Judy.

Rating: 10/10 (12 April 2000)

No superlatives. VERTIGO turns in one itself. Yes it's 'about' cinema, about the male spectator especially, about the self-destructive passivity of active desire. Like 'The Great Gatsby', its corresponding text in literature, VERTIGO is about illusory lives, dreams, and the unattainable girl. But VERTIGO complicates this. VERTIGO is not told only from the point of view of Scottie, or the omniscient 'narrator'/director who subtly undermines him. VERTIGO, unlike 'Gatsby', or 'Lolita', gives its heroine a voice. We are allowed to see what she sees and thinks. Scenes are coloured by her emotion, just as they are for Scottie. See how they both visualise Ernie's, for example: Scottie's expansive, enquiring, free point of view and Judy's broken, Sirkian, experience, foregounding intruding decor and different levels, like shattered fragments.
VERTIGO is Judy's tragedy - Scottie is actually offered a woman who will love him early, who will humiliate, negate, even kill herself for him; Judy loves someone who doesn't even know she exists. But her Scottie doesn't exist either - like Heathcliff awaiting his Cathy, he is in another realm. Her cramped ordinary room for her is a suitcase, a wardrobe, a wallet, photos; for Scottie it is a magical, fairy-tale, substance-less cave, where once again time collapses, and talk of 'three years' is irrelevant.