Vertigo - The Divine Tragi-Comedic Fall of Lacanian Gaze

The opening scenes of Vertigo provide the viewer with several keys with which to unlock the film's codes and modes of operation. At the outset, the eye over which the credits roll hovers, cinematically amputated, in prototypical likeness to the film apparatus -- the movie camera --mirroring the gaze of the spectator. It becomes apparent, in the camera's closing in from face to eye to spiraling abstraction, the viewer's gaze will be guided, and none too gently. The eye sparkles in an intense zoom, filling the screen and suggesting its infinitely seductive depth (window to the soul, as is said; or, to whatever preverbal entity of Lacan). Its purpose seems to be to expose the oblique vulgarity of the intent eye, that optical thief which cannot but help its wandering fixations and quest for completion -- in a word, voyeurism. After all, in what other natural context can that solitary, overblown eye be seen staring, besides when peering into a room through the keyhole? Perhaps like a child, spying on the private & sacrosanct Scottie, the able-bodied San Francisco detective, who has been traumatized by his partner's fatal plunge and rendered in his mind, useless by his acquired acrophobia.

He is in the study of his friend and former fiancée, Midge, a commercial[ized] artist.

Bespectacled, her image hotted up, in the Mcluhan sense -- she is all eyes. Here, he collapses onto the leather couch (not unlike that which a psychoanalyst typically employs, to place the analysand into the vulnerable alpha-state, inducing, so it would seem, a regression in order to access his/her unconsciousness). Scottie has collapsed inward, toward his inner child. Throughout the scene, he plays the buoyant role of the playful, self-absorbed toddler -- even referring to Midge as motherly -- innocently occupying himself (twirling his cane) while Midge goes about the very adult business of rendering brassieres, those masks of the bosom. He is putting on a play, acting for her, game-set-matching her magnified eyes by giving them an eye-full. On display, secure within the confines of her gaze, Scottie can even play with his own under-developed sexuality: in a vaguely queer expression, he muses "Midge, do you suppose many men wear corsets?"

She responds, humoring him coyly, "More than you think."

One of these brassieres is unrecognized, strange to him. He points toward it, poking and prodding inquisitively, tracing its feminine curves with his walking stick (a phallic extension of his body, which props him up and is the artificial source of his power):

Scottie: What's this doohickey?
Midge: It's a brassiere. You know about those things; you're a big boy now.
Scottie: Never run across one like that.
Midge: It's brand new -- revolutionary uplift. No shoulder straps, no backstraps. But does everything a brassiere should do.

Indeed, this new technical invention still masks the breasts, makes them inaccessible. Can we also not extend this metaphor to the inaccessible eye, that of the audience? The optical apparatus has been amputated irreparably from the beholder, given a new, free-roaming life as the movie camera, without nerves or straps to fasten it -- a "revolutionary uplift." Yet magically, the filmic apparatus "does everything [an eye] should do," and more, since it has been unleashed from the neocortex. Its gaze is mindless. Yet Scottie still has his cane to guide him:

Scottie: I'm a man of independent means as the saying goes. Fairly independent.
Midge: Hmm, mmm. Well, why don't you go away for a while? [She dares him]
Scottie: You mean to forget? Oh now, Midge, don't be so motherly; I'm not gonna crack up.

To prove it, he takes his first baby step up the ladder: "First step... I look up, I look down." Up toward mother, searching for her reassurance, studying her face for signs she is pleased. They are comingled in that secure, transcendental partnership, two becoming one, as in a spiritual dance. Then looking down, toward self, toward his separation, actualizing his independence. He is urged onward by his newfound self-possession and emboldened by Midge's approving supervision. Like a mother, she must tirelessly encourage him, must never show any signs of her confidence waning (but imperfect as any human, she inevitably will). A mother is expected to preserve the illusion of the womb, that she is not a separate person with separate needs and desires.

But of course, that terrible rupture must occur, and does. On the verge of reaching the apex of the ladder (confronted gradually, unignorably, by the devastating perspective of separation from her), he suffers a violent relapse, and no sooner than when Midge slices into the symbolic womb with her cautioning. Her human imperfection may be one cause of this, but another perhaps is her jealousy -- the gentle maternal sadism, conflicted & inflamed by the loss of her child. This implants doubt by calling attention to his insecurity, for he is without his cane. She sparks his separation anxiety -- he has strayed too far from mother, from security, and castrated, availed of his phallic cane. Upon his failure to spread his wings and leave the proverbial nest, he collapses into Midge's accepting bosom, terrified by his glimpse of the imminent loss of the sacred mother/son fusion.

Midge, for her part, re-incorporates him quite readily. Yet the Lacanian mirror cannot possibly be glued back together -- such a proposal is absurd, for the damage is tragically irreparable. He is compelled by Gavin Elster to follow his wife Madeleine, to "dig up what he can." In effect, Scottie further regresses, from the cognitively mature law student, through detective, into the private[s] investigator, that of the child, the penetrating "private eye" on the end of the keyhole. Gavin foreshadows:

Gavin Elster: The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast. I should have liked to have lived here then - color, excitement, power, freedom.

Later, investigating the story of Carlotta in Argosy Bookshop, the owner revives this idea:

Pop Leibel (pop-ular, or pop-ulist, libel -- a reference to the wild & oftentimes libelous claims of psychoanalysis in its day?): Oh yes, I remember. Carlotta, beautiful Carlotta... Sad ... It is not an unusual story. I cannot tell you exactly how much time passed or how much happiness there was... but then he threw her away. He had no other children. His wife had no children. So, he kept the child and threw her away. You know, a man could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom. ~[Note: emph. mine]

Madeleine for her part, is nothing if not a stark caricature, a lone mirage that Scottie (and the camera, and by extension, the viewer) looks through in that gorgeous museum perspective, resembling the real but projecting that singular surreal feature -- her cartoon-like, overarching eyebrows consume her, summarize her, elevate her into sublimity and she is thus able to transfix his inner eye. And he, the fragmented voyeur, is hooked on her painted totality. She is perfect for him; he needs to become Gavin, to feel what the husband feels when a wife recedes, what the child feels when the love of his young life, the mother, is distanced or lost.

Gavin: Now when she's alone, she takes them [Carlotta's jewels] out, looks at them. Handles them gently, curiously. Puts them on and stares into the mirror, and goes into that other world... someone else again.

Whenever Scottie drives, following her, the camera is set high onto his face, a close up. He is driven, consumed, small- and single-minded. Her image is everything. She, congruently, is the larger-than-life icon of totalitarianism. Detecting Scottie's breaking away, Midge desperately re-formulates herself into a faux Carlotta, in a tortured, impotent scribble -- a significant reversal of the adage that in romance, men look for their mother's traits. When this last-ditch (and again, intentional) effort to re-inject herself into his psyche backfires (it was doomed to fail, especially on his rebirth-day), she is admonished: "That's not funny, Midge," which is to say, the light-hearted role-play is over. He is grown up, truly "a big boy now," with big-boy concerns, and never would they regain that blissful & blind union, not in any case nearly as it used to be.

She fails to preserve the dreamlike quality of Carlotta, not grasping the real point that it is rather a blank canvas which intoxicates him so. She weeps at the loss of her son's exclusive favor, punishing herself for her desperate (and disparate) emotional nudity (her own Freudian slip).

Scottie [to Midge]: I always said you were wasting your time in the underwear department.

Is this code? Is Scottie channeling the auteur himself, Hitchcock, making the director's statement about sexual fixation? Could it actually be Mulvey, Baudry, & Lacan who are wasting their time in the underwear department? In her desire to please him, Judy overzealously completes the look, trying to seal (sell) the ideology once and for all by donning that heirloom ruby necklace. It is this transgression, the first act of her own initiative rather than by Scottie's insistent, corrective gaze, that shatters their illusory oneness by training his eye onto the jewel, the unifying apparatus that connects her with Madeleine and with Carlotta, and distances her from the blank canvas she had held in front of her own face for him (in the same way that Midge was banished for her assumption of control). As in Baudry, "the spectator is brought abruptly back... to the body, to the technical apparatus which he had forgotten" [Ideological Effects, 359].

She is no longer the suspended, floating icon, but has rather fallen down to banal reality, the overheated mirage reconstituted. Channeling her others, she has now become all too real. The mirrors always around, surround her, refract her body, make her physicality unignorable, since its shards lay everywhere, totalitarian.

Madeleine: It's as though I... I were walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored. And fragments of that mirror still hang there. And when I come to the end of the corridor, there's nothing but darkness. And I know that when I walk into the darkness, that I'll die. I've never come to the end. I've always come back before then, except once.

Scottie: Yesterday? [She nods.] And you didn't know. You didn't know what happened till you found yourself in the...you didn't know where you were. But the small scenes, the fragments of the mirror, do you remember those?

Madeleine: Vaguely.

It is no accident that the monastery and its pious denizens are involved in the most important scenes, including the final one, in which Scottie, on the cathartic precipice, instead watches his beloved fall, in perverse symmetry with the opening trauma of his other 'partner' plunging to his death.

The entire film thus coils back in on itself -- the tree of wisdom's serpent consuming its own 'tale' -- as Scottie's initial, pathetic innocence is lost (his ideological fixation shattered by the
transgressive shock of grasping the murderous truth), and Judy is fatally petrified by the expectant confusion her various mirror fragments have incised. She has been stripped of her being, and even her right to it; used and abused as a pawn, beaten down into hollow caricature by dueling male gazes, and finally giving her self completely over to his ideal-ogy. "No one possesses you," as Scottie neuro-linguistically programs into her, not even she herself, until she exposes herself, and he finally grips her -- physically & forcefully. Therein lies the real transmogrification between the first and final scenes, the surreal, transcendent twist which the audience perceives only sub-consciously:

Scottie would be cured neither by revisiting his trauma, nor by exposing himself incrementally to heights; this is all child's play. He would never, as the viewer is led to believe early on, be cured even by a comparably jolting event. The only way for him to transcend his unconscious dæmons, would be to do real -- to repeat the ordeal, only this time while exerting his own total(itarian) control over the event. His at first innocent, optical seizure of Madeleine's (rotted) image has now followed through its brutal logic, has now materialized into the physical grip of his hand on her arm, pulling her toward fate.

Judy [about climbing the tower]: You can't... you're afraid.

Scottie: Now, we'll see... we'll see. This is my second chance...

But you knew that day that I wouldn't be able to follow you, didn't you?

Utterly æthereal now (transcendent, per Baudry), she is seized in the end by this terrifying hollowness, and ultimately it matters not if she perceives that shadowy figure as a nun or as

Death itself. They are one and the same in the most important way, in their effect and purpose: for just as the hooded wraith would lay claim to her tortured, tattered soul, the Catholic nun would in like manner summon a divine wrath unto her guilty conscience. Thus, by her necessary atonement (at-one-ment) the disembodied angel Judy/Madeleine/Carlotta (altar-egos) reenacts the sublime 'fall from grace'... and the viewer is left breathless.

Madeleine: Only one is a wanderer, two together are always going somewhere.

Scottie: No, I don't think that's necessarily true.

Madeleine: You left your door open.

Vertigo - The Divine Tragi-Comedic Fall of Lacanian Gaze