Experiencing Vertigo (1958)
Alex
John Ferguson’s line in the climax was incredibly evocative for me. “You’re my second chance!” This encapsulates many of the prime themes of my life. Romantically (in the most personal terms possible, then), I’ve watched this theme play out to dramatic effect. My biggest mistakes with women have haunted me, and they surely were a factor in attracting similar situations and partners which presented me with a chance to show a lesson learned. We saw John play out this psychological pattern to a grotesque extent, dressing up his girlfriend with a neurotic accuracy to create the likeness of his lost love, and the familiarity I have with this basic pattern made the sequence that much more unbearable to watch.
Perhaps this phenomenon occurs with every huge crossroads in one’s life, particularly the crossroads that, though traversed, remain unresolved in the psyche. “These are moments in my past, moments I have to change!” says Inception protagonist Dom Cobb, in reference to a series of tragic past mistakes that he obsesses over to a destructive extent. One is tempted to label this karma: The soul must right itself. If there’s a mistake in the past, a mistake that involves your most important values as an individual, you will find chances to make it right again and again, until you feel hounded by apparent demons of the past, and resolution can only come from a personal choice of your own.
Jade
As I watched John Ferguson’s neurotic makeover of Judy Barton, his insistence on returning over and over to the image of his lost love, I thought of tragic romantic figures in literature. John is “borne ceaselessly back into the past,” like Gatsby, and insists on turning back to look upon his lost love as Orpheus turns back to look at Eurydice in Hades.
For John, his will to reenact his tragedy completes a karmic cycle and frees him from his ultimate problem introduced at the beginning of the film (fear of heights). Judy Barton has no such luck. Feminists criticize the pattern in film noir of always killing off the femme fatale. The idea that this is the best way for the femme fatale character to experience divine retribution is weak at best.
Judy agrees to reenact the tragedy with John, even as it pains her. In the act of ascending the stairs for the second time, she too should experience a metamorphosis of spirit, so that she is no longer running away but boldly confronting what has haunted her: her own guilt.
She would become empowered by this confrontation and on the screen we would see a final form, a powerful synthesis of both the Madeleine and Judy images, to make a more complete whole. The fact of the human’s ability to traverse personae offers profound potential. Judy, in understanding her capacity for monstrousness, now has a more full picture, a better understanding of the world as a whole, and can engage with it more usefully. Judy agrees to participate in a murder plot in the beginning of the story because she needs money, she is desperate, fearful; she believes in her own powerlessness. Through this alternate resolution, her redemption would show the scope of her power. In Hitchcock’s version, John wins because of his insistence on carrying through his story, decency be damned. Perhaps this is why Judy must die: There is not sufficient room for the anima in John’s mode of action.
Perhaps the masculine aspect of Judy is simply underdeveloped. Again, it would be more powerful if Judy were emboldened by John’s intensity as he drags her up the stairs. John’s passion at revealing the truth is a direct repudiation of her decision to hide the truth (writing her confession letter to John, then tearing it up). The animus in her could respond positively to him, could remake itself in John’s image, and empower her boldly to confront the truth.
Alex
This presents itself to me as a distinction of genre. Psychological thrillers are often assumed by the screenwriter to be tragedies, from the start. It does not often occur to him, in his quest to make the audience confront themes at once stimulating and disturbing, that a cathartic conclusion opens up the audience for even darker experiences. “The stronger the issues, the more powerful the catharsis,” again from Inception. The detective-noir, a close relative of the thriller, more readily lends itself to this good-triumphing-over-evil pattern. Of course, a good hero’s journey requires that the storyteller embody this principle in his own life. I mean to say that it’s damn hard work to make a happy ending believable, and a whole lot easier to lean back on the literary genre of tragedy.
Judy’s death feels less like an intentional statement of the plot, and more a piece of the plot left unwritten. Your suggestion that Judy must die, because John Ferguson’s driving quest has no room for the anima, is not the answer. If it were, we would feel a dark kind of relief at her death; we would experience her death as inevitable and necessary. Instead it’s abrupt and arbitrary.
In the absence of a hero’s journey, we’re left with the chilling resonance of humans in all-too-relatable crises, who correct the situations at instinctual levels only. Every survivor of catastrophes, romantic or otherwise, is familiar with John Ferguson’s curse of being “borne ceaselessly back into the past.” The thriller gathers its fuel from such resonances.
I’ll bet the compulsion to dress up Judy to look exactly like his old girlfriend is a snapping-rubber-band effect. His previous girlfriend was mystery incarnate. He had to know what ailed her, he had to know what went on within her mind, and knowledge of his own weakness (losing his job because of fear of heights) only accentuated the intuition that he could never have her. When he then found himself with a pliable mate in the form of Judy, John went a bit overboard. This need to project the glaring light of masculine order into the feminine shadows of the unconscious often destroys a romantic relationship.
Jade
This makes me think of the best way to approach a cat. If you stare at a cat head-on and reach out to it, it may assume it’s being hunted and run away. So the recommended way to befriend the feline is to close your eyes or turn your back to it. When your back is turned, the cat will often walk right up to you. This is a good way to confront the force of the anima as well. To find out what is happening within your girlfriend, or within the anima aspect of your self, a forceful demand for a tell-all just won’t do. The cat-like anima will retreat. The masculine must lay down neurotic desperation, must become disinterested in petting the cat, so to speak. It is his role now to maintain an almost stoic curiosity, a willingness to simply sit in the same room and see what happens.