Boy, was I obsessed!

Rating: 10/10 (9 September 2004)

possible spoilers-

Does anyone need another comment on Vertigo? I don't think so. I'll be brief, sort of. Vertigo is the story of an illusion, of something that cannot be had. Scottie falls in love with a woman that doesn't exist so he's bound to lose her every time he falls for her, chases her or simply tries to make somebody else into her. It's not unrequited love or doomed love, it's just love, period, the idea of love, there's nothing else because there is no one to love, just Scottie entrapped in this sexual obsession with no object that can never be satisfied and from which there is no escape. I think that's Vertigo, sort of.
So what about Kim Novak? Miss Novak is Hitchcock's MacGuffin, the master's bait, the poisoned ghost he gives to Scottie to feed his imagination but at the other end of the ghost there's a woman, Judy, and she suffers the consequences. If there's a haunted soul in Vertigo is not that of Madeleine but Scottie's. Madeleine is the haunting ghost.
Vertigo is a very strange movie for Hitchcock. The plot has more than one hole. Vertigo makes sense for the eyes rather than the ears. But not always in a rational way, not if you think of Novak's make-up. The Carlotta subplot, for instance, are we to believe that Hichtcock is making a supernatural thriller with a Shyamalan twist? If we go along with everything is because we look through Scottie's eyes. To show us what Scottie sees Hitchcock displays a surreal feast worthy of Bunuel accompanied by an aesthetic refinement that would make Visconti eat his heart out. He was no stranger to either surrealism or elegance but I don't think he had ever abandoned himself to his visual instincts in this way. And he had a couple of master cards up his sleeve: a devastatingly beautiful Kim Novak and a peerless James Stewart. Stewart never was a heartthrob, he was the "everyman". Could some 50s hunk or some contemporary "everyman" have done what Stewart did in Vertigo? I don't think so. He makes accessible what is twisted, rich what is baseless.