murder for love: two hitchcock romances
by Douglas Messerli
at edge
Alec
Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor (screenplay, based on a fiction by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac),
Alfred Hitchcock (director) Vertigo /
1958
For years I have put off writing about
Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, not
because I have nothing to say about it, but because I have so much! As I've
noted elsewhere, the first time I saw this film at a small Manchester, Iowa theater
in 1958, I was only eleven years of age. The film whirled around me like a
mysterious, inexplicable virago. I was literally made dizzy by the film, and I
remember, as it ended, going into men's room on the second floor of the movie
house, thinking to myself, "I am too young to see this film."
Immediately, I went downstairs once more and saw the movie all over again!
Since that time I have seen the movie perhaps 100 times, both on
television and in theaters, on DVDs and computer screens. Only on the latter,
did the movie suffer.
Even from the beginning I realized this film was about a romantic
obsession—an obsession for a woman (Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton) dreamily
played by Kim Novak, and an obsession for a city, San Francisco. Just as the
film's structure functions as a kind of double helix (the coil appears in the
credits, shifting at moments into a pattern very much like Crick and Watson's
later representation of DNA, and again in Madeline Elster's hairdo, in the
painting of Carlotta Valdes at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
and in the rose symbolizing Scottie's descent into madness), in which
everything that happens in the first part reoccurs in a slightly different form
in the second, so too do these two obsessions weave around each other, the same
woman appearing slightly different the second part and city changing from a
magical world of lights (both sunlit and artificial) to a darker world of
restaurants and a night drive to Mission San Juan Bautista. Indeed, the two
parts of the film are played out in almost oppositional worlds, the first the story of a
glamorously beautiful woman, traveling in a kind haze through the sun-filled
streets of the beautiful city and environs with Scottie (James Stewart)
following and later joining her almost as if they were tourists, Hitchcock
taking his audience along for the ride. It is a slow story of developing love—
lushly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's Wagnerian-like score—which ends
tragically as the suicidal Madeleine Elster seems to jump from the tower of the
Mission to her death, from which Scottie has been unable to save her because of
his vertigo.
The film then turns to Scottie's inquest ("Coroner: He did nothing. The
law has little to say on things left undone.") and his descent into
depression, a kind of madness that even his chipper and loyal friend Midge Wood
(the wonderful Barbara Bel Geddes) cannot help him to escape.
The second roll of the helix begins with Scottie's accidental encounter
with a young woman who looks somewhat like Madeleine. But this young woman is
dressed atrociously, her hair hanging in tasteless bangs. She works as a shop
clerk. And there is little mysterious about her as she reports in her flat
American accent her background, even providing her would-be offender with her
driver's license. It has always struck me that if Judy had been made over by
Gavin Elster into such a beautiful woman in the first part, why should have
chosen to revert to Judy Barton in the second? And reportedly—I have not read
the article nor have knowledge of its existence except for a message board
posting on the IMDb site for the film—Claude Chabrol, writing on Vertigo, claimed that she is not the
same woman, but another whom Scottie makes over to look like Madeleine. Yet,
obviously, that does not account for the letter of admission she writes to
Scottie before tearing it up, nor her possession of the jewelry previously worn
by Madeline, nor her verbal admission on the tower of the Mission near the end
of the film. And that reading misses the point. While everything in the second
part is the same, has the same genetic make-up of the first, everything has
changed, which gives the viewer the slightly sickening sensation that things
are not right.
Indeed, they are not right. For by acting as Madeleine, Judy has helped
in the murder of Gavin Elster's real wife. She is a murderess first, but also a
cheat, a liar, even a kind of whore for allowing Scottie to dress and coif her
as someone else:
Scottie: Yes. Yes.
Judy: All right. All right
then, I'll do it. I don't care anymore about me.
In Hitchcock's patterning of the human
DNA we recognize the potential for humans to be two beings, to have the
capabilities of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Although Scottie has throughout this
second half of the film been seeking his past, in recreating Judy into her
former being he has also symbolically taken away her current life, which gets
played out into the final incident where he forces her to return to Mission San
Juan Bautista and, overcoming his dizziness (not only his vertigo but the confusion
of his thinking) forcibly grabs her, demanding the truth:
tell you exactly what to do, what to say? You
were a very apt pupil too, weren't you?
You were a very apt pupil! Well, why did you
pick on me? Why me?
The sudden appearance of a mission nun
so startles Judy that she rushes to the edge, actualizing her previous
performance of death.
Los Angeles,
February 25, 2012.

the jealous mother
Joseph
Stefano (screenplay, based on the novel by Robert Bloch), Alfred Hitchcock
(director) Psycho / 1960
It was not until I began writing the
essay above that I suddenly realized that Hitchcock's well known 1960 horror
film Psycho bears much in common with
Vertigo in the sense that it too is a
kind of romance—a very strange one to say the least—but still a romance between
a young man, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), and a passing stranger, Marion
Crane (Janet Leigh), staying the night at his hotel. The two hardly meet,
sharing only a short conversation over shared supper, where it becomes clear
that the lonely Norman, miles from the more-traveled highway, is fond of his
new guest, and through his shy looks and comments we observe his interest in
her. An supposed argument with his mother confirms his emotions:
Norma Bates: [voice-over]
No! I tell you no! I won't have you bringing some young girl in for supper! By candlelight,
I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds!
Norman Bates: [voice-over] Mother, please...!
Norma Bates: [voice-over]
And then what? After supper? Music? Whispers?Norman Bates: [voice-over] Mother, please...!
Norman Bates: [voice-over] Mother, she's just a stranger. She's hungry, and it's raining out!
Norma Bates: [voice-over] "Mother, she's just a stranger"! As if men don't desire strangers! As if... ohh, I refuse to speak of disgusting things, because they disgust me! You understand, boy? Go on, go tell her she'll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with MY food... or my son! Or do I have tell her because you don't have the guts! Huh, boy? You have the guts, boy?
Norman Bates: [voice-over] Shut up! Shut up!
Like Madeline, Marion is a liar and, in
this case, a thief. The realization of her errors comes soon after her
conversation with Norman, as she determines to return to Phoenix; and, like the
mythical bird, she clearly hopes to be "reborn," to rectify her
behavior. The shower, as numerous observers have noted, is a kind of ritual
baptism, a washing away of her sins with a hopeful return to innocence. Yet,
the attentive viewer also knows that a resurrection will be impossible, for as
we have witnessed in Norman's room behind the motel's front desk, Norman's
hobby is taxidermy:
he stuffs birds,
assuring no possibility of their being reborn out of the ashes.
Minutes later, dressed as his mother, he stabs Marion to death in the
famed shower scene, a scene so powerful that women all over the world became
terrified to take a shower. The three minutes of 50 cuts is a kind of small and
masterful film in itself, revealing in its
attention to the details to Marion's body just how obsessed Norman/his mother
is with this woman. It is hard to perceive such a brutal murder as a kind of
love scene, but the way Hitchcock has filmed it, beginning with the sensual
pleasure Marion finds in the shower, her scream upon the sudden intrusion, the
outstretched hand and fingers, the gradual fall, the appearance of blood, and
the final focus upon her dilated eye, it is almost a kind of dance, a dance of
death if nothing else.
Norman has to destroy her as his jealous mother to keep his psychosis
alive; and it is that necessity—the acts of the jealous mother—that makes us
realize just how attracted he has been to Marion. In a sense, Norman has been
as obsessed with her as Scottie was with Madeline.
The rest of the story, how family and authorities discover the truth,
hardly matters. The only thing that keeps the audience's interest—which is why
the director was so determined not to reveal the story's secret and would not
allow audiences to enter after the movie had begun—is the fact that we do not
yet realize that Norman is his
mother, having killed her off long ago. What gradually becomes apparent is that
his real lover was his mother, a tyrant who would allow him no other lover,
keeping him frozen in infancy forever. So, in the end, playing the role of both
his mother and himself, he is, as his last name suggests, making love to himself,
a kind of psychical masturbation. As the doctor summarizes:
Dr. Fred Richmond: Like I said...
the mother... Now to understand it the way I understood it, hearing it from the
mother... that is, from the mother half of Norman's mind... you have to go back
ten years, to the time when Norman murdered his mother and her lover. Now he was
already dangerously disturbed, had been ever since his father died. His mother
was a clinging, demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if
there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man... and it seemed to
Norman that she 'threw him over' for this man. Now that pushed him over the
line and he killed 'em both. Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of
all... most unbearable to the son who commits it. So he had to erase the crime,
at least in his own mind. He stole her corpse. A weighted coffin was buried. He
hid the body in the fruit cellar. Even treated it to keep it as well as it
would keep. And that still wasn't enough. She was there! But she was a corpse.
So he began to think and speak for her, give her half his time, so to speak. At
times he could be both personalities, carry on conversations. At other times,
the mother half took over completely. Now he was never all Norman, but he was
often only mother. And because he was so pathologically jealous of her, he
assumed that she was jealous of him. Therefore, if he felt a strong attraction
to any other woman, the mother side of him would go wild.
[Points finger at Lila Crane]
[Points finger at Lila Crane]
Dr. Fred Richmond: When he met your sister, he was touched by her... aroused by her. He wanted her. That set off the 'jealous mother' and 'mother killed the girl'! Now after the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep. And like a dutiful son, covered up all traces of the crime he was convinced his mother had committed!
Los
Angeles, February 27, 2012
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