Vertigo - Hitchcock's Tale of Obsession

This film, although not flawless, is a monumental cinematic achievement. Hitchcock in Vertigo masterfully integrates all the constituent elements of film -- the players, the acting, the script, the set decoration, the equisite color cinema- tography, the musical score, audio and special effects, the costuming, and above all the direction -- into an an unified aesthetic imperative driving the viewer inexorably into a personal (this is an intensely personal film, not only for the director, but for every viewer who sees it) exploration of not only who Scottie Ferguson, Madeline Elster and Judy Barton are, but who, in reality, he or she, the viewer, is. Unlike any other film I have ever seen, Vertigo disturbingly questions not only the characters reality and genuineness, or lack therof, but our own reality, our own authenticity as viewers, and perhaps our own desire for that ""last true obsession of the romantic"" -- death -- and the perfection that we may find in death, but never in this world, never in this universe. Vertigo is an exemplar of Ezra Pound's dictum that ""great art is news that stays news"". I first viewed Vertigo as young boy in a small movie theater in northern New Jerysey more than 50 years ago, and, yet, every one of the many times in the decades I have viewed the the film since, like a symphony of Beethoven or Mozart, or painting by Rem- brandt, Velasquez, Renoir, or Van Gogh, I discover another insight, another perspective, another truth. Vertigo is a motion picture that is about many things -- the frality of human beings, the nature of identity, or reality itself, the potential for human beings to create great beauty but also, the inherent limitations of human kind to develop true interpersonal connections, the awful realization that, whatever beauty humanity in our limited universe is capable of creating, such beauty is very fragile and fleeting, as is our real understanding and connection to any of our fellow men and woman -- ultimately leaving us existentially alone in a quotodian miasma. Thus, all we have in this word, is, at best, a ""glimpse"" of the infinite, if we are lucky. In this connection, the film Vertigo is suffused with images of death -- early in the picture Scottie's laying down on Midge's sofa, as if in a coffin, Madeline's visit to the flower shop, the quietude there, the floral arrangments suggestive of funeral settings, Madeline's visit to Caroltta's grave in the cemetery at Mission Delores, her pointing out of the rings on the redwood tree in the forest -- ""here I was born here I died"" - an almost impercepable interstice in the eons that have preceeded us and will, inexorably, follow us. And of course, Madeline's ""suicide"" at Mission San Juan Batista -- one staged and perhaps the other, in essence, real. Against this inexorable drive toward death by Scottie and Madeline, we have only the ineffectual and almost pathetic efforts of Midge and Madeline's alter ego, Judy Barton, vainly trying to, in Midge's case, relieve Scottie of his obsession with beauty, perfection and the death that can encompass those elements and Judy's failed attempt, as with Norman Bates, to survive against the stonger personality within her -- as Norman becomes his mother, Judy, by the end of the film, succumbs to what she fears -- the Madeline side of her being and thus inevitable death. And Scottie? He could no more tolerate Judy than Midge. One must believe that at the end of the film, he too jumped into the void to join his beloved Madeline -- for eternity.

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