Hitchcock’s Vertigo – The Perfect Foil for Freud’s Paper on the Uncanny

 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…      

      

   To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment.