Vertigo, Hitchcock, Psychoanalysis of the Film Vertigo, Psychology of Vertigo, Uncanny, Doubling in Vertigo
I am co-teaching an honors class called “Reading Freud” with
a friend and colleague from the English Department.
This is the third time we have taught this
course together, and each time we teach it, I get a better sense of what it is
that we are trying to do – eventually I will know what we are doing!
This time my biggest step forward, at least so far, is
rereading Freud’s paper The Uncanny and, this time, I think, getting it. Or more of it. The Uncanny is one of those papers that
academics read and that clinicians, generally, do not. Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo fall into this category. Big
sweeping papers that are assigned in University classes, but that are rarely
read at Psychoanalytic Institutes.
Smaller – and quite lovely papers also fall in this category – what is
coming to mind at this moment is Freud’s heart wrenchingly beautiful paper On
Transience. Psychoanalytic training
programs tend to include papers such as The Interpretation of Dreams, the Case Studies, Mourning and Melancholia, The Ego and the Id and the
Technique papers; papers the academics don’t generally spend much time on.
In this course, intended to show how thinkers from different
disciplines approach a similar problem, my co-teacher and I alternate taking
the lead (and sometimes share it on those papers that we are both strongly
drawn to). When not in the lead, we play
the role of lead student, asking questions and posing alternative takes on
material, while supporting the students doing the same thing, (at least in
theory – this class is still finding its voice(s)).
As lead student, I learned last week that Freud’s paper on
the Uncanny – the umheimlich in German – was written at a time of great turmoil
for him. All of Europe was reeling from the horrors of
a war of a different magnitude than had ever been seen. Meanwhile, Freud was reorganizing his
understanding of the human psyche. So,
the paper is a mess. Apparently tossed
off and written in a free associative style, it is difficult to follow, but it is, my
colleague assured us – and helped us see, brilliant.
Freud is describing how the familiar; the canny or heimlich
– homelike, is the companion of the umheimlich; the uncanny or unhomelike – the
foreign. The tingling that we feel when
something foreign becomes uncanny – when we begin to recognize it as familiar,
is the feeling of recognizing that we have seen this before. So, déjà vu is one form of the uncanny, but
what became clear to me (under the guidance of my co-teacher) is that the
uncanny is the awareness that something in the present is related to something
in the past. So, when we make a
psychoanalytic interpretation, this is based on an uncanny feeling on the part
of the analyst that this problem is related to something else that we know
about the patient. More familiarly, when
we engage in a relationship with someone new, we frequently call up old dance
steps to do that – and Freud called this transference, which can now be seen as
transferring something homelike into a new, foreign situation. The uncanny, then, is not just a weird moment
or two, but a foundational human experience, one we consistently rely on to
navigate new situations.
My colleague made the case that this toss off paper,
confusing and doubling back on itself over and over, was at the heart of the
analytic enterprise. To generalize this,
self-discovery involves a process of doubling back and finding out that there
is more to our experience than we knew at the time. We look back on our lives and say, “Oh, what was
really happening at that moment was this – I wish I knew then what I know
now.” In the present tense, “It feels
like I’ve been here before and if I could only figure this out this thing would
– this time – end differently. It would
end better.”
So, from the perspective of a poet and English literature
teacher, what Freud is talking about are the devices that authors use to pull
us into a story, the devices that help us feel that we are connected to the
action of it. He talks about the feeling
of seeing a doppelganger – a person who resembles us in some particular way,
and other forms of doubling – of seeing this being like that – as examples of
the use of the uncanny. And certainly
identifying with the hero of a story is a way of doing that.
So watching Vertigo, where in the first scene a San
Francisco police detective who has so many nicknames it is clear that he must
be everyman, chases a bad guy across a roof, slips, hangs from a drainpipe,
looks down (never look down) and sees how high he is, then he watches in horror
as the policeman who tries to help slips and falls to his death; something he
sees when he looks down (never look down).
John Ferguson (or Johnnie or “Scottie”; Jimmy Stewart), stricken by fear
of heights after the accident, quits the force and concocts a sort of home
grown exposure based behavioral treatment at his ex-girlfriend’s house only to
fail at this – and fall into Midge’s (Barbara Bel Geddes) arms, something that might lead to the realization of the apparent attraction between them in someone who wasn't afraid of that heights that intimacy could lead to. Midge reassures him that he will beat this this feeling, but it will take something big to dislodge it.
Who isn’t afraid of heights?
For me, this fear comes and goes.
I love to climb trees. I like
being on top of mountains. Driving
across bridges is usually OK, but not always.
Tall buildings, especially when I am outside, exert a pull on me. Friends who have balconies outside their
apartments rarely find me out there unless I am hugging the wall. Hitchcock is using a common fear that we all
experience to some degree (you may experience it more or less than I do, but if
I dangle you outside of a helicopter (as has been done in some exposure
therapies), I guarantee you will feel a sense of vertigo).
Scottie has been contacted by a friend from college, Gavin
Elster, who runs his wife’s shipbuilding company. Gavin hires Scottie to tail his wife whom he
fears has been haunted by a ghost. Her great-grandmother. Scottie tries to back out – he is a
policeman, not a private eye. He can
find a good private eye, but his friend trusts him and he is drawn in. As are we.
We join Scottie in trailing the wife through San Francisco at a pace,
our students assured us would not fly in modern movies. We, in Scottie’s DeSoto, follow the
mysterious Madeleine (Kim Novak) in her gorgeous green Jaguar to a church,
where she heads to the graveyard out back and the headstone of Carlotta Valdes
(her great-grandmother, we learn later) and then to the art museum, where she
sits in front of a portrait of Carlotta, holding the same bouquet as the one in
the portrait and with her hair done in the same fashion, before heading to
Carlotta’s mansion, now a boarding house where Madeleine has been renting a
room – a room that Scottie sees her enter but from which she mysteriously
disappears.
“Aha”, we think in our Freudian minds, “this is a story of
possession. The uncanny feeling we have
is the sense that Madeleine is connected to Carlotta. No matter how much things change, the past
returns and we discover that the umheimlich – the unfamiliar – is just a
version of the Heimlich. This is a ghost
story and we will see Carlotta take over Madeleine. This won’t end well and will be creepy.”
Midge, continuing to be Scottie’s good friend, helps Scottie with
the case by taking him to a local historian who explains that Carlotta was a
very well kept mistress until the wealthy man who was keeping her tired of her,
at which point he and his childless wife adopted Carlotta’s daughter and he
quit supporting her. Powerful men could, in the old days, simply discard women, as the friend tells the story. Carlotta, who now
lived in her mansion with no money to support herself, ended up wandering San
Francisco wearing rags and ultimately killing herself. Aha, we think, Madeleine’s fate is sealed. And Scottie has been given a mission – save her
from her fate.
Sure enough, when Scottie starts trailing her the next day,
Madeleine, after spending time with her favorite painting, drives to the base
of the Golden Gate bridge and throws herself into the water. Scottie, now the hero, jumps in after her,
carries her out of the water, takes her – not to a hospital, and not to Gavin’s
home, but to his apartment. We discover
them as Madeleine is awakening, naked, in Scottie’s bed. He has, apparently, undressed her and we see
that he has hung her clothes to dry.
This is a crazily transgressive scene. Scottie, though he is reporting on the phone
to Gavin, has just crossed a bunch of lines.
Have I mentioned that Madeleine is a beautiful blond woman? One of the students’ primary objections to
Freud is his focus on the sexual drive.
They experience him as tremendously transgressive, especially when he
talks about infantile sexuality. We
disabused them of the idea that infants have mature sexual fantasies, but they
continued to be appalled at Freud’s apparent obsession with sex. This scene
signals that this movie is not solely about Madeleine’s problems, but also about
Scottie’s.
Aha, we say, Scottie needs to recover from the loss of his manhood, symbolized by – and here I’m going to
use Freud to stretch the metaphor – his inability to get (it) up to a height
where he would be competent. This scene
suggests that while he is incapable of acting out in the open, he can act under
cover of darkness. He can undress
Madeleine when she is unconscious. This
is creepy – a different aspect of Heimlich.
Scottie knows Madeleine in ways that she has not consented to – in the
ways that we know things about our family because we live with them. So Madeleine is both heimlich – familiar to –
Scottie – and she is forbidden fruit.
She is married to his friend who has hired him to look after her. We have the makings of an oedipal
triangle. And now we are in familiar
territory. Scottie is re-enacting
something from his past – his own lived past, not the spooky past of a
great-grandmother. Both he and Madeleine
are now firmly in the mansion of the uncanny, though in different wings of it.
And Scottie, like Madeleine, is hurtling headlong towards a
bad ending. He is not facing his own
fears head on, he is playing the hero and protecting Madeleine from her
devils. This feels like doing therapeutic
work, which can at times give false solace to therapists like myself who feel at moments that we, too,
are doing our own work alongside our patients, but it is doing the work at a distance
and on behalf of someone else, and Scottie is not, in fact, doing his own work,
just as we therapists need to do our own work on our own time (and dime).
But gosh it feels good when, after ghosting him that night,
Madeleine shows up the next day with a letter of thanks and then, even better,
she responds to his flirtation and they spend that day together – and the
next! On the second day together, after
they have declared their mutual attraction and have embraced, she tells him of
a dream – a dream of a particular place, a place that Scottie recognizes. An old Mission, and he drives her to it. He is trying to apply a version of the failed
exposure treatment to her. It didn’t work for him, but it will work for
her! Won’t it?
When they arrive, she is pulled to the bell tower. Because he has not done his work, Scottie,
paralyzed by his fear, cannot go up the tower with her and prevent her from reenacting the suicide because his
fear is stronger than his ability and desire to help her. She escapes his grasp, climbs to the top of
the tower, and Scottie sees her falling to her death, an uncanny reprise of the
start of the film.
An inquest is held –
the judgement is rendered that she killed herself. Scottie is cleared of responsibility for her
death but he is publicly humiliated for his failure to prevent it. If we
wondered if his masculinity is on trial in this film, we have now received indisputable
evidence. A tragedy. Scottie, though not responsible, has been
made keenly aware of his tragic flaw and, because this is mid twentieth century
America and not ancient Greece, he ends up not wandering around after having put his eyes out, but in an asylum where Midge attends to
him.
If the film had ended here, it would have been a satisfying
but also somewhat curious watch. We
would, like Scottie, still want to know what had happened to Madeleine, and we
would feel for Scottie – but most of the feeling would be pity – and despite
his everyman appearance, we would have been able to distance ourselves from
him. My writing to this point would lead
us to conclude, especially if we were Freudians, that his oedipal conflict had
gotten the better of him, but this would not bring us very much pleasure. It would have felt heady and abstract, not
visceral. The film would have felt like
an empty and meaningless exercise. Well
done-ish and somewhat curious.
Thank goodness it doesn’t.
Scottie recovers, but only enough to resume a joyless life on his own,
pining for Madeleine – seeing her in every passing blond – in the uncanny way
that we do when we have lost a love that we still yearn for. He returns to the spaces that he saw
her. And then, becoming a creeper again,
Scottie follows a department store worker, Judy Barton, home to her hotel
apartment. He makes creepy contact and,
surprisingly, Judy not only welcomes it but seems to intimate that she would be
fine if he were to make an advance – she has been picked up before, she
states.
Scottie now goes from passive to active mode. Instead of looking for Madeleine, he decides
to turn Judy into Madeleine. This seems
a ridiculous task – Judy looks and acts nothing like Madeleine. She is from Salina, Kansas. She is a brunette, not a blonde. She carries herself completely differently. Her language is coarse and, we suddenly
realize, Scottie, when he was engaging with Madeleine, was in rarified air.
The trouble is, we know, through flashbacks, that Judy is in
fact the persona that Scottie was led to believe (by Gavin and Judy) was
Madeleine. The students objected to
learning this through a flashback at this point. It took away from the feeling of uncanniness
that would have arisen as we would have discovered with Scottie just who she
was. I agree with that. I think Hitchcock’s decision to reveal who
she was shifts our focus. Instead of
being curious about who Judy is, we attend to Scottie. What’s going on with this guy? I think there are two reasons Hitchcock makes
this move:
First, Scottie’s pursuit of Madeleine and his interest in
recreating her in Judy is the uncanny double that he wants us to be curious
about. Why does a boy obsess over this
type of girl? What is it about the past
that haunts our present and leads us to try to find a version of what is
familiar? Scottie is obsessing over a
high class girl, a girl who would appear to be out of his league. But we know, from early on, that Scottie is
an attorney. He chose to go into the
police force so that he could pursue the bad guys more directly. Or is that why? Was he afraid to be a member of high
society? Was he slumming it on the police
force? Is that a version of his vertigo?
Midge is clearly high class.
She is a brassier artist - she draws bras for magazine ads (as my colleague pointed out, here is Hitchcock
being heavy handed with the Freudian language again – she is a maternal figure –
someone whose professional focus is on a symbol of maternity). She is someone that Scottie proposed to when
they were in college together – she currently pines for him, but not as he is,
but as he could be. Perhaps she’s always
known he is a little boy. Midge herself
is well connected. As is his buddy
Gavin. Scottie could have been a member
of the upper crust, but he chose not to be… Why? The oedipal answer is that this would have
required him to grow up enough to marry his mother not as a maternal figure,
but as an object of desire. Midge wants
him to desire her as a mature object of lust, but not as his caregiver, a role that comes naturally to her, but she wants to be a grown up in ways that Scottie doesn't seem ready to be.
And speaking of desire, the big reveal here, of course, is
that the second reason that Hitchcock wants us to focus on Scottie is because
Scottie is a stand in for Hitchcock himself.
Hitchcock has just lost his beautiful blond leading lady (who starred
opposite Jimmy Stewart in, for instance, Rear Window) Grace Kelly. The prince of Monaco swept Grace off her feet
and stole her from Hitchcock. He is
searching for a replacement, just as Scottie is. Hitchcock is hoping that, as he transforms
Kim Novak into a blond bombshell, she becomes not just Hollywood royalty but
that he will discover her to be, underneath it all, the woman he has lost –
Princess Grace.
At least that would be the idealized version of what he
wants. The movie, however plays out
differently than this idealized version.
I think it delivers a much more realistic version of what the loss of
Grace Kelly evokes in Hitchcock.
In the climax of the film, as it becomes clearer and clearer
to Scottie that Judy is, in fact, the person he formerly knew as Madeleine,
Judy lets him know that she is letting him know who she is because she is
convinced that he can love her – not as Madeleine, but as Judy. This hope increasingly wears thin as it
becomes clear that Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine is less and less about
love – it is not about reclaiming a lost love – but reclaiming something else
that has been lost – Scottie’s manhood. He
is obsessed with returning to the scene of the crime and having the recreated
scene turn out differently. He forces
Judy up the stairs at the Mission and he is able to conquer his fears – he achieves
the redemption he is looking for – the cure – the reclaiming of his
masculinity. He can now live, again, at
the height that should have been his birthright.
There is a small fly in the ointment, though. Instead of claiming the prize that should
have been his – the love of the woman whom he is now able to see eye to eye
with, the woman he can now get (it) up there for – they are interrupted in
their moment of reckoning by a nun from the mission, and Judy (at least in my
mind) throws herself off the tower.
Does she jump or does she fall? I find it hard to believe she does not
jump. Pragmatically, she has just
confessed to an ex-cop that she is an accessory to a murder. She is going to the electric chair anyway –
especially because he is not actually looking for her – he did not fall in love
with who she is but with who he imagined her to be – the person he wanted to
create her to be, and that was not her.
And this is the real reason she jumps.
She wants to be loved, but she realizes she won’t be.
The tragedy here is that Scottie’s failure to love her has
less to do with who she is than who it is that Scottie is. He is
focused on her – as he was when he was trying to save Madeleine. It becomes clear as these things often do
only in retrospect that Scottie was never interested in Madeleine – he was
interested in saving Madeleine – he was interested in being the hero. Of being strong and virile. Madeleine – and now Judy – are both simply
means to an end.
Scottie has surmised, accurately, I assume, that Judy was Gavin’s
lover. That’s how Gavin got her to
impersonate Madeleine, he seduced her into it.
When he had no more use for her, he, as a powerful man, could throw her
away – as he literally threw away the real Madeleine when he tossed her off the
tower the first time Judy went up and Scottie couldn’t get there (Gavin had
chosen Scottie for the role well – he knew of Scottie’s vertigo). Judy has now been used by two men – and she
realizes that she has been a bit player in a drama that doesn’t actually
involve her – it revolves around these men trying to figure out how to love
themselves.
To return to the uncanny aspects of the film – to the ways
in which the same thing keeps occurring in different forms – not only did
Madeleine – the real one – meet the same fate as her great-grandmother – so did
her impersonator. Hitchcock can rest
confident that women will always be tossed aside by men – the truly powerful,
potent forces in the world.
Meanwhile, Hitchcock’s double, Scottie, is able to stand at
the edge of the tower and look down on the woman who has wronged him without
feelings of vertigo. He knows who she is
and, more importantly, he knows who he is.
He is potent, but also deprived.
The woman he would have loved and the actress he fell for are both
dead. He is alive, virile, and
alone. His focus on his own recovery,
something I criticized him for not attending to earlier, became the focus at
exactly the wrong moment. His central
concern throughout the film has been his own integrity and this self-focus has
interfered with his being able to judge the character – not the surface
characteristics - of the people he engages with.
This is an interesting landing point. Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most “psychological”
directors from the Golden Era of Hollywood.
This film – one that was initially poorly critically and popularly received
– has been elevated to the pantheon (as it were). Some lists have it as a better film than
Citizen Kane, another film that revolves around the narcissistic development of
the central character. The film
suggests, in context of Freud’s take on the uncanny, a timeless theme – one in
which the disempowered central figure, in searching for his power, takes a familiar
path towards power and, in the process, is blind to both his virtues and to the
loves that could be available to him.
Meanwhile women offer a way out, but his self-obsession leaves them
disempowered. The timeless quality of
this is part of what Freud found so baffling.
I think it is related to his suggesting that the power to repeat – the power
to return to the home-like setting – the Heimlich – the canny, trumps our wish
for pleasure. This led him to posit the
crazy death drive.
If the wish to repeat is going to be interrupted, I don’t
think that will come from those in power.
Those whom the empowered would convince are powerless are, in fact,
those who would change things. To
rewrite the script, we need to hear voices that, instead of being enamored with
where they came from, are disgruntled by it, and they need to figure out how to
harness their dissatisfaction in truly transformative ways – to wrest power
from those who would keep us singing the same dismal dirge. Can we learn a new tune? We’ll just have to see…
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