Blog 9

All about Scottie: Vertigo

   It is a fact that, the patriarchal way of telling the story is dominated the Hollywood tradition of filmmaking for years. Mulvey says: “Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in phantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions.”(p.713) In Vertigo (1958) a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock; we are seeing these male-centered codes a lot. But how the movie deals with these codes and what are the women place in the narrative of the movie?

                First, our protagonist is a ex policeman named Scottie. We are witnessing the story from his point of view. But the problem does not start with this point because he is not portrayed as a strong powerful male character instead, we are seeing his weaknesses: The acrophobia. https://youtu.be/N7sznnL0NZ0?t=43 He is a man who lost his skills and I think the whole movie, the all narrative flow, and the resolution part is for making him gain his skills and power again. When we look from this perspective, Vertigo is a very male centered movie and shows woman body in a fetishistic way. The woman characters in the movie exist only for the sake of helping Scottie to gain his power again.

               When we look closer to the Scottie’s acts, we understand that he is taking care of Madeline just because he wants to compensate his inability about his fear by doing trying to rescue a lost woman. The body of the beautiful woman is just a positive motive in his aim. I want to focus on the role of Midge in the movie. She is a powerful and strong woman with contrast to the Madeline. However, she is not in the center of Scottie’s attention. She also should fight for gaining his attention all the time because there is nothing attractive in the Midge for the Scottie. She can not help him on satisfying his desires and gain his power again. If the woman is not needy, the man doesn’t find anything interesting to her.

          On the other hand, Judy is like a shadow of the Madeline. She is not needy, but she has something interesting for Scottie: her resemblance with the Madeline. Mulvey says: “He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie’s active sadistic voyeurism.” (p.720)https://youtu.be/tesqTwX7cpc?t=1 I agree with Mulvey’s ideas about objectification of the women as a fetishistic phantasy. However, I think there is something more important in the movie about male centralization. All the women in the story is portrayed in a negative way. Midge could not gain Scottie’s attention even she tries a lot, so she looks like a looser. On the other hand Madeline is portrayed as a criminal and evil person who causes an innocent woman’s death: “True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness—the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong.”(p.719)

         The only person who gains something at the end of the story is a leading male character. He achieves on satisfying his dream: defeating his fear and gaining his power again.https://youtu.be/P-sWReV2DDQ It does not matter how many women is dead, disappointed, or lost their self-confidence, it is all about Scottie: being able to climb this tower again. While he is climbing, he stamps on women and with the help of this he is securing his position in the top. It is a metaphorical summary of the patriarchal society we are dealing with today.

Bibliyography

Mulvey, Laura.Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen eds. Film Theory and Criticism 7th edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. (p.711-722)