English 1302

A "Woman's" View: The Vertigo Frame-Up

Laura Hinton

. . . the theoretical frame of reference which governs recognition is a constitutive element in the blindness of anv interpretative insight..

-- Barbara Johnson

"/ was set-up. I was the madetoorder witr\ess." -- Scottie Ferguson, Vertigo

Vertigo is a symptom, not an illness. The illness that it accom- panies is acrophobia, or fear of heights. This paper asks again the questions implicit in much of the feminist criticism written about Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958): what does the symptom, vertigo, and a fear of heights have to do with a detective in pursuit of ghosts; and what do ghosts have to do with the pursuit of a woman and a man's recovery from madness? It poses an "in-quest," perhaps not unlike that of the Vertigo coroner, into the nature of a man's madness, or ghos^woman-chasJng-both associated with the vertig- inous effects of viewing the fllm and of analyzing its narrative effects.

For Vertigo has become both a "limit text" in "the problematics of identification," according toTania Modleski (87), and a "limit text" for debates about classic-cinema feminist interpretation. As Susan White notes. Vertigo has been "at the vortex of critical debates about the fundamental structures of classical narrative cinema" for feminist critics since Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) charged the film with the psychoanalytic drama of

the male oedipal spectator (910). Critics of the film since its 1983 re release have emphasized Vertigo's narrative ambiguity toward gender identification, following Mulvey's own lead when she revised earlier assertions about classic cinema's male-identified sadism by suggesting she had "shelved" or denied her own "look" as a female viewer who might subvert rigid bourgeois gender roles ("After- thoughts on 'Visual Pleasure,'" 12). Modleski has gone further in arguing that Verigo actually conveys a "feminine" design, since Scottie, the male protagonist, is identified with an ambiguous, problematic femininity. Karen Hollinger claims for the film a feminist insight into femininity as "a male fantasy construct...a falsity" (26), revealing, as Garry Leonard also claims, "the impossibility of a woman occupying the space culturally designated as 'feminine'" (271). Deborah Linderman demonstrates that sexual ambiguity in Vertigo belies an indeterminant referentiality; the film "avows and disavows" sexual difference, she writes, while there is "an incessant slippage" in signification.2

Such commentaries are persuasive and helpful in penetrating the film's complex irony and its contradictory gendered structure. But they also sustain the source, or abyss, of a Hitchcockian hermeneutic hoax, one that frames the feminist spectator as well as Scottie. By adding to the maelstrom of vertiginous debates on gender ambiguity and indeterminant meaning. Vertigo's feminist critics inadvertently contribute to the fetishistic codes underlying male subjectivity that serve to heighten hermeneutic anxiety in the film. In this article, 1 explore the way in which readings of ambiguity and indeterminacy promoted by the film's abyssal structure erode the possibility of a feminist critique by inviting but then frustrating female agency. Organizing my discussion in sections based upon the three "looks" Mulvey named for cinematic production in general, but did not elaborate upon for Vertigo specifically-the "look" of the character, the camera "as it records the pro-filmic event," and the audience "as it watches the final product" (17)--I return, first, to the "look" Mulvey described for the male protagonist in Vertigo, but I emphasize the way in which male scopophilia contributes to the larger theme of contradiction and the spectatoria! hoax. I then examine the camera's "cutting" look, associated with the Madeleine- Judy division but primarily through the misogynistic connotations of castration. Finally, recalling early feminist film theory on internal division within classic-cinematic texts, and turning to the textual- ideological "rupture" produced by the only female character who survives the film's plot. Midge, I show that Vertigo persuades us to take a "woman's" view, but only as a symptom of the lack of view

accorded women themselves.

I I begin with a look at the male protagonist (James Stewart), my

look at his "look"--who he is looking at and what he is looking for. John "Scottie" Ferguson has been enlisted by an old school chum, Gavin Elster, to follow and watch Gavin's wife, to find out the "truth" about the wife and where she "wanders." Mulvey first noted that Scottie's mission invokes the genre of ihe film noir, whose oedipal trajectory portrays a male detective unraveling a mystery and solving a crime, usually in tandem with or in struggle against a feminized nemesis, the femme fatale. As the story goes, Scottie's watching of Gavin's wife along San Francisco's streets recalls that "passion for meaning" Roland Barthes has ascribed to the "Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end)" (lO)--an "end" encoded as the "feminine," according to Mulvey and others.^

But Scottie's bit of detective work is only half the story, the story leading up to the wife's death, or what Linderman has called the narrative's "first phase" (53). Scottie, after all, is but a half- hearted detective, disabled by acrophobia and therefore unable to serve on the force, only reluctantly agreeing to pursue the wife, and becoming obsessed not with solving an overt crime but with curing the wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who, in turn, is obsessed with, or possessed by, a ghost. Desiring to penetrate Madeleine's madness, Scottie's work becomes that of a pseudo-psychoanalyst, debunking demonology as the cause of hysteria, seeking "the key," he says, so he can "put it together," assuring Madeleine that "there's an answer for everything." But while Scottie is looking at Madeleine, or who he believes to be "Madeleine," he is looking for a ghost, or the truth about ghosts: that "Madeleine's" possession is all in her head, that she lacks a "head," rationally speaking. This contradiction riddles the directive of Scottie's "look," one which dissembles "Madeleine" while holding her visually intact.

Another look at the male "look," as described by Mulvey, suggests that it incorporates this contradiction into its logic. Part of its specular strategy is to offer deconstructions of the male-female and subject-object binarism Mulvey's original argument somewhat notoriously overemphasized. Although Mulvey has been criticized for upholding this binarism in her formulation of the male gaze,"* "Visual Pleasure" seems to lay the groundwork for the more complex analyses of the "gaze" that have emerged since. We recall that Mulvey describes in "Visual Pleasure" "two contradictory

aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation": one which is voyeuristic, implying erotic pleasure derived from a separation between the viewing subject and the object viewed; and one which relies upon "identification with the image seen," requiring unification, however imaginary, with the viewed object. In Vertigo, Scottie's look reveals these seemingly contradictiory separation and unification practices.

Scottie's look at Madeleine effectively separates him from her, as he watches Madeleine, or who he believes to be "Madeleine," from within the context of his own viewing frame-literally, through the frame of his car window or the flower-shop doorway, or from the portal of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where his gaze is repeated by "Madeleine" staring at the framed image of Carlotta. But the look also unifies Scottie with "Madeleine" as he leaves the safety of frames and encroaches upon her with his own bodily frame, holding her, for example, as he rescues her from the San Francisco Bay or, later, embracing her above the coastline near Muir Woods- becoming, symbolically, /i7ce Madeleine, a "wanderer," too, and ultimately identifying with her image as an image of his own inexplicable madness. Pursuing a woman to cure a hysteria that is obviously a displacement of his own, the acrophobia, and experienc- ing his simultaneous terror of and desire for the "mad" "Madeleine," Scottie attempts to resolve the contradictions he experiences between these mechanisms of separation and identification.

However, the contradictions are implicit to his narrative meaning. His dual self-division is illustrated, albeit reductively-a reductivity that will be self-consciously repeated throughout the film-in Vertigo's opening scene, one that is vital to the film and has been discussed by a number of critics, since it reveals the source of Scottie's acrophobia. In this scene, we initially view a bar dividing the film frame in half, then the hands of a fleeing fugitive pursued by a uniformed police officer, who, in turn, is followed by Scottie in plain clothes, ambiguously figured both within and without the taw. Second in the chase, Scottie should be first to fall; but it is his counterpart, the uniformed officer, who more rigidly and symboli- cally represents "the Law"--here we might invoke Lacan--and plunges to his death as he tries to save Scottie. Hanging from the rooftop, Scottie leaves us hanging, a suspension that opens up the suspense of the plot, as Robin Wood has noted (225). While hanging from the rooftop, Scottie witnesses his death through a substitute. Vicarious identification with the dead officer-the dead officer should have been him-and vicarious separation from the corpse itself, actually reproduces, cinematically, the visual effects of the acrophobia.

the vertigo, indicated by the famous reverse tracking shot with a forward zoom. It is significant that the camera work representing the vertigo is edited into the narrative the moment before Scottie actually views the dead officer's corpse. A temporal contradiction occurs in the filmic narrative, suggesting that Scottie projects-to use a word critical to film reproduction as well as psychoanalysis-a fear of dying onto the corpse before actually viewing it.̂

The process of projection repeats the effects of division posed by Scottie's gendered look throughout the first half of the narrative. "Madeleine," his feminine "other," is a substitute for Scottie's substitute, projecting "her" own death onto that of the image of the ghostly foremother/other-mother, Carlotta, both of them double carriers of the schismatic logic. The Madeleine/Carlotta figure for double substitution temporarily reduces Scottie's anxiety: no longer does he view himself as a male corpse-another member of the police "corps" as him-but as the body of a (dead) woman who, by sexual difference, can more safely represent death in his imagination. He reinforces this representation by "possessing" a "woman," and, as Muivey concludes, inhabiting this feminized image for himself. The act of possession is contradicted, however, by Scottie's desire to de-possess her: both to rid her of her demons and to get rid of her, to see her dead.

As Mulvey and others have concurred, the film noir plot requires that this feminized image be condemned for what she represents: the dualism in male self-representation. Watching Madeleine in order to subdue her demons, then, becomes Scottie's method for condemning her for having them.

Yet the "woman" must remain tacitly alive, sustaining the plot, and Scottie's dilemma is that he must save "Madeleine" to annihilate her. This paradox is emphasized in the scene following "Madeleine's" plunge into the bay, when it appears that Scottie has rescued her from drowning and brings her to his apartment, ostensibly to see her recover. To this end, Scottie, who always must get to the bottom of things, uncovers "Madeleine," and he has seen for himself that she has "nothing to see." By a slip of the tongue, we learn that, indeed, Scottie enjoyed this scene/seeing. Meeting him at the apartment the next day, with the phallic Coit Tower in the panoramic background, Madeleine tells Scottie: "It must have been so embarrassing for you." Scottie replies: "No. I enjoyed it...[a Jimmy Stewart stammer] ah...talking to you." Yet spectators do not see what Scottie did (or did not): "Madeleine's" nude form. We get the picture, so to speak, second-hand, when the camera exposes a view of a woman's undergarments hanging in the kitchen. The spectators' exclusion

from the scene of the seeing marks the dual and yet excessive nature of the fetish, standing as a placeholder, another substitute, for a veiled threat. A shot of "Madeleine" stepping sleepily from the bedroom, "re-covered" in Scottie's bathrobe, reminds us that her nakedness is but another cloak of the male wardrobe, and that stripping her layers, seeing that she has nothing to see, will tell Scottie nothing about her identity.

For as Scottie's oddly warped viewpoint suggests, the desire to see enables him to remain blind: by looking at a woman, he engages in acts of projection and substitution that prevents him from looking at himself. As "Madeleine's" nakedness cloaks Scottie's own, her supposed hysteria and unconsciousness forms an alterna- tive to Scottie's rationality and self-control, an alternative that validates the need for detectives, psychoanalysts and film critics, all of whom seem quick to defuse the knowledge of the lack of alternative "she" possesses. While Scottie may be looking for a cure to a supposed "Madeleine's" madness, he also reasserts the conditions that make her sick. While there is a naked truth here in what "Madeleine's" unrepresentability stands for, the real Madeleine already has been dead within the context of the first half of the narrative, supposedly a story about her death.

The real Madeleine, after all, has always been a ghost, existing in a Lacanian Real, or perhaps an irrecoverable reel of celluloid on the cutting-room floor. Spectators only view the real Madeleine once, as a dummy-like corpse within the San Juan Bautista belfry. It is this uncanny view of the real but deceased Madeleine, seen within the context of Judy's flashback replay of events, that invites Vertigo spectators to look twice.

U The second half of the narrative focuses on the camera as

"look," the lens that acts as a mirror of the contradictions and displacements encoded by the logic of the male gaze. In my view, the second half of the narrative begins not with the inquest scene following the first belfry sequence but with Judy's flashback confession, her letter revising the first half of the Vertigo script from Judy's point of view. Judy's point of view introduces an erroneous and excessive plot from the point of view of Gavin. After destroying the letter, she claims for herself a new, if temporary, role, herself as "Judy." Devising her own plot, to "have" Scottie once again, Judy tries to construct a new plot that is a deviating detour from the scenario premeditated by Gavin. The fact that Judy's plot is inaugurated by the scene of letter-writing mandates a major contradiction for Vertigo's spectators. Although Judy destroys the

letter, its mark is never erased, for the spectators now know more than Scottie does; they are forced from a presumed complicity with Scottie's point of view during the first half of the narrative into a more explicitly duplicitous identification with that of Judy.

The acknowledgement of doubleness promotes a spectatorial awareness of cinematic doubleness, of the "look" of the camera that has mimicked Scottie's view all along. In this way, Judy's point of view momentarily challenges the continuity of the classic-cinematic style. Using Vertigo as an example, Mulvey argued in "Visual Pleasure" that Hollywood cinema denies the "look of the camera" in "its materiality in time and space" (18) in order to provide the illusion of spatial plenitude that is Hollywood's narrative hallmark. However, as other critics have pointed out, Mulvey had ignored the sequence of Judy's flashback, which ruptures the classic-cinematic appearance of seamlessness and political neutrality.^ This rupture in the Vertigo narrative continuity recalls a theory posed by Pam Cook and Claire Johnston in the 197O's, which hypothesized that some Hollywood narratives previously viewed as impervious to a patriarchal critique actually "ruptured" from within their own narrative design, calling attention to "woman" as "an empty sign" ("Woman in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh, "27).

This potentially "feminist strategy for the cinema," in the words of Cook and Johnston, seems to be foregrounded in the Vertigo opening credits, a sequence in which the camera pans a woman's face, segmenting it first into one half along a vertical axis, then quarters by shifting to a horizonal one. The woman's anonymity -she is not Kim Kovak-stresses her generalized, symbolic function. The camera calls attention to its own subjectivity in making these segmentations and divisions through its mobility, presenting the left side of the face, then the right, then the lower and upper sections. The camera movement that divides the woman's face recalls the process of rupture described by the 1969 Cahiers du Cinema editorial from which Cook and Johnston took their inspiration: "'An internal criticism is taking place which cracks the film apart at the seams. If one reads the film obliquely, looking for symptoms...one can see that it is riddled with cracks...splitting under an internal tension.'"' That the "cuts of a woman's image distributed by the subjective lens will be reconstructed by a woman subject as viewer is suggested when the camera zooms in upon the image of her eye: an eye for which the camera will act as a double or substitute. The dividing and substitutional images are attributed to the eye of "woman." These images call forth the psychical process of fragmen- tation underlying the Freudian castration complex; they also call

forth the less reassuring psychical processes of mirroring and projection described by the Lacanian Imaginary and the subject's entrance into the Symbolic.

In the Lacanian mythos about subjectivity and representation, self-identification is arrived at, somewhat paradoxically, through self-alienation, during the mirror stage of the Imaginary, itself a mode of infantile narcissism." What is critical to my discussion of Vertigo in Lacan's often-invoked paradigm for subjectivity and linguistic devel- opment is its insistence that the subject-presumably male, in the theoretical model-conceives of himself as "whole," but not whole in himself, rather, whole in relation to another, a feminized "other." Self-completeness, as finally constituted by a Symbolic Order identified not with the (m)other but with the Father's Law, is arrived at through a loss: desire for wholeness expressed as the subject's imagined union with "mother" is denied as the subject is initiated into (he Symbolic Order structuring language. It is the mother-identified "anatomical incompleteness," to use Lacan's phrase (4), that best expresses the male subject's toss, perceiving that loss as a castration experience. The properly repressed "castrated" male, now a subject of tanguage, experiences interminable c/e/ays in the path to self- recognition. In the Lacanian specular system of projective gazes, the body of a woman absorbs these contradictions.

Theories about the formal imptications of the cinematic apparatus-from the work of the camera to editing procedures to projection processes-have drawn upon the Lacanian map for devetopmenta! subjectivity. Christian Metz has suggested that the actual screening processes of film display "a technique of the imaginary," in which the screen behaves as "a veritable psychical substitute" for mirror-like identificatory states (15). Metz links cinematic production to the contradictions implied by the mirror stage, the presence-through-absence structure of self-recognition. In a more Freudian register, Jean Louis Baudry has suggested that (he divided effects involving cinematic apparatus-including the camera, film, screen, and projector-mirror the effects of dreams, Freud's differential conduit for primary process configurations. Both Freudian and Lacanian versions of apparatus theory imply that behind the work of the lens, at least as perceived by the ideal Holtywood spectator, a complex system of recognition and disavo- wal exists due to the divisions and repressions that constitute an oedipally determined subject. In Vertigo's emphasis on the duplicity of the cinematic look, we might look again at the male subject's dilemma, focusing, more specifically, on the male castration theme and its relation to "femininity."

Judy's flashback, which is about Gavin's plot, enacts a duplicitous scenario that takes viewers away from the theme of Gavin's plotting to a plottedness within cinematic form itself. The rupturing "cut" of Judy's flashback is anticipated just prior to it, in two mini narrative sequences that break into what I am calling the first and the second narrative halves. These are the scenes of the coroner's inquest and Scottie's dream, respectively, which both repress and illuminate these narrative castration themes. 1 isolate these scenes from the larger narrative structure because, narrato- logically, they stand as symbolic "bars" marking a placeholder for castration and repression, and they stand as figural bars marking the division between the first and second portions of the story.

Like the segmented image of the woman's face in the opening credits, these two sequences act as partiatized frames that will initiate the "cutting" work of the cinematic apparatus. The two sequences are structured so as to divide against one another thematicatly, as the coroner's inquest features paternal repression and the dream sequences bring to light the repressed facts hehind Scottie's frame-up. Dividing and splitting from within the symbolic centerpiece of a larger narrative structure, the two sequences "cut" into double parts but then split again, forming mirroring doubles of a pair of doubles.

We had been reminded of the figura! importance of "cutting," itself a figure for the castration-repression theme, in the first bar image that divides the very first Vertigo film frame in half-again, an appeal to reductivity in image-inaking. This literat bar prefigures the more psychical and also cinematically structural meanings a "bar" image will take on throughout later sequences in the film, distinguish- ing primary and secondary processes, the latter of which attempt to "bind" or master primary sensory and affective data through narrative activity. The bar is made a structural device when it becomes a symbolic dividing tine, splitting the sequence of the coroner's inquest-an inquiry into "Madeleine's" death-from the sequence about Madeleine's actual or, at least, supposed death, Judy playing "Madeleine." (There is a brief scene interposed, that of Scottie visiting Madeleine's grave.) The inquest scene, in addition, puns upon the legalistic connotation of "bar" through its quasi- judicial events, which, of course, serve to circumvent rather than enforce the law against murder.

While the courtroom setting and inquisitionat atmosphere estabtish the legal theme, the stern and punitive judge-tike coroner is reminiscent of the psychoanalytic Lacanian Father, whose "Law," the taboo against incest, regutates other forms of "itiicit" desire, as welt. It is curious that this scene, supposedly an inquest

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into the cause of "Madeleine's death," actually represses or suppresses the cause of death, reinserting the story of how she did not die into the film rather than allowing the facts to surface. The suppression of facts serves Gavin's evil purpose. But it also serves Scottie's denial. The suppression of the cause of Madeleine's death keeps Scottie from acknowledging what will terrify him most: that the woman he is obsessed with is a figment, or fragment, of his imagination, a substitute both for "herself" and for another man.

The suppression of facts takes the form of a dual repression, the surface layer of which is Scottie's denial of his lack of control in the circumstances surrounding the death, interestingly, the fact that Scottie lacked control over the events of the first half of the narrative-that the story, so to speak, was out of his hands-is repressed behind the coroner's judgement: that Scottie's lack of control was his failure to control the effects of his acrophobia. Now, acrophobia, or fear of heights, is linked rather crudely but perva- sively in traditional psychoanalytic theory to mate impotence-and, time and again. Vertigo inspires a Freudian-styte reductivity bearing some version of this reading out.** The coroner states, in only slightly veiled references, that Scottie's "failure" is his impotence, his inability to perform "as a man." The coroner, hence, becomes a castrating father, reasserting Scottie's need to inhibit or repress sexual desire. Furthermore, the coroner suggests that Scottie coutd have exercised "controt" had he chosen to. Excusing Gavin from any wrong-doing, the coroner pronounces: "The husband coutd not have anticipated that Mr. Ferguson's weakness, his fear of heights, would make him most pou;er/ess when most needed...It is a pity that knowing her suicidal tendencies you [Scottie] didn't make a greater effort."

Scottie's "impotence," however, is symbotic; it ties not in his failure to "get up" for a woman-a verbal pun embedded into the film's iconography-but in his faiture to admit that he has been maniputated by a man. Scottie, indeed, is Gavin's perfect choice: a "made-to-order" witness, as he says when he finally ascends the spiral staircase of the belfy at the film's end, because his obsession with the enigma marks the projection of his own "feminine," hysterical impulses. The ceremoniat assertion of Scottie's "faiture" at the inquest "puts together" for Scottie-we recall Scottie's anatytic determination just before "Madeteine" runs up the betfry tower-his deeper fear of his own shifting sexual identity, as Modleski has explained, and his homoeroticism. Thus, figuralty man-handted by Gavin, Scottie wants both to be and to have a man. Repressed homosexuality is exptosivety expressed by Scottie's dream sequence

U

Vertigo (Courtesy MOMA)

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following the inquest. The dream sequence is actuatly a series of bizarre images and

events unleashing the primary processes encoded in but also repressed by the staid and proper courtroom scene, ruled by the Father's Law. Forming a secondary narrative "bar" of the "sptit" that sptits the hatves of the targer Vertigo narrative, the dream sequence atso splits off from the inquest scene, forming a detour, a derailed version, of the sexual knowledge the coroner's inquest subversively has relayed in Scottie's mind. Composed of a wild disarray of conflicting psychedelic images, imagistically reversing the repressive effects of the courtroom, the dream shatters the psychoanalytic "bar" by which Scottie manages to deny his homoerotic affiliation with Gavin up untit this point. One image in the dream sequence, for example, shows Carlotta ftanked by both men, in triangular relation one to another, and framed by the inquest-chamber window. Cariotta stands as sign of and mediator within the tableau of male homo sociality; her function is tike that of the fetish, to convey and to conceat the sexual vatue of the male exchange. '"

Carlotta's figure signifies the comptex system of substitutions and exchanges that informs the Judy/Madeleine frame-up. In making up "Madeteine," Gavin has offered a copy of his wife both to incite Scottie's desire and to misrepresent it. This brief glimpse of Carlotta in the dream is the only tive image the film's spectators witness: she materializes through the haunting interactions of primary and secondary processes that Freud recognized as the dream work. Carlotta's material "presence" is an otherwise significant absence; her "presence" is displaced through raciaiized myths about women of color, as Virginia Wright Wexman has noted: women who are made foils for white heroines (38). As a ghost story and lifeless painting, Carlotta is tike Madeteine: always dead within the diegesis and, therefore, subject to others' interpretative readings. Yet as ghostty spectre, Cartotta is Scottie's most true representation of femate spectacte throughout the dream. ("Spectre" and "specta- cte" have Latin roots in specere, "to look at," as does "to spy," Scottie's primary activity in the narrative's first half.) Scottie's headtong plunge into the frame of Carlotta's open empty grave signats the speculation (also from specerej reverberating around Carlotta's terrifying inaccessibitity," which, according to Sarah Kofman, describes the function of the enigmatic woman, mirror to both the narcissism of the male subject and its ironic dream of self-comptetion (53).

Fatling in love with the feminine enigma, Scottie has fatlen for another (empty, groundtess) story. For Carlotta is but a multipte

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framed story: framed once by her lover, then again as a frame tate within Gavin's plot, then yet again by the painting and the stories that render her. The ftower arrangement whose petats peet off- another brief image from the dream-suggests that Scottie has not yet begun to get to the source of the story, a story that is ait frame, tacking substance. The dismantting of the petats and the increasing fragmentation at this point in the Vertigo narrative enunciate the breakdown of the identity-quest trajectory supposedty guiding Scottie's search for "the answer" until now. The dream is a representation of the probtems of representation Scottie is having, and it causes Scottie's breakdown. Rejecting the prophesy of dreams, however, Scottie, in the second half of the narrative, enters into an emotional narrative recovery, seeking to recover the Carlotta-Judy-Madeleine story from the grave.

The second hatf of the narrative dramatizes Scottie's attempt to exorcise the nightmarish effects of the dream by repeating and, thereby, controlling the events of the preceding narrative. Scottie's compulsion to repeat the events of this narrative is based upon his betief that he can re-cover-regain and cover (over) again-the woman he betieves to be Madeteine, titerally to raise her from the dead. "You're my second chance, Judy," Scottie tetis her, an assertion of his visual controt over her image, buying her wardrobe and "making her up." Recovering Madeleine from the dead aids Scottie in recovering from madness, covering up the dreaded woman's lack and reconstituting it as his fetish. By re-covering "Madeleine," Scottie recovers his naive faith in Hollywood tove stories.

But the took of the camera reveats to the Vertigo spectator what Scottie has spectatoriatty disavowed: that Judy and Madeteine are both the same and different, different women played by the same actress. Symboticalty, they are the ruptured remains of a stereotype, a bourgeois cultural ideal that expresses an otder Bibtical duatity about women: the frigid, unattainable Madeleine is an upper-class matron (the Virgin); the "cheap," working class shopgirl Judy is a whore (the Magdeteine). These divisions of women are traditionally impervious, one to the other, protecting the masculine sexual economy of patrilineage, the father's line in famity descent. Like the image of the woman in the opening credits, the "cuts" of woman's image suggest what wilt be the intention of the camera throughout the fitm: to cut apart and dectare her castrated, ironicatly to insure the presence of the mate "member."

Judy, playing "Madeleine," will re-member the woman's fragmented image, feigning hysteria before Scottie and the camera.

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Seeming to recall a dream, "Madeleine" states: "It's as though I were walking down a tong corridor that once was mirrored, and the fragments of that mirror are still hanging there." In language that uncannily echoes this statement. Luce Irigaray has written poig- nantly about the effects upon women figuratly "Cut up, dispatched, finished," therefore, made uncoherent as "women" (21). Irigaray also articutates the way in which women can appropriate the "cut up," divided image for themselves, converting a "form of subordina- tion into an affirmation" through mimickry and ptay (76). Mary Ann Doane has suggested, further, that feminine "masquerade" provides women with "the distance, alienation and divisiveness ol setf" necessary to tanguage itsetf (47). Again, recatling the scene of the opening credits, we might interpret the cinematic "cuts" of this woman's body as an assertion of her "view," since the subjective camera traverses the inner terr''in of the woman's eye.

The experience of vertigo may belong nietonymicatty to the woman. But the repeating substitutions that suggest tier eye, an eye that opens out into a vast space engulfed by swirting, spiraling figures, declare to the viewer that the frame of reference, to borrow from Barbara Johnson, is "crumbling, abyssal" (130). As if haunted by this problem of reference, the second half of the Vertigo narrative operates as an unfaithful re-production of the first. We see its difference in a brief series of scenes before Scottie meets Judy and we view the flashback. In these scenes, Scottie revisits the flower shop, the dining room at Ernie's, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where he spies the Madeleine-like knot of hair on another woman. Bu( the scenes and images are not imbued with the same aura or mystique as their original versions. They portend that the second half of the narrative will be an inhabitation but not a true mimetic replication of the first, and that the second hatf is a partial rewriting of the story based on Judy's desire for Scottie.

It IS a plot that Gavin had not counted on. But when Judy takes up the "frame" for herself, dressing to play her "part" of the part, choosing from among the costumes in her oujn wardrobe, the Vertigo narrative subjects Judy herself to the instabitity of the frame. In scenes that fottow, Scottie gradually, sadisticatty, reimposes upon Judy his own image of Madeteine's icy purity. His sadism foreshad- ows his finat controlling act, when he forces Judy up the tower.

In an important criticism of what she terms the "rupture thesis," Janet Bergstrom has pointed to the importance of examining the targer narrative context in which ideologicat rupture takes ptace; Bergstrom warns that the "tear" in the mainstream of the ideologicat textuat fabric may be "cancelled or overdetermined or made

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equivocal by other narrative interests" (85). Looking at the larger narrative context in which Judy's textuat chattenge occurs, we see that Judy dies falling from a phaltic tower, and not even through Scottie's doing. Instead, it is the nun's sudden apparition that triggers the uncanny binarism of repressed sexuatity and death--a binarism to which Judy has resigned herself-that scares Judy off the betfry. In the end, it is Judy, not Scottie, who remains figurally suspended, a "fatlen" women, nonethetess, who is defined by passivity and tack of self-interest, which resutts in her subtle self- destruction. The film's parting shot reveals Scottie in a more tenabte position, his feet ptanted firmty on the San Juan Bautista rooftop. The film's spectators view Scottie from the perspective of (what might have been) the dead Judy's gaze, a macabre woutd-be "took," concluding the promise of a woman's view and leaving Scottie ambiguousty triumphant.

in , "Well, now, Johnny O. Was it o ghost? Was it fun?"

- Midge watching Scottie and "Madeleine" leaving his apartment

There is yet another Hue woman in the fitm. Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), whose more detached setf-representation in her portrait joke offers a different formulation of the rupture thesis and its application to a potentiat female spectatorial view.'' Midge, perhaps, is the closest representation of a feminist woman we will find in Vertigo. Unlike the tawdry Judy, the shop girl who cons and seduces men, or the enigmatic Madeleine, who never reatly exists at alt. Midge is an artist with her own business, a designer of women's brassieres who "supports hersetf (yet another pun surety intended by Hitchcock) '̂ outside the parameters of the idealized middle-class famity of the fifties headed by a male wage-earner. Midge's financiat independence extends to a certain emotional independence from men like Scottie. In one of many demonstrations of such independ- ence. Midge urges Scottie, against his judgment, to investigate the Carlotta story by interviewing Pop Liebl. Then, as they are leaving the apartment, and Scottie telts her to wear a hat. Midge scoffs, "t don't need one," asserting herself against Scottie's conventionality.

Seemingly determined to frame the conventions of her tife. Midge paints her own image onto a copy of the portrait of Carlotta, a brilliant joke that reveats a stick moment of feminist insight. The portrait depicts Midge's face-plump, maternal, grinning, and

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bespeckled-superimposed upon the head of the mysterious, glam- orous Carlotta. It undermines the seriousness Scottie has invested into Gavin's Carlotta-Madeleine story, and, therefore, any straight- forward interpretation of romance-detective ptots; it atso injects a moment of stark analytic realism into a shrouded, illusive icon that, throughout the film, has represented "femininity" as mystery and "lack." Furthermore, the surprising superimposition of one kind of female icon-that of Midge's caretaking maternity-onto another- that of Carlotta's enigmatic sexuality-shifts the frame of reference before the film spectator's own eyes, calling attention to the "look" of the audience usually repressed by classic cinema, as Mutvey noted. It is this shift in the frame of reference, and the reference, therefore, to the cinematic viewer, that momentarity brackets the misogyny in the film, hetping to decode its naughty secrets.

Returning to the Cook and Johnston "rupture thesis," we might distinguish between two kinds of rupture. Prior to publishing the theory on feminist rupture with Cook, Johnston had written an earlier anatysis of what she calted "fragmentation." In her earlier essay, Johnston warns that fragmentation can be used in two ways: "as an anatytic tool," or to promote "emotionatity and mystery" in the tradition of Romanticism and Surrealism. To use "fragmentation" or "the juxtaposition of disparate etements...to bring about emo- tional reverberations" witi not revolutionize cinema," but to use fragmentation in order to challenge "the depiction of reality will" ("Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema," 29). Judy's masquerade invokes the first use of fragmentation, promoting the "emotionality and mystery" fixating Scottie's gaze and oedipal quest; Judy ultimately "fixes" herself by playing the "other" in a dangerous masquerade game. Midge's portrait, however, challenges the struc- ture of oedipat representation, revealing the slippage of frames by creating a sudden visuat drama of moveable icons that candidly ridicules fetishistic codes associated with suture, the point-of-view shots that bind viewers to the screen in mimetic faith.

Midge's portrait forms a hermeneutic rift that sends shock waves throughout the Vertigo narrative structure. But, tike Judy, Midge is punished for her crime, which is her interrogation of male- identified mimesis. Viewed from within the context of the fetishistic codes which the narrative, as a whole, adopts. Midge's portrait appears unflattering; it makes Midge hersetf the butt of the joke, face grinning and leering foolishty behind her own tenses-not those of a nattering camera but those of the awkward eyegtasses. Scottie's reaction to the juxtaposition of the silly, mother-identified Midge

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onto the glamorous, fetishized Cartotta is one of horror and disbetief. Midge, literatly, has outdone hersetf, or does hersetf right out of the Scottie-framed diegesis. Her witty interpretative skills itiustrate that Carlotta, "Madeleine," and Mother Midge are one and the same. But Scottie does not tike what he sees, and chides, "That's not funny. Midge," stomping, childlike, out of the room and out of her life.

Midge, it appears, has a masochistic streak. She berates herself, pulting her hair, chanting, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" Like Judy, Midge only had wanted Scottie's tove. This fact is made apparent early in the film, in a brief close-up of Midge's pained expression when Scottie recalls their former engagement and jocularly ctaims that she had been the one to break it off. Midge, remaining singte, has waited for Scottie, the close-up suggests. After Scottie's breakdown. Midge cannot regain even her former position with him as an asexuat mother figure, bustling helptessly over the mute and listless Scottie refusing consolation. The last shot of Midge in Uerfigo is that of her drooping silhouette against the window in a hospital corridor, evocative of the many windows, doorways, and corridors associated in the film with a potentially mobile frame of reference, but also with passive femininity and male voyeurism. Midge, who had once defied the suggestion of a hat, finally, cinematically, is "framed," too.

Given the fact that all the women protagonists and potential heroines of the fitm either die, are dead, or wind up tike Midge, losing everything they wanted, one might concur with Mutvey's original argument: that Vertigo provides no woman's view at alt, since every moment of patriarchy's ideological vulnerability is reframed by a masculine perspective. The opening credits sequence anticipates the failure of a woman's view in this film, when the words "Produced by Alfred Hitchcock" emerge solidly from out of the woman's swirling eye, more than hinting that the vertiginous woman's eye is the product of a male movie maker, and a technological illusion promoted by an industry of spectacles exploiting male-identification themes.

Like Midge's confrontational joke, however, the eye of the woman in the opening credits sets up a confrontation of views, a visual battle zone that divides the interpretative field along gendered lines of power. The anonymous and somber woman's face in the credits sequence alludes to the mythotogical Medusa, whose devisive, multiple-headed image-a product of patriarchy-contains the potentiat to crack but never shatter the ideoiogicat tens. The portrait of the grinning Midge invokes the Medusa, as wetl, in the

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revisionary mode offered by Hetene Cixous. The writer's often quoted essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa," rereads the severed snake-infested head of the Gorgon (attributed in psychoanalysis to the castrated sight of femate genitals) not as "deadty," but as "beautifut and...taughing" (255). Here 1 would tike to posit a correction to Cixous: that the Medusa is deadty, because it has never been ative. Perseus never looks at the Medusa "straight on" (Cixous, 255), precisely because the Medusa is that figure which "knows" it is an image. These deadly effects of female specularity are what Vertigo spectators witness. Women spectators, in particular- women capable of reading their own simultaneous subjectivity layered upon a specularized objectivity-might be the film's best viewers, after all, since they are well positioned to experience the vertigo of viewing that the film is about. Like the Medusa myth. Vertigo may not promulgate female role models with whom feminist spectators, at least, might want to identify. But what Vertigo does offer them is a rather astounding acknowlegement, from a male- dominated Hollywood of the 195O's, that feminized spectres and female spectators are not the same, and that the rigors of hermeneutics can cloud as well as illuminate that distinction.

Notes Reseach for this essay was partially funded by a Pforzheimer Fellowship from the City College of New York. Thanks to Patricia Parker, Kaja Silverman, and Patrick O'Donnell for their help in revising the manuscript.

1 Johnson, 137. This article, including its title, is indebted to Johnson's analysis of "the frame of reference," in its implications, both criminal and interpretative, for detective plots.

2 Other critics of Hitchcock include Keane, who also argues that Scottie occupies a feminine role, because he is played by Stewart, an actor who "'projects a willingness for suffering,'" Keane writes, quoting Stanley Cavell; Lee argues against a psychoanalytic, "conflicted" approach but suggests Hitchcock's films, in general, offer "a powerful feminist critique of male domination over women in society" (38), atthough admitting that Vertigo is the most probte- matic film in making this assertion.

3 See de Lauretis, who perhaps writes most eloquently that traditional narrative conclusions are constructed out of images of "the womb, the earth, the grave, the woman" (121). " See, for example, Hotlinger and Keane.

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^ It is also interesting to note that Hitchcock solved the technical problem of how to fitm the vertigo staircase as if from an angle above by subsfi7ufing the actual staircase for an artificial one, then shooting it sideways.

^ Wood, Modteski, and Keane have alt pointed to the importance of Judy's flashback in structuring identification in the film.

' For the original commentary on rupture, see Comolli and Narboni. ^ Although Lacan first described the mirror stage as an actual childhood development event, he later treated it as a structural paradigm describing an on-going acquisition of symbotic identity through language, a treatment presumed here.

^ Price elaborates upon this reductive interpretation of the vertigo sensation in psychoanalysis, repeating the repressive structure of the fitm narrative itsetf by emphasizing the meaning of mate impotence as an interpretative "key" to the fitm, rather than its more symbotic implications for subjectivity and representation. •" Carlotta's value is derived from the process of the male exchange itself, as the triangular image in the dream makes explicit. The triangular arrangement, in which a woman stands as sign of an erotic-linguistic exchange between men, has been analyzed by many feminist cutturat scholars, from Jutiet Mitchetl to Luce Irigaray to Gayle Rubin. In reference to the early Hitchock film Blackmail, Modleski writes about the use of a simitar triangutar tableau and its connotations for the exchange of women.

" Other critics have noted Midge's importance to the fitm: Hotiinger argues that Midge is an appropriate feminist role modet; and Linderman calls Midge "a point of balance" and a "surrogate" figure for Hitchcock himsetf.

'2 Modleski notes the obsessive humor Vertigo finds in women's undergarments, linked to Midge's profession and the more serious theme of feminine masquerade. Linderman puns upon Midge's career pursuits in light of her version of Midge's "corsetting" narrative function.

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