Prismatic (possible spoiler)

Rating: 10/10 (12 April 2000)

No superlatives. Bernard Herrman's score, Wagnerian, Liebestod, love in death, in love with death - Hitchcock called the film a story about a necrophiliac. Yet lushly romantic too, as it totters, surges, jars and circles.
Flowers - beautiful, but already dead, plucked, dressed in bouquets, withering, dead, like the yellow flowers at the graveyard.
Images, almost mocking, throughout, of vertigo, the pans descending pans in Midge's kitchenette, the nocturnal shot of San Francisco that seems as if it has collapsed into the ground.
VERTIGO is not one movie, but an endless series of diffuse narratives - for example, you could watch the film by just looking at all the paintings.

Midge, brassiere, suspension bridge, 'don't be so motherly' - sexuality, San Francisco and mother complex (grace a Luke Gibbons).
The city as mind, compartmentalising of space, the inability to believe even what the 'normal' characters (Midge) say. The Waugh-like inferno of Mozart.
The use of religious iconography (the crucifix-avenues Scottie staggers away from after Maddie's fall; Scottie's chivalric quest coming to an end at Judy's hotel - twelfth (k)night, eve of the Epiphany, when Jesus revealed himself to the Wise Men - Scottie never makes it to the morning.
The film's most rapturous scene, as Scottie and Judy walk by BRIGADOON-like glades and fountains and ruins, unremarked by either. No superlatives. This film is the prism through which I view my life.