Matt Desiderio

Constructing Fantasy in Hitchcock's Vertigo:

  A Textual Model of Consumerism

The amount of critical analysis surrounding Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is itself dizzying, but as the film has recently been restored, it seems appropriate to provide it with a fresh critical reading. The purpose of this paper then, is to draw this film out of the past with a reading that offers not only a new way of understanding it, but a close look at the culture that produced it. Specifically, Vertigo offers its most exciting ideas when contextualized in a culture of consumerism. Consumerism shaped the film, and also shapes the way we view it. The desire of the consumer is the driving force behind not only our economy, but our mode of seeing the world, and seeing films. As consumers, we are always looking for, and looking at, new commodities, especially clothing. We gaze at clothing in shop windows. We purchase it and wear it, making it visible to others. Indeed, the desire to buy clothing is linked closely to our desire to show it off. We shop in a visual economy, a visual culture of consumption. To understand this culture it is important to understand the historical figure of the flâneur. The flâneur is a wandering male consumer of images who is, and was, particularly in the nineteenth century, the visual and economic agent at the center of consumer culture. He is also at the center of Vertigo, personified in the main character, Scotty.

     The flâneur is an inveterate urban wanderer and voyeur who is at home in the public spaces. In the words of Baudelaire, "for the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement" (qtd. in Brand 5). Walter Benjamin, in his work on the Paris arcades, was even more explicit about the public life of this figure: "The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls" (qtd in Glebber 54). But the flâneur is as much alone in a crowd as he is at home in it (59). He is detached from the world around him. According to Anke Glebber, "the necessity of this solitary perambulation corresponds to the flâneur's predisposition for states of melancholy, a melancholy from which he seeks escape in a deluge of images -- searching in these images for points of orientation, markers of life" (59-60). He wanders the city, financially independent and with time on his hands, casually observing urban life. His haunts are those markets and arcades which, particularly in the nineteenth century, provided a new public space for strolling and shopping. But the flâneur also has an earlier manifestation in the eighteenth-century figure of Addison and Steele's Mr. Spectator. It is here, that the character Scotty has his cultural roots.

     Steele's Spectator no. 454 is particularly important in this discussion because of the instructive similarities it reveals between Mr. Spectator and Scotty, similarities which inform the fundamental consumerism that underlies their wandering and voyeurism. Spectator No. 454 recalls a day spent in London, during which Mr. Spectator roams the streets and open markets of the city. We readers share in his excursion, which involves the pursuit by carriage of a woman through the streets, a game of cat and mouse full of furtive glances. We also share Mr. Spectator's glimpses of his quarry, including a fetishistic look at the woman's "laced Shooe on her Left Foot" (130). When his pursuit of this "Silk Worm," (that is, a woman who window shops in fine fabric stores without the intention of buying anything) finally concludes, the narrator continues his day of speculation by window shopping within the passages of the Royal Exchange. The goods he eyes, and in turn presents to his readers for their consideration, are not just "fabrics and ribbands" being sold in the shops by young ladies, but the salesgirls themselves:

to observe so many pretty Hands busie in the Foldings of Ribbands, and the utmost Eagerness of agreeable Faces in the Sale of Patches, Pins, and Wires, on each Side the Counters, was a Amusement, in which I should longer have indulged my self, had not the dear Creatures called to me to ask what I wanted, when I could not answer, only To look at you. (132)

For the flâneur, the market place of the Exchange is not merely mercantile, but visual, and its commodities are valued by the visual pleasure they give. The currency that purchases the visual gratification of seeing wares and goods on public display, and in particular of seeing females in the same in public space, is the male gaze.

     Scotty is the twentieth-century manifestation of Steele's Mr. Spectator. Both are insomniacs. Mr. Spectator, "being restless," sets out for London early in the morning out of a "busie Inclination" (129); Scotty, tries to sleep, but is first wakened by Madeleine, then by nightmares. He also shares Mr. Spectator's "busie Inclination": nearing the end of his recuperation, he literally itches to get out of his binding corset and out into the world. "Tomorrow," he says to his old college friend Midge, "the corset comes off and I'll be a free man." When Midge asks him what he will do with his free time, he replies that he is uncertain, but that he is "a man of independent means." And while this conversation points ironically to Scotty's dependency on the motherly figure of Midge (who, appropriately, designs underwear for a living), and to his struggle to get the freedom and power to ditch her, it also identifies him as the independent flâneur who can roam the city at will.

     Scotty shares much with Mr. Spectator, including above all the compulsion to wander. Wandering constitutes most of the action of Vertigo. And it is equally present in the dialog. The word "wander" occurs in various forms at least 11 times in the film. Wandering is both preoccupation and occupation for Scotty. He is a detective shadowing Madeleine, purposely wandering after her. Scotty's car moves through San Francisco in a spiraling, deliberate pursuit of Madeleine, just as Mr. Spectators carriage jogs through the streets of London chasing the "Silk Worm."

      But there is a difference in their wandering. Scotty not only wanders to gratify his visual desires for the figure of Madeleine, but he also wanders to travel in time. Anne Friedberg's study of cinema and post-modernity, Window Shopping, draws a clear and important link between visual consumption, commodities, and the past, and can help to clarify Scotty's consumerism as a method of reconstructing the past. Friedberg points out that Walter Benjamin's incomplete study of the Paris arcades, the Passagen-werk, identifies the mobilized gaze of the flâneur as a modern, scopic time machine that turns window shopping into temporal mobility:

The passage was a fitting paradigm for all of modernity. ...the arcade was lined with luxury items produced in the economies of the newly industrialized textile trade. Hats, umbrellas, gloves, and cloth mantles were displayed in shop windows and vitrines as if they were antiquated objects in a natural history museum. The passage was not a museum or a warehouse, but a sales space where the purchase was a transaction endowed with near-philosophic significance. Commodities were transformed into souvenirs, memory residue. (49-50)

In moving through these passages, the flâneur and the window shopper both enact a scopic and economic relationship to time, one which allows the wanderer to observe, even to buy, fabricated remnants of the past. Time thus ceases to be linear, but spirals around the observer. It becomes, in the words of Theodore Adorno, "the new, the already past and the ever-same" (qtd. in Friedberg 51). It is this understanding of time as a series of mementos and souvenirs of visible, purchasable moments, that drives both the wandering of Scotty and the narrative of Vertigo. But like the spiral of Madeleine's hair, the spirals of Saul Bass's title sequence and fantastical dream sequence, and the rings of the giant sequoias Scotty and Madeleine visit, Scotty the flâneur never really goes anywhere. "Only one is a wanderer," says Madeleine. "Two together are always going somewhere." "I'm not so sure about that," replies Scotty. He is right. Scotty, and indeed the viewer, wander through Vertigo in a circle, surrounded by and gazing at images of the past, never breaking out of the spiral.

      But where Scotty moves through this spiral by gazing, Madeleine is moved through as an object of Scotty's gaze. To put it more directly, she becomes the dressed up object of Scotty's gaze. Madeleine / Judy is literally fabricated, that is, her identity is manufactured by the clothing she wears. In the visual economy, she is only another commodified image. As Scotty creates this image, his obsession with fabrics recall's that of Mr. Spectator, who chases the Silk-Worm (even the name Silk-Worm indicates her fetishized identity), ogles her laced boot, and then leaves off the chase to go and stare at sales girls. Both women and fabrics are on display. The sales girl is not on the other side of the display counter from Mr. Spectator, rather she and the goods are on the other side of the consumer's gaze. Madeleine becomes the stuff of shop windows, what Benjamin calls andenken. According to Friedberg, "Andenken translates as souvenir, but also as memory; memory was the commodity-fetish retailed in the arcade" (49). This commodity-fetish is Madeleine; in fact, the name Madeleine is entirely appropriate for a commodified woman who brings back the past, for since Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the word for a type of cake (a literal commodity) has entered the lexicon as a thing which evokes memory. Madeleine is andenken, and thus purchasable with the currency of the gaze.

      Scotty is a good shopper, and for a veteran detective, surprisingly comfortable in an upscale, ladies' department store. When Scotty demands a particular dress to re-fashion Judy into Madeleine, the saleswoman comments, "The gentleman seems to know what he wants." As he becomes more forceful and demanding in his requests, she exclaims, "You certainly do know what you want sir." She is right. Scotty knows what he wants and how to create her. Scotty fabricates the identity of the woman he desires in a clothing store, buying Judy the same dresses that already hang in her closet, commodities left over from her past role as Madeleine. Judy has been constructed from purchased commodities, and is herself a commodity in the visual economy in which Scotty is also an adept shopper. Judy belongs in a shop window, just like her clothing, and just like andenken. Appropriately, Scotty is staring into a shop window when he sees Judy for the first time and sees in her the image of the past.

     Scotty the flâneur constructs the object of his gaze, creating an illusion that obscures the real woman. Judy never looks with the agency to create. Rather she is trapped in a cycle identity construction in which she is created through shopping. She becomes a blank canvas on which an identity is created by purchases of flowers, shoes, and fabrics. Both Scotty, and the camera are mesmerized by her static profile portrait. Madeleine is framed identically each time: first at Ernie's; then in the graveyard; then in her superimposed image over the portrait of Carlotta; then before the fireplace in Scotty's apartment; and finally while riding in the car. She is also framed within the actual frame of the film image, twice in windows: once in room at the McKintry hotel, and once in her room at the Empire Hotel. These shots, these profiles and women in windows, all serve to construct images within a frame, objects like a commodity in a shop window that is looked at, but does not look back. The static profiles call to mind Barbara Kruger's image of a woman in profile, with bold type announcing her objectified state: "Your gaze hits the side of my face."

     Midge also appears frequently in frames. In an attempt to attract Scotty's attention, and gaze, she literally places herself into a frame by painting her own face onto a parodied Portrait of Carlotta (Madeleine's ghost / grandmother). When the attempt angers Scotty, Midge vents her frustration by throwing a paintbrush at her large studio windows. The camera cuts to the paint smudge on the glass, but the predominant image is Midge's reflection in the window, which seems to hover high over the skyline of the city. The image suggests that Scotty's rejection has thrown Midge out of a window, just as Madeleine will be cast out of the tower window by Gavin. And in fact, Midge finally is figuratively thrown out of a window: the last shot of her in the film is a long-shot silhouette. She stands before a large picture window shortly after Scotty has sunk into a what his psychiatrist refers to as "acute melancholia," (we should remember here Glebber's remarks that the flâneur has a "predisposition for melancholy). Midge has been thrown away through a frame, but she is not, like Madeleine, an illusion constructed within a frame; in fact, that is precisely why Scotty ditches her. She does not gratify his need to construct fantasy; to the contrary, she restricts it, just like the binding bras she creates. Scotty remains unaware of the illusion he is creating until the final climactic scene in the mission bell tower. It is here when he is cycled back in time and finally sees his own role, and also Gavin's role, as creators of illusion. Dragging Judy up the stairs of the bell tower, Scotty reveals that he has recognized the necklace around Judy's neck, the necklace once worn by Madeleine and Madeleine's grandmother, Carlotta, and has consequently unraveled the mystery of her deception and Gavin's crime. "You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing." Scotty sneers. Appropriately, it is a commodity that has recalled the past, a commodity just like the souvenirs that Benjamin found in the windows of the Paris arcades. The souvenir necklace is "memory residue," a thing from the past. Determined now to get to the top of the tower and relive the past in order to conquer his crippling Vertigo, Scotty drags himself and Judy towards a reckoning with his own illusions. Feverish and nearly mad, screams, "He made you over, didn't he? He made you over the way I made you over." The word play is significant. Not only do the men make Judy over, but they make her, and Scotty makes her over again. Scotty, dragging Judy up the stairs torturously recounts for Judy the detail with which Gavin created in her the fiction of Madeleine, a lie that involved teaching Judy Madeleine's upper-class manners. In what is probably the most significant line of the film, Scotty praises her proficiency at learning her role: "And you were a very apt pupil, weren't you! You were a very apt pupil!" His hysterical voice explodes on the word pupil. Here there is a telling irony that turns the thrust of the line back on to Scotty, for it is not so much Judy's aptitude that created the illusion with which Scotty was smitten; rather, it is Scotty's own gazing pupils that skillfully constructed the object of his desire.

     Ultimately, we see Scotty as a creator of fantasy who lacks the "independent means" he claims for himself. Clearly he has money, but he lacks "power and the freedom," something that both Gavin and Midge's friend Pop Lieble say men used to have in the old days of San Francisco. Scotty cannot do what Carlotta's paramour did ("He threw her away," says Pop Lieble -- twice), and he cannot do what Gavin does (first Gavin literally throws away Madeleine, then in Scotty's own words, he "ditches" Judy). Scotty is a man "of independent means" who, nevertheless, struggles to throw away the constraining and motherly Midge, only to lose the object of his desire when the image of another restrictive mother reappears in the looming figure of the nun (who scares his fantasy to death).

     What is most important, however, to any reading of Vertigo is that the textual construction of fantasy in the film follows a consumer model. Fabrication is illusion. It reduces the subject, the thing in itself, to a commodity, just as it reduces Judy to another sophisticated blonde in a gray dress. The object of the gaze is never perceived as a subject. In this respect, our mode of perception is always a matter of misinformation: Madeleine will never be Madeleine. She will only be an image passing in the street, as she does in the film, before shop windows where behind the staring figure of Scotty, mannequins imitate her state of being, an object of the gaze waiting to be dressed up in fabrics.

     It is in this respect that Vertigo shows us the relationship between textual construction, and the construction of illusion. Just as auteur criticism claims that Hitchcock constructed cool, sophisticated blonds to gratify his desire, so can a cultural reading reveal the ways in which male consumers culturally similar to Scotty create fantasy. Our culture normally associates window shopping with women, but the focused and wandering gaze of Scotty in Vertigo points to one of the ways in which men operate within this consumer model. But male and female alike, we are not only a society of actual window shoppers, but one that loves to wander in the static temporal fantasy of the darkened market place that is the cinema. We are all like Scotty in one respect: we are "very apt pupils " Scotty's line about pupils returns us to the opening credit sequence of Vertigo and the staring pupil of a woman. Over her eye is superimposed the spinning green spiral from Saul Bass' credit sequence. This image is an explicit graphic metaphor for the iris mechanism of a cinematographer's lens, the aperture through which the image passes onto the film. This image is the text returning our gaze. We see Madeleine, the constructed identity of Scotty's gaze, looking back at us. She is the very fantasy that is cinema itself returning the gaze of those who create the illusion of the text.

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Notes

Works Cited

• Brand, Dana. The Sectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
• Gleber, Anke. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, litera ture, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.
• Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
• Simmons, Patricia. "Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture." The Expanding Discourse. Ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard. New York: Harper Collins. 39-57.
• Steele, Richard. "Spectator No. 454" 1712. The Spectator, A new edition. Cincinnati: Applegate & Co., 1857.

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  Matt Desiderio was a photographer in Albany, New York, is now a graduate student and teacher in Philadelphia, and hopes to become a martial artist and hermit living by the sea.

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