The development of key themes and ideas in VERTIGO

Past Exam question to consider this lesson:

Explore the importance of narrative structure in the development of key themes and ideas in Vertigo.


Starter: 
Define the term foreshadowing.

Answer this question:
In the opening credits, the mysterious woman’s face drenched in red is a foreshadowing of what in Vertigo?

Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Common Hitchcockian themes –

The world is unstable and unpredictable (intensifies post Holocaust) and things are not what they seem – Scottie as an obsessive voyeur. Nobody is innocent, no one is morally good – dark impulses exist in us all. Hitchcock extends this to the audience so that we question it in ourselves. 

Controlling, manipulative cinema.

How does 'Vertigo' address the conventions of a Thriller?

The first shot used in the opening is a close-up of a females face which steadily moves to an extreme close-up of her eye. The face reveals expressions of fear, worry and uncertainty which indicates the genre. During this part the music adds suspense and builds tension. The eye eventually fades to red symbolsing the idea of danger, blood and death which addresses the genre through the themes that the eye creates.

During the opening credits the moving, optical shapes that spin in blue and purple give a vivid sense of madness and craziness, which could be related and hint to the audience the narrative of the movie - Vertigo. For the audience the shapes used are visually interesting and would keep the audience engaged.

The characters used are both antagonistic and protagonistic, as there is a man running away from a police officer which inidcates the theme of crime. The audience know that this scene will be significant throughout the movie as it is shown to be important through the fast action being used and the tense music that intensifies at this point. The music implies the idea of a chase/escape which relates to the genre.

THeme 1: DEATH AS BOTH ATTRACTIVE AND FRIGHTENING

In the opening scene of Vertigo, Scottie is moments away from death as he dangles from the roof of a tall building. His fear is palpable, and while he is overcome with terror watching his comrade fall, letting go seems to be the only way out of the situation. Madeleine is the embodiment of this fear of and attraction to death. Supposedly possessed by a woman who took her own life, Madeleine wanders San Francisco, drawn to the idea of suicide and yet fearing death. One day after attempting to drown herself in the San Francisco Bay, she and Scottie wander among the ancient Sequoia trees and she expresses a dread of death. “I don’t like it, knowing I have to die,” she tells him, and she pleads with him to take her into the light.

This confusion of impulses manifests itself on a more figurative level when Scottie attempts to mould Judy in Madeleine’s image. While Judy initially fights the annihilation of her real self—a kind of death—she eventually embraces it as a way to claim Scottie’s love, saying, “I don’t care anymore about me.” Scottie enacts these contradictory impulses when he drags Judy to the top of the bell tower with the apparent desire to kill her, and then reacts with horror and despair when she plummets to her death.

THEME 2:THE IMPENETRABLE NATURE OF APPEARANCES

The mask-like qualities of appearance are suggested during the opening credits of the film, which feature a woman’s expressionless face and a shot first of her lips and then of her nervously darting eyes. The depths of emotion and experience in this woman are unknowable to us. In the scene in Midge’s apartment, Scottie appears to be a balanced man on the mend from a traumatizing experience, but it does not take long to realize that his healthy exterior masks a burgeoning madness. And while Midge is pragmatic, unromantic, and controlled in her responses, her exterior hides the soul of a passionate person. After her failed attempt to break into Scottie’s dream-world by painting her own head on Carlotta’s portrait, she flies into a surprising rage, flinging paintbrushes at her own reflection in the window—an attempt to shatter the mask that Scottie sees and mistakes for her whole identity.
Madeleine’s character is nothing but appearance. She is a fabrication loosely based on the legend of a dead woman, and Scottie’s attempt to understand and penetrate that appearance is what leads to his downfall and the downfall of Judy/Madeleine. After assuming Madeleine’s appearance at Scottie’s insistence, Judy has difficulty penetrating her own mask. By the time Scottie drags her up the steps of the bell tower, she no longer has a firm grasp on her true identity and alternates between speaking as Judy and as Madeleine.

THEME 3:THE FOLLY OF ROMANTIC DELUSION

While Scottie’s acrophobia is his most apparent Achilles’ heel, his true tragic flaw is his penchant for romantic delusion. He fools himself, and is easily fooled by others, into believing in illusions that are romantically gratifying to him. Hitchcock presents Midge as a highly sympathetic character and prompts viewers to root for her in her vain attempts to woo Scottie. Midge is the antithesis of romantic delusion, firmly grounded in the real world and able to offer Scottie a mature kind of love. But this is the kind of love that Scottie rejects in favor of the illusive, dreamlike love he finds with Madeleine. And it is his decisive submission to delusion that ensures the film’s tragic ending. Judy pleads with Scottie to accept her as she is, to try to move beyond the dead Madeleine, but this is something he cannot do. Judy’s startled fall from the bell tower is the film’s final example of the folly and danger of romantic delusion. When the shadowy figure of a nun appears behind Judy and Scottie in the tower, Judy seems to be overtaken by the romantic notion that it may be the ghost of the real Madeleine returning to the scene of the crime.

Foreshadowing

In the opening credits, the mysterious woman’s face drenched in red is a foreshadowing of the murderous role a mysterious woman will play in the film. When Scottie faints in Midge’s arms while attempting to conquer his acrophobia on a stepstool, it prefigures his more significant incapacitation when his acrophobia prevents him from stopping Madeleine’s suicide. A close-up shot of Madeleine’s tightly wound hair—a spiral—hints at the chaos into which she will lead Scottie.

Past Exam question (general) to consider this lesson:

How far has an awareness of the filmmaker as auteur influenced your response to your chosen film?

VERTIGO - The significance of this as a “Hitchcock” film 

- Recurring motifs and the possible symbolic patterning of the film