Fear of space

Rating: 8/10 (19 April 2009)

This one's been through the mill. I mean it, no joke -- every amateur and professional critic has had their crack at this film. If you piled up every interpretation, the film could mean just about anything and everything. You could also see it the way perhaps most of its original audience saw it, simply as a stylish suspense film with Jimmy Stewart playing a somewhat less savory hero than usual. But I'll go ahead and offer up what the film seems to say to me, without fear of repetition or hope of originality because there may simply be no uncharted territory where this film is concerned.
Looking at the film's text first -- it should be admitted and recognized that this is in no way a "mystery" film. The whole idea of what happened is revealed halfway through, just in case it wasn't obvious enough for some of the dunces in the crowd. It's an out and out suspense film, and the object of the suspense is the Stewart character and how he will react to the moment when he recognizes that Madeleine and Judy are actually the same person. I would say that in terms of the dramatic functions of the film, it scores perhaps a B plus. Throwing dollops of makeup on Kim Novak and making her look like some kind of gypsy didn't make me think she was a different person, and wouldn't be likely to make this former detective who Stewart is playing either.
However there is a lot of very compelling subtext here. There's the whole implication of dopplegangers, the idea of the fluidity of identity which is common to a lot of "noir" films. After all, it's impossible to talk about Madeleine and Judy being "actually" the same person without realizing the irony -- Judy was never Madeleine, but Scottie (Stewart) can never look at Judy without seeing that other person. In the end he is psychologically confused, throwing a tirade in the defense of a "Madeleine" who he never actually met and certainly never loved.
There's this striking sense of a disconnect between past and present, intention and action, place and feeling. For example Hitchcock takes this lovers' stroll in Muir Woods among the redwood trees and somehow turns it into a scene of dread, as if the forest were haunted. There's absolutely no way for the characters to connect with that environment, and it produces a weird dissonance. Everywhere in the film, elements are being inappropriately juxtaposed: Marjorie's face on the portrait of the old Spanish lady, an older woman in a similar dress getting into Madeleine's car, the "real" Madeleine being thrown from the tower and mistaken by Scottie for his Madeleine, in the film's final moments a nun of all things being mistaken for the angel of death. The point is never that these things are not what they seem to be -- after all, which Madeleine was the "real" Madeleine, for Scottie I mean?