Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) has marveled audiences for decades. Released initially to a mixed reception from critics and crowds alike, the film has steadily grown in popularity and now commonly numbers highly among the greatest American films (rated as the 3rd greatest American film by the BBC in 2015).¹ This ranking is indeed well deserved, as the movie boasts beautiful visuals, an excellent score, an incredible lead performance by James Stewart, and a thrilling plot. Above all, Vertigo is able to remain increasingly relevant to our own time; Stewart’s character’s disillusion with reality and obsessive state relate ominously well to the social disconnect and idealism of today.

Stewart plays Detective John “Scottie” Ferguson, who is afflicted by vertigo throughout the movie. This case of vertigo – accompanied by visuals of disorientation and mania – is used by Hitchcock to display Scottie’s sense of disillusion with reality. Disillusion is the primary mechanism that moves Scottie throughout the film, appearing to begin early in the movie with the death of his policeman colleague. Slipping from a rooftop in close pursuit of a criminal, Scottie dangles from the end and watches helplessly as his partner reaches out a hand to help, only to slip from the edge and plummet to his death. This situation gives him vertigo, and results in his retirement from the police force to address his trauma. Scottie’s helplessness and failure surrounding the death of his colleague is a dramatic visualization of his inner psychological and behavioral confliction, which is revealed throughout the movie. Following his departure from the force, Scottie accepts a job from his college friend Gavin Elster to investigate his wife Madeleine, whom Gavin believes to be possessed by her suicidal great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. Scottie shadows Madeleine around town and, after rescuing her when she jumps into the San Francisco Bay, begins to fall in love with her. He becomes enamored by both her beauty and the intrigue surrounding her potential possession by Carlotta. The character of Carlotta, by virtue of Gavin’s view that she possesses Madeleine, is a spiritual and mystical figure divorced from Scottie’s mundane reality. Hitchcock conveys this by surrounding Madeleine with the color green in many of her scenes, which conveys the beauty of the scenes’ natural environment and proves a jarring juxtaposition from the San Francisco cityscape. Not unlike Jay Gatsby’s obsession with the green light on the dock, Scottie is obsessed with Madeleine and the glimmering charm she brings into his life.

Madeleine, however, is not the only woman in Scottie’s life. Throughout the movie, he is accompanied by his close friend and ex-fiancé Midge, who helps him recover after the incident on the roof and assists in his quest to uncover the truth about Carlotta Valdes. If Madeleine is a preternatural and enchanted being, then Midge is presented as a perfectly mundane individual. She works a regular job, lives in an apartment, and is simply living her life in the background while Scottie chases after Madeleine. What is fascinating about Midge and Scottie is the fact that they were engaged when they were younger, broke off the engagement, but remain extremely close friends. This suggests, in my opinion, the existence of unresolved feelings between the two of them, particularly as Midge becomes increasingly annoyed with Scottie’s obsessive behavior toward Madeleine and even paints a portrait of herself as Carlotta to win over his attention. We do not know what caused their engagement to end, but I posit that Scottie is probably the one who called it off, as he does not reciprocate to Midge the same affection she has for him, and their clear potential for a healthy relationship remains floating in the air between them. Despite the great potential he has with Midge, Scottie chases after the married Madeleine, who is able to provide him with some kind of escape from reality, a grotesque vision of human connection, which eventually results in disaster. Hitchcock dares us to re-examine ourselves in light of Scottie’s condition. What grounding are our own relationships upon? What kind of connection do we cultivate with the world? Scottie is a case-study for these questions, and the catastrophe that unfolds for him shows their importance.

Madeleine’s plunge into the San Francisco Bay demonstrated her suicidal tendencies under Carlotta’s spell to the dismay of Scottie and his attempts to cure her possession. Then, at the San Juan Bautista Mission, Madeleine runs away from Scottie to the top of the belltower while he struggles to overcome his vertigo to reach the top before her. He fails and is forced to watch her fall to her death. Scottie is lambasted by the authorities for his failure and eventually suffers a psychotic breakdown and is institutionalized for a time. Once released, he wanders the streets of San Francisco, reminiscing about Madeleine and uncertain of how to reassemble the fragments of his shattered dream until he meets a girl named Judy who looks like her. He cultivates an extremely domineering and obsessive relationship with Judy. He follows her up to her apartment, pressures her into spending all her time with him, and practically orders her to change her hair and wardrobe to match Madeleine’s appearance. His delight is only realized when she emerges from her closet as the spitting image of Madeleine, complete with a green glow filling the room from a neon sign outside. Scottie has turned Judy into something even more enchanting than Madeleine: she is the perfect object of his desire, a mold to create the perfect woman of his ideals and illuminations. But Scottie’s delusions are shattered when he discovers that Judy is not only the mirror image of Madeleine, but is literally Madeleine herself, or at least the woman Scottie believed to be Madeleine. We discover that Gavin Elster concocted the story of Carlotta possessing Madeleine in order to murder his wife under the guise of her being insane. Gavin hired Judy to pretend to be his wife to deceive Scottie. Gavin murdered the real Madeleine Elster and threw her body from the belltower to give the illusion that she had committed suicide. Once he discovers the truth, Scottie drags Judy back to the Mission belltower and forces her to climb to the top once more, determined to follow her to the top and finally conquer his vertigo. At the top, Judy professes her love for Scottie and begs him to forgive her. But before he can respond, a nun appears behind them and frightens Judy, who loses balance and falls to her death. The credits roll as Scottie gazes down at where she fell, helpless as yet another person in his life has been lost to a mortal descent.

Vertigo weaves the thread of Scottie’s attitude towards relationships with the individuals in his life and their effect on his relationship with reality. He feels estranged from Midge, enticed by Madeleine and Carlotta, and domineering over Judy. Scottie’s relationships here depict the ever-true reality of humanity that our own desires for connection are essential to our nature. From the time of the first man, we have been animated by the reality that it is not good to be alone. Relationships at every social level build upon each other in construction of the fundamental human desire for communion with others. Social relationships build upon each other: individuals form families; families form communities; communities form societies. Without a sense of connection on the individual level, all following elements of social cohesion become disjointed from one another and the world itself becomes separate from our own realities. Scottie serves as a case study for this lack of cohesion. His failure on the police force and subsequent vertigo catalyze his estrangement from reality which we see personified through his rejection of Midge and embracement of Madeleine. He ostracizes himself from the rest of the world, leading to his allurement by the otherness of Madeleine who reaches through the San Francisco cityscape as an unnatural connection.

This situation, as sad as it is, is not at all foreign to the world we find ourselves in today. The all-encompassing glow of artificial reality has been transforming our relationships into digital forms, if not fully substituting its own creations for the real world itself. And now with the rise of AI “companionship,” the perceived necessity of human interaction is fading away. Ever more increasingly today, technology has become an agent instead of a tool, and the human connection present in reading, writing, and artwork dissolves itself into a vehicle for digital work. If we are now less connected and engaged with each other, then what does that leave us with? The average person can now find himself possessed by a Carlotta—an animated ideal of a flawed socialization—who urges him away from the physical present and towards some kind of enchanted notion of the world not built upon humanity’s relational nature. But this is not strictly limited to our use of AI. Around the world, rates of depression and mental breakdowns have grown, despite the supposed progressiveness of modern society. Radicalism and hatred spread like an ever-raging wildfire across the fields where discourse was once possible. Political debates degrade into mudslinging and spectacles, serving only as grotesque entertainment for a disillusioned population. Figures rise to power as ideologues professing whatever vaguely populist ideals they can think of to awaken an apathetic public, proposing manifestos to incite radical change without care for how a surface-level analysis of the world ignores the true complexity of society and its problems. These are the symptoms of a society in vertigo – a society forgetting where it even came from because of our inability to forge basic human connection.

Though it never made it to theaters, Hitchcock filmed an alternate ending to Vertigo. Instead of fading to black after Judy’s death, we see Scottie return to Midge’s apartment in San Francisco. We hear the radio broadcaster detail the search for bringing Gavin Elster to justice, while Midge and Scottie share a drink, looking out the window at the city below. Scottie rescues himself from his own prison of disillusion and returns to Midge, as we the audience dare to hope that the two of them might reconnect and reforge their own relationship. Though this ending was ultimately not part of Hitchcock’s vision, it can very well still be part of our own reality. We have the option and the opportunity to live with a sense of discipline and purpose, sanctifying the world itself by our witness to what is essential and good for all people. We can choose to return to the essential and basic grandeur of human relationships which have formed everything we share today, if only we have the heart to abide in the world and accept reality for what it truly is.

N o t e s

1. BBC Culture, “The 100 Greatest American Films,” July 20, 2015, bbc.com.