Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece from 1958,
is about many things -- that is, it can be analyzed from many different
perspectives -- but one of the most important things it's about is the medium of
movies itself.
Every work of art is on some level about the medium in
which it's expressed -- its nominal subject, sometimes confused with
its "content", is often merely an excuse for a demonstration of the
metaphysical resonance of a particular set of techniques. The process
of art itself is a subject, a conveyor of meaning, which interacts with
the nominal subject of a work in complex ways.
The technique of Jan Van Eyck's Altarpiece Of Ghent
testifies to a lifetime of study and mastery in the discipline of
painting, a supreme commitment to the medium, which is inseparable from
the religious devotion of the work -- they become co-identical. By the
same token, when Robert Rauschenberg wraps bits of an old tire around a
tree stump and calls it sculpture, he is expressing a cynicism not just
about art but about life, about all human endeavor.
The obvious text of Vertigo, the narrative element
which can be rendered into words, clearly has parallels to filmmaking.
A man dresses a woman up and coaches her in playing a part to
facilitate a murder, creating an image that another man falls in love
with -- and when that other man loses the woman he thinks he's fallen in love
with he dresses yet another woman up and coaches her in playing the part of
his lost love.
Critics have seen the images of the two men in the
film as images of a film director, who on one level constructs drama
for cynical, mercenary purposes, but can also, like Pygmalion, fall in
love with his creation and want it, like Galatea, to come alive and
embrace him.
To the degree that we as spectators enter into the
activity of the director, become seduced by it -- first as
entertainment, then as the motivation of real desire -- we share the
director's dilemma and the director's temptation. We risk falling in
love with ghosts -- the ghosts we've summoned, cynically or
narcissistically, from our own psyches.
As I say, this analysis of Vertigo is available to
us on a literary, intellectual level just from the plain narrative of
the film. The art of the film, however, lies in the way Hitchcock
makes us feel the spiritual jeopardy of his protagonist in personal,
often subconscious ways -- to experience his protagonist's jeopardy as our own. The
genius of the film, then, is the way Hitchcock uses the medium of
movies not just to express its nominal subject but to
internalize it in the psyche of the spectator.
Primarily, Hitchcock does this by encouraging the
pleasure we take in being spectators, voyeurs, luring us into a comfort zone
about the activity, and then subtly deconstructing our comfort, our
distance from the activity.
The film moves with astonishing fluidity between
different kinds of images, which place us in different relationships to
them. The simplest example of this is found in the early scenes in
which Jimmy Stewart follows Kim Novak's car through the streets of San
Francisco. Location shots in which the moving camera, representing
Stewart's point of view, pull us imaginatively through the fascinating
urban landscape of a real place, delight us and so pull us
imaginatively, emotionally, into the chase narrative. But these shots
are intercut with oddly quiet and dreamlike reverse shots on Stewart
filmed against patently unreal backscreens. Stewart is clearly not
driving a real car, he's clearly not really in the streets he seems to
be driving down -- he's watching something from a distance, as we are.
Subliminally, we're being told that we can enjoy this chase without
having to imagine it as real -- because it's just a movie -- but we're also
being told, and shown, that we can choose to enjoy it as real, to
whatever degree we like.
This dynamic is a paradigm for the aesthetic strategy
of the whole film. As the Stewart character becomes more and more
obsessed by the Novak character, Hitchcock progressively eroticizes her
as an image on screen, inviting us to fantasize about her also in
purely sensual terms -- but he keeps stepping back and forcing us to
step back, to see her once again as merely an image, perhaps a
dangerous one.
Finally Hitchcock is able to bring us to the spiritual
climax of the film, when Stewart is so thoroughly enchanted by the
erotic illusion of Novak that he's willing to suspend his disbelief in
her reality in order to possess her, whatever the hell that might mean
under the circumstances. As spectators, we are right with him.
Hitchcock can tell us with every means at his command as a filmmaker
that Stewart is living in a dream, that we are watching a dream, but
can at the same time so eroticize Novak that we don't care -- we want
the dream to be true. We want it right up until the final shot, when,
like someone having a wonderful dream he or she doesn't want to end, we
try to incorporate the sound of the alarm clock into the dream, so as
not to be forced to switch our mode of consciousness.
The paradox is presented from a predominantly male
point of view, but isn't limited to one. The moment in the hotel room
when Stewart waits for the embodiment of his deepest sexual fantasies
to walk out of the bathroom with her hair done just so is one of the
most erotic moments in all of cinema. It connects with the hope and
suspense of every sexual encounter -- and not just for men. Kim Novak
said that the scene was incredibly powerful for her -- that she was
literally trembling with emotion, involuntarily, when she walked out of
that bathroom, because the moment connected for her with all those
amorous moments in real life when she wanted to be perfect for her
lover, wanted to perfectly embody his fantasies.
The self-reflection of a film director, the spiritual
jeopardy of voyeurism on the part of moviegoers, thus becomes
universalized in Vertigo into a profound reflection on the hope and
suspense and illusion (and charity, and fun) of sexual love. The
medium incarnates the message and we receive it not as a message but as
an interior insight, a wisdom born of our own experience.
