Movie break: Stalk me, stalk you: Hitchcock’s most ingenious movie, treating love as intertwined with fear of death, and the pain of “bereft” love set up by deception: Vertigo (1958) [start]

[Edits done 1/7/13.]

This movie has been fairly routinely included on “Greatest Films” lists, and this past year it became number 1 on Sight & Sound’s critics’ poll list, supplanting Citizen Kane (1941), which had been there for years. It gets mentioned as a package of director Alfred Hitchcock’s artistically greatest works along with North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), Notorious (1946), and/or whatever others you might round off the short list with. And yet it is in a class by itself, with such emotional subtlety, such plot complexity, and such a disturbing quality (even while it draws you in) that it almost seems like an odd but deeply touching sermon that leaves you so shaken (depending on your ongoing state of mind) that you might leave it saying, “That was good, but I want to stay away from it for a while.”

Young people seem most struck by its interesting plot, while not taking full cognizance of its emotional theme. I realize that I appreciate it more as I get older (and, really, it is for older viewers, who don’t have all the “happy idiot” illusions about love that the young do). I’ve seen it numerous times over many years; the first was in about 1985, when it along with a few other Hitchcock greats, totaling five (including Rear Window [1954]), was re-released after having been taken out of circulation by Hitchcock and had been placed in a property-ownership arrangement that his daughter Patricia inherited. Once Hitch had died in 1980, his daughter re-released the films in the mid-1980s, and critics remarked on the exquisite power of Vertigo. It was later restored in the 1990s, in a very painstaking process.

When I saw it in a festival/oldies theater in Washington, D.C., in 1985, I found it one of the most beautiful films I’d ever seen. Some parts of it still strike me as remarkably beautiful—especially the relatively early scene in which Scottie (played by James Stewart) tracks Madeline (played by Kim Novak) to a church graveyard and watches her from afar. His sly, careful watching, the fog-filtered visual atmospherics, and especially the almost otherworldly music (by Bernard Herrmann in perhaps his greatest score) make this scene astonishingly entrancing, no matter how many times you see it.

You may come away from this film thinking it gives an awfully grimly noir picture of a horrendous con game played on intelligent but unwitting detective Scottie by an old college chum, who sets him up to track his supposed wife, whom he believes to be haunted by an old spirit. (The genre-like setup may seem hokey and shallow, but how the plot is played out on this basis is really what makes the film magnificently conceived and executed. By the way, one of its writers was the prolific Samuel A. Taylor, who worked with Hitchcock later on the much less sublime Topaz [1969].)

But because of its poetry—namely, the way love can be made to appear, can be played on, and lead whom it “blesses” to a bout of depression when the inspiration for it suddenly seems to die—is really a meditation on the relationship between love/care and fear/death. And it shows, especially at the film’s seemingly rushed end, that when someone finds he or she has been tricked into a sequence of love–depression–slow recovery, that person can say he or she has been unforgivably raped (not something he or she can always get justice for), and (more within his control) brought to a new vision of reality that, while not being cold to the former object of love, is aware that stark business is what is needed to get things back into order (and in a sense is also an act of love). It’s the film’s final gesture toward a sort of artistically posturing despair that the woman (Judy, also played by Novak) who pretended to be Madeline falls off a church tower out of Scottie’s arms, not as Scottie would have wanted, to her accidental death.

Real-life correlates

Also, for me, this film’s thematic side can be likened to something I’ve encountered a few times (as long ago as 1995-96), and which is a very emotionally tumultuous thing to go through: within a workplace context, the triggering of love/care in you by a female borderline personality (a histrionic personality will also "do the trick"--it's a more honeyed version of a borderline personality, you could say), and the painful shock of needing to walk back to reality when you find that person has been (maybe not fully intentionally) leading you on (either by reckless behavior or by a kind of short-term flirtatiousness, along with all else). Even if you recognize the person as a borderline personality early on (which is a strange “apprehension” I get), as simple life among both of you goes on, your “care” instinct can’t help but draw you in to some kind of entanglement with the person, where the maturity of the both of you is the best hope to right things that go seriously awry.

What is especially troubling in this sort of situation is that your heightened care may be a crucial support to carrying on with the person as you otherwise are impelled to—such as in a workplace. But when workplaces don’t understand this dynamic, and don’t try to competently address and mitigate issues that may come up incidental to this in a fair, non-sensational (non-stupid), and careful manner, they may find that they emotionally rape both the person for whom care has been aroused and the person (the borderline) who has aroused this care.

I would need to re-view this film within the next few days to flesh out this review, but I may not get to it right away, because this film can be an awfully potent shot of emotional liquor.