It also proposes to the reflective viewer an alternative account of love. In short, Vertigo is a visual counterexample to the property-based view of partner-love.īut that is not all that Vertigo has to say about love. He is clearly out of control and treating Judy badly and the audience can feel it as Judy pleads that Scottie love her as she really is. Vertigo makes these intuitions palpable in the scenes where Scottie attempts to remake Judy into another Madeleine Elster. As Shakespeare put it: “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” And what of the fact that with ageing, I may lose those very properties that first caught her fancy. If the answers to these questions were “yes,” I would surely protest that my partner did not really love me. And if there were someone who was better looking than me, would she trade up? Again, I hope not. If I died, would my partner be just as happy with a clone of me? I hope not. Yet there is a problem here, since those are properties that can be possessed by someone other than our partners. When asked why one loves one’s partner, one often says: because of her sense of humour, or because of his looks, or because of their intelligence or generosity. The idea that we love our partners because of their properties comes naturally. And as such, they set forth two views of the nature of love – the idea that we love our partner because of his/her/their “properties”, to use the philosophical term, or because of something unique to him/her/them. Though these two stories evolve sequentially, it is hard not to compare them.
But eventually, Scottie discovers the truth about Judy’s role in the murder of the real Madeleine Elster and things end badly for everyone.
Because of this, Scottie tries to remould Judy in the image of Madeleine Elster – having her dress like the ersatz Madeleine, having her dye her hair as Madeleine did, and even having her style her hair in a French knot like Madeleine’s. Although she looks very different from how she did in the role of Mrs Elster, there is something about her that reminds him of his Madeleine. The second love story begins some time later when Scottie accidentally sees Judy on the street and follows her to her apartment. Scottie falls in love with this counterfeit Mrs Elster (Judy), whose apparent suicide Scottie is then unable to prevent due to his fear of heights, allowing Mr Elster to murder his wife by throwing her from the top of a bell tower. Mr Elster tricks Scottie into thinking that Judy is Mrs Elster. In the first one, Scottie, the ex-police detective, falls in love with a woman, Judy Barton, who is masquerading as Mrs Madeleine Elster as part of Mr Elster’s plot to murder his wife, the real Madeleine Elster. Vertigo is a twice-told tale of two love stories. If Scottie (James Stewart) is really as good a detective as he’s alleged to be, wouldn’t he have discovered in the first half of the film that Kim Novak’s character wasn’t the real Mrs Madeleine Elster, but a phoney? And in the second half of the movie, how could Scottie have failed to notice that the body of Judy Barton (again Kim Novak), the woman he’s romancing, is identical to that of the fake Madeleine Elster’s?īut if it is not the plot that keeps us returning to Vertigo, what is the secret to the film’s inexhaustibility? One possible source is its philosophical insight into the nature of love. The plot on subsequent viewings, moreover, seems ever more improbable. Once one has seen it, the mystery is dispelled. Yet there is a real question about what has repeatedly drawn them back to the film.
Cinema lovers have viewed it again and again, their admiration ever increasing. Although Vertigo opened to mostly poor reviews in Great Britain and just broke even, the film’s reputation has grown immensely over the years.
#Alfred hitchcock vertigo movie
In 2012, the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound elected Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 movie Vertigo as the greatest film of all time, thereby ending the 50-year rule of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
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