Vertigo

Throughout this film, I couldn’t stop thinking about Susan Sontag’s quote describing the action of looking at photographs, which can be applied to the viewing of films; “Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on the keep on happening.” There were many times through out the film when I was creped out by what was going on but it’s not like I ever stopped looking and we don’t want it to stop even if it gets weird and uncomfortable.

There are definite camera tricks that tell us what and who we should be fixated on the screen. The first time we see Madeline, we see a large span of flawless skin through the deep v in her dress, back turned to us. Immediately we want to see what she looks like. This is followed by a tight close up of her face, we take her all in, realizing through tight angle and misty lens that we are suppose to be watching her. As the camera holds for a long time on John’s face as he drives, following Madeline, it is not he we want to see it is her; although this shot is successful in strengthening our view of his obsession.

To me, Midge and John’s interactions represented the idea of identity from separation. Midge is the lost object John knows he cannot have and he separates himself from her, taking a detective job after he retires in order to identify himself and hopefully get past his acrophobia. I thought the shots in the beginning of the film in Madeline’s apartment were very interesting. Madeline on the left, John on the right, a frilly bra framed in-between them in most of the shots. The bra in this case can be seen as a symbol of femininity, and this particularly one with its ultra provocative design, especially for this time, seems to get very little attention. It is safe to say that if a heterosexual man is with a women he is sexually attracted to and her frilly undergarments just so happen to be lying around, he is probably going to be very interested in them. John asks about the bra in a way someone would ask about a new clock on the wall, not like he cares but feels that he should because it is there. If we are following the narrative through the view of male lead, this interaction tells us that we aren’t interested in Midge.

I think this is why the painting is so strange to us. The woman in the painting is posed in a feminine and dainty way, and we are set up to see the glamour in Madeline, Midge just happens to be there so to see Midge in this role is just funny and off-putting. And as John tries to understand himself through the body, misrecognition, he falls deeper into his obsession with Madeline, who is vapid but glamorous. John, watching Judy and following her to her hotel room, grosses us out but yet we are watching too. We are have the same scopophilia.