Close Analysis Vertigo

Keeva Artman
Film Theory TR 11:00-12:15
Paper Proposal
Vertigo
The film Vertigo explores the intricacies of the line between fantasy and reality through the lack of reality in the film. The entire film is built around characters attempting to create illusions in order manipulate the other characters, but also, the film displays the mysterious allure the dead may exert on the living. The twist here, however, is in Vertigo the deathly object of desire is fully incarnated in the figure of a character, Madeleine, who is supposedly possessed by Carlotta Valdes; a woman whose picture hangs in the San Francisco art museum. The ghostlike Madeleine brings to life the youthful image of Carlotta giving the character a sense of timelessness, a mask-like immortality. In comes Scottie Ferguson (also known as John by close friends), a detective who was forced to retire because of his severe fear of heights, is asked a favor by an old friend, Gavin Elster, to come out of retirement to follow his wife, Madeleine, to find out what exactly is going on. Ultimately Scottie reluctantly agrees. After following Madeleine a few times and saving her life from an apparent suicide once, he begins to grow a strange fascination and love for his friend’s wife, all the way up until (and considerably after) her untimely suicide. Ultimately Madeleine becomes a fetish object for Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) as shown through the way he reacts when he loses her. In a desperate attempt to get back the woman he loves, he reconstructs her image in the body of one Judy Barton (Kim Novak) from Salina, Kansas, who, of course, turns out to have been Madeleine after all. Essentially having one actor depict so many different characters throughout the film naturally results in a whirlwind of uncertainty and difficulty for the audience in establishing what is real from what is not; in a sense almost giving the audience a feeling of vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock’s use of twisted character profiles and confusing double names emphasizes the sense of artificiality in the film. However, it’s the visual themes, such as mirrors which also make a huge contribution to the illusion and ultimately gives the audience a way of depicting what’s reality and what’s not in the movie, which will be explained in greater detail throughout this essay. One of the main visual aids Hitchcock chooses to employ to highlight the difference between the reality and fantasy worlds in the film is through his use of mirrors. This device is most prominent in the necklace scene, after Judy has completed her transformation into Madeleine. The scene takes place in Judy’s apartment, which shows almost no personality and is quite devoid of color, emitting only tones of grey and an eerie green. John sits off to the corner seemingly happy, reading a newspaper, knowing that through his tireless efforts he has seemingly been able to recreate the image of the ideal woman, Madeleine, his fetish through Judy. His happiness gives almost an eerie sickness to go along with the tone of the apartment. He has been so infatuated with recreating the character of Madeleine that he has changed the look of a completely different woman (at the time it’s what John is meant to believe) and seems almost psychotic to think that the recreation of her will substitute for his loss of the actual thing, essentially his recreation is just a mirror of the real thing. Finally Judy exits the bathroom wearing a long figure flattering black dress, her hair bleached blonde, like Madeleine, and pinned back, like Madeleine, for the liking of John. When she exits the bathroom they begin discussing dinner plans for the evening and oddly enough Judy picks Ernie’s, the very first place John saw Madeleine. John then makes a remark about how much Judy must really like that place and in a way it seems as though as Judy (who the audience knows was really Madeleine to begin with) is also trying to mirror John and Madeleine’s relationship from what it was before. As much as Judy would like to be herself for John it seems as if she’s more comfortable with John acting as Madeleine. After John’s remark Judy begins to look in the mirror and attempt to put on a necklace, the very necklace that Madeleine once wore, that belonged to her grandmother Carlotta Valdes. After Judy’s failed attempt to put the necklace on, she asks John for help and he obliges. At first John doesn’t realize the necklace, and it is noticeable that while he is helping Judy put on her necklace he never looks directly at her; he only looks at her through the mirror. Finally John comes to a realization that the necklace was that of his supposedly dead fetish, a frame flashes back to that of the necklace on the painting and for the first time after he got up from the chair, he looks directly at Judy for exactly who she is. There is no longer a “mirror” there to display a replica of what once was, but instead the very woman who made him believe she was Madeleine and that she was dead.
A very crucial formal decision Hitchcock makes in the necklace scene is his strategic choice not to give his audience the point of view shot of Scottie looking at the mirror, but the point of view shot as us looking at the mirror through Scottie’s eyes as himself. In that shot the audience is Scottie, hypothetically and he becomes the mirror of the audience themselves, therefore the audience is forced to feel the shock and anger Scottie does within himself (and now their selves). The audience, however, should not feel any sense of shock at all, considering they were already aware of Judy’s lies to begin with, so by setting up the frame in this way and creating emotion within the audience, Hitchcock also creates a sense of suspense for the audience that will be kept up throughout the rest of the movie. Filming this shot from the point of view as Scottie helps keep up with the multiplying mirror effects that the audience has been witnessing throughout the film. By having the audience view the necklace through the mirror from Scottie’s point of view it allows the audience to get lost in conflicts of the movie once again, so they are now not simply watching the movie but are emotionally invested as well as tangled up in all the confusing manipulations going on in the film itself. This brilliant decision made by Hitchcock to film this one shot in such a way, creates so much more depth for the movie itself, while taking the audience that much farther into the world of Vertigo.
The use of the mirror is a stroke of genius by Hitchcock and is vital in Vertigo because it adds a visual dimension to the film, which keeps the audience constantly guessing and constantly on their feet. Mirrors can be defined as simply representing a lack of reality, or a representation of an object and not the object itself. In the book Film Theory, by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, the way they choose to define mirror goes right along with the film itself. Their explanation states this about the mirror: “This feeling of having the ground pulled from under one turns the mirror into a privileged place of ontological uncertainty by virtue of the fact that the mirror absorbs the lack of groundedness of the cinematographic image and turns it into a double reflection.” In effect, just as a movie itself is a mirror for reality, the mirror within the movie serves to reemphasize the "ontological uncertainty". So going back to the necklace scene, John realizing that Judy was actually Madeleine the whole time could be thought of as the ground being pulled from under his feet. This gives him an uncertainty as to the nature of Judy’s existence, ultimately leading him to realize he’s looking, essentially, at a reflection of a reflection. She is a reflection of a woman who played the wife of John’s friend, and now she’s a reflection of a woman John’s transformed back into the image of the wife of his friend, but is still playing Judy, herself. Ultimately she’s playing different characters with the same exact image, but is always a representation of John’s friend’s wife, therefore making herself a double reflection. The character expresses the dualistic nature of the mirror; a reflection of that which faces it and also simply a plate of glass with no organic essence.
As outlined above, the use of the mirror serves to emphasize the imagined reality of the cinema. Just as the mirror is simply a plate of glass but can be made to project a thing that is living, so too the movie screen is simply canvas that is made to project a reality, a reality that exists only in the mind of the audience and the filmmaker. The added genius of Vertigo is its ability to demonstrate that this imagined reality is not simply a consequence of attending a movie. Through artifices such as the use of mirrors, Hitchcock shows the audience that such imagined reality can be a part of everyday life.
Vertigo is a movie that can also beg the question of the relationship between mirrors and the imaginary signifier. How are the two related and vital to each other when being used in a film? It is said that fashion passes, but culture survives (Film Form 109). The culture of the cinema today has a rich language behind it that is important to understand different concepts and terms of cinema before answering the question above. It’s necessary to understand that film is itself a ‘textual system’ and with that textual system there lays signs (Heath 131). Film has the signifier, the signified and the referent, which are all used to explain different cinematic concepts, which will be explained a little later on.
The film image is understood as a reflection of the self (Elsaesser and Hagener 55). One could say that all mirrors are reflections of objects themselves; however when it comes to cinema the obvious object at hand that is missing is the reflection of the spectators body itself. So how could the screen ever be considered a reflection of ourselves? Christian Metz in his article “The Imaginary Signifier” states that when we are young we learn to identify household objects, our mother’s hands, arms etc., and through those actions we eventually come to primary identification or the formation of our ego, which develops further from objects that are our like. Therefore before one can step into the cinema they have to have a true understanding of self, meaning one does not have to see himself/herself in the mirror (the true mirror) in order to identify what they are looking at. Once the primary identification is set the secondary identification takes place, where the spectator can identify with the characters, making the cinema a more symbolic mirror than a true one because the reflection on the screen is not of them, but of the world of objects around them, The spectator is now able to see the unified image as part of our language. The imaginary signifier is the idea of, for example, a person (the signified) and not the actual person itself (referent). In Vertigo Judy posing as Madeleine, Gavin Elster’s wife, is the imaginary signifier for Elster’s actual wife, who is only seen when Madeleine’s apparent “suicide” happens. Therefore the whole time Judy is just representing the idea of Elster’s wife and is not the actual wife herself. With the basic meaning of mirror and imaginary signifier set aside, it is easier to delve into why they are so vital to each other in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
In this particular movie there is ultimately one specific character representing the idea of another, and that character is Judy. In the beginning she represents the idea of Elster’s wife but then when Scottie finds her again she will eventually be turned to represent the idea of the deceased Madeleine again, however that time she is able to keep her own name. The second time around when Judy becomes Madeleine and the audience is aware of who she really is and was, the movie then turns to the use of mirror in a way that both actors attempt to mirror their relationship to the way it was prior to the suicide of Madeleine. Scottie being unaware of Judy’s secret does not realize that when she picks out Ernie’s for their dining experience, that she is actually trying to mirror her relationship as Madeleine with Scottie. Judy is uncomfortable with her actual self because she knows that he fell in love with the idea of a woman that she was portraying and not the woman who she actually is. She is visually just the mirror of Madeleine and intellectually, for Scottie, the idea of Madeleine. Ultimately the use of mirrors and the imaginary signifier is essential in making this movie as suspenseful and manipulating as it is. Without the two elements together Hitchcock would have never been able to create such a revolutionary movie that is still talked about by film theorists today.

Annotated Bibliography

Eisenstein, Sergei, and Jay Leyda. Film Form; Essays in Film Theory,. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. Print.
I chose this book because it had many different chapter on film from many different essayists. The chapter “Film Language” and “Film Structure” allowed me to broaden and understand some cinematic concepts better, however I did not use this source a whole lot throughout my paper because I felt that it did repeat some concepts I already had from other sources.
Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. New York, New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
I used our film theory book because it had a chapter on mirror and face. The beginning of the chapter talked about the screen as an object of reflexive doubling of everything but the spectator himself/herself. Being able to explain the reflexive aspect of the screen allowed me to go more into detail about an idea of an object/person when I have to explain the imaginary signifier.
Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981. Print.
I chose this source because it went into detail about the language of cinema and in order to truly understand the imaginary signifier you have to understand the semiotics of film. The chapter that I obtained most of my information from was chapter five “Film, System, Narrative”. Chapter five explored the textual system of film, explaining semiotics etc., which I felt was very important for me to understand before writing about the imaginary signifier, which uses signs (signified, referent) to explain its concept. I did actual reading of this source more than I used it in my paper, however it was very help for me in writing my paper because it allowed me to understand some terms and concepts that I have not understood fully before.
Metz, Christian. "The Imaginary Signifier." Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York, New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Web.
I used Christian Metz article of the imaginary signifier because it had all the information for me to read and use on my explanation for the imaginary signifier in my paper. Every other source I would look up for this subject would always reference back to this article, so I felt it was only right to use this article for my paper. The article talks about primary and secondary identification as well as the introduction to the ego, all of which I was able to incorporate into my paper to make it possible to relate to the idea or mirror and film.

Bibliography: Eisenstein, Sergei, and Jay Leyda. Film Form; Essays in Film Theory,. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. Print. I chose this book because it had many different chapter on film from many different essayists. The chapter “Film Language” and “Film Structure” allowed me to broaden and understand some cinematic concepts better, however I did not use this source a whole lot throughout my paper because I felt that it did repeat some concepts I already had from other sources. Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. New York, New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. I used our film theory book because it had a chapter on mirror and face. The beginning of the chapter talked about the screen as an object of reflexive doubling of everything but the spectator himself/herself. Being able to explain the reflexive aspect of the screen allowed me to go more into detail about an idea of an object/person when I have to explain the imaginary signifier. Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981. Print. I chose this source because it went into detail about the language of cinema and in order to truly understand the imaginary signifier you have to understand the semiotics of film. The chapter that I obtained most of my information from was chapter five “Film, System, Narrative”. Chapter five explored the textual system of film, explaining semiotics etc., which I felt was very important for me to understand before writing about the imaginary signifier, which uses signs (signified, referent) to explain its concept. I did actual reading of this source more than I used it in my paper, however it was very help for me in writing my paper because it allowed me to understand some terms and concepts that I have not understood fully before. Metz, Christian. "The Imaginary Signifier." Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York, New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Web. I used Christian Metz article of the imaginary signifier because it had all the information for me to read and use on my explanation for the imaginary signifier in my paper. Every other source I would look up for this subject would always reference back to this article, so I felt it was only right to use this article for my paper. The article talks about primary and secondary identification as well as the introduction to the ego, all of which I was able to incorporate into my paper to make it possible to relate to the idea or mirror and film.