Gotham Diary:
Depths and Shallows
10 July 2013
Last night, I watched Vertigo for the first time in several years. Because I had just read Dan Auilar’s book about the making of the movie, and because, over the past week or so, I had watched the Hitchcock films that preceded it, from Strangers on a Train on, and in order, Vertigo was not the same movie that it had been. It was more disturbing than ever. Well-known layers of meaning peeled back to reveal deeper layers, layers that perhaps could not be perceived when the film was made, because our assumptions about life (especially American assumptions) were relatively naive. Time has also served to stylize the action, by making palpable — visible, even, in the more formal costumes — the polite distances that were maintained by ladies and gentlemen in those days, distances for romance to punch through. To the charge that Vertigo is “dated,” one could only agree, on the understanding that it is no more dated than Hamlet or Aida.
Vertigo is, proverbially, about obsession. It is about a man’s obsession with a woman whose suicide he was unable to prevent, and it is about a film director’s obsession with a woman whose elevation into unreachable royalty he was unable to prevent. I saw last night that it is also a study of depths and shallows. Scottie Ferguson’s obsession with Madeleine Elster rocks him to his core, and in that sense may be said to be “deep,” but this passion is excited by Madeleine’s surface — by a surface that seems to close off such depths as she might have; the cause of Scottie’s obsession may be said to be “shallow.” He is not interested in who Madeleine is; he seems not to want to know her. He wants to possess her qua mystery. And this, unlike his obsession, is not abnormal. Many men seem to be wired just as Scottie is. Whether this wiring is inborn or acculturated remains to be determined, but it is unquestionably related to the conviction, widely held and effectually challenged only within living memory, that women are second-class, inferior human beings. Their beauty and their desirability depend upon it.
Like many fans of Vertigo, I’m always inclined to scold Scottie for the callousness with which he whiningly commands Judy to change her appearance, but it has until now seemed no worse than a lapse of gallantry — no way to treat a lady. Last night, I was more distressed by the imprisonment into which Judy was reluctantly preparing to enter. Madeleine’s looks and costumes would constitute a prison wall through which Scottie would never pass to pay a visit. Judy’s casual, good-times personality (so powerfully dressed by Edith Head), would have to be suppressed, reserved for girls’-nights-out. I must have been aware of this on some level, but, last night, it emerged as a clear wickedness. I began to see that Scottie had been chosen to serve as an unwitting accomplice to the crime of murdering the real Madeleine not just because of his vertigo.
Although I admire James Stewart as an actor, I am usually grateful that I don’t have to spend time with his characters. I find his all-American guys to be more frightening than appealing; however capable, they’re horse-tempered, unnerved by ignorance. Perhaps it was this misgiving that highlighted a minor passage in Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic. Art Director Henry Bumstead told Dan Auilar something that I found most interesting.
In the early days, we kept good set pieces to reuse, and I was building an apartment for this one character, so I was using three great-looking bookcases that we had in storage. When the director walked through, he didn’t say anything critical, just “Hm, this guy must like to read.” And, in fact, he didn’t. It wasn’t in his character at all. That’s when I began to realize that the set has to match what’s happening with the character.
Now, I misread this remark as a statement about the making of Vertigo, and it isn’t. Hitchcock and the movie are not mentioned. But it’s apt: the walls of Scottie’s apartment are manifestly not book-lined. And when he wants to research the life of Carlotta Valdes, he turns to a bookshop owner from whom, rather rudely, he purchases nothing. Another kind of shallow.
And in Scottie’s discontent with the natural person of Judy Barton, I found reconfirmation of my belief that the last thing you want to do is meet your favorite movie star. They don’t want to meet you, either, and not because you’re nobody. They’re paid to be other than they are (as Judy was paid to play Madeleine), and it’s that “other” that you fall in love with. Actors can only disappoint you, except as actors.
***
More surprising was the reprise of the line, “Try, just try.” This line comes up twice in Vertigo — Scottie begs Madeleine to try to wake up from her bad dream, and Midge says the same thing to Scottie when he is hospitalized. The line is a reprise of Manny Balestrero’s plea in The Wrong Man, also made in a sanitarium. Watching Vertigo on the same day as The Wrong Man, which I’d seen in the afternoon, made the connection between the two movies remarkably obvious. Between them, The Wrong Man and Vertigo feature three cases of mental disturbance. The two that aren’t feigned, moreover, might be bracketed together as what Scottie’s doctor calls “acute melancholia.” Scottie’s unresponsiveness to Midge mirrors Rose Balestrero’s to her husband.
Even Hitchcock, I think, missed the paralleling counterpoint of the Balestreros’ story. Hardly does he get out of jail before she enters the prison of her depression. Depression, it’s true, is profoundly undramatic — that’s the problem: nothing happens. What sets depression apart as a disorder is that it rouses such massive impatience in healthy people. Dan Auilar writes,
The Wrong Man‘s microscopic focus on the justice process left little screen time for Manny’s wife. Dressed down and psychologically shattered by Manny’s unjustified arrent, Miles’s character is never fully developed. Hitchcock seemed impatient with the wife’s story line, and his indifference shows on screen. The film’s sanitarium scenes are similar to the scenes in Vertigo, with the same overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of psychological crisis, yet there was little occasion for Vera Miles to do much else on screen to make an impact.
At the end of The Wrong Man, a nurse tells Manny, “She’s not listening to you now.” This is a stab at educating the audience about the powerful clamp of deep depression. The effort to engage with other people is too exhausting to be kept up; Rose says, “You can go now.” We’re told that the real Rose Balestrero left the hospital two years later, “completely cured.” That’s not very likely. Patrick McGilligan, in Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, writes,
Hitchcock kept in touch with the real-life Balestreros … asking how Rose remembered feeling, but they were consistently discouraged by the couple’s responses. The Balestrero’s had only mild anecdotes. Far from flooding him with intriguing details, reality let Hitchcock down.
Floods of intriguing details are precisely what cannot be expected from the ordeal of depression. I sense that, had Hitchcock (or anyone else at the time) properly understood the disorder, a way would have been found to set Rose’s plight more effectively. (Perhaps she might have been presented in a locked ward.) As it is, Vera Miles’s performance is deeply truthful, and I sobbed at the end. The Wrong Man is arguably Hitchcock’s grimmest film, but it is indeed what Donald Spoto calls it: a fine piece of Kunstprosa.