Thriller Thursdays: Vertigo – a Masterpiece of Obsession

Intro: In our new weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

Alfred Hitchcock’s stories often defy life’s karmic twists. They are a rule unto themselves, follow their own obsessions, and find their own retributions. The suspense has heartbreak inherent in it, the evil it’s gleeful consummations, and good can only hope for its one good day in office. If there is innocence, there is danger lurking in the shadows, if there is joy there is something to be suspicious about.

There is not a Hitchcock movie that has been released where it has not rendered one cynical, felt endlessly hopeless. Vertigo is no different.

Scottie (James Stewart), a police detective while chasing a culprit with his colleague on a rooftop is faced with a tragic experience that changes a stays forever. His colleague slips but Scottie is unable to save him despite holding onto him as a result of vertigo, something which he had never experienced before. Scottie discovers he has acrophobia and gets vertigo at heights. The trauma of the death forces him to retire from the police force.

Slowly, he begins to get over his guilt with the easygoing and comfortable company of his college friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). However, any attempt to overcome his fear of heights gets nullified — even when it is just a short stepladder.

But when an old friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), who owns a shipbuilding business, rings him up out of the blue, he is thrust onto a new mystery. Gavin asks Scottie to help him after he informs him that something has possessed Madeleine, his wife (Kim Novak), possibly the spirit of her great grandmother Carlotta Valdes. He adds that Madeleine has been acting strangely of late and he requests Scottie to look into the matter, maybe follow her to keep tabs on her.

Scottie does follow her, as she goes around San Francisco — wandering into a department store, then a church’s graveyard, followed by an art gallery where she sits in front of a portrait, holding a bouquet and wearing a necklace which is exactly the one worn by the girl in the painting.

When Scottie informs Gavin about all this, Gavin confirms that all these addresses have a connection to Madeleine’s great grandmother, who had committed suicide when was Madeleine's age. And almost on cue, Madeleine drives to a location right next to the San Francisco Bay and jumps into it. Scottie saves her and takes her to his home. And whilst talking to her, realizes that she remembers nothing of what had transpired — as if she had been possessed. Madeleine slowly opens up and talks about having weird dreams which she can't place and which renders her fearful and disoriented. Whilst describing her visions, Madeleine talks about a tower and a Spanish church with a cloister, and Scottie realises from the description that it is a Spanish mission, San Juan Bautista, outside the city.

Both Scottie and Madeleine drive down to the place, and on seeing the tower of the church, she rushes towards it. Scottie follows her but whilst alighting the sharp staircase of the tower, he starts to get vertiginous. Madeleine reaches the top, and before Scottie could reach up and do something, he sees her fall to her death from a window. Madeleine had committed suicide.

Scottie had fallen madly in love with Madeleine by that time, and the impact of the death renders him numb. He is put into an institution, wherewith the help of Midge, he comes to some modicum of normalcy. However, as he is wandering the streets of the city one day, he sees a girl with an uncanny resemblance to Madeleine, except for her brunette hair - and he is stunned! He follows her, with the intent of confronting her, and the mystery gets convoluted in extremis.

Hitchcock’s films are journeys, either inwards as an examination of evil or outwards as an exemplifier of intention. In Vertigo, both the journeys coalesce. And, in his inimitable style, Hitchcock uses mirrors, light patterns, colour schemes and animated dreams to showcase the ambiguities and portend the duplicity of the characters of the tale.

Hitchcock's palette of the deepest colours of blue and velvet, brown and black is symbolic of the richness of the inner worlds of the characters, and the changing lights on Madeleine's face reflect the enigma of her being. And as Scottie and Madeleine start to wander together, and get into the gorgeousness of San Francisco's Muir Woods (actually Big Basin State Park) with their 2000 years old redwood trees - Sequoia sempervirens, which means “Always green, Everliving" - Hitchcock is beautifully outlining both the tenderness of the growing relationship and the tenuousness of its truth.

More than any other film, Hitchcock explores the contours of a city and its landscapes — San Francisco in this case, with great delicacy and beauty. As Scottie follows Madeleine and then they explore the inner workings of their affection and relationship, the city becomes a map charting their relationship. The shocking denouement, as it were, is then both heart-rending and apposite.

Scottie is both the progenitor and the victim, as his duty spins into a mission and then into desperation. At one point, he tells Madeleine that since both of them are wandering randomly, they might as well wander together. And Madeleine replies - “Only one is a wanderer. Two together are always going somewhere.”  Is that ‘somewhere’ a spiral upwards or one downwards is the film’s subliminal message which Hitchcock leaves the viewer with.

Trivia:

Watch Vertigo here .

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)