A Vertigo enigma

Rating: Null/10 (9 August 2010)

What can one possibly write about "Vertigo" that hasn't been written before? In spite of its detractors, who have quite rightly been relegated to the bottom of this enormous pile of contributions, it has come to be regarded by so many as the crowning glory of the Hitchcock oeuvre. As one who would not quite rank it so highly, I could possibly dispute this at length but it hardly seems worth the effort from one whose prime motive for these reviews is to impart enthusiasms rather than dissatisfactions. In any case there is so much that I admire about the film. I only raise my eyebrows with incredulity when a critic such as Michael Wilmington places it on a level with Augelopoulos's "Landscape in the Mist" ("Foreign Affairs" pub Mercury House inc.) or Donald Spoto's rating it as "one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has given us" ("The Art of Alfred Hitchcock" pub. W.H.Allen). For what it's worth, I consider "Vertigo" a tremendous entertainment, but not quite on the same level as "The Birds" or "The Wrong Man" which say so much more about the human condition. My only reason for writing anything that could be considered worthwhile about "Vertigo" is to mention something that I remember as completely puzzling from several viewings over the years. It is a mystery that on a reshowing this week still doesn't become any clearer. Remember the scene where Scotty (James Stewart) follows Madeleine (Kim Novak) to the McKittrick Hotel. When he asks the receptionist about her he is told that although Madeleine is a frequent visitor she is not there at the moment. When he is taken to the room where he had seen her looking out of a window only a few minutes earlier, she is not there. When he looks out of the window for her car, even that has disappeared. For a director of earthbound plots that never venture into the supernatural this is the only sequence in the whole of Hitchcock that makes no sense. I rushed to Spoto whose excellent analysis of "Vertigo" would surely offer enlightenment but even he seems at a loss to explain it, implying that the sighting of Madeleine at the window could be a figment of Scotty's imagination. He then rather wriggles out of it by citing another critic as saying it is an example of Hitchcock's "knot in the narrative which people may ponder at home after the movie". As I cannot think of any other such "knots" in Hitchcock films I rather think this could be bunkum. So there it is, an enigma for which there must be some explanation, or am I missing the point?