Vertigo by Any Other Name, Would Still Be a Really Creepy Image of Jimmy Stewart

So, having proclaimed the title of my little rant to be, I would first like to point out how f****** creepy Jimmy Stewart can be. By the end of the movie we know what his intentions were/are, but we still feel that almost violent nostalgia as we progress through the second half of the movie. Jimmy Stewart, too me, is such a staple of the family movie genre that this movie was borderline horrific to watch.

In Vertigo we get this same kind of irrational draw to the image of the ideal woman as in Preminger's Laura. In both we have this painting that kind of haunts the Mis en scene in both films.
While the one in Laura is an absolutely gorgeous depiction, that I might someday hunt down without explaining to my future wife why, that causes the main character to fall in love with her. In Vertigo there is this creepy 100 year old painting of a dead woman that Scottie's character becomes obsessed with. It also becomes a bit of fun for a friend. Instead of being a picture of Madeline we have a picture of Carlotta, which kind of plays to the deceit that Scottie is a victim to. We think it is Carlotta in Madeline's head, which Scottie believes he's fallen in love with. But in actuality it is Judy who is pretending to be Madeline which Scottie falls in love with. In either case it is Madeline that Scottie falls in love with, but the deception of who the lie that is Madeline, is symbolized through Madeline's absence in the portrait.

Oh, haha, I almost completely forgot this weird love triangle, consisting of two actual people, movie masquerades as a detective film for the first half of the film. Scottie is contracted as a private investigator to follow Madeline, which kind of foreshadows the rest of the film because a P.I.'s job is to be obsessed.

The plot leads us to believe that there is a suicidal spirit controlling Madeline. This drives the first half of the plot. As we get into the second half of the movie we see a woman who looks remarkably similar to Madeline, except she has bad makeup, bad hair, and this mid-west drawl to her voice.Turns out she (Judy) was pretending to be Madeline so that Elster could kill his wife (Madeline) and have Scottie as a witness to her lunacy. Scottie tries with an almost fierce sense of utter delusion to recreate Madeline from Judy. The love is actually between the two the whole time, which is were we get into symmetry. In class we talked about how the movie was forced symmetrically. Scottie is tryin to recreate his exact visions of her which we get in sort of a loop. We start back at the beginning of Scottie's experience with Madeline and how how he is going out to recreate that, to recreate his image of beauty. This again goes back to Laura and how the main character becomes obsessed with an image of a woman instead of the woman herself.



We also discussed in class, the point of view of the movie. Besides for the one scene where Judy has a flashback to reveal what really happened, which feels really forced in my opinion, the entire movie is from Scottie's POV. This gets us into the Freudian discussion brought up by the reading. Since the POV is the main character's, sometimes literally. We identify with him, no matter which gender (ego libido) and we see Madeline as the sexual attraction the whole movie. What is crazy is that everyone who watches this movie experiences this. So when we get this scene of a Madeline slightly recreated we all cringe because she is not what Hitchcock has built up beauty to be like.

Otto Preminger’s Laura definitely deserves to be remembered. The cinematography follows in the footsteps of Citizen Kane in how it portrays the main character through camera tricks and storytelling.

(SPOILER ALERT) Lydecker did it. Ok? At the point in the movie where we find out about this, you do not even care really. Lydecker becomes irrelevant. However there are some huge hints throughout the movie that range from obvious too subtle. The obvious hint is when McPhearson arrests Laura and Lydecker is excited that she is the one getting arrested, not him.

Other moments where Lydecker’s guilt is foreshadowed are subtler. Lydecker owns a pair of unique clocks and gave Laura one of them. When this was mentioned, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince popped into my head. It seemed a lot like the vanishing cabinets kept in the room of requirement, in Hogwarts, and the other was in Borgan and Burkes, which was in Knockturn Alley, the shopping center for dark wizards. The cabinets were used to send items that would be used to kill Dumbledore. Which is ironic because that clock is where Lydecker hid the shotgun he used to kill the model Vincent Price’s character was bangin’ at Laura’s place thinking it was Laura.



Other things that were noticeable in the way the movie was shot was that at certain moments in the film, Lydecker cast a very strong shadow, hinting to his ill intentions. Other characters of course had shadows, but were none were as eye grabbing as Lydecker’s. As he was leaving Laura’s apartment near the end of the movie his shadow was extremely dark. Also, McPhearson would only pull out that little baseball game, like he is trying to figure out Lydecker, to physically put the pieces in place, much like Kane’s second wife with the jigsaw puzzles.

Femme Fatal, the text we read for this movie sheds some light on the sexual symbolism of the characters in Laura. There is no Femme Fatal in the forefront movie, the title character is the epitome of the ideal woman. Her picture in the living room of her apartment is so enchanting you begin to fall in love with the softness of her character just from that picture. The picture has a kind of gravity to it that draws you in. It is the best prop in the movie.

The review of Laura also mentioned the spectrum covered by Lydecker, McPhearson, and Carpenter. Lydecker is high class, high society, and flaming. He appears to represent an extreme of Laura’s taste. Carpenter is a suave man who is skating by in life no his looks and his charm. Kind of like a free-loading Han Solo character. McPhearson is the man’s man, clever, and rugged. These three characters are three different kinds of men and Laura finds herself in the middle, even though she is dead.

In class we talked about the triangle formed in the scene when Laura returns home from the country . McPhearson is passed out on the chair from drinking and the shot has Laura’s portrait in the background to almost suggest what he is dreaming about. When she comes in and sees McPhearson sleeping the camera gives us Laura on the left, the Portrait between the two and above, and McPhearson to the right. It is as if the Portrait is a character itself that McPhearson has fallen in love with and now he has to distinguish between the two Lauras.