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The Most Psychological Film of All Time
Hitchcock's "Vertigo" was selected as the greatest film of all time
Posted September 16, 2012
The prestigious British film magazine, Sight & Sound, based on voting by "critics, programmers, academics and distributors," each decade selects the fifty greatest films of all time. In 2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo replaced Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever according to this poll. Citizen Kane had had this distinction for fifty years. But Vertigo, released in 1958, has risen steadily in the poll in recent decades, and almost unseated Kane in 2002.
Not bad when a film made in 1958 rises in critical esteem over more than a half century -- or, of course, for it to be recognized by knowledgeable people as the greatest film of all time. Why is Vertigo being more highly valued? As I wrote some time ago, we can only "account for the continuing attraction Hitchcock exerts on movie goers by noting Hitchcock's acute sensitivity to psychological drama in character development as well as in the interplay between audience reaction and cinematic content."
Vertigo tells the story of a high-end San Francisco police detective, Scottie Ferguson (played by James Stewart), who is traumatized when a police officer fall to his death trying to rescue Stewart as he dangles from a collapsing drain high above the street. Stewart then quits the force due to his fear of heights. One might judge that Stewart is depressed. Doing nothing in particular, living alone, dropping in from time to time on his old girlfriend, he is contacted by an old college friend who requests that he follow his wife, Madelaine (played by Kim Novak). The friend claims the spirit of a woman who died alone and mad after being abandoned by her lover has taken possession of Madelaine.
It turns out that the friend has used Madelaine as a prop and a ruse in order to kill his actual wife, then throw her from a mission tower that Stewart cannot ascend when following Novak, with whom he has fallen in love, due to his vertigo. Stewart has a total breakdown. Apparently recovered, he then runs into Novak as her actual self, shopgirl Judy. Recognizing the resemblance, but not identifying her as the same woman (I know -- hard to believe -- but Madelaine was made over by the murderer to be a Grace Kelly kind of woman, while Novak plays the Judy character quite well naturally*), he insists on dating Judy. Stewart then recreates Judy as Madelaine (uncannily like Hitchcock's own attitude towards Kelly and Novak+). When he finally realizes the ruse, Stewart forces Judy back to the scene of the crime, where this time she actually falls to her death.
The film is both claustrophobic and breathtaking, transfixing as it travels its inexorable, unfathomable route to Novak's second death. The psychological crux of the film is -- "Why is Stewart doing this?" (and, secondarily, "Why does Novak consent to it?"). Here is one explanation of the film's themes and purpose:
The 1958 film, Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, demonstrates the Freudian idea of the uncanny. The plot of the film centers on a woman's apparent return from the dead unmasked as a murder plot. Through the use of doubling and the return of the repressed, Vertigo demonstrates the "arousing gruesome fear" of the familiar becoming frightening (Freud 224). Yet the film and its production can also be seen as Hitchcock's attempt to double, and thus immortalize the act of directing his favorite actress, Grace Kelly.
I don't think Vertigo would garner the attention it has based on these mechanics. The film is named for a mental disorder, vertigo. But it is a film about obsessive love, and a woman's willingness to becomes its object, a lethal combination (as it is in Romeo and Juliet). It is a film about desperation and aloneness. All three principal characters are loners who yearn for, but are incapable of achieving, love -- or, really, any form of intimacy. The film's hypnotic, inescapable progression draws viewers in until they, like Stewart, climactically climb the stairs of the mission tower. We hope against hope for Stewart to regain his sanity by grasping the reality of the situation, even as we recoil at the sight of Judy's feet scraping over the steps as Stewart drags her to the top of the tower.
Stewart could be said to have overcome his mental defect by climbing the stairs -- which he claims he has done when he reaches the top. But he has not resolved -- he has only demonstrated by his compulsive behavior -- the depth of his existential despair, the void at the core of his being, which predates his affair(s) with Madelaine-Judy. What a dark conclusion for a film!
Hitchcock actually addresses treatments for mental illness in Vertigo. Early on, Stewart himself demonstrates "desensitization" by climbing a step ladder, only to faint when he reaches the top, falling into the arms of old girlfriend Barbara Bel Geddes (best known as "Miss Ellie" in the television drama series Dallas). While Stewart is closeted in a sanatarium, Bel Geddes plays classical music for the unresponsive patient. Bel Geddes asks to see Stewart's psychiatrist, whom she tells, "Music therapy isn't going to work." The psychiatrist indicates Stewart will gradually overcome the guilt and trauma of his allowing a woman to die. But Bel Geddes, nursing her own broken heart for Stewart (they were briefly engaged in college, which "she" broke off), says, "There's something you need to know -- he loved her. And you know what: he still loves her" (her being the dead -- actually nonexistent -- Madelaine).
The psychatrist's brow furrows as he responds, "Oh dear, that is a problem." And it is a problem -- one that psychiatry, desensitization therapy, medications (as Stewart would today be saturated with) cannot resolve.
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* Hitchcock would have preferred Grace Kelly for the role. For Hitchcock, Kelly's cool demeanor combined with her sensuality to create an epiphany of female sexuality. He had made Rear Window with her (co-starring Stewart) in 1954, and To Catch a Thief (with Cary Grant) in 1955. But Kelly married and became the Princess of Monaco in 1956 -- a loss Hitchcock never recovered from as a director. Rear Window is itself a remarkable psychological work, a cinematic study of Stewart's connection with Kelly as he watches a range of male-female relationships develop, including one murder, through his apartment window.
+ Hitchcock found Novak slatternly, as he revealed in his book of interviews, Hitchcock, with François Truffaut. But that attitude worked well for the lead female's Judy character in Vertigo, which it might be hard to imagine Kelly having played.
