Unfathomable.(spoilers)

Rating: 10/10 (15 August 2001)

It has become one of the cliches in talking about 'Vertigo' that it is Hitchcock's most personal work, a naked confession of his desires for blonde actresses in general, for Vera Miles (who was originally intended to play Madeleine/Judy) in particular. In this model, Scottie Ferguson who makes over Judy Barton in the image of another woman and destroys her in process, is Hitchcock making over Kim Novak in the image of a pregnant Vera Miles.

This is all well and good, if a little facile, but isn't the true Hitchcock altar-ego in 'Vertigo', a man whose place of business is introduced by Hitchcock's cameo, Gavin Elster? The seemingly stolid, amiable craftsman creating mad, mind-bending murder plots, and then disappearing for ever, just as Hitchcock creates in 'Vertigo' a truly Borgesian labyrinth without a centre, lets generations of critics loose in it, and vanishes with the map? The plot of 'Vertigo' is pure illusion, a phantom narrative starring a possessing ghost, formerly an actress; in trying to recreate a phantom, to become Gavin Elster, to possess a possessed woman (in both senses - by Carlotta Valdes; by Elster), Scottie merely duplicates and proliferates more and more phantoms until he wanders around in a world that doesn't exist.
There is a school of thought that presuasively argues that 'Vertigo' is a Surrealist film - one critic even suggests that Scottie dies at the beginning (and how on earth was he rescued from a rotting gutter; by the criminal?), and that the rest of the film is a dream. this is convincing because the film follows a dream logic, in its repetition, overlaying and transformation of scenes, characters, motifs, colours etc. When Scottie has the famous nightmare after Madeleine's death, the nocturnal view of Scottie, with 'SP' blazing in neon that began the film, with Scottie and the policeman pursuing a miscreant, is repeated here. Why?
One thing is for certain, this nightmare sequence is the key moment in 'Vertigo'. There is a pattern in the film where characters take on the characteristics of other characters, like ghosts, most obviously in the case of Judy and Madeleine. In the film's second half, Scottie begins with his mind blasted, emptied of his own personality. He begins it leaving a mental institution. He is ready to become someone else. He wants, both unwittingly and, after the discovery of the necklace, consciously, to become Elster, the creator of the film, the potent God who created a world and convinced his actors it was the real one. The man who got away.

Scottie fails to become Elster because he becomes Madeleine, another of Elster's creations. Madeleine tells Scottie the imprecise details of a recurring dream she has - Scottie in his nightmare enacts her dream and her fate. The end of the film will see him trying to extricate himself from his role and his Creator, but he will only repeat it, once again causing an 'innocent' woman to die for his own masculine vanity.

The film is full of blatant visual imagery expressing male and female principles, but it is Scottie who is feminised, who ends the film paralysed in a vaginal arch, just as earlier he stood in his doorway and Elster's actress stood with (the sardonically named) Coit Tower behind her. These arches are not just the female principles Scottie gets lost in, they are the proscenium arches of master playwright Elster, whose signature is found throughout the film, right from their first meeting, he relating his plot on a stage, Scottie the audience listening.
'Vertigo' was recently shown at the Irish Film Centre on 70mm. Some clown fouled up the sound. Normally this would be a vandalism punishable only by torture, but this time it gave me a chance to do something I'd always wanted to do, but was always prevented by Hitchcock's narrative intractibility - follow the story through the paintings. There are so many paintings in every room in 'Vertigo' (and in Scottie's is one of those scientific patterns of the opening credits, linking him again to the female object).

In Midge's study, the images of the female are fetishistically Surreal, fragments of the female body and their clothes (just as Scottie is decapitated/castrated in his nightmare) - in one painting above her sofa, where Scottie lies, surrounded by pictures of women, is an abstract study of fragments as if an explosion has just taken place. In Elster's room, ships naturally predominate, especially a storm scene where light on the left where Scottie stands meets the dark turbulence on Elster's, the side Scottie will cross into. The sound, I'm afraid, came back, and I once again got lost in the labyrinth, but I'm determined to do this properly some day. I did like the child with the code in the gallery behind Scottie (Carlotta's child? The child none of the characters have?), and the forest scene in the mental hospital, reminding us of the sequoias.
Still the greatest.