Vertigo is not the Last Word in Misogyny, but a Feminist Deconstruction of It

In March this year I posted this on my Instagram account.

Last night BBC showed 78/52, a documentary on the shower scene in Psycho (1960) from director / writer Alexandre O. Philippe. My daughter saw the film, some weeks ago, for the first time and we spoke about it. I told her about my reservations. I think Hitchcock went too far in his later years. The slashing of a naked woman in the shower in Psycho. The bird attack in Mitch's attic on Melanie in The Birds (1963). The rape scene in Marnie (1964) . The murder of Gromek in Torn Curtain (1966), he is stabbed, battered with a shovel and eventually gassed in an oven. Still I hold both The Birds and Marnie in high regard. I think Hitchcock is a true romantic. I like his heroines. I like Erica Burgoyne, daughter of a policeman, in Young and Innocent (1937) who is determined to proof a man’s innocence. I like Charlie in Shadow of a doubt (1943), who exposes her charming uncle Charlie as a ladykiller, loosing her naïveté in the process. I like Lisa Fremont in Rear window (1954) , a fashionable woman from high society who has the courage to enter the apartment of a man who has murdered his wife, while wheelchair-bound photographer L.B. 'Jeff' Jefferies has to watch. All strong women who know how to man up. Transformation is a theme in all his films; Norman Bates dressing up as his mother in Psycho, Roger O. Thornhill (mark the initials), in North by Northwest ( 1959) , is mistaken for George Kaplan, a man who doesn’t exist, but Roger becomes George, in Vertigo (1958) detective Scottie Ferguson buys the right clothes for Judy Barton, he even rearranges her hairdo, she changes into Madeleine Elster (initials!), a woman he followed professionally , loved and lost, the 2nd Mrs de Winter in a dress of her dead predecessor in Rebecca (1940). Hitchcock was at his most romantic in Notorious (1946). It’s about the exploitation of Alicia Huberman to near death, by a secret agent called Devlin (devil), who falls in love with her. It’s all about Alicia infiltrating Nazi circles in Brazil, to prevent them from seizing world power again with 'uranium ore'.

       Today we celebrate the 60^th anniversary of his film Vertigo.

       If, in some quarters, Hitchcock and his films are still considered the last word in misogynistic creepiness, Vertigo is exhibit No 1. “Look how strong and stable the male characters are,” says one critic (I’m paraphrasing, but not by much), while describing the female characters as simultaneously “unhinged, duplicitous and submissive puppets” – which would be quite a feat if it were true.

While Scottie is Vertigo’s protagonist, his point of view is unambiguously delusional. There are only brief flashes from the female characters’ perspectives, but they are as clear-eyed as Scottie’s own vision is blinkered, and are as essential to the story’s poignancy as the women watch helplessly while he rejects the real world and spirals down into necrophilia. Judy loves him, but he is not interested in her – he just wants to remould her into the spitting image of his fantasy woman. She reluctantly capitulates, but was there ever a line as heartbreaking as: “If I do what you tell me, will you love me?”

As for dear sweet Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), Scottie’s friend and ex-fiancee – has there ever been a woman who watched Vertigo without identifying with her, even just a little bit? She’s clever, funny, down-to-earth and selflessly supportive, but what use are these attributes when the man she loves has no sense of humour or self-awareness, and prefers instead to lose himself in an ethereal, flaky fantasy of womanhood?

It is not hard to find claims that Hitchcock’s female characters are blond and bad and deserve to die. “The sexual fantasies of his adult life were lavish and peculiar, and, from the evidence of his films, he enjoyed devising the rape and murder of women,” Peter Ackroyd wrote in Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life. “They all get punished in the end,” Bidisha wrote in a Guardian article about Hitchcock’s women. “They were blond. They were icy and remote,” wrote Roger Ebert. “Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated.”

And not for the first time, I wonder if I have been watching the same films as these other writers. Hitchcock himself didn’t help matters by colluding in his own mythology with statements that seemed designed to provoke. “I always believe in following the advice of the playwright Sardou. He said: ‘Torture the women!’ ... The trouble today is that we don’t torment women enough.”

But just for a moment, let us consider Hitchcock’s women – all his women, not just the ones played by Novak, Leigh and Hedren. At all stages of his career, he surrounded himself with strong female collaborators such as his wife Alma (whose contributions to his work should never be underestimated), Joan Harrison (secretary, screenwriter and producer), Peggy Robertson (script supervisor and assistant) and Suzanne Gauthier (personal secretary).

And for a so-called misogynist, his films feature a lot of intrepid heroines. Think of sharpshooting Jill Lawrence in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), feisty Erica Burgoyne in Young and Innocent (1937), Iris Henderson rejecting attempts to gaslight her in The Lady Vanishes (1938), Mary Yellen tackling a gang of wreckers in Jamaica Inn (1939), Charlie Newton realising there’s more to her beloved Uncle Charlie than meets the eye in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Dr Constance Petersen treating her patient and solving the mystery in Spellbound (1945), Eve Gill sleuthing in disguise in Stage Fright (1950), Jo McKenna singing Que Sera, Sera as a child-locating device in Hitchcock’s own remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

Even when the women are nominally just love interests, they are unusually plucky and quick-witted. Take Pamela in The 39 Steps (1935), Carol Fisher in Foreign Correspondent (1940), Pat Martin in Saboteur (1942) and – above all – Lisa Fremont in Rear Window (1954), who proves she is more than just a vision of pulchritude in a perfect little day dress by breaking into the murderer’s apartment to snoop around. In all the rooms across the courtyard, Rear Window lays out the various stages of sexual relationships for the benefit of its commitment-phobic male voyeur, but marriage in Hitchcock’s films is rarely a happy-ever-after ending, more often the prelude to a woman’s struggle for survival in films such as Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941) and Notorious (1946).

The monstrous mothers of Hitchcock’s films are often cited as another proof of his misogyny. Yet no one ever seems to question Hollywood’s perennial obsession with father issues. And why should mothers be self-effacing and weak? Besides, Mrs Bates in Psycho exists only as a figment of her son’s imagination, and Alexander Sebastian’s mother in Notorious is – from her point of view – entirely correct to be suspicious of his new wife, who is a spy. And offsetting the monstrous mothers or domineering housekeepers (Mrs Danvers in Rebecca, or Milly, hiding shrunken heads in Henrietta Flusky’s bed in Under Capricorn, 1949) there are always benign, dotty but delightfully unconventional – and both played by Jessie Royce Landis – Jessie Stevens in To Catch a Thief (1955) and Clara Thornhill in North by Northwest (1959). “You gentlemen aren’t really trying to kill my son, are you?”

As for Vertigo, it mercilessly scrutinises romantic love while swooning over it. That giant redwood, Bernard Herrmann’s music, that dizzying dolly and zoom. The film doesn’t just reflect Hitchcock’s own attempts to control his leading ladies, but suggests how contemporary notions of romance have themselves been shaped by Hollywood movies. It is not an example of misogyny, but an overblown, beautiful and tragic deconstruction of it.

By Anne Bilson, The Guardian , June 28 2018. 

The official 60^th anniversary trailer on YouTube

There are two ways of approaching Vertigo. One is to see it as a male film on the side of the male view of women; the other is to see it as a satirical attack on the misogynist mindset. They are, in fact, two sides of the same interpretative coin. The imaginative sympathies and dramatic voltage are wired up to Scottie’s anguished point of view. (Actually, Hitchcock did make a film from the viewpoint of the woman, the female gazee, forced by a controlling man into the shoes of his obsessed-over first love – Rebecca.)

One of the film’s most brilliant moments concerns Scottie’s platonic pal and ex-girlfriend Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a commercial artist in whose messy bohemian apartment Scottie is in the habit of hanging out. Midge crucially wears glasses, the sort that in other circumstances might be removed by someone saying: “Why Miss Wood, you’re beautiful!” These glasses are there to make her less attractive and signal that she is not the movie’s romantic interest, but also that she herself is a seer, a gazer – noticing from afar evidence of Scottie and Madeleine’s affair with a wry smile, but also perhaps a twinge of the heart.

Inspired by Scottie telling her about Madeleine’s own trance-like obsession with a 19th-century portrait of a beautiful tragic ancestor, Midge paints herself in the same pose: glasses and all. When he sees it, Scottie winces. So do we, the audience. The pure wrongness is shocking: smart, wry, detached Midge is completely wrong in the role. The portrait has to be of someone infinitely, demurely, fatally passive and gazed upon – not a humorous, intelligent woman with her own visual judgment and indeed her own job.

The Freudian images are everywhere in Vertigo, and not simply in the showstopping dream sequences or the nightmarish light-filter changes bringing out the hypnotic pale blue of Stewart’s eyes. The “brassiere” or bra that Midge is drawing for an ad is cantilevered, she says, like a bridge – thus associating the famous Golden Gate Bridge scene with a woman’s underwear. (When Scottie brings Madeleine back to his apartment after saving her from drowning, he undresses her and puts her in bed while she is still unconscious: although perhaps he left her underwear in place. It isn’t clear.) The tower could be phallic, and the nestling nosegay of flowers that Madeline buys is also emblematic of something, though not as obviously as the tight whorl of hair at the back of her head: a mesmeric circle (again, like bloody water circling a drain) or an orifice of some sort.

Vertigo review – still spinning its dizzying magic

By Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian , July   12, 2018

       

If you want to know all about Hitchcock’s masterpiece.

The most studied and analyzed film of Alfred Hitchcock’s career, ‘Vertigo’ is on every level a masterclass in filmmaking. Cinephilia  & Beyond

François Truffaut :

In that case it would have been bought by some French director, on account of the suc­cess of Diabolique. As a matter of fact, Boileau and Narcejac did four or five novels on that the­ory. When they found out that you had been interested in acquiring the rights to Diabolique, they went to work and wrote D’Entre les Morts, which Paramount bought for you. Can you tell me what it was about this book that specially appealed to you?

Alfred Hitchcock  :

I was intrigued by the hero’s attempts to re-create the image of a dead woman through another one who’s alive. As you know, the story is divided into two parts. The first part goes up to Madeleine’s death, when she falls from the steeple, and the second part opens with the hero’s meeting with Judy, a brunette who looks just like adeleine. In the book it’s at the beginning of that second part that the hero meets Judy and tries to get her to look like Madeleine, and it’s only at the very end that both he and the reader discover that Ma­deleine and Judy are one and the same girl. That’s the final surprise twist. In the screenplay we used a different approach. At the beginning of the second part, when Stewart meets the brunette, the truth about Judy’s identity is disclosed, but only to the viewer. Though Stewart isn’t aware of it yet, the viewers already know that Judy isn’t just a girl who looks like Madeleine, but that she is Madeleine! Everyone around me was against this change; they all felt that the revelation should be saved for the end of the picture. I put myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling him a story. When there’s a pause in her narration, the child always says, “What comes next, Mommy?” Well, I felt that the second part of the novel was written as if nothing came next, whereas in my formula, the little boy, knowing that Madeleine and Judy are the same person, would then ask, “And Stewart doesn’t know it, does he? What will he do when he finds out about it? In other words, we’re back to our usual alternatives: Do we want suspense or surprise? We followed the book up to a certain point. At first Stewart thinks Judy may be Madeleine; then he resigns himself to the fact that she isn’t, on condition that Judy will agree to resemble Madeleine in every respect. But now we give the public the truth about the hoax so that our suspense will hinge around the question of how Stewart is going to react when he discovers that Judy and Madeleine are actually the same person. That’s the main line of thought. But there’s an additional point of interest in the screenplay. You will remember that Judy resisted the idea of being made to look like Madeleine. In the book she was simply reluctant to change her appearance, with no justification for her attitude. Whereas in the film, the girl’s reason for fighting off the changes is that she would eventually be unmasked. So much for the plot. To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who’s dead; he is indulging in a form of necrophilia.

   

Richard Allen demonstrates his enduring fascination and respect for Hitchcock’s filmmaking within a compelling new authorial study. Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony examines the director’s overarching modes of narration and formal dexterity, and deftly incorporates an analysis of the entire spectrum of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. In his preface, Allen describes this effort as a “study in poetics” in which he articulates a process of “descriptive generalization” that unifies his analysis of Hitchcock’s work around the concepts of romantic irony and aestheticism (p. XII). Although the author explains at the outset that the concept of romantic irony is elusive and its usage often amorphous, he offers an adventurous intellectual inquiry into the formation and definition of the term as it applies to Hitchcock’s work, stressing its importance in the organisation of narrative meaning as the articulation of a double perspective in which its various and opposing forms serve to both define and unify the director’s diverse body of work. Allen situates his critical inquiry amongst a wealth of Hitchcock studies by academics and theorists (including his own previously published essays) which he draws on throughout the book while privileging his distinctive approach to this project. The influence of late Romanticism on Hitchcock’s work is explored in detail, as well as the particular ways in which Hitchcock utilises the forms of romantic irony within suspense and black humour to both affirm and subvert the Romantic ideal. Allen cogently relates this inquiry to the questions of aestheticism and style that emerge in the conception of romantic irony and in the articulation of suspense.

Allen’s investigation of sexuality and suspense offers perceptive and original insights in his analysis of the wrong-man/wronged-man motifs, specifying how problems of recognition and misrecognition structure Hitchcock’s plots, and how sexual difference informs the quest for knowledge and the consequences of that knowledge. While noting the distinctions drawn by Hitchcock between “male and female forms of knowledge and being” (p. 81), Allen presents a fresh take on the work of feminist writers such as Laura Mulvey and Tania Modleski through an interpretive approach that vividly renders the director’s realignment of traditional gendered epistemologies. Hitchcock’s “self-conscious revision” of masculinity, characteristic of his films of the ’40s and ’50s, is identified within a cross-section of protagonists who are subject to vulnerability and weakness, ranging from the alluring rogue to the sympathetic anti-hero to the “criminal dandy” (p. 83). The ambiguity of “queer” sexuality found in both male and female characters who are excluded from normative heterosexual relationships emerges from what Allen identifies as the “residue of Hitchcock’s English, Edwardian sensibility” (p. 107). In Hitchcock’s earlier English period, Allen cites examples of the dandy persona in the protagonist of The Lodger and Sir John (Herbert Marshall) in Murder! (1930), characters who create a template for a “sympathetic figure of deviance” in Hitchcock’s films and whose relationship to good and evil “exists outside of ordinary structures of social authority” (p. 107). In his later American period, the dandy often appears as a criminally perverse character, such as Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), both Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) in Rope (1948) and Bruno (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train. Allen articulates the complex ways in which Hitchcock informs the criminal dandy’s particular relationship to knowledge and power, exhibited here as unambiguously demonic in comparison to the “wrong man” protagonist, while simultaneously exhibiting traits of vulnerability and empathy lacking in the hero (p. 107).

In conceptualising aestheticism as Hitchcock’s stylistic mode of romantic irony, Allen defines an essential distinction between contrasting modes of masculine and feminine aesthetic in which his visual style registers as either “perverse sexual content” or “the idealization of an incipiently self-annihilating femininity” (p. 161). This is exemplified at times in the playful appropriation of male voyeurism, fetishisation or narcissistic illusion that suggest an aura of perversity and sado-masochism, and constitute the perverse sexual content that Allen contends is “the alibi upon which Hitchcock can construct his pure cinema” (p. 154). Hitchcock’s aestheticism is richly elaborated in Allen’s discussion of Vertigo’s stylistics, illustrating his claim that within the director’s work “human sexuality, deemed by definition perverse, is self-consciously displaced into style in the manner of a Freudian joke that at once disguises and reveals its sexual content” (p. XV).

The final chapters of the book delineate in compelling detail the significance of iconography, expressionism and the domain of colour in the director’s later works, which Allen argues is a gesture towards a “surrealist aesthetic” (p. 219). While stressing Hitchcock’s attention to visual expressionism as the articulation of the double or “shadow world” (p. XVI), Allen offers a comprehensive catalogue of the elements of graphic design and expressionist imagery, demonstrating the author’s visceral engagement with his material. In a series of 48 black-and-white plates, Allen deftly illustrates the visual patterns and strategies which convey Hitchcock’s genius in his use of visual rhetoric and its relationship to larger narrative patterns. Archetypal images specific to Hitchcock’s expressionist iconography – including banisters, staircases, and black-and-white parallel line designs – are cleverly contrasted in stills from a number of films across various periods and genres, including The Birds (1963), Vertigo, Strangers on a Train and Rear Window (1954). In this analysis, the author offers a keen appreciation for the stylistic unity evident in Hitchcock’s later work in an illuminating discussion about the director’s unique attention to the idiom of colour. Allen asserts that the director’s enthusiastic and experimental approach to colour design respects the “constraints of realism” while it is always motivated by character and the narrative world, citing pre-Raphaelite influences to demonstrate that “the rhetoric of color allowed Hitchcock to articulate the doubled world of appearances – that is, the way in which the chaos world supervenes upon the world of the ordinary” (p. 219). From the director’s collaboration with Salvador Dalí in Spellbound (1945) to the articulation of colour surrealism in films such as Rear Window and Vertigo and the inverted use of black and white in the colour design of Marnie (1964), Allen demonstrates, in considerable detail, the ways in which the formalist visual style in Hitchcock’s colour films expands the visual vocabulary and narrative expressiveness of the work and enhances our understanding of story and character.

Allen’s careful attention to narrative formations and suspense, along with his meticulous rendering of Hitchcock’s visual aesthetic as the stylistic mode of romantic irony, constitute an accessible and engaging analysis of Hitchcock’s work and sets this effort apart from other scholarly studies. Allen’s achievement here directly underscores his ambition for this book, expanding on more contextual approaches in contemporary studies which are limited to the history of film style to encompass a broader analysis of the director’s aesthetic form as it emerged from the legacy of romanticism. This study is particularly invigorated by the author’s compelling perspective on Hitchcock’s visual aesthetic and its relationship to the complexities of human sexuality, which offers an original alternative to the proliferation of psychoanalytic readings that Hitchcock’s work has inspired. Allen’s poetics-driven interpretation of the director’s adaptation of the idiom of romantic irony makes a notable contribution to Hitchcock scholarship, inviting us to revisit the director’s oeuvre with fresh eyes and renewed curiosity.

Karen Goodman reviews Richard Allen’s  Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony.

Senses of Cinema, August 2008. 

More on Hitchcock’s romanticism here :  

Hitchcock and Romantic Irony. Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 1

By David George Menard.  Offscreen  , October 2008.

Hitchcockian Suspense.     Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 2

By David George Menard.  Offscreen  , October 2008.