Abstract.
Being in love with the idea of someone, and realising only too late that they are not who they pretend to be: this sappy sentiment has and will continue to inspire countless songs, novels, and suicides. It is a thought both trite and perpetually ripe for creative and intellectual exploration. Alfred Hitchcock breathes new life into the idea through his warped thriller Vertigo (1958) wherein the boundaries between love and obsession ceaselessly and tragically blur. Jacques Lacan, however, sees this as part of a larger problem, one that goes to the very root of identity, due to the overarching symbolic order which pervades social life.
Introduction
By bringing the two thinkers, Alfred Hitchcock and Jacques Lacan, into conversation, I will show how Vertigo (1958) presents love as inherently nebulous and the desire for it impossible to fulfil, precisely due to the fact that this desire is mediated through symbolic means which cannot accurately capture it. Scottie’s desire for love is shown to be invested in, and solely precipitated by language, be it textual or visual. The film’s main tension thus arises from the fundamental incompatibility between Scottie’s love for Madeleine stemming from Lacan’s “desire for [something unnameable]” and the symbolic, concrete ways he tries to actualise this desire through inherently textual “[varieties] of animation” (Seminar II 223).
Summaries
First, a quick summary. In the film, Scottie, a detective in retirement due to his acrophobia (fear of heights; thus fear, necessarily, of falling), is hired by an old friend, Elster, to follow his wife Madeleine throughout her day. She is a woman haunted, both psychologically, by strange visions and fainting spells linked vaguely to a distant Spanish relative, Carlotta, of whom a painting is displayed in the museum which Madeleine visits frequently; and perhaps literally, as the film suggests to us a ghost story along with a love story. Scottie falls in love with Madeleine before witnessing her death from a church belltower, a death which he is unable to save her from due to his acrophobia. Later, Scottie encounters Judy, who bears a striking resemblance to Madeleine; he learns that Judy is Madeleine, having been part of an elaborate ruse by Elster to kill the real Madeleine, on whom the faux Madeleine (Judy acting as Madeleine) was based on - this real woman, whom Scottie does not know, and yet loves.
Next I will lay out Lacan’s theoretical framework which will be used as a lens for this reading. The origin of social identity is the mirror stage, the point at which an infant first recognises himself, literally in a mirror. For Lacan, this however is a misrecognition, wherein the child sees not the reality of who he is but an elevated fantasy self, a unified construct to which he will always aspire and fall short of, as it is simply a “flight of fancy” (Ecrits 6). This misrecognition is precipitated by language, through the word “I” which points the child towards this fantasy. After the mirror stage, the child grows up into a world in which every social function is predicated fundamentally on this misrecognition, mediated through the symbolic order, the "world of words that creates the world of things” (Ecrits 65). Put simply, the symbolic order is the entire realm of language which mediates the ways humans interact with the world, each other, and themselves. But Lacan, drawing on the poststructuralist work of Saussure’s semiotic theories, aims to point to the fragility of the symbolic order, through highlighting the fundamentally tenuous linkage between the signifier (i.e. the word) and the signified (i.e. the physical ‘thing’, the referent of the word). This is the paradox of the symbolic: while identity formation is impossible outside of the symbolic order, the language through which one achieves identity is inherently marked by a fundamental misrecognition, and thus a lack - the gap between expectation and reality. With this, there is then a distinction between desire and love for Lacan: desire is only found in and understood through the means of the signifier, whereas love is what escapes the symbolic altogether. While desire functions as a lure towards love, it is the same thing that keeps us fundamentally at a distance to love. These thematic preoccupations of distance, and of misrecognition, are then what link the work of Lacan and Hitchcock.
I: The Lover
Bringing in Lacan’s theories, we see how the deceptively readable visual language surrounding Madeleine causes Scottie’s misrecognition of the object of his love: the desire for a false person, invested, through the facade of Judy’s acting, with deep symbolic weight, and yet hollow. From the first frames we see of Madeleine’s profile, she is instantly readable to Scottie and to viewers acquainted with cinematic tropes. The soft lighting on her face, the gentle gait, neat hair and immaculate dress, and accompanying romantic soundtrack tell us clearly that she is the blonde bombshell, the noir love interest, the damsel (literally, for the purposes of Scottie’s quest) in need of saving. In the flower shop, she is presented in a deeply aestheticised way, surrounded by flowers and framed in the mirror like a painting. Her alignment with art - more accurately with the fantasised perfection of classical forms of art, which tend to inflate reality with symbolic significance rather than represent factual truth - later extends into the places she ‘haunts’ which are charged most acutely with the symbolic economy: she slips past the church’s wall of statues; she sits, perfect, among the museum portraits.
Fig.1: Madeleine in the flower shop
By aligning Madeleine with these iconic images, Hitchcock is aligning one symbolic economy with another: the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema’s visual language which Judy dons through Madeleine, with that of religious and artistic iconography. He exposes the symbol’s artifice, its allure like the spiral’s allure. From the repeated references to sight - the first shot of an eye in the titles; Scottie’s eye peering at Madeleine from behind the flower shop’s door - we see how it is as implicated in the negotiation between self and symbol as it is in Lacan’s visual recognition of a mirror self, the birthplace of language and of desire.
For both Hitchcock and Lacan, this recognition of self and other is thus fundamentally a misrecognition: Scottie reads the signs correctly, falling in love with and desiring Madeleine, yet fails to see the farce; the subject reads the mirror self, yet fails to see within it the projection of his own desire for the unified self. Like Hitchcock, Lacan uses the language of art to elucidate the fundamental hollowness of the symbolic, comparing the subject’s conception of itself through symbolic means with “sincere portraits which leaves its idea no less coherent, [...] rectifications that do not succeed in freeing its essence, [and] stays and defences that do not prevent his statue from tottering” (Ecrits 42). Fragility is inherently embedded in the symbolic; the illusory perfection of Madeleine is shown to be no more than a construct of symbols. Outside of these symbols (her mannerisms, hair colour, poise, voice, etc) she is simply Judy, whom Scottie cannot love.
II: The Spiral
Fig.2: Madeleine in the museum
The close association of the spiral motif with Madeleine shows that Hitchcock is acutely aware of the hollowness at the heart of the symbolic. Lacan’s “essence” is the darkness at the middle of the spiral, the meaning behind the symbol which Scottie tries, in vain, to excavate; it was never there, and yet this lack of essence is a precondition for one’s desire. Both the painting of Carlotta (iconic in the artistic sense) and the construct of Madeleine (iconic in the cinematic sense) are unified by this image of the spiral that Scottie fixates on when trying to understand the mystery of Madeleine. In the museum, he fixates on the whorl of her hair; right before she jumps into the river, he squints his eyes, fixating on the bouquet of roses with petals enfolding upon themselves like spirals.
Fig.3: Madeleine by the water
However, the closer Scottie seems to get to the heart of the spiral, the further away an answer seems from him. This is summed up in the scene preceding “Madeleine’s” death, when Scottie tries to chase her up the belltower but is prevented from doing so by his fear of heights; because of this delay, he arrives too late to save her. A dolly shot, used to visually capture the effect of vertigo, emphasises the distance between the subject (Scottie) and the object (the ground). He looks down the stairwell and sees another spiral. The image of allure, of the promise of a meaning, inverts itself into a visual representation for the mechanism of desire - that which draws and distances, concomitantly.
Fig.4: Dolly shot of the stairwell
The spiral thus both distracts from the lack at the centre of it and points directly to it. Scottie wishes to access this centre which is impenetrable to the symbolic, but has only the means of the symbolic, the trace of the spiral, to do so. He is so enchanted by the symbol that he fails to see the trick being played on him. He fixates on the signifier itself, because it is the closest he will come to the fulfilment of desire, the last step before the impenetrable chasm of meaning he cannot contend with: the lack of a signified, a significant other, a true object of love. The detective story is thus most suited to this attempt to uncover essence; the great hubris of this attempt betrays its own impossibility.
Love is then one way in which Scottie persists in his mistaken pursuit of essence. To understand his love for Madeleine - this comical degree of infatuation given the brevity of their interactions - we first unpack her allure. This hypnotic pull operates doubly, each aspect complementing the other through an interconnected construct of impermeability: there is first the veil of beauty, of aesthetic perfection; then there is the mystery of Madeleine’s haunting, the case which Scottie attempts to solve. Through the first, Scottie’s relation to Madeleine is as a lover; through the second, a detective. Both these relations - the distinction is eventually muddled - are predicated on one’s ability to read signs (or clues) that lead to an eventual end, an “essence” which the subject uncovers after having navigated through a maze of signifiers - “You see, there’s an answer for everything!” Scottie exclaims to Madeleine right before her ‘death’, after having seemingly uncovered one such explanation.
Fig.5: Hollow spiral in the film poster
Scottie learns, however, that the sign of the lover points no closer to the fulfilment of desire, while the clue points no closer to an answer: the signifier not to a stable signified but to another signifier in the chain. The two unsolvable mysteries, of the haunting and of love, merely reflect back onto each other: when Midge asks Scottie whether he thinks that “[...] the Beautiful Mad Carlotta has come back from the dead, to take possession of Elster's wife,” Scottie contemplates. Seeing that he is unable to answer, that he has come up against the darkness in the centre of the spiral, Midge diverts the question, instead asking “Is [Madeleine] pretty?” He is rerouted from the unachievable “essence” to the symbols of love which he thinks he can read. Later, after Scottie saves Madeleine from drowning and they are in his room, he asks her, “Has this ever happened to you before?” to which she replies, startled, “What?” having interpreted the question as implying falling in love; he instead says, “Falling into San Francisco Bay.” In both examples, the two tensions in the film, the love that Scottie and ‘Madeleine’ share, and the psychological/spiritual trouble that Madeleine is haunted by, face no resolution through language, just a deeper provocation; one facet twists deeper into the other, like the two strands of the iconic spiral of the opening sequence. The thing at the heart of the spiral is darkness: there is no essence, only a reminder of the inherent lack in the symbol, the fact that “[the] neutralization of the signifier [might be] the whole nature of language” (Ecrits 62).
III: The Haunted
Judy, the real person who exists behind the spiral, then is forced to assume this lack, internalising it due to both her role and her love for Scottie. Towards the end of her role of Madeleine, the boundaries between the actor and the character begin to blur, and the ambivalence of language comes to the fore once more; she explains her dream to Scottie: “It is as though I were walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored, and fragments of mirror still hang there [...] reflecting a dark image of me... and yet not me... someone else [...] doing things I have never done... but still me…” While Scottie reads this to be Madeleine referring to Carlotta’s possession, it is also Judy subtly revealing her own situation as an actress. She concludes with, “At the end of the corridor there is nothing but darkness.” While the darkness could refer to her eventual death, we can also understand it to be the lack of fulfilment of love that she herself has to contend with, like Scottie. She will never be the object of Scottie’s affection, because his love is mediated through the symbolic language of Madeleine. Madeleine thus becomes representative of the symbolic for Judy: a means to get closer to the fulfilment of desire, yet the very thing preventing that fulfilment. She is walking at the other end of the spiral-path that Scottie does, only to meet the same lack at its centre, as every utterance of hers, no matter how true, is distanced from her own desire.
The chain of signifiers thus becomes a chain of hauntings: where Madeleine is haunted by Carlotta, Judy is haunted by the ideal of Madeleine that she cannot live up to, even though it is “still [her]” who is living this other life. Madeleine is then equated with Judy’s fantasy self, born from the mirror stage: this shadow of the fantastical other alienates Judy from herself precisely because of what she lacks in comparison. She possesses none of Madeleine’s poise or demureness, comes from a small American town instead of a mysterious Spanish bloodline, and her voice is “louder, more confident, and more ‘ordinary’, unlike that of the more educated and well-off Madeleine ” (Doy 8).
Fig.6: Madeleine's ghost Fig.7: Scottie's vision
Scottie’s desire is also estranged, predicated on lack: he does not feel that the illusion of Madeleine is complete until Judy assumes the ultimate inscription of lack, the spiral in her hair. This scene, which is the closest that Scottie comes to finding an essence, is also the one in which symbols betray their artifice. Madeleine appears ghostly, almost translucent, and in green (Judy’s colour); later, when embracing her, the romance of the scene is undercut by the intrusion of Scottie’s memory of her site of death, the stables, into the construct of her resurrection. The symbol, in trying to fill the very lack which it conceals, is thus only able to “[reveal] both the one and the other to be no more than mirages” (Ecrits 80).
Before Judy’s Madeleine ‘dies’, Scottie proclaims his love to her, and she replies, “I love you too... too late... too late…” The “I love you” is incomplete because it fails to take into account the precondition of lack, and the ambivalent language returns: “too late” both signals Madeleine’s death and how inopportune it is for Judy to love him. He already loves the construct which she has created, the ideal self, through the symbol. To Hitchcock, then, love always comes too late, because it can never catch up with the ever-expanding and unbreachable darkness at the end of the spiral, the lack from which desire is birthed.
Works Cited
Doy, G. "Vertiginous Voices: The Lover’s Voice…… Kim, Madeleine, Judy and Gen", 2021.
https://gendoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/vetiginous-voices.pdf.
Hitchcock, A, director. Vertigo. Paramount Pictures, 1958.
Lacan, J. Ecrits: A Selection. 1st ed. Routledge, 1980.
Lacan, J. Seminar II, p.223 – 224: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955
(Edited by Jacques Alain Miller, WW Norton:1991).
