ALFRED HITCHCOCK

[MissGoddess]

I think you're doing a brilliant job with these photo collages, CineMaven---I love them! Here is one of my favorite candid shots of Hitch; the baby looks almost like him, ha ha:



September.....alas, it means for me the end of summer and that winter is not far behind.

[JackFavell]

Oh my gosh, that is a great photo! Do you suppose they arranged the fuzz on top of their heads to look exactly the same?

[RedRiver]

I'm a "Psycho" gal

Do you know my ex-girlfriend?

[CineMaven]

I think you're doing a brilliant job with these photo collages, CineMaven---I love them! September.....alas, it means for me the end of summer and that winter is not far behind.

Thank you, Miss G. and I see what you mean about September. Br-r-r-r!! That baby is Hitch's doppelganger. Yikes!!

Do you know my ex-girlfriend?

Yes. ...And she said it's all your fault!!

[CineMaven]

I think "VERTIGO" is more a puzzle and more personal to Hitchcock than any one ever imagined.

[JackFavell]

I re-watched Vertigo this week, and I'll tell you, I am a bit of a newbie to this movie, having only seen it once before (at least the restored version). But I have to agree that it's a puzzle and so very personal that it hurts. And somehow, by getting deep into his own psyche, going internal...down down down, Hitch tapped into something innate in us all, and this is what makes the film great.

First off, Vertigo is so plainly a masterpiece that I don't know how you can see it without seeing it's transcendency. What I find so interesting about it is that it is not only a story, but a story within a story within a story, and on top of that, it's also a commentary by the director on the human condition, and a deeply personal delving into his own life, which somehow relates to all people, and then even MORE SO, a comment on what is happening to the viewer right at the same time he is watching it. THAT'S the key. It's incredible.

A spiral in a spiral in a spiral ad infinitum... a movie that works on all levels - a fictional level and a real life level and probably more levels I haven't even begun to think about. So I get the feeling that I'm watching a movie, and living something outside that movie that fits into the scheme of that same film. Does this sound familiar? It's what Welles talks about in F for Fake. It's what makes art.

You've got me very excited, Maven, wondering about your Vertigo post. I know it will capture the film in all its glorious perversity, in its beauty and lasting importance. And in how we feel about Madeleine, Judy, Scottie, Midge. But I have a hypothesis about Vertigo too... I wonder if it's the same as yours? Shall I tell you mine? I'm going to, just so it doesn't seem like I'm copying yours if they turn out to be the same. It may be way off the beam to some, or so mundane that you will groan and say, "well, yeah." It has to do with that idea of the film happening to the viewer in real time, being a personal expression of Hitch, but also unrolling, acting upon you internally in untold ways.

My hypothesis is that Scottie is Hitch.

Well, DUH!

I know, I know! but it seems so deep when I'm thinking about it while watching the movie! Anyway, here goes, and remember, this is just how I personally feel about it, when I watched this last time. I simply felt what I felt, it isn't written in stone at all:

Scottie/Hitch relies on Midge, who is Alma. They have a wonderful, warm, and very understanding relationship. A husband and wife, like any other husband and wife. I can relate. They even work well together. Midge/Alma loves Scottie/Hitch. But Midge/Alma doesn't really fulfill Scottie/Hitch (and I think this is where most men and women can relate on some level). Nor does she quite know that Scottie/Hitch has a dark side, a side he keeps from her. Or does she know it, and just doesn't say anything? Perhaps. Anyway, his dark secret is that he's in love with this ideal woman, who is blonde and tall and gorgeous. He needs this woman in his life. She IS his life. She is his creative inspiration, she is Film and obsession, his depth and his essence (no not like Dr. Strangelove essence, but close).

The problem is, she's completely unreal, a figment of his imagination. To him, she's more real than Alma. She understands, and fulfills. She knows his wants. To her, he is heroic and brave and handsome. She is inside his head. He recovers her from the brink of being lost forever in the recesses of normality. The shrink tells him he must put her aside and live in the real world, or lose everything. But she might vanish, if he were to live fully in the real world, not in his head. He never lets Madeleine (for that is who she is) go away completely. He saves her from that brink of being lost or put away in the back of his mind, and puts her up on the screen instead. She makes him into the man he wants to be, she makes him famous for his movies about her. He keeps trying to portray this fictional love of his life with actresses (Judys, we could call them). But it never really quite fulfills him, because they are not quite her likeness, and even more to the point, she is not real, and so cannot truly fulfill him in that real world. Maybe one of the actresses WAS the real deal...the Madeleine, I don't know.

In the end, he has a fear that this obsession will bring him down, because he can never really have the real thing the way he wants it. His dream becomes the nightmare. He is afraid that his real life will recede from him as he goes deeper and deeper into unreality. He loses Midge, he loses each Judy, because he is obsessed with Madeleine. And Madeleine is actually....himself. His own sexuality in woman form. (Please don't yell at me for this opinion, for that is all it is, a very personal opinion, not translatable to anyone else, unless they choose to see it that way.)

OK. That probably doesn't even make sense, and you are now thinking that I have gone a little Norman Bates. Please don't think I'm crazy for Psycho-analyzing poor Hitch. But don't we all, as movie goers, do this to some extent? We fall in love with those screen gods and goddesses? So he captures the inmost feelings we all have of wanting to be wanted by the perfect partner. As I watch the movie, I see Hitch's deepest fears and deepest feelings unspool before me. And they are mine. I swear he put his innermost thoughts on attraction, on obsession. on love, on fear, on death on the screen for everyone to see. And they are all connected. And we connect with it, it's catching, because on some level we live this obsession too. It's so brave of him. I just see an alternate story going on in this movie, the story of Hitch and Alma and his internal demons, happening in real time as the movie unfolds. That blonde he can never capture. And it's fascinating, and painful and beautiful too, to me.

Maybe mine's a cold clinical dispassionate account of the movie, a la Henry Jones in that courtroom. But how can you not see the delicacy of it, the structure, the way Hitch sets up every little part of it to riff on that spiral? Every part, smoothly fit into the puzzle. And the movie is not even about the story here, the macguffin. It's about what happens to us as we watch it, the outside of the film is the story. It's fascinating, and I'm not sure how he did it. By being deeply personal, he hit on something that everyone has felt or feels on a continuing basis, and it comes up every time you watch the film. The FILM is what's happening to YOU as you watch it.

I loved the opening credits this time... because I saw the story played out in that animated spiral - it's an eye, yes, I got that last time....but it's also a dead body outline on the sidewalk...and they are attached to one another, are the same thing - the eye - straight to the dead body. What the eye sees, can make you live your wildest fantasies... or make you dead inside.

[movieman1957]

Darn it. You are such a good writer that I have try and find time to watch it again. This time through a new perspective. I'm sure it will be even more interesting.

The blonde thing with Hitchcock was always kind of with me but I never took it beyond that level. Watching it in a more autobiographical eye needs to be done.

[MissGoddess]

Brilliant, as always, Wendy---I believe that good directors put themselves (sometimes unconsciously, obliquely) in their movies and Vertigo in particular is very, very personal. You can't exhaust it no matter how often you watch and pick it apart, that's why it's my favorite of his films even though it is uncomfortable and painfully beautiful as you aptly describe.

[JackFavell]

Thank you. That's a great point, MissG, about great directors sort of putting themselves into their movies. I know we've talked about it with Ford. I think Hitch knew he was putting himself up there with Vertigo, at least to some extent, self aware, deeply exposing himself.

It IS a painful watch. That's why I had only seen it once before!

[CineMaven]

Wendy, call me a copycat, but I wholeheartedly agree with Movieman and Miss Goddess on the great writing you put out there with your take on how personal Hitch gets with "Vertigo." I'd like to touch on that as well...but first I think I have to explain how I see the movie.

"VERTIGO" ( 1958 ) - YOU STEPPED OUT OF A DREAM...



If you fall in love in Hitchcock's world, straight up, you will be put through the ringer, no doubt about it. Take "Vertigo" for example. Basically, the plot is all a means to an end. The ingredients: use a man's illness against him to make the perfect foil. Add a dash of an accomplice who'll never be able to testify against you and voila! The souffle: the perfect crime. Gavin Elster doesn't need The Movie Murderer's egotistical satisfaction of showing off HOW smart and clever he is. The entire movie hides his crime in plain sight. But the byproduct of all this, is a love story. And who better than Alfred Hitchcock to hide a love story inside a crime.

Does who we love say more about us than the person we love? How we love, who we love, what is love, why we love, who loves us... Hitchcock explores this in "Vertigo." Scottie Ferguson has a choice between two women to love ( hmmm...or maybe three? )

MIDGE - she is a self-sufficient working girl; a clothes designer with a job that probably pays well enough to afford that fabulous sun-drenched apartment with windows that offer a panoramic view of San Francisco. I want this apartment!!!



Despite the old adage: “boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” Midge is attractive - sensibly and casually dressed. Her sex appeal is muted, but she seems open, frank and broad-minded.


“Oh Johnny, you’re a big boy. You know about these things.”

She’s got a sense of humor and there’s history between her and good old ‘available Ferguson.’ Is there a window for love? They were an item in college, but Midge broke it off. ( Maybe she put career before marriage? ) If there is a window for love and it closes, does it pass you by, never to reopen again? She’s a classy gal as the classical music wafts through her apartment signifies. She’s a helpmate. She ribs him, which backfires on her. He’s in no mood to be mocked about the mystery woman he’s falling in love with. There’s no mystery to this open book that is Midge. Comfortable familiarity not enough? Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. Midge gives her love one more go for Scottie, when she visits him in a rest home. ( Funny, she never was at his trial. Why? ) He’s catatonic - filled with guilt and shame. That wonderfully scathing testimony by actor Henry Jones ( who holds the screen by himself for a good long five-seven minutes ) was the last nail in Scottie’s coffin, and those who look at “Vertigo” with the jaundiced-eye of logic will come off just...like...Henry Jones. ( You don't want to be Henry Jones with that droning supercilious voice, d'ya? ) At the rest home, Scottie barely knows Midge is there. The doctor gives her the sad verdict on Scottie’s condition. Midge rationally pulls the plug on their relationship. She won’t and can’t compete with a ghost. Midge is attractive, smart, self-sufficient, classy, open, caring & has a sense of humor. What more does a man want? What’s missing?

Mystery.

* * * * * * * * * *

ELSTER: “Scottie, do you believe someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being?”

SCOTTIE: “No.”

Maybe I have a soft spot for movie detectives...poor schmoes. They deal in blood & guts, violence & murder and just the facts, ma’am. Their job is to put together pieces of the puzzle, solve mysteries, come up with solutions. When they get tripped up by their emotions, they fall like a ton of bricks.



MADELEINE'D

It’s not love at first sight for Scottie. He’s skeptical about even taking the assignment. He goes to Ernie's Restaurant. He sees Elster's wife, Madeleine. She is a beautiful swan gliding out of Ernie’s. Alright!! Okay!! Maybe it is love at first sight. ( You can’t fight Kim Novak AND Bernard Hermann! ) But first and foremost, he is intrigued. The voyeurism goes unfettered - watching to his heart’s content. He really falls for her when he jumps into the bay. He plays hero. ( What man doesn’t want to? ) Saves her from drowning. He’s protective - her wet clothes are drying in his kitchen. ( I’ve no doubt Scottie was a perfect gentleman. And I guarantee you, women like this don’t fall into Scottie’s lap everyday. ) She is more real now, now that he’s interacting with her. He wants to get to the bottom of her. He wants to fix her.

But there must be something about Scottie that touches Madeleine. Regret that she’s tricking him?

( Nope, not yet...too soon in the plot for that revelation. )

At first blush, it looks like Elster’s wife is falling for a man that, unbeknownst to her, her husband has sent to spy on her. Your plain old typical drama. But folks...that couldn't really be it. This is HITCHCOCK! We won’t know that this is not it, until the climax of the movie; or really understand what’s going on until a second or third viewing. I'm really speaking of "Vertigo" in the past tense. Perhaps THAT’s the beauty of “VERTIGO.” Hitchcock was genius enough to make a movie that is meant to be seen a second, third and fourth time. BRILLIANT!! Not just the first time and be done with it. Or the second time around because we love John Ford. ( Ooops! Sorry. ) A director who makes a movie for FUTURE viewings. ( I stole that idea myself for my webseries, "Meg Ramsey." ) Suffice it to say that if you’re reading this and you like “Vertigo” you’ve seen it a number of times yourself. I think Scottie’s feelings for Madeleine spring forth genuinely, honestly, organically. I don't think it has anything to do with making him feel a certain way about himself. Well maybe a little. ( I like the scene by Madeleine's car when Scottie asks if he could wander with her. ) It does make him want to "wander" and not "desk jockey settle." It was the beginning of their love affair. Madeleine is very beautiful in a dream-like, cream-coloured way. Troubled. A mystery. He feels protective. She is just this much more of a challenge to love. To reach out toward love. Not an open book like Midge. Madeleine is a "seeking" project; not a done deal.

There's three parts to the "Vertigo" I experience when I watch this movie:

* The plain common sense simple reality-Midge

* The dream-Madeleine

* What IS loving?

JUDY! JUDY! JUDY! - Part 3

When Madeleine says she loves Scottie, cares for him, I think that it is Judy's heart and mind talking through Madeleine. And "Madeleine's" pulling away, is Judy knowing that this ruse will be ending soon. It's really a form of doublespeak that Judy says a truth that the audience doesn't quite understand how truthfully she's speaking. Judy has fallen in love with Scottie through Madeleine. Madeleine is a total dream - a ghostly spirit - a medium through which Judy’s feelings come. They come...THROUGH...Madeleine. Looks like Madeleine’s not the REAL entity throughout this whole thing. ( Maybe we only saw the real Madeleine Elster at Ernie's and the rest of the time, it was Judy. ) There’s something about Scottie that Judy/Madeleine responds to.

Poor Judy. ( Yeah I'm saying poor Judy, even if she IS an accessory. ) Different from Midge and Madeleine. Garishly made up, stacked, but common. Not upper crust like Madeleine or upper middle class like dear Midge. She's a salesgirl. Look at where she lives. Not in an open airy apartment like Midge. Not even a nice hotel room like "Carlotta." (( )) But in a dark cramped place with a window next to her building's neon sign. At least as Hitchcock shoots it. He doesn't show us the expanse of her apartment.

What keeps Judy there? Can you just imagine the jaw-dropping shock she experiences when she opens her apartment door to see Scottie standing there?!!! She knows she’s an accessory to a crime. Why take a chance? Love.

I made the mistake. I fell in love. That wasn’t part of the plan. I’m still in love with you and I want you so to love me. If I had the nerve I’d stay and lie hoping that I could make you love me again, as I am, for myself...”

I mean it was Judy all along, she just had on a different persona. Was her essence still the same inside the Madeleine persona? Maybe Gavin told Judy to play it anyway she wants to, just make sure she hits the flower shop, the Museum, the cemetery and the old McKittrick Hotel. Judy decides to stay. She hangs out with Scottie in her misguided hope to get Scottie to like her for her. But the spectre of this other girl shows up. I feel bad for Judy because she gets hurt time and time again when she sees affectionate lovers, or other blondes walk into a room. I understand Scottie, happy to be around someone that gets him out of his doldrums, that reminds him of the other girl. He hasn't gone whole hog in acting out his feelings...yet. But I really feel for Judy and those paper cuts to her heart.

Scottie is the one who ventures into bizarre territory with his demented Pygmalion act. Yes, Judy stays all through the dress shopping and the shoe shopping. She’s acquiescent. She surrenders to love. I guess that’s what Scottie’s doing as well in his recreation of her. ( ) He’s gone past a point of return and acquiesces to his obsession. His longing and lost is so acute that the man can't help himself. ( And I love that Jimmy Stewart gives IN to all all all of it! I think Cary Grant would have held part of himself back from Scottie. Any thoughts anyone? ) Scottie and Judy are running towards each other in a field of dreams that's sad; both of them reach out to each other in parallel planes, parallel purposes, missing each other by “that much.”

Remember the end of Wilder’s “The Apartment” when Lemmon professes his love and MacLaine says: “Shut up and deal”? Hitchcock hits us with the same irony of not saying...but showing. Hitch’s actions speaks louder than words in his films.

Those last ten minutes of “Vertigo” is killer. First Judy knows something Scottie doesn’t know. Now Scottie knows something Judy doesn’t know. And we, the "lucky" audience, are privvy to the info they both share and we see a train wreck ahead. Part of the human condition sometimes, can be self-destruction. Hey, would the world be happy if there were peace in the world? The world wouldn’t know what to DO with itself. In the midst of this emotional chaos, Scottie is cured of his vertigo. But he’s now an emotional wreck again...and worse. He now doesn’t even have THE DREAM. That bubble’s been burst. As annoyed as I want to be with Scottie, my heart goes out to him. As cold and dispassionately and Henry Jones as I want to be to Scottie, I feel for the guy for wanting to hold onto and recreate the dream. When he says:

Why did you have to pick on me. Why me?!!!”

...I'm undone. A silly romantic. Naaah! We’re all so vulnerable when in love. Lay ourselves bare only to be stabbed, tricked, hurt. That's the most devastating thing I think of the whole movie. But Hitch doesn't let us off the hook there. Oh no.

I feel sorry for both Scottie and Judy. Hitchcock plays a dastardly trick on our emotions and he doesn’t give us a happy ending to assuage that topsy turvy roller coaster ride we've just been on; nor that I think audiences understood in 1958. ( Did the movie get better or are audiences more sophisticated? ) Hitch doesn't even give us the "crime does not pay ending" and sends Scottie to the police. Nope. Hitch gives in to the human self-destruction mode and takes the girl away from him again with a devastating finality. Yes Scottie says it’s too late. But if it were really too late he’d have left the tower a little sooner. But with them entangled in an embrace, keeping them connected and then Judy slipping from his grasp, she really is gone this time. And he'll never recover.

...And also give thought to how long Judy was up in that tower with Gavin Elster as they watched Scottie slink away from the crime...and watched the priests and nuns and doctors and police and ambulance come to the scene of the crime to pick up Madeleine's broken body. Think of Judy being alone with this murderer who pays her some money and a trinket and drives alone with him through that long and winding road of trees back into San Francisco. The terror...and pain.

I guess with everything and everyone we deal with, it says something about us. Is to love, a mystery? Withholding? Is it a challenge? Is it a chase? If you’re not chasing, is it too easy? If no one follows you, are you not loved? As you sleep you dream, this time a beautiful dream. Your alarm clock rings and you wake up from that dream. You hit the snooze button and fall back to sleep trying to pick up where you left off in that dream. Maybe you'll have better luck than Scottie.

[movieman1957]

Vertigo is playing on the big screen here on Oct. 2. Guess I'll go. Maybe I can watch it in the interim and have something worthy of the conversation.

[JackFavell]

I certainly hope you'll see it and come back and talk about it with us, Chris, because I am having such a BLAST! I am SO enjoying this (extended, multi-thread) conversation! And Maven, You just blew me away!

What you said about Hitchcock making a movie for future viewings, future viewers, well, that is amazing, and something I NEVER thought about. It's absolutely true, and of course he must have known what he was doing, done it purposely. He at least wanted people to come back to Vertigo many times in the movie theatre, if he wasn't prescient at this time about TV or video. This explains to me why he went to such lengths to perfect the trappings of the movie. It's not tossed off lightly, for sure: the reversal of colors (red and green) faultlessly applied to all of the Judy and Madeleine scenes... there isn't a flaw or mistake in coloring anywhere. The spiral motif used ruthlessly and impeccably throughout the movie - from the tunneling effect of Scottie looking down from the ledge at the beginning, to Carlotta's funnel flower arrangement all pointed into the center of the wrapper, to that chignon, to the deep focus shots of Madeleine in the distance at the museum, pressed in by ceiling and floor and walls around her, to Scottie's aimless lonely circling drives. Even Madeleine's jump into the bay is focused at the end of the bridge, like a bulls-eye. And not only does Hitchcock keep the spiral motif going downward and out to the distance, he then doubles back, like Keaton's train ride in The General, and repeats it, focusing inward, with Judy, the spiral in reverse. Seeing her walk towards him from the elevator at the end of the hall. Driving, this time with Judy, back to the mission - instead of away, toward. Together. Once at the mission, the stairway buckling back in on itself as he looks downward but battles to go up those stairs. There's a perverse pleasure I think for Scottie in finally being able to solve the riddle, to TELL someone, to tell Judy, the only one who really knows...that he knows what happened. This might have connected them later, had Judy's guilt and Scottie's hurt anger not destroyed her.

I think Scottie’s feelings for Madeleine spring forth genuinely, honestly, organically. I don't think it has anything to do with making him feel a certain way about himself. Well maybe a little. ( I like the scene by Madeleine's car when Scottie asks if he could wander with her. ) It does make him want to "wander" and not "desk jockey settle." It was the beginning of their love affair. Madeleine is very beautiful in a dream-like, cream-coloured way. Troubled. A mystery. He feels protective. She is just this much more of a challenge to love. To reach out toward love. Not an open book like Midge. Madeleine is a "seeking" project; not a done deal.

When Madeleine says she loves Scottie, cares for him, I think that it is Judy's heart and mind talking through Madeleine. And "Madeleine's" pulling away, is Judy knowing that this ruse will be ending soon. It's really a form of doublespeak that Judy says a truth that the audience doesn't quite understand how truthfully she's speaking. Judy has fallen in love with Scottie through Madeleine. Madeleine is a total dream - a ghostly spirit - a medium through which Judy’s feelings come. They come...THROUGH...Madeleine. Looks like Madeleine’s not the REAL entity throughout this whole thing. ( Maybe we only saw the real Madeleine Elster at Ernie's and the rest of the time, it was Judy. ) There’s something about Scottie that Judy/Madeleine responds to.

I do think there is something of Judy that comes through Madeleine to make Scottie love her, as you say, and the pulling away makes her irresistible. And I think Judy recognizes something in Scottie, something to warm her and protect her, a classiness that might rub off. I think there is a RECOGNITION between them, at least at the beginning when she's Madeleine. A recognition that they both are lonely, that they both have no place in the world anymore. You mention the scene where Scottie asks her what she's doing and she says 'wandering'. and he responds by asking to wander with her, and I believe it's she who says:



Well, they both are just that, wanderers in the world, observers in a world that is stagnant or dead for them. But where are they going? I don't think it can be good. There are never any tourists at the places they go. The space they inhabit is empty, isn't it? Surrounded by walls, or trees, or sky or ocean, but essentially empty of any living being. Some of these scenes actually remind me of Between Two Worlds.

I do have a question. I am pretty sure of the answer... it WAS Judy all along, wasn't it? When do you think Judy took over the part of Madeleine? Were they alone in the world, because Elster set things up that way? So no one would see them together and say to themselves, but I just saw Madeleine at the hairdresser's?

[pvitari]

I really don't have anything much to add to all that great commentary about Vertigo, other than I was completely obsessed by it for several years. (And still am to some degree.) I went to visit San Francisco once and arrived in a great big fog, but I still made my aunt drive me out to Fort Point so I could see where Madeleine/Judy jumped into the bay.

Henry Jones is effing brilliant in his scene. It's one of the creepiest things ever.

I keep wondering what happened in the scene we didn't see -- the one where Scottie undresses Madeleine/Judy and hangs up her clothes. What does he see, think, feel..........or do?

I have a friend who thinks Vertigo is stupid piffle. Yeah, he's still my friend despite that.