Dreams within a Dream

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2014)

Unless a movie is a fantasy, like "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), people tend to feel cheated if they find out that most of a movie has just been a dream. To keep the audience from feeling cheated, then, some movies will be ambiguous as to whether what we are seeing is reality or a dream, and this is the case with "Vertigo." The movie begins with a close-up of a woman's face. The camera moves in even closer on her eye, in which we begin to see swirling animation along with the opening credits. Moving into her eye suggests that we have moved into her subjective state, allowing us to see what she is imagining or remembering. And the animation is a further indication that what we are seeing is not real. Is the entire movie that follows this woman's dream?
After the credits, the movie jumps right into a chase sequence on the rooftops of tall buildings, when police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson slips and finds himself hanging from the gutter above the city street below, which causes him to have vertigo. A uniformed policeman tries to pull him to safety, but slips and falls to his death. When the scene ends, Ferguson is still hanging there, and we do not see him being rescued nor is there any reference to his being rescued afterward, leading some critics to argue that the rest of the movie is his hallucinatory dream while he remains suspended.
In the next scene, we meet Midge. In her conversation with Ferguson, whom she calls Johnny or Johnny O, we find out that they were engaged for three weeks while they were in college, but that she broke off the engagement, even though she says that she never married because he is the only man for her. From the surreptitious glances she gives him as they talk, we suspect there is more to the story than Ferguson is aware of. Midge is played by Barbara Bel Geddes, a nice looking woman with no sex appeal. We can easily believe that she broke off the engagement when she realized that he had no passion for her, so their relationship is Platonic. Such relationships are often characterized by saying that the man and woman are like brother and sister, but several remarks suggest that she is more like a mother to him. This implies that there is something naïve and inexperienced about Ferguson, as when they talk about braziers, and she says, "You know about those things. You're a big boy now."
Ferguson is an old bachelor. Today, a man who has been a lifelong bachelor would be assumed to have had sexual relationships along the way. But in 1958, when this movie was made, it was not uncommon for bachelors to be virgins, and that is probably the case with Ferguson. This makes it understandable when he later becomes obsessed with Madeleine, a woman he has been hired to follow by her husband, who is worried about her mental state. His latent sexuality suddenly bursts forth, for which he is completely unprepared.
Madeleine appears to be possessed by the spirit of her great grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, causing her to have strange dreams, to enter dreamlike trances, threatening to cause her to die like Carlotta, who committed suicide. When Madeleine does indeed apparently leap to her death, Ferguson feels responsible, and he ends up having nightmares, in which he sees himself falling the way Madeleine did. As a result, he ends up in a mental institution, in catatonic state.
Supposedly, he gets out of the mental institution, discovers a woman named Judy, who looks like Madeleine, and begins trying to make the resemblance even greater by getting her to dye her hair and wear it like Madeleine, to dress like Madeleine, until he eventually discovers she really is Madeleine. Or rather that Madeleine was murdered by her husband, and that Judy helped him do it by pretending to be Madeleine. This leads to a climactic scene in which Judy accidentally falls to her death.
Though the movie can be understood realistically in this way, there is a good reason to suspect that the second half is just a dream. In any movie you have ever seen in which someone is in a hospital, there is always a getting-out-of-the hospital scene, as in "The Glass Key" (1942), "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955), and "The Godfather" (1972). But there is no such scene in this movie. And considering that we last saw Ferguson in a psychotic state, the need for a getting-out-of-the-hospital scene would be even greater than in the examples just given, where only physical conditions were involved. Instead, we suddenly see Ferguson outside the building where Madeleine once lived, and the fact that he had once been under the care of psychiatrists is never even referred to during the rest of the movie.
By regarding the second half of the movie as a dream, the movie as a whole becomes more realistic. The murder plot is far-fetched and would have been extremely difficult to arrange. There are easier ways for a man to get rid of his wife than that. The idea that Madeleine was mentally unbalanced, had found out about her great-grandmother and become obsessed with her story, leading her to commit suicide, is much easier to believe.
Furthermore, Midge is not seen in the second half. She represents rationality and common sense, as well as being the woman Ferguson should have married. Her absence in the second half is an indication that only irrational forces are at work in his dream. The dream is wish-fulfilling. By dreaming that the woman he loved really did not die, that she was involved in a murder plot to kill the real Madeleine, he absolves himself in his dream of any responsibility for what happened to her, and is cured of his vertigo too.