“I Look Up. I Look Down. I Look Up. I Look Down”: The Cycles of Vertigo
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Some novels, it is said, should never be read the first time; comprehension, and aesthetic pleasure, come only with rereading. Few films require (or reward) repeated attention, but foremost among them is Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo. Bewildered, mystified, tantalized, even haunted by its memory—so I felt the first time I saw it, as did the many friends I implored to do likewise. At the second viewing, the story and its themes became clearer; the third time, Hitchcock’s aesthetic designs came into focus. Every time since, I have discovered more and more in the film.
My experience parallels Vertigo’s critical reception. Today it is has been regarded by some as the greatest movie ever made—a status ratified two years ago by the decennial poll of 846 critics in Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute. It was the first film in 50 years to displace Citizen Kane. But upon its release in 1958, Vertigo was almost universally panned: Time called it “another Hitchcock-and-bull story”; to The New Yorker it was “farfetched nonsense.” The facile comparison was with a film released three years earlier, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques. (Not coincidentally, both films derive from novels by the same authors, the French team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.) Les Diaboliques forever remains in the mind because of its trick ending, and film reviewers derided Hitchcock for prematurely revealing the surprise of his ending. Yet without the twist, there is no point to Les Diaboliques. By now everyone knows the twist in [End Page 516] Vertigo, yet (as with Psycho) the movie is endlessly rewatchable—the surprise is not the point. Unlike most movie thrillers (though commonly in Hitchcock), Vertigo has meanings beyond its story line.
In fact, plot per se is its negligible element. Plausibility is seldom a movie thriller’s strongest suit, but consider what Vertigo posits: a husband’s scheme to murder his wife is predicated on a detective’s acrophobia, a scheme the detective uncovers when he stumbles across the woman hired by the husband to impersonate his wife. But, as the English critic Robin Wood noted, “the organization of Vertigo is thematic”; plot, like characterization, music, costume, colors, and camera movements, is “strictly subordinated to thematic development.” To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, the story diverts the mind of the audience while the film does its work upon it. (In this respect, the stock conventions of the thriller in some ways fulfill Eliot’s wish for a “form to arrest, so to speak, the flow of spirit at any particular point before it expands and ends its course in the desert of exact likeness to the reality which is perceived by the most commonplace mind.”)
“I’m not concerned with plausibility,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut during their celebrated interviews; “that’s the easiest part of it, so why bother?” What he looked for in a story was “What can we hang the theme on?” Given his commitment to visual story-telling (rather than the usual practice of “photographs of people talking”), Wood profitably suggests that Hitchcock’s movies “derive their value from the intensity of their images—an intensity created and controlled very largely by context, by the total organization—rather than from the creation of ‘rounded’ characters.” So rigorously organic is Vertigo that both its theme and its aesthetic find a visual correlative in the first shot of the film’s narrative: against an indistinct background a bar horizontally bisects the image. Within seconds we see it is the top rung of a rooftop ladder, but the initial impression is one of division: figure and ground, above and below—to be followed by other dueling dualities: truth and deception, reality and illusion, life and death. [End Page 517]
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The way up and the way down are one and the same.
—Heraclitus
Throughout his career, Hitchcock was engrossed by formal symmetry. Sabotaged by producers’ demands for a happy ending, he was unable to bring the plots of The Lodger, Blackmail, Suspicion, or Shadow of a Doubt...
