Vertigo: A Lesson in Obsession

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Kim Novak, James Stewart, Barbara El Geddess

Halfway through Vertigo, I needed to take a break. I vividly remember the scene when I felt the need bubble up. John Fergusson (James Stewart) had driven Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) to the Big Basin Redwoods State Park. John struggles to keep his growing emotions about Madeline at bay while she slowly transforms into a different person right in front of his eyes. John watches in transfixed horror as the new, strange Madeleine slowly walks away and disappears behind an enormous tree. The forest bed is blood red with fallen flowers. Unearthly tall trees that have witnessed the continent’s history make humans feel insignificant. You suddenly realize that Bernard Hermann’s background score, which till now was content with providing a backdrop of effortless suspense and thrill, is now tinged with the supernatural.

“Oh Scottie. I’m not mad. I’m not mad. I don’t want to die. There’s someone within me and she says I must die. Oh Scottie, don’t let me go!”

Hitchcock’s mastery lulls us into thinking we know where the movie is going. We are intrigued but not anxious when suddenly the tone shifts. What is happening? Where did Madeleine go? Were the woods always this dark?

We start doubting ourselves.

Even now, when I think about how I felt about that scene, I cannot help but think that Hitchcock was aided by something beyond his conscious power, intensified very ably by Bernard Herrmann’s consummate cinematography, to create such a chilling effect on us viewers.

Vertigo, the remastered version, is a visually ravishing and stylistic self-exploration by a master craftsman. It exists in the twilight zone – hazy and haloed – awash in Ruby and Emerald gradients. San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean contrasts how tiny the unfolding drama is compared to elemental nature. Throughout the movie, Hitchcock employs windows to present glimpses of cityscapes that look like they themselves have a million stories within them. Gridlike shipping dockyards, undulating streets of San Francisco, winding coast-hugging roads of California, neatly manicured missions. In true Hitchcock style, even the cityscape seems to have to conform with the director’s meticulous aesthetic.

John Ferguson seems to be recovering from an accident, much like L.B. Jefferies in Rear Window, but in this movie, his lady companion, Midge Wood, is unable to land her price. Ironically, she has rejected him. Hitchcock’s infamous relationship with the female characters in his movies is visible in how he stage-manages strained relations between his male and female leads. Their awkward and estranged relationship is left unexplored.

Our entire attention is wrenched away from Midge and thrust onto Madeleine when Madeline enters the scene.

Kim Novak, as Madeleine, oozes mystery and melancholy. The chemistry between John-“but-friends-call-me-Scottie” and Madeleine moves from curious to brooding to burning to stilted and ends in menace. To me, Madeleine’s character induces the most horror. Stuck between vicious men, forced to dress up as a doll, first for money and then for love, unable to extricate herself from her complicity, Madeleine’s position becomes increasingly claustrophobic as she climbs the emotional ladder from apathy to madness. Arguably, she was affected most by heights, metaphorically and literally.

Vertigo is suffused with gorgeous tones: olive green cars, a ghostly green room light that diffuses into a garish fluorescent green – green, green, green everywhere Madeleine goes. Contrasted by John’s red. In the restaurant scene where Tom Helmore (played so effortlessly and innocuously by Gavin Elster) arranges for John to discreetly see his wife, the walls are an ominously deep and rich burgundy. The men are wearing black suits. Madeleine, poor, poor Madeleine, a shimmering satiny ball gown of such a hue of green that the whole scene feels like a Caravaggio painting of a goblet of sweet wine and grapes laced with arsenic.

This is supposed to be Alfred Hitchcock’s most confessional movie, and maybe that’s what gives Vertigo its unmistakable potency. The director’s obsession with Grace Kelley, which he has projected onto Kim Novak, is reflected in John’s extreme insistence on how Madeleine is forced to accede to his demands.

Finally, we are left with haunting questions that do not have warm and fuzzy answers. The answers we come up with are reflective of ourselves. Why doesn’t Madeliene skip town when she could have? Was James ever in love with anyone other than himself? Who does Madeleine think is coming up the stairs?

Vertigo is a chilling and decadent feast for the eyes. I’m glad I watched it so late in my life.