Vertigo

Watched the film last night on DVD in my own home. I mention this because this is significantly different from the cinema situation where we sit in semi-darkness and have the images projected onto a large screen. It must necessarily effect how I reacted to the film. There is also the question of how my awareness of cinema techniques has changed over the years. Compared with present day in your face sex and violence this film was tame and it was not helped by the 'wooden' acting of the two main actors. In fairness both were considered good actors in their time but we have become much more used to 'natural' acting. Take the kissing for example - it looked and was contrived - fake passion.

I saw it in its original version back in 1959 in a cinema. Unfortunately I cannot remember the impact it had then and certainly I never considered whether we were being fed the Hollywood version of women.

I have no real quarrel with Mulvey's analysis of how women were and still are portrayed on screen. However her voice is strident and she looks for examples that really are not there.  One discordant note reads:

"Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer". [Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema in 'visual culture: the reader' ed jessica evans and stuart hall Sage Publications Ltd 2010 p. 382].


Perhaps Mulvey has never observed the audience in a cinema when a feature film is showing. There are not too many signs of repression amongst the audience of either gender and quite a lot of 'acting out' their fantasies as evidenced by their body language. Amongst many jobs that I have had,particularly after retirement,was that of an auditor for a Cinema chain in the UK. Part of this task was to count the members of the audience. I could if I wished watch the featured film but found it far more interesting to observe the audience. Sometime they were far more fascinating.

I failed completely to see the objectification of women in the film Vertigo. It is true that the two main female characters play the expected role of the support to the main character and that by present day standards this was subservient and yet both retained their own individuality. After the 'death' of Madeline  and Scotties breakdown we have the attempts by Scottie to turn Judy Barton, a woman he meets later, into Madeline by changing her external appearance. Although not made immediately clear to the audience, although you would have to be fairly thick not to work it out, Judy is Madeline insofar as she played the part of  her in a murder plot created by the real Madeline's husband.

It is legitimate to ask whether Scottie at a subconscious level 'knew' that they were one and the same and at what point his realisation became concrete. Although full realisation comes when Judy wears a necklace that Madeline wore and that Scottie had not given her it is difficult to ignore the fact that apart from a change of hair colour it was obvious to any one that Judy was ' Madeline' (particularly obvious to the viewer as the parts were played by the same actress). What we are witnessing is a man who was hospitalised because of the events that happened meeting a woman who is so like his true love (not surprising given that they are the same person) that he wants to change her physical appearance to that of his lost love. Although there is a reluctance on the part of the female this is because of her fear that once he discovers the truth he will reject her. We do not have an example of the usual dominant male who for his own reasons wants to change women into his idealised picture.

As I have said earlier I have no quarrel with Mulvey's theory but using Vertigo as an example fails to demonstrate her argument. The odd thing is that there were so many more films at that time that were evidence of her argument. Virtually every film that starred Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollibrigida or Jayne Mansfield offered the audience the female as the fantasy woman whose sole purpose in life was to meet the stated or unstated desires of men.