"One Doesn't Often Get A Second Chance": A Sequence Analysis of Vertigo
The moment of truth reveals itself in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo (1958) when John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) spots Carlotta Valdes’ necklace around Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton’s (Kim Novak) neck. This instance snaps the film back into reality, breaking Scottie’s obsessive attachment to an elusive soul image – the archetypal ‘anima’, the idea of Madeleine. When the sequence occurs the spectator has already learned the truth but we do not know when or how Scottie will discover it for himself. Moreover, we do not know how he will react. The final sequence to the film delves between layers of duality – reality and dream, love and death, believe and doubt. In a desperate retracing, all stand and face one another one last time.The previous scene is important to note because it marks the end of Scottie’s fantasy. Judy, having acknowledged Scottie’s desperate expression, makes her final move to re-enter Madeleine’s being. As she silently enters the door into the past, Scottie turns and steps away, mindful of the severity of what he is attempting to do. As the door opens again, he reluctantly turns to see, hesitating in a struggle between fear and desire. The camera holds on Scottie’s gaze as Judy comes into focus for both Scottie and the viewer. She is enclosed in the same green aura, which outlined Judy previously. As they kiss the camera makes a 360-degree pan around them, with the background meta-diegetically shifting into the stables at San Juan Bautista, visualizing a moment of déjà vu for Scottie. He stops, turning away from her lips, just as Judy did in the same instance when she breaks out of the illusion. This embrace can be read as an alternate finale. It is as close to a happy ending as the protagonists are going to get. A crescendo lifts the music up to a classical peak, and they share a last suspended moment of bliss as the camera slowly fades its eye on their dream, as if preparing for the inevitable waking to reality.
The first scene opens as if they both have succeeded in escaping from the false note of their union. A quality of newlywed energy fills the living room as if the previous kiss was the marriage and the promised dinner at Ernie’s the honeymoon – returning once again, after all that has happened, to “their place”. The camera fades in behind Scottie sitting in an armchair waiting for Judy/Madeleine to finish getting ready for their date. She enters the living room, having changed out of Madeleine’s grey suit into her black dinner dress. “Hello, my love. Like me?” she says quickly, with a half twirl, making sure the absence of the grey suit is not the determining factor in keeping the Madeleine persona intact. “Come here,” Scottie replies, intending to “muss” her. “It’s too late, I’ve got my face on”, she remarks. Multiple meanings can be taken from this line: the dialogue implies that this face, Madeleine’s face, is back, intact, possibly permanently. It cannot be “mussed”, implying that it cannot be messed, smeared, or altered in any way from its present state. Moreover, this face is the face that Scottie first fell in love with, and is now the one to draw to the surface her love for him. Also, when Scottie says, “That’s what I had in mind”, his desire to connect meets her refusal, as she stands in front of the mirror, suggesting that Madeleine cannot be physically touched; her kisses are illusions, fantasies. The truth is that she is only to be gazed upon, desired from afar.
Seconds later Judy makes the foolish mistake of bringing forth an object from the past, which can be recognized. “Help me with this, will you?” Scottie stands up and walks towards her, at first unaware of what necklace she holds up to her throat. “How do you work this thing?” he asks. She replies, “Can’t you see?” foreshadowing the truth that he is about to see. Scottie’s line of vision is reflected through the mirror, which places Judy in the same ‘portrait-like’ position as Carlotta. This increased similarity helps trigger Scottie’s flashback. His eye (pov) zooms into a close up on the necklace, cutting to the same close up on Carlotta’s portrait in his mind’s eye. He knows. The camera pulls back, tracking his memory recognition onto and then away from the necklace. The memory dates back to the museum, the first time he (we) connect the necklace with Madeleine. The shot tracks back into a master then dissolves back into the present. On this Robin Wood writes:
…the back-ward tracking shot contrasts with the frequent forward tracking shots that characterized the earlier part of the film, to suggest recoil, Scottie extricating himself from the quicksands of illusion. The earlier shots in the art gallery took him (and us) forward into the dream, tracking in on the posies, and on the similarly styled hair, of Madeleine and Carlotta, hair arranged in a spiral that evoked the patterns of the credit titles and the whole vertigo theme. (128)
In his struggle, the two parts of Madeleine/Judy are inadvertently clasped together, leaving one being, one truth – what is real emerges from the representation. With what he now knows the idea and the ideal of Madeleine is crushed. Judy hugs him but Scottie is cold. Instead of mussing her, he leaves her just as she is; he wants her just as she is, to stand and face the truth just as he has. There will be no blurred identity this time. Then his sudden change of plans …“How would you like to go someplace out of town for dinner?”
The camera fades from their limp embrace to a long shot of their car steering down the same highway back to San Juan Bautista. The camera then cuts to the main two shot of them in the car. “We’re going awfully far,” Judy states, her anxiety instantly evident. Scottie masks his motive with a casual excuse and she looks to the exterior surroundings, the camera mounted on the hood of the car, acting as her point of view just as before. Bernard Herrmann’s underscore works in dissonant half steps, motivic intervals that create a sense of spiraling down towards an inevitable fate. The camera cuts back to her reaction. She looks up to the trees. It is the same low angle shot as before only a darker aspect. An expression of recognition engulfs her face. She has been here before, on so many levels. Only this time she is not behind the wheel.
The first time Scottie brought Madeleine/Judy to San Juan it was to prove to her that the place was real – that what was present in her dream really existed – and to have her accept it as truth. Now, still certain that “there is an answer for everything”, Scottie is separating dream from reality for himself. It is his turn, his second chance. A static camera observes as the car slowly pulls up to the church. Scottie gets out and walks around the front of the car. Opens Judy’s door and takes her by the arm. “I need you”, he says, “I need you to be Madeleine for awhile”. He reiterates their previous exchange, running her through exactly what was said outside the church. Judy tries to break free but Scottie forces her to look towards the stables. A medium close-up captures the degree of pain both characters are experiencing. This moment is equally painful for Judy. Torn between personalities, she returns to the same broken state she was in before entering the church the first time, taking an even further step away from her true self. As Donald Spoto says, “This time she has really renounced herself and has become the double of a double. She has been forced to imitate the false Madeleine who was herself forced to imitate the real Madeleine.” (331)
Scottie turns and glances upwards towards the tower. With a tight hold on Judy, he begins to walk her towards the entrance of the church, leading her through the motions of how he experienced that fateful day. The camera tracks along the side of the car and then freezes, as they move towards the pillars of the past and walk along the side of the church to the front entrance. As they reach the doorway, Judy resists entering. “But it was too late,” Scottie says, again re-enforcing his vocal replay of the past event, making it twice as hard for Judy to endure, making her re-experience it both visually and orally from his perspective. Once inside, Scottie expresses his crippling demise, how he experienced those last aching moments, paralyzed with fear from his acrophobia, unable to make it to the top. “You’re my second chance, Judy”, he proclaims as he pushes her towards the staircase, determined that what will happen at the top will set him free. The camera tilts towards the ceiling as they slowly step behind shadows on their way to the top. As Scottie reaches a bend in the stairs, he once again looks down; the camera dollies out and zooms in simultaneously, illustrating his distorted perception, accompanied with Herrmann’s score ‘hitting the action’ to exaggerate this vertigo effect. Scottie pushes himself forward through the shadows trying to stay close behind Judy. Then he stops, “This was as far as I could get, but you went on, do you remember?” His narrative recap comes to an end as he forces her to pick up where he left off. Judy’s confession fills in the blanks. However, since he has already retraced every last detail, all he needs from her is confirmation of the truth. He pauses in stunned realization that his vertigo has left him. “I made it,” he says. He is cured. He can look down now that the whole truth has been unveiled. He is free.
When they go through the trap door, he asks Judy what happened. “Did he ditch you?” – the same caustic query Judy had tossed at him when she first met him in her hotel doorway – “Did she ditch you?” The parallels continue. Just as he accuses her of being sentimental for keeping the necklace, he realizes he too is guilty of clinging to the past. This brings him full circle to the wrenching cry, “I loved you so, Madeleine,” unaware of whom he is really addressing. Even in their desperate embrace, they are deadlocked. “It’s too late, there’s no bringing her back”. And as the black shadow of the nun rises up from Judy’s perspective, the shadow of the past looms like an accusation, the eternal haunting, “and Judy falls, destroyed by Madeleine’s return from the dead as Madeleine was supposed to be by Carlotta’s”. (Wood 129) The bell tolls – tolls for them both – and Scottie steps out onto the ledge, cured, free, and yet in chains as never before because he has lost both past and present, illusion and reality. The camera captures his frontal pose, a replica in reverse of his nightmare pose of falling; he is the last man standing, reduced again to his wandering state – a pale shadow of “Available Ferguson”.
Works Cited
Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1991. Print.
Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. James Stewart, Kim Novak. Paramount Pictures, 1958.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films Revisited. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Print.
