Vertigo: authorship as transformation.

Williams, Anthony (African American musician)

"I would make a plea, then, for criticism of Wuthering Heights to turn its attention to the human core of the novel, to recognize its truly human centrality. How can we fail to see that the novel is based on an interest in, concern for, and knowledge of real life? We cannot do it justice, establish what the experience of reading it, really is, by making analyses of its lock and window imagery, or by explaining it as being concerned with children of calm and children of storm, or by putting forward such bright ideas as that Wuthering Heights might be viewed at long range as `a variant of the demon-lover-motif' (The Gates of Horn, H.H. Levin) or that `Nelly Dean is Evil' -- these are the products of an age which conceives literary criticism as either a game or an industry, not as a humane study. To learn anything of this novel's true nature we must put it into the category of novels it belongs to - I have specified Women in Love and Jules et Jim and might add Anna Karenina and Great Expectations--and recognize its relation to the social and literary history of its own time."

(Q.D. Leavis, Lectures in America, 1969, quoted by Garry Watson, 121)

Since the original appearance of Hitchcock's Films by Robin Wood, the status of Vertigo as a major cinematic achievement whose last third is "among the most disturbing and painful experiences the cinema has to offer" (387) has been more than confirmed by the volume of critical studies devoted to the film. It is not my purpose to add to this continually flowing stream nor to critique many of the insightful works devoted to this film. However, I wish to suggest that future studies of this film do not neglect the significance of the original source novel upon which it is based. Although the novel may contradict any claims made for the pure originality of Hitchcock's authorship, it is an important object in revealing the transformative nature of the director's talent. It is one using the novel's themes of voyeurism, male insecurity, and patriarchal oppression but developing them in an artistically significant manner.

According to Wood, "Hitchcock took very little from D'Entre les Morts apart from the basic plot line, and then proceeded to minimize the importance even of that.' Writing at a time when cinema defined itself as a unique art in the Anglo-Saxon world, Wood dismissed the original novel as "a squalid exercise in sub-Graham Greenery.'(108). This is a judgement which needs challenging on several levels. First, an examination of the original novel reveals the presence of many motifs Hitchcock transferred and then transformed in his own creative manner. It does not deserve dismissal in such cavalier terms and needs further study. Significantly, Wood later reversed his earlier dismissal of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca in relation to the Hitchcock version. Secondly, although this is not the place to argue for Graham Greene's significance as a novelist exposing the ideologically sterile nature of British life (as well as his claim to be regarded as one of the literary influences behind forties British film noir), not all works outside the evaluative realm of F.R. Leavis's great tradition are completely devoid of interest as Wood seemed to believe when he wrote the original Hitchcock's Films in the early 60s. Significant works do not appear in a vacuum and it is important to examine the nature of the original source material and how it may lead to artistic transformation. The same is true of D'Entre les Morts.parUntil Tim Lucas's brief examination in Video Watchdog the novel received very little critical attention. The book definitely displays themes Wood exclusively ascribes to Hitchcock such as male insecurity, violence against women and their victimization within a deadly patriarchal romantic illusion. Male fears concerning female sexuality also appear. Written by the authors of Les Diaboliques, D'Entre les Morts ("From Among the Dead") was published in America as a Dell paperback in April 1958 prior to the release of Hitchcock's film. Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury, the publishers chose the title, Vertigo, rather than The Living and the Dead which appears in small print below. Contrary to popular legend, Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau never wrote the book especially for Hitchcock. However, the 1955 release of Clouzot's Les Diaboliques brought D'Entre les Morts to the attention of both Paramount and Hitchcock (Auiler, 28-30). A synopsis of the novel is necessary at this point.

During France's preparations for mobilization against Germany in 1940, shipbuilder Paul Gevigne asks his former college friend, Roger Flavieres, "to keep an eye" (5) on his wife. Former policeman Roger is an insecure male. He has always suffered from vertigo, feels remorse about the death of a colleague who slipped and fell from a roof in his place while chasing a criminal, and harbors guilt feelings about his inability to enter military service during a crucial period in French history. Roger is now a lawyer. He has chosen this profession "to discover the secrets that prevent people living" (22), an apt parallel to Hitchcock's cinematic interrogation of people dominated by the dead hand of the past.

Like his later counterpart, Gavin Elster, Gevigne has married into money. His wife, Madeleine, is supposedly possessed by the spirit of her great grandmother, Pauline Lagerlac, who committed suicide a few months after she gave birth to a son (11). Although this reference remains unexplored it clearly associates Pauline's death with post-natal trauma and also anticipates the heroine's fate as a victim of patriarchy. Furthermore the reference also supplies a key motivation for both Roger and Scottie since it connects the male's romantic pursuit of the female with a desire to regain pre-Oedipal union with the lost mother, a desire which turns to violence if frustrated. The novel also anticipates Hitchcock's expressionist color techniques in films such as Rope and Marnie as well as Scottie's dark mystical quest for Madeleine by referring to a 1920s German expressionist film the two college friends once saw -- Jacob Boehme. (8) Thus, the original source material for Hitchcock's film already contained references to the type of visual techniques he would both use and develop during the filmmaking process. As many critics have noted, Hitchcock was influenced by the silent film techniques of German expressionism and developed this formative influence in later films with the aid of new technologies such as sound and color.

Themes of voyeurism clearly occur in the novel. Roger begins to spy on Madeleine. He first sees her in a theater but cannot use "the mother-of-pearl opera glasses to raise to his eyes to study Madeleine's face" (19). As the play begins, Roger remembers his college days with Paul when both "lacked the audacity to cope with girls" (20) who used to tease them both. He remembers his virile college friend Marco who had no trouble at all. Even his former police colleagues "used to make fun of him". He feels jealous of Paul for marrying. The novel thus already presents Roger as a vulnerable and insecure male. He erotically imagines himself in his friend's place watching Madeleine undressing and framing her in a classical portrait: "in that gilded half-light she stood out like a portrait."(21) He performs functions common to both Scottie and the voyeuristic camera eye in Vertigo.parD'Entre les Morts also suggests that despite comfortable external masks, the whole of human existence exhibits deep insecurity, especially when it involves conscious or unconscious reactions to a negative world of patriarchal power. "Even Gevigne, with his money, his factories, his influential friends, wasn't really living. They were liars, all of them, these people who, like Marco, pretended they could rise rough-shod over every obstacle. Who knew whether Marco wasn't at that moment in desperate need of a friend to lean on? A man on the stage kissed a girl .. It looked so easy, but that was a lie too." (22)

Many features exist in the novel which Hitchcock recognized as akin to his own authorial vision as the following quotation shows: "The truth was that they were all like him, Flavieres, trembling on the edge of a slope at the bottom of which was the abyss. They laughed, they made love, but they were afraid. What would become of them if there weren't whole professions whose job it was to prop them up--the priest's, the doctor's, the lawyers?" (22)

Roger saves Madeleine from drowning in the Seine and falls in love with her. But theirs is a chaste relationship suggesting Roger's pathological fear of femininity. He compares Madeleine to Eurydice whom Orpheus failed to rescue from the underworld. Roger also cites the visit of Aeneas to the underworld (50-51) thus revealing himself as dominated by Freud's Death Instinct, a psychopathological pattern strongly evident in a decade which saw both the appearance of Vertigo and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (see also Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age). Roger also blames Madeleine for his self-induced male psychopathology in terms reminiscent of Scottie's later condemnation of Judy. "She absorbed literally all his strength. He was a blood-donor. No, that wasn't the word. A soul donor" (52).

Eventually, Madeleine rushes up a church tower and supposedly plunges to her death. Roger first denies his culpability to Paul then finally admits it. When he listens later to news about the German breakthrough, an interesting comparison between the historical situation and Roger's personal dilemma appears. "In any case, this war they talked so much about was only a tiny episode in the death-struggle that was his" (80). His romantic yearning for Madeleine appears as a sublimation for masochistic insecurities concerning his physical inability to fight for his country. "Outwardly he looked himself: inwardly he was ravaged, corroded, burnt-out and blackened, his four walls left standing round a heap of wreckage. With that picture he nourished his misery, making it more bearable. He was beginning to respect his ordeal" (84, italics mine). Finally, with "death in his soul", he travels south for the duration of the war.

When Roger returns to Paris as an alcoholic in 1944, he discovers that Paul died in a car accident while under police investigation for the death of his wife. Viewing a newsreel of General de Gaulle's visit to Marseilles he sees a woman resembling Madeleine. "The eyes were pale, and the delicate features recalled some portrait by Lawrence" (100). The authors again use framing metaphors which anticipate Vertigo's cinematic techniques. Roger eventually "finds" her in Marseilles under the more vulgar persona of Renee Sourange who gives him the impression of "a badly dubbed film, with some nonentity speaking the part of a star" (110). Like Scottie, he forces her to resemble his lost love by taking her to a boutique, choosing her perfume, and making her change her hair style. Without that perfume the resurrection would be incomplete" (119). When he finally makes her speak like Madeleine, "the sound of their steps, the silence of the things round them, the paintings and the portraits, reminded him of the Louvre with aching intensity" (121).

Finally, the successful nature of his Pygmalion dominance not only evokes parallels between himself and Paul but also anticipates those sinister ones between Scottie and Gavin Elster. "He signed and took her into a room full of models of boats and ships--caravans, galleys, tartans, and a three-decker complete with all its guns and an exquisite network of rigging" (121).

Although the novel does not contain a flashback similar to Judy's in Vertigo, the reader guesses the truth when Roger discovers Pauline's necklace in Renee's possession. The revelation occurs two-thirds through the novel and parallels the point at which Hitchcock makes his later cinematic revelation. Roger begins drinking again. Like Scottie, Roger begins the psychological torture of his victim by resurrecting Madeleine's image even further. "He only wanted to remodel the shape of her head, giving it the noble line, the serenity of a Leonardo. To put it differently, he was painting the portrait of the Madeleine he remembered" (136). He follows Renee to a hotel where she registers under the name Pauline Lagerlac. At this point, she wears a grey suit. Renee then writes Roger a full letter of confession but it blows away in the wind during a struggle. (149)

Despite Renee's submission, Roger persists in psychopathologically recreating his lost love. The novelists describe this intensity in musical terms anticipating Bernard Herrmann's different romantic Liebestod soundtrack composition. "In despair, he squeezed her arm. In the murky twilight he could now identify her with absolute certainty, by her step, her scent, and the hundred and one other details that love can interpret so unerringly. Vague snatches of music, an accordion, a mandolin, came to them from somewhere or other. Behind them, an occasional blast of a siren sounded like some wild nocturnal beast." (151)

Once Renee confesses to her involvement in Paul's plot by impersonating his wife, Roger becomes angered at the collapse of his romantic dream and strangles her when she refuses to become Madeleine. Despite knowing the full reality of the situation, he denies it and pathologically desires the return of his lost illusion. The novel ends with Roger arrested. He kisses the dead girl before the police take him away. "`I shall wait for you', he said." (159)

The above plot synopsis reveals that Hitchcock borrowed much from the original novel. But rather than uttering "Gotcha!" and attacking the director's supposed lack of originality, it is important to examine the transformations and changes Hitchcock made to his source material. Vertigo appears a generation after the original period of D'Entre les Morts and in a different country. It is a Hitchcock film from Paramount studios geared to different cultural circumstances. Roger now becomes James Stewart's Scottie Ferguson, a role tailored to an actor associated with normal all-American guy characters in popular memory. However, the "film noir" segment of Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1947) revealed a far more tormented and vulnerable aspect of the actor's personality, one Hitchcock and Anthony Mann in his Westerns used to good effect in the 50s. As originally conceived, Roger is a masochistic male figure resembling those psychologically disturbed males in the universe of David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich whose work can never be described in any way as "hard-boiled" masculine works of fiction in the tradition of James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett. Although revered by the French for alternative depictions of masculine dilemmas, the Goodis/Woolrich male persona is not one American cinema audiences would feel comfortable with, at least, initially. Hitchcock's casting strategy uses the "Jimmy Stewart" persona and tears it apart to reveal a "beast in the closet". Vertigo's famous opening sequence makes Roger's malady of the original novel into a crucial section of the film. Vertigo suddenly subverts the male control associated with an actor usually regarded as a reassuring representative of American patriarchal values in popular films such as The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and Strategic Air Command (1955). The ailment suddenly appears from nowhere and reduces Scottie from man-of-action into a state of helpless vulnerability. As others have noticed, the sequence ends with both Scottie and the audience placed in a position of insecurity. Hitchcock's changes to D'Entre les Morts resemble an artist painting over an already completed canvas who decides to keep some features and develop others into more creative patterns. The original models from D'Entre les Morts exist in Vertigo. But they are transformed in significantly new directions to become part of an essential Hitchcock universe of male desire and male anxiety. Scottie and Madeleine/Judy still exhibit problematic patterns of behavior, but they become changed into representing a particular human condition. They do not merely exhibit individual pathological case-histories of the original characters viewers can safely distance themselves from. As Wood points out, the difference between book and novel involves aspects of mood, tone, and meaning. "The drab, willful pessimism of D'Entre les Morts is an essentially different world from the intense tragic sense of Vertigo, which derives from a simultaneous awareness of the immense value of human relationships and their inherent incapability of perfect realization." (109)

In his later more psychoanalytic and political exploration of the film, Wood traces Scottie's predicament to "the nature of desire and how it is constituted in patriarchal culture" (384). Two significant characters in Vertigo who do not exist in D'Entre les Morts are extremely relevant to this interpretation: Midge and the nun who appears in the climactic scene on the bell tower. If, as opposed to the original source novel, Vertigo contains wider implications paralleling Wuthering Heights's relationship to "the social and literary history of its own time", it is one involving the psychological construction of human identity in western culture.

Although the Freudian paradigm has recently faced attack for its Eurocentric connotations, it is still an important model (naturally subject to revision and reinterpretation), for explaining certain cultural aspects of patriarchal behavior in drastic need of radical change. Scottie's desire for Madeleine derives from a regressive male desire denying dependence and a repressed polymorphous sexual identity. It has associations with the male child's original relation to the mother and the social construction of identity within the family. As Michel Schneider notes in Neurosis and Civilization, the Oedipal trajectory is really culturally determined according to a process whereby the male child must separate himself from the mother and femininity to move towards socially acceptable masculine roles. However, like the Oedipal trajectory itself, the process is often never entirely successful and the male child may react aggressively towards any threatening feminine object challenging his hegemony in any way. In Vertigo, Barbara Bel Geddes's Midge is both androgynous and feminine in appearance, an independent woman with an (implicitly) active sexual life. But she is also described as "motherly" and a reminder to Scottie of his own inner dependence. Midge becomes Melanie Klein's "bad mother" not only by refusing Scottie her breast but also by demystifying the romantic male's yearning for a lost object. She designs brassieres, wishes "her boy" to be more mature, and makes the mistake of destroying his illusion by her parodic portrait of Carlotta. Her action also parallels Madeleine/Judy who moves from being the desired Kleinian "good object" to the "bad object" after Scottie realizes the illusory nature of his romantic yearning. After realizing Scottie's hopeless dependence on a lost figure and his maternal dependency, Midge leaves the film for ever. Her departure parallels Madeleine's and anticipates Vertigo's final loss. It forms an appropriate conclusion to the first part of the film.

After wandering like a "lost soul" in San Francisco like Carlotta in the past and Madeleine in the recent present, Scottie finally discovers the missing mother in the presence of Judy. However, unlike D'Entre les Morts, the latter part of Vertigo intuitively sympathizes with the plight of Judy who finds herself used and abused by another male who dominates her in a different, yet similar, manner to Gavin Elster's. Her earlier concealed relationship with her stepfather in Kansas is also pertinent. Yet Scottie's psychopathology is not masochistically nurtured like Roger's in D'Entre les Morts but results from a social construction of identity harmful both to himself and others. Although both texts clearly share patterns of voyeurism, male aggression, and doomed romanticism, Vertigo develops these themes into a critique of a human condition based upon a western system of values harmful to males and females trapped within its ideological and psychopathological confines. This particular "structure of meaning" (Raymond Williams) raises Vertigo above D'Entre les Morts despite their basic similarities.

Vertigo moves towards its conclusion on the bell tower. Judy appears momentarily to convince the punitive Scottie of her genuine love for him. Scottie echoes Madeleine's final words "Too late, it's too late." He concludes, "There's no bringing her back." Judy appeals to him. "Please!" As William Rothman observes, "He does not ask for proof of Judy's love; he believes her, as he had the first time. Whatever the woman in his arms has done and whoever she is, he loves and forgives her." (168) But the culturally coded image of mother returns to condemn Judy for her transgression of patriarchal values. She looks away from Scottie, sees a shadowy figure, and falls to her death. This figure is a nun who appears briefly but crucially. The nun symbolizes many things: a virginal Sister of Mary expressing a celibacy inimical to human desire, a punitive avatar of Hitchcock's own Catholicism, the ghost of Madeleine Elster, the reincarnation of the ghostly doomed mother Carlotta Valdes, and Hitchcock's patriarchally repressive authoritarian side. Her actual meaning is difficult to define. But her ambiguous presence is crucial here. Appearing at a pivotal moment, the nun is the final maternal figure to appear. Her sudden arrival disrupts for ever any possible reunion, forgiveness, and mutual personal development that Scottie and Madeleine/Judy might have achieved. A punitive patriarchally-inscribed mother figure emerges to destroy a woman who temporarily attempts to turn the male away from those self-destructive and destructive tendencies infecting his entire personality from birth onwards. The nun's abrupt appearance also foreshadows the sudden, shadowy, intrusion of "Mrs. Bates" into the shower in Psycho. "Her" action destroys for ever any chance of Marion Crane's advancing beyond her own "private trap." Has Scottie unconsciously yearned for this figure to appear as if wishing not to avoid the implications of his brief insight into his civilized and savage form of conditioning? It is impossible to be certain. Whether accidental or not, the nun's appearance represents the violent return of a culturally punitive psychic mechanism. It is almost as if Hitchcock is making a veiled allusion to Emile Zola's last novel Verite (1903) in which the novelist recognizes the ways an oppressive Catholic religion attempts to manipulate and use women as a reactionary ideological force in the cultural battle for mind control.

As Julia Kristeva notes in her essay "Stabat Mater", Western society urgently needs a new discourse on maternity to replace those unsatisfactory traditional cultural codes affecting both males and females. She points out that "we live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood. If, however, one looks at it closely, this motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what is more, it involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the relationship that binds us to her, one that cannot be localized--an idealization of primary narcissism" (161). Kristeva notes the problematic development of the fourth-century asceticism grafted on to the image of the Virgin Mary which links sexuality and death. "Since they are mutually implicated with each other, one cannot avoid the one without fleeing the other. This asceticism, applicable to both sexes, was vigorously expressed by John Chrysostom (On Virginity: `For where there is death there is also sexual copulation, and where there is no death there is no sexual copulation either')." In other words, despite Kristeva's criticisms of Freud, Vertigo exhibits another tragic example of a human condition plagued by the continual battle between Eros and Thanatos. Thus in Vertigo's final drama, the fantasy image of a culturally coded mother emerges from the shadows, as if in a horror ]film, to destroy whatever alternative potentials exist within the fleeting self-knowledge Scottie and Judy briefly possess at that moment.

Judy screams and falls to her death. Scottie stands numbly by as the nun ironically rings a bell which may denote spiritual salvation but which can also signify psychic damnation. Mother's boy finally stands on his own feet looking at a dead object whose demise is necessary for his male construction. The final image is creatively and ambiguously meaningful. Wood states, "He is cured, but empty, desolate. Triumph and tragedy are indistinguishably fused." (129) But far beyond D'Entre les Morts, Vertigo creatively embodies that peculiarly transformative nature of artistic creation, one exemplified by Kristeva. "Might not modern art then be, for the few who are attached to it, the implementation of that maternal love--a veil of death, in death's very site and with full knowledge of the facts? A sublimated celebration of incest ..."(177).

Perhaps. But it may also signify an important awareness of things in need of change, an awareness briefly recognized by Hitchcock, his fictional creations, and ourselves. The challenge remains.

WORKS CITEDparAuiler, Dan. Vertigo: The Making of A Hitchcock Classic. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1998.

Boileau, Pierre and Thomas Narcejac. Vertigo. Trans. Geoffrey Sainsbury. New York: Dell, 1958.

Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.

Kristeva, Julia. "Stabat Mater." The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Moi Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 160-186.

Lucas, Tim. "Vertigo Before Hitchcock." Video Watchdog 40, 1997: 70-71.

Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. London: Panther, 1969.

Rothman, William. "Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock." The "I' of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 152-173.

Schneider, Michel. Neurosis and Civilization: A Marxist/Freudian Synthesis. Translated by Michael Robot. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.

Watson, Garry. The Leavises, The `Social' and The Left. Swansea, South Wales: The Brynmill Press. 1977.

Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.