It is no secret that the late Alfred Hitchcock was—and still is—not only one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, but also the “Master of Suspense.” After having started his career as a silent film title designer and art director, the London-born auteur had his directorial debut with the 1925 (silent) movie The Pleasure Garden and subsequently went on to make a number of films that would, after a mere few shots, become instantly recognizable as his. Dramatic shadows, unpredictable visual revelations and odd camera angles were all part of his repertoire, with the narrative of wrongfully accused people becoming a pervasive one throughout his career. He often told the story of how his father would treat him after he would misbehave during his childhood—the boy would be sent down to a police station with a note intended for the sergeant, asking him to lock the child up for the purpose of “teaching him a lesson.” As a result, an adult Hitchcock once said that he wanted the words “You see what can happen if you are not a good boy” engraved on his tombstone. It also made the subject matter of blameless people on the run into one of his favorite thematic elements. During his career that spanned six decades and included over fifty feature films, this wildly studied filmmaker earned forty-six Academy Award nominations and won a total of six times. By the year 1960, he had made four movies that are still regarded among the best of all time. One of them is, of course, the 1959 noir Vertigo (with the other three being Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). But the now-adored film was not always considered one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, quite the contrary.

Upon Vertigo’s release, critics were nowhere near impressed with the screenplay, finding the story unconvincing and farfetched, and audiences were not on board with either the mystery being resolved two-thirds into the movie or with watching Jimmy Stewart in a role very much unlike those they were used to seeing him in, such as that of J.B. “Jeff” Jefferies in Rear Window and Dr. Ben McKenna in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)—in both cases, viewers were quick to side with the main characters, which is not something that could be said for Stewart’s John “Scottie” Ferguson in Vertigo, who made them feel all sorts of ambiguous ways. On top of that, the creation of suspense that Hitchcock’s films became so known for was not the primary driving force of Vertigo, leaving audiences baffled and confused. But with the passing of time, the director’s misunderstood gem finally got the recognition it had deserved all along—in 1982, Vertigo entered the list of the ten greatest movies of all time published in the British Film Institute’s magazine called Sight & Sound, and came in seventh place. By 2002, it ranked up, coming in a close second, and in the 2012 edition, it was voted into first place, dethroning the movie that had occupied that position since 1962—Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. In 1989, it was deemed “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Hitchcock wanted to buy the rights to a novel called “Celle qui n’etait plus” (translated into English as “She Who Was No More”) by writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, but unfortunately for him, director Henri-Georges Clouzot had beaten him to it and had directed the 1955 movie entitled Les Diaboliques based on said source material. The filmmaker was, therefore, very vigilant when it came to any new material written by the two—so when the follow-up D’entres les morts hit the bookstores in 1954, the director had Paramount commission a synopsis before the novel even got a chance to get translated into English. When the studio secured the rights, playwright Maxwell Anderson (Anne of the Thousand Days, The Bad Seed) got the job of adapting the novel into a film. Anderson wrote a script entitled Darkling, I Listen—a quote from English poet John Keats’ poem Ode to a Nightingale—and Hitchcock did not like it one bit, so he discarded the draft and brought in Alec Coppel (The Captain’s Paradise, Mr. Denning Drives North) instead. Unfortunately, his second pick did not satisfy him either, leading to Samuel L. Taylor (Avantil, Sabrina) being hired to write the screenplay from scratch, with the help of Hitchcock’s notes. Taylor wanted to take sole credit for his work, but Coppel would not have it, and objected to the Screen Writers Guild, after which both were credited and Anderson was left out. Kim Novak was cast alongside Jimmy Stewart, although the part of the female lead was initially intended for Vera Miles, who would later on play her most memorable role in Psycho. Miles became pregnant so the director chose Novak instead. By the time the actress was ready to start shooting after having taken care of her other commitments, Miles became available again, only to find out that Hitchcock had decided to stick with his new leading lady.

Vertigo follows John “Scottie” Ferguson, a police officer who discovers he has a fear of heights that manifests itself as vertigo, forced to retire after his condition results in an unfortunate event taking place. He spends his time with his friend and ex-fiancée Marjorie “Midge” Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a smart and independent woman who obviously still has feelings for him. But Scottie’s daily routine suddenly gets a bit more exciting when his old college friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) contacts him and asks for a very peculiar favor. Elster wants his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) followed, but not because he suspects her of infidelity—but rather because he is afraid for her mental health. Madeleine is presumably acting out the final days of her late great-grandmother’s miserable life and Scottie becomes more than intrigued by the mysterious blond young woman who does not seem to know where she is going or what she is doing. Our protagonist soon finds himself enamored and unable to stay away, on the one hand desperately trying to get to the bottom of the mystery that is Madeleine and on the other reveling in it, for it is precisely the unknown about this woman that fuels his attraction turned obsession.

A shocking plot twist and resolution to the mystery that happens before the final third of the movie—the perceived premature reveal that left contemporary audiences dissatisfied—sets Scottie on a downward spiral that ends in his obsession taking control over both his actions and his life. For it is here that we clearly see the sad truth of a man in love with an untouchable fantasy, a phantasm in his head that no woman could ever live up to—not even the one he claims to be in love with. For the character of Madeleine is the epitome of the unknown woman, so mysterious, evasive and alluring that a person could project all of their deepest desires onto her, forever worshipping and feeling a miraculous pull towards the constructed image in their mind’s eye, provided real facts about her remain obscured and she herself stay just slightly out of reach. Scottie’s inability to fully understand Madeleine drives him mad with desire and gives rise to an urge within him—the urge to try. And when he does, it is to no avail, for his every attempt provides him with yet another intricate puzzle piece, the result being the opposite of driving him away. The more the truth evades him, the more obsessed he gets with getting to the bottom of Madeleine, but this is, in fact, a puzzle he subconsciously never wants solved, for that would imply his attraction ceasing to exist, and with it, his vertigo, which could be viewed as a metaphor for the loss of control and sense of disorientation experienced when falling hopelessly in love. And that is something Scottie cannot afford to do.

On one level, Vertigo is a clever story about the factuality of the unrelenting male gaze that dominates and dictates both our shared collective reality and the majority of the narratives we as a species create and willingly consume, but it should also be viewed as a clever deconstruction of it. In depicting a man who, at a certain point in the film, controls what a woman should look like, how she should talk, walk and behave in order to adhere to his fantasy and cater to his gaze, Hitchcock unsubtly reveals his own obsession with controlling his actresses and his attempt at turning them into the perfect “Hitchcock blond.” As Kim Novak stated in a 1996 interview with Roger Ebert: “Of course, in a way, that was how Hollywood treated its women in those days. I could really identify with (…) being pushed and pulled this way and that, being told what dresses to wear, how to walk, how to behave. I think there was a little edge in my performance that I was trying to suggest that I would not allow myself to be pushed beyond a certain point—that I was there, I was me, I insisted on myself.” In other words, possessing a woman becomes an obsession in and of itself—and in obsessing, the man himself acts as if he were possessed. But on another level, Vertigo’s male voyeur is actually the one who finds himself on the submissive side of this patriarchal power play—for he is not the one who controls the narrative, she is. Scottie is rendered powerless by the idealized and idolized fantasy in his mind, unaware of who the unknown woman really is and oblivious to what is actually taking place. She, on the other hand, is always one step ahead of him, counting on his gaze, attraction and urges to get both of them to where they need to be, if the plan they are a part of is to be played out as was intended. Ultimately, the final decision whether to stay or go was hers alone—she willed it so, knowingly and consciously, potential repercussions be damned.

The big revelation surrounding Madeleine’s true identity, the aforementioned plot twist that many considered came much too early, was actually perfectly timed, for it provided us with a much-needed change of perspective. At first glance, it does seem to have taken the suspense out of the remainder of the story. But upon further inspection, it becomes evident that any other route would have deprived us of the experience of stepping into Madeleine’s shoes. Up until then, we were in the same position as Scottie, equally baffled and confused, just as eager to solve the mystery at hand and gaze into the eyes of a woman in an attempt to uncover her secrets. But then we are suddenly gifted with an epiphany that Scottie is not privy to, and our being in the know creates another type of suspense—having explored both Scottie and Madeleine’s internal worlds, we get to watch them clash and collide, painstakingly aware of the tragic implications that permeate the core of their relationship drenched in illusion which, therefore, neither can, nor ever will be based in truth and authenticity. The suspense is a deeply emotional one, for our own disillusionment leads to us clearly seeing the depths of Scottie’s delusion—and the pain it causes Madeleine. Hitchcock himself ironically summed up Vertigo as “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, boy loses girl again.”

Although the big reveal was originally in the script, Hitchcock feared that the game was given away too early and decided on deleting the scene in question after the first test screening. Jimmy Stewart agreed with him, an associate producer did not, but it was Paramount boss Barney Balaban who ultimately ordered the director to “put the picture back the way it was.” Furthermore, the Production Code Administration wanted to see the real villain of the movie punished for their crime—the required scene was indeed shot, with Midge listening to a radio report about the character’s destiny, but the director managed to keep the ending he initially intended. Vertigo is, therefore, his only film where the culprit gets away with it.

Vertigo is also the first film ever to feature the trademark shot that captures Scottie’s acrophobia, which became known as “the Vertigo effect.” As Hitchcock stated in Hitchcock by François Truffaut: “The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and zoom simultaneously. I asked how much it would cost, and they told me it would cost fifty thousand dollars. When I asked why, they said, ‘Because to put the camera at the top of the stairs we have to have a big apparatus to lift it, counterweight it, and hold it up in space.’ I said, ‘There are no characters in this scene; it’s simply a viewpoint. Why can’t we make a miniature of the stairway and lay it on its side, then take our shot by pulling away from it? We can use a tracking shot and a zoom flat on the ground.’ So that’s the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars.” Hitchcock later on used this technique in his 1964 movie Marnie. Other filmmakers paid homage to the director by using “the Vertigo effect”, such as Steven Spielberg in Jaws, E.T., and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Movies like La Haine, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Goodfellas and The Lion King have also featured this effect.

It truly is fascinating to watch Vertigo unfold, for the first third of the film presents us with what seems like a ghost story about possession that dabbles in the subject of ancestral trauma. It plays with the notion that sensitive individuals of future generations are, in fact, capable of acting out unresolved trauma belonging to their late family members by repeating their patterns over and over again, implying that the ancestor’s pain was too grand to be tied to the time and space it initially belonged to. This narrative is meant to excite us, thrill us and unsettle us, as we follow Scottie who tries as hard as he can to “think” the problem away, but gets drawn into it deeper than he could have possibly imagined and ultimately ends up repeating a destructive pattern of his own. No (supernatural) possession needed, only obsession. And yet it is his obsession that ultimately makes him act as if he were possessed. Scottie’s medical condition, although factual in and of itself, envelops the movie as both an atmosphere and a feeling state, one that we as viewers go through alongside the protagonist, constantly grasping at straws, incapable of being at ease, feeling as if the world is crumbling beneath our very feet. And as we look down, we are rendered unable to do anything about it.

SOURCE: Cinephilia & Beyond

ARTICLE: The Unrelenting Male Gaze that Blurs the Lines Between Possession and Obsession