Vertigo - Critical Approaches

Vertigo - Critical Approaches

1. Critical Approaches - Narrative Theory

   • "Vertigo is implausible, full of plot holes and inconsistencies and cannot be taken seriously from a narrative realist perspective. "
   • Six significant falls + kisses

2. Critical Approaches - Genre Theory

   • “Vertigo is best seen as a ghost story, a tale of haunting, with the detective story supplying little more than a plot mechanism”. - Peter Wollen (Sight and Sound, 1997)
     • “The distinction between suspense (the viewer knows the truth and – on behalf of the doomed victim – fears what is going to happen) and mystery (the viewer does not yet know the truth) is fundamental to Hitchcock’s approach to the thriller.”
   • “The concept of the Femme Fatale, central to hard-boiled detective and film-noir traditions on which Vertigo draws, is examined and undercut –"
     • "The film is explicitly about how men, out of their own anxieties and for their own convenience, create mythic images of women.” - Martin Rubin (Cambridge, 1999)

3. Male Gaze; Gendered Look

   • “…stunning is the entrance of Kim Novak in Vertigo… Novak is female, passive, silent, offering herself as an object to the male gaze.” - Charles Barr (2002)
   • The Three-Way Look - Director/Camera, Character, Audience/Spectator
   • The spectator identifies with the main controlling figure (and doesn’t allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right) in the narrative -the male protagonist – and shares his sense of power, as he sees himself in the protagonist and shares his voyeuristic gaze that reduces women to erotic objects.

4. Voyeurism

   • “The mechanism of the POV shot allows director and spectator to enjoy the same voyeuristic gaze at the female that the male hero does; for both, the character acts as kind of a surrogate.”
     • “Alfred Hitchcock, supreme manipulator of POV structure… we are all in this together.” - Charles Barr (2002)

5. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975, Laura Mulvey)

   • Mulvey’s focus (within a psychoanalytical/ feminist framework) is on visual pleasure associated with scopophilia (the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as erotic objects).
   • She emphasised two forms of scopophillia; voyeuristic and narcissistic.
     • Narcissistic scopophilia: pleasure we get in imagining that we are the people we are looking at.
     • Voyeuristic scopophilia: the pleasure we get from looking and in seeing other people as objects. We get a sense of power from being able to do this.
   • “…pleasure in looking has been split between the active male and the passive female”. - Laura Mulvey
     • “displayed/ exhibited, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness”
     • “as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium.”
   • Hitchcock takes the idea of the male gaze/look as “the content or subject matter of many of his films” (the male hero sees precisely what the audience sees) and Vertigo “takes fascination with an image (of the ideal woman) through eroticism as the subject of the film”.

6. Marxism

   • A system of economic, social, and political philosophy based on ideas that view social change in terms of economic factors. Under Marxism, outdated class structures were supposed to be overthrown therefore creating a working class revolution.
   • It held that as capitalism has succeeded feudalism, it too will be removed by a dictatorship of the workers (the proletariat or working classes) called socialism, followed quickly and inevitably by a classless society which governs itself without a governing class or structure. This forms the foundation of communism.
   • Developed by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).

7. Hegemony

   • The theory suggests that these representations are used to privilege dominant ideological beliefs e.g. Patriarchy, and that those in power, e.g. the government, Advertising Industry … maintain domination through the repetition of these representations.
     • This is then seen to result in legitimising forms of social inequality, thus naturalising it and therefore disguising it as such.