The Obsession of Possession
A Formalist Approach to Vertigo (1958)
Vertigo (1958) – Formalist
We’re back again (and again and again and…) for another addition of Review Roulette: Spooky Edition!
While the rumour is true that I am a coward when it comes to spookiness, thrillers, horrors, and the like, I do have a soft spot for the thrills of Alfred Hitchcock. My first review on Review Roulette was of Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), so I thought we might make this a bit of a tradition and have at least one Hitchcock every spooky season. This week I watched Vertigo (1958) for the first time and the Review Roulette wheel landed on Formalist for our approach, so let’s fall into the dizzying spirals of the surreal realist film.
For those unfamiliar, I am not going to spoil the film. It has been written about to death and back again, and you might already know the twists, but I am going to tiptoe around certain details like Hitchcock himself because that’s just right. I am going to discuss the events of the first portion of the film, however.
Vertigo is about a detective, John “Scottie” Ferguson (my main man Jimmy Stewart), who leaves the police force after a spell of vertigo (described as dizziness) leaves him clutching a gutter for dear life, unable to grasp the helping hand of an officer who slips from the roof and dies. Scottie feels guilty for the death and publicly leaves his post with the department as well as his ambitions to be police chief. Having read of his departure, a friend from college, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), hires Scottie to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) and watch out for strange behaviour. Gavin believes his wife is being haunted by the spirit of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. Events transpire, vertigo spirals, and confusion reigns the rest of the film.
Now, if we’re looking at this for its form, there are a million options for lenses. We could think about the interesting angles and optical illusions of certain scenes: when Scottie’s vertigo is triggered from a tall height, the view looking down trebles in a dizzying fashion. We could muse on what the orientation point of the film is (Coit Tower) and how it is almost always seen in the distance, as though it is the centring point for the surrealist spirals Scottie and we are falling into. We could talk about the use of colour (absolutely brilliant VistaVision in this film): the greens and reds in particular are of interest. Green often means life or sickness or ghostly occult vibes, while red is largely intense, immediate emotions such as love or passion or anger. When these two colours follow a character or a couple, as they do with Scottie and Madeleine, it leaves us speculating about the relationship between intense, immediate emotions of the reds and the potentials of life, sickness, and death of the greens.
What I want to focus on is an interplay between these latter two but with a focus on one scene in particular from early on in the film. When Scottie is initially following Madeleine, she goes to several places including the grave of Carlotta Valdes, an art museum to sit still as the dead staring at a portrait of Carlotta, and to Carlotta’s former home, a Victorian house that has since been converted to a long-stay hotel named the McKittrick Hotel. When she arrives at the McKittrick, Madeleine goes up the stairs and into the front door while Scottie watches from afar. Dressed in a deep-maroon suit, Scottie looks deliberately at Madeleine’s green car outside of the hotel and then up to the first-floor window in which Madeleine can be seen opening the curtains and taking off her jacket. She looks as though she is settling in for the afternoon.
Scottie enters the McKittrick and sees no one until the manageress emerges and the two discuss Madeleine’s room rental. The manageress informs Scottie that Madeleine’s rental is in the name of Carlotta Valdes and that she has not been in that day, pointing to the key still on the rack behind the reception desk. Disturbed, Scottie insists that he watched her enter the building and asks the manageress to check the room which is in fact empty and undisturbed. Madeleine’s green car is nowhere to be seen.
A lot of things happen in Vertigo, but in a film largely about obsession, I am obsessed with this scene. Now, a realist would probably argue that Madeleine told the manageress that a man was following her and then went upstairs for a moment to trick Scottie into entering the hotel, and then slipped out the back and drove away. Fine, logical, makes sense. But that doesn’t sit well with me (and it’s also a little boring). So, let’s have a little fun.
Let’s take as a given that Scottie is mentally unwell since the grief and self-imposed guilt after the death of his fellow officer. Let’s also take as a given that Hitchcock does nothing by accident. I won’t inherently take as a given a supernatural element (even though I could totally make an excellent case for Scottie as a ghostie himself (see below)). That puts us with a person struggling with his sense of reality in a situation that seems surreal. Here is the description of Scottie entering the McKittrick in the screenplay:
The abundance of greenery in particular is fascinating to me. “There is no one to be seen, no sign of life” but of course there is someone there and of course plants are alive. Greenery in itself suggests life, and the greenery is simultaneously physically concealing life by hiding the manageress. If green here is a liminal space (as it is again later in the film in the form of a physical green fog), it can still suggest life, sickness, or death or all three at once. Specifically, unacknowledged life (plants), Scottie’s mental sickness (grief/guilt), and the acknowledged death of Carlotta Valdes (former owner of the house). All of these things are present when Scottie then realises that Madeleine was not. Additionally, as he pulls up to the hotel, we can also just vaguely make out the blurred image of Coit Tower far in the distance.
My theory is that this is the first time we see Scottie has ventured too far from his orientation point of Coit Tower. During the opening credits, Hitchcock shows us what his visualisation of vertigo is: geometric spirals with eyes, almost like hurricanes. I believe that Coit Tower is the visual eye of Scottie’s vertigo and the farther he ventures from it, the less control he can exert over his own mental health. His vertigo is triggered by his perspective and orientation (looking down from a height), and as the tower is one of the highest points in the city, it functions as a symbol of his vertigo, his spiralling around it in wilder fashions the farther out he goes. Those familiar with the film know that the most outrageous and traumatic events of the film happen outside of San Fransisco, with Coit Tower nowhere to be seen.
I think that this moment so early in the film in which Scottie seems to have lost Madeleine is not a coincidence and is more interestingly considered if we think about the interplay between the meanings of the colours and the orientation point of Coit Tower. The greenery (partly representing his mental unwellness) drenches the room in which his own reality starts to unravel so far from the Tower representing his centre. His apartment is incredibly close to Coit Tower, and throughout the film, much is made of driving away from San Francisco. We spend a lot of time on the journey away or circling around Coit Tower, showing us physically how the spiral spins for Scottie as he begins to fall into his own spiralling, erratic obsession with Madeleine.
Regardless of the reading, I think it is immensely fair to suggest that the disappearance of Madeleine at the McKittrick is the point at which an objective reality is broken in Vertigo. Others have suggested that the breaking point for reality is in the opening scene in which Scottie realises his vertigo, and it would also be reasonable to suggest that there is no objective reality in the film (or otherwise, to be fair). But the fun part of movies, especially Hitchcock’s in my opinion, is deciding for ourselves what we believe and why, and I have had a ball with Vertigo. A confusing, spiralling, sometimes hurricane-like ball.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
An Alternate Formalist Reading
I have been thinking about Vertigo for about three days before I sat down to write my review, and one of the theories I considered is that Scottie himself is the reincarnation of Carlotta or at least that he is possessed by her spirit. One suggestion is that Madeleine’s name is a Proust reference, that she is literally his petit madeleine that brings him back to an earlier life. In this reading, the green is genuinely the liminal space between his own memories and the present day, clouding his perception of reality and projecting his previous life onto those around him. We can take this thought further with Coit Tower itself, which was built in the 1930s from money left to beautify the city by the wealthy socialite Lillie Hitchcock Coit. Coit herself was frequently seen dressed as a man to access men-only spaces around the city, suggesting a fluidity of life and identity that I think is very much present in Scottie.