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Midway through Vertigo, after Madeleine has fallen to her death and her husband, Elster, has left San Francisco, Scottie has a dream. Critic Tania Modleski points out that in that dream, Scottie plays out precisely the hallucination of which he has, in the first half of the film, tried to cure Madeleine. He even dies Madeleine’s death. Scottie has become Madeleine, but, because the Madeleine he knows does not exist (it is Judy playing Madeleine), he has thus become someone who never existed — Judy-as-Madeleine. He is committed to an institution. What would it be like to live out the life of something without life?
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Or does a fiction have a kind of life?
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In his quest for his lost Madeleine, Scottie becomes like “the mad Carlotta,” who accosted strangers in the street in desperation, seeking the child that had been taken from her: after the dream, we see Scottie wandering the city, repeatedly mistaking other women for Madeleine, stopping them in the street only to be bitterly disappointed at his error.
(Modleski, Women)
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Does Elster, too, suffer Carlotta’s madness? Had the cameras been rolling prior to the movie’s start, might we have seen Elster accosting potential Madeleines in the street, attempting to convince them that he is not mad, that, even though his plan sounds reprehensible, he’ll make it up to them, until finally he comes upon Judy? “Have you seen my lost child? Have you seen the child of Carlotta?”
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François Truffaut writes, “Alfred Hitchcock achieved a real tour de force in inducing the public to identify with the attractive leading man, whereas Hitchcock himself almost always identified with the supporting role — the man who is cuckolded and disappointed, the killer or a monster, the man rejected by others, the man who has no right to love, the man who looks on without being able to participate.” In Vertigo, the attractive leading man is the man rejected by others, the man who has no right to love, the man who looks on without being able to participate. Or is he? Would Truffaut go against the overwhelming opinion of critics and say that Hitchcock, in Vertigo, identifies not with Scottie, but with Elster? Would he be right in doing so?
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But if both Scottie and Judy play out the roles assigned them by Elster, if Madeleine has been dead throughout the movie and Elster’s actions have been forced upon him by his murder of Madeleine, then Midge is the only character who truly acts out of her own free will. And she disappears before the second half of the film even really begins.
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It is no exaggeration to say that Masoch [from whom the word masochism is derived] was the first novelist to make use of suspense as an essential ingredient of romantic fiction. This is partly because the masochistic rites of torture and suffering imply actual physical suspension (the hero is hung up, crucified, or suspended), but also because the woman torturer freezes into postures that identify her with a statue, a painting, or a photograph.
(Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty)
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[T]he lover’s dream is to identify the beloved object with himself and still preserve for it its own individuality; let the Other become me without ceasing to be the other. To know [the body of the other] is to devour it yet without consuming it.
(Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes)
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A mimetic relation is one of similarity, not identity, and similarity implies difference — the difference between the original object and its reflection, between the real world and the fictional heterocosm.
(Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction)
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Jean Corbett, Kim Novak’s stunt double for Vertigo, died just two weeks after I was born. She appeared in at least 17 films, but her name isn’t in the credits of a single one (her name does not appear in the credits of Vertigo). Jean had a sister, Joan Corbett, who was in several movies with her sister, always also uncredited. It could be a joke, but it isn’t.
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Hitchock: “The majority of actors are stupid children. Think of Kim Novak. In the second part of Vertigo, when she’s dark-haired and looks less like Kim Novak, I even managed to get her to act. But the only reason I took her was because Vera Miles was pregnant.”
(Oriana Fallaci, The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews (trans. Pamela Swinglehurst))
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The psychologist Martin Conway believes that what he calls the “reminiscence bump”—the period between the ages of 15 and 25 when the experiences that will become our most vivid memories occur (also when more of our experiences are recorded as memories than at any other time in our lives; as we get older, fewer and fewer events get recorded) — is the thing that makes identity possible. Conway believes the reason memories of this time are so plentiful and so powerful is that this bump is when we create ourselves, and, in order to maintain a more or less consistent self through the rest of our lives, we call upon those memories again and again, as though they were a kind of script, reinforcing and deepening the significance of the experiences they represent. It’s a chicken or egg thing, though, isn’t it? Maybe we remember the things that happened during the period our memories worked well more frequently because, no matter what else happens, we won’t remember it as vividly, or maybe our brains are by nature nostalgic and just naturally return to that period whenever some question about who we are comes up. The surprising thing is that, either way, the memories themselves, our identities, are arbitrary: they are neither more nor less significant on their own than memories made later (or earlier). It is only the age at which they were formed that makes them so important to us.
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Carlotta commits suicide at 26. Madeleine is murdered at 26. We do not know Judy’s age (it would be on that driver’s license she shows Scottie; if only we could see, if only we could know), but she might as well be 26 (it’s unlikely Elster, so concerned with appearances, would have chosen someone much older or much younger than his wife to play her). These three women, then, are all 26 years of age or nearly so. If Conway’s theory is correct, then, they have each only just finished creating an identity. Not one of them has yet had time to inhabit it. Though they are all indisputably themselves, they have not yet had much opportunity to be themselves, to know what that means. Carlotta was driven insane during this all-important period — it is precisely the fact that she has had the identity she thought she had (mistress, mother) taken away from her that drove her insane. Madeleine is supposed to be living Carlotta’s creation, her set of memories, though one assumes she didn’t actually do so in life — as far as the audience is concerned, Madeleine has no identity; we never see her alive. And Judy is living Elster’s creation, which is supposed to be Madeleine’s identity, which, in turn, is supposed to have been taken from Carlotta’s memories. None of the three has been allowed to live as herself, if living as oneself means to draw upon the memories of the period during which one has decided who one is. The richness of selfhood, the very consistency that is the most important hallmark of identity, is that one can call upon past decisions and act in consonance with them when presented with new problems, that one can have some sort of coherent memory of — and connection to — the past. The real psychic violence committed in Vertigo is that neither Elster nor Scottie nor Carlotta’s “rich. powerful man” have allowed the women they profess to love access to their own memories, their own identities. It would drive anyone mad.