), has always been pre-occupied with the
Apollonian, with the intellect, with 'sky-culture', at the expense of
attending to 'the chthonian, which means "of the earth" - but earth's
bowels, not its surface'. Paglia continues: 'Jane Harrison uses
the term for pre-Olympian Greek religion, and I adopt it as a
substitute for Dionysian, which has become contaminated with vulgar
pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the
chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of
subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze.'
Paglia calls it 'the west's dirty secret'. (I'm reminded by
all of this of Psycho's
'faecal' swamp ...) Later, in a chapter called "Goethe to
Gothic", she appears to associate it, if not with the womb, at any rate
with the realm of 'the Mothers' in 'Faust', Part Two. In that
place, in 'an eerie netherworld beyond space and time' - constituting
'the omphalos [navel] of the universe, a female heart of darkness' -
reside the play's 'most imposing androgynes', i.e., 'the Mothers'.
These 'blind goddesses ... are Greek Fates combined with Plato's
eternal forms'. And Paglia notes: 'The Mothers appear in Faust
when the hero tries to materialize the spirit of Helen [Goethe's
Eternal Feminine figure]. Adult love is overshadowed by maternal
claims to priority. The male struggles through his sexual stages,
returning to the mother even when he thinks himself most free of her.'
It was these last three sentences that I applied to the final
scene of Vertigo in my book on
Hitchcock. Next time: I'll spell out the
implications.
December 16 I'm saying that in Vertigo, all around, on every side, is a vastness, associated with mystery and with the Oedipal aspect of the voyage of life. (Not for nothing is the bookshop in Vertigo called 'The Argosy', which may suggest
just a merchant ship of that type but is also redolent of
Jason's legendary ship 'Argo' in which he and his 'Argonauts' searched
for the Golden Fleece; and also of the mythical giant Argus, said
to have a hundred eyes! So: a vastness associated with looking and questing,
with ships and the sea.) Associated, too - the Oedipal aspect -
with an endless
male-female search for wholeness, not always a peaceful search (hence
the perennial 'battle of the sexes'). And, speaking of 'on every
side', there are also literal ups and downs (heights and depths),
associated, respectively, with life and hope and
with death and annihilation. Again there are
male-versus-female associations. If Camille Paglia is right,
Western culture has traditionally been Apollonian and sky-oriented and
male-dominated, whereas the neglected (by the West) realm of 'the
chthonian' is associated with 'subterranean force' and 'murk' and ooze'
- female attributes! (Cf Julia Kristeva's notion of 'the
abject'.) True, Goethe's realm of 'the Mothers' isn't located
underground, exactly, but rather 'beyond space and time'.
Nonetheless, it is incontrovertible that Paglia wrote (as I
quoted last time): 'The Mothers appear in Faust
when the hero tries to materialize the spirit of Helen [Goethe's
Eternal Feminine figure]. Adult love is overshadowed by maternal
claims to priority. The male struggles through his sexual stages,
returning to the mother even when he thinks himself most free of her.'
To me, this could be describing what happens in Vertigo.
I'll come to the end of that film - where
the sinister-seeming nun, or mother-superior, surely represents
what Paglia calls the Great Mother - in a moment. But first,
a note on what psychologists, mystics, etc., call the 'oceanic
feeling'. This was famously evoked in
correspondence between Freud and the French writer Romain Rolland to
refer to the feeling of being at one with the universe, a feeling which
causes (in
Rolland's words) 'a sensation of "eternity", a feeling as of something
limitless, unbounded - as it were, "oceanic"'. Sadly, Freud said
that he could find no trace of such a feeling in himself and attributed
it to 'a regression to an earlier state: that of the infant at the
breast'. He wasn't impressed with Rolland's claim that the
oceanic feeling is the source of religious sentiments. Perhaps
missing
the point, he claimed that man's need for religion originated with the
infant's sense of helplessness, saying, 'I cannot think of any need in
childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.'
Certainly, Anthony Storr, in his book 'The School of Genius'
(1988), takes issue with Freud's position, calling it 'less than
satisfactory'. He points out that those who have experienced the
states of mind recorded by, for example, Admiral Byrd and William
James, 'record them as ... being the profoundest moments of their
existence. This is true both of those who have felt the sense of
unity with the universe and of those who have felt the sense of unity
with a beloved person.' (p. 38) Triggers for these
experiences can be of many kinds: for example, nature, art, religion,
sexual love, certain forms of exercise, solitude, silence. (p.
188) Enough said. I think that the oceanic feeling
is powerfully evoked in Vertigo,
and is part of the film's Lost Paradise imagery, associated with the
wounded, even impotent, Scottie's quest to overcome his 'weakness'.
The 'motherly' Midge calls him 'a big boy now' and watches
concernedly as he attempts to assert his masculinity, to emulate the
father (even God). In this, he differs only in degree from, say,
Guy in Strangers on a Train
who at one point pauses beneath those printed lines from Kipling: 'If
you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ .../You'll be a man, my son.'
Sadly, then, in trying to 'materialize' Madeleine, his Helen of
Troy, in Judy, Scottie is only emulating Faust in Goethe's drama - and
fated to the same disappointment. (Whether God will intervene to
save him from damnation is, of course, left up in the air, so to
speak.) I do see the 'mother-superior' who rises up so
terrifyingly at the end that she causes Judy/Madeleine to elude
Scottie's grasp and fall to her death, as the Great Mother. A
comic precedent had been the spectre of Mrs Stevens coming to live with
daughter and son-in-law (Francie and John) at the end of To Catch a Thief; a sombre echo of the mother-principle defeating the son-figure is, of course, the end of Psycho.
.
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