Vertigo: Falling As A Symbolic And Thematic Function

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological rollercoaster, Vertigo, is one of many defining works of his career. Featuring James Steward as John “Scottie” Ferguson, a retired detective plagued by acrophobia, Vertigo is masterfully crafted, replete with subtle motifs in every frame. After Galvin Elster asks Scottie to shadow his wife, Madeleine Elster, whom he believes to be possessed, Scottie finds himself smack dab in the middle of an elaborate murder plot. With a bit of cinematographic magic, Hitchcock projects Scottie’s feelings of confusion onto the audience. Through the use of intentional symbolism, Hitchcock drives home messages concerning the instability of identity, reality, and infatuation with a connecting feeling of literal vertigo.

Many of Hitchcock’s films demonstrate an individual swamped with angst when dealing with a disordered world. To that end, Vertigo emphasizes the uncertainty of reality by evoking feelings of the supernatural. With the use of corridors, Hitchcock produces physical passages between the worlds of the living and the dead. For example, when Midge has lost faith in rekindling her romance with Scottie, she leaves down a sanatorium corridor which darkens around her. On the flipside, when Judy arrives back from the beauty salon, she enters the frame from the hallway as a resurrected Madeleine Elster. The color green, archetypically associated with ghostly apparitions, appears frequently in Vertigo, from Judy’s green dress worn when Scottie first notices her to Scottie’s green sweater worn when he is immersed in his dream world. Playing on Scottie’s deception concerning the identity of Judy/Madeleine, Hitchcock reinforces the message of appearance vs. reality elsewhere. Midge forcefully attempts to place herself into Scottie’s fantasy by painting herself into the “Portrait of Carlotta, while Scottie has hallucinations of Madeleine when he revisits her favorite places after his release from the sanatorium. As always, appearances are deceiving.

Spirals are showcased frequently in Vertigo, evoking an overwhelming feeling of dizziness. When Scottie relives the moment where his acrophobia prevented him from saving a fellow officer, his fallen colleague’s limbs are spiraled outward. Madeleine purchases a circular bouquet, sending several individual petals spiraling downward into the water before she jumps into San Francisco Bay. One of the more prevalent spirals, found in the hair bun of Carlotta and Madeleine, is indicative of the dizzying process of falling in love which Scottie will soon undergo. In fact, Scottie’s very relationship is circular: he falls in love with Madeleine, loses her to death, falls in love with Judy, and finally loses her to death as well. As Scottie follows Madeleine up the winding church bell tower stairs, he is left powerless as his lover falls to her death, his nauseating love having brought him to his knees. Hitchcock’s clever camera technique, zooming in on a subject while simultaneously moving away, perfectly emulates the physical feeling for the viewer. Love is a romantic delusion, and Scottie’s madness for Madeleine is what secures her fate at the end of the film.

Were it not for the level of explicit and implicit complexity delivered in each of his films, Hitchcock would not be remembered as the film genius he was. As a genuine “Master of Suspense,” Hitchcock draws his audiences into his films not with heavy-budget explosions but with narratives which demand our full attention. Indeed, an understanding of Vertigo’s central messages requires an understanding of Hitchcock’s subtle symbolism. Hitchcock’s use of thematic motifs helps audiences make headways into several diverse concepts including the delusion of romance and the uncertainty of reality via a central theme of disorder. Just as Scottie, all of us as viewers suffer from our own unique forms of vertigo, regardless of if that nauseating fear is related to acrophobia or not.