Detectives.

Rating: 10/10 (12 April 2000)

No superlatives. Detectives. Sherlock Holmes - personally detached from crime. Reads clues in the material world. Navigates London, time and place can be read and contained. Scottie Ferguson. Obviously not detached. He can't read material world because it doesn't exist, for two reasons: one, the world he sees has been created by someone else, a god/author figure, Gavin Elster, who like a good director gives Scottie a synopsis and a general idea of the plot, and then lets the actor (remember Hitch called them 'cattle') think he's improvising.
Two, because even if the world wasn't an illusion, Scottie's vision is. He cannot interpret what's in front of him, because he can't see it. No more than any of us can. Even before he begins the Madeleine/Carlotta chase, he first sees her at Ernie's, but not for what she is, a woman in a restaurant, but bathed in a strange, 'unrealistically' motivated glow.
In Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Daedelus distinguishes between Plato's realm of 'formless' ideality, with Aristotle's more material philosophy, 'what you d--- well have to see'. VERTIGO points up the shortsightedness of this viewpoint - Scottie sees what he sees, but it is a world of formless ideality. But Scottie's love isn't an illusion - not only is it real and painful, but it is psychosomatic: his mental anguish is suppressed and comes out in his body, and he becomes catatonic.