Coitus Interruptus?

Rating: Null/10 (12 December 1999)

In "Death In The Afternoon", Ernest Hemingway goes into considerable detail concerning penile tumescence. "To a man in that portentous state," writes Hemingway, "all objects look different. They are ... more mysterious, and vaguely blurred." Is this why, when Scottie Ferguson follows Madeleine into the graveyard, the scene is shot in soft focus?
Coit Tower is a recurrent phallus, standing proud against the San Francisco skyline. When Scottie has the naked Madeleine in his bed, the Tower is plainly visible through his apartment window. It is Scottie's insignia, and Madeleine uses it to navigate by ("it led me straight to you"). Whenever Madeleine is lost to him, Coit vanishes. When she re-enters his life, the Tower reappears.
Churches are important, too. The film's twin climaxes take place in the (equally phallic) church tower of San Juan Bautista. In real life, San Juan has no tower - the one in the film is pure Hitchcock. Churches represent mystery and a higher plane of spirituality, something to which Scottie cannot aspire, but they also symbolise the thing he fears most - geometry. In the graveyard, as he lusts after Madeleine, a church floats high above his head, up on the ridge. Madeleine is dangerous. When he gets out of his car outside the seedy McKittrick Hotel, a large neogothic church seems to fill the screen behind him. His thoughts are on squalid sex, and he stands out as a dark brown silhouette against the church's complex geometry. The repeated shot from inside the bulky arches of the San Juan colonnade remind us of the sense of permanence which is absent from Scottie's life.
Architecture is geometry, and the structures inherent in both have bothered Scottie ever since he saw the cop fall to his death against the severe perspective of the downtown buildings. He fears order - hence the remarkable animated nightmare which marks his loss of mental health, and hence Saul Bass's haunting title sequence with its epicyclic spirals. The Golden Gate Bridge is clean and spare, seemingly architecture-free, and it is associated in Scottie's mind with sexual arousal. It was underneath the bridge that he first got to fondle Madeleine, and like Midge's new bra, it is cantilevered out without any need for struts or supports. Scottie is one sick dude.