Scars

the Hero as Psychopath

from Schizo Cinema: The Occult Text in Popular Movies, by Jake Horsley

Fathers and teachers, I ponder: What is Hell? I maintain it is the suffering that comes from an inability to love.

—Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) is a man who has lost all heart. He is not merely the impotent male as hero, but a closet schizophrenic and a failed suicide to boot. At the commencement of Vertigo (1958)—following the psychedelic nightmare spirals of the opening credits—Scottie is from the very first moments losing his grip, quite literally in fact. Following a brief rooftop chase, he is left hanging by his fingertips over a precipice, with neither the strength to pull himself to safety nor the courage (the abandon) to let go. Before this, the rooftop chase sequence (which The Matrix tellingly quoted for its opening sequence) ensures that Vertigo begins in motion, a motion (the swirling trance of vertigo) which it will sustain to the end. The movie is motion, be it that of pursuit or that of plummeting; stasis is unequivocally connected to stagnation, or even death (when the hero winds up catatonic, and the heroine splayed out on stone). Only at the end of the movie do movement and inertia meet, when the hero is paused on the edge of the abyss once more, swaying gently between madness and death. Motion is central to Vertigo, and this is perhaps what makes it one of the most powerful and beloved motion pictures of all time. And yet, for all the hero’s motions, he is only ever going in circles: spiraling to the center, like a fly caught in the web of his own compulsion. This compulsion, as I say, is schizo Scottie’s will to death.

Vertigo is of course not fear of heights but fear of falling, and even beyond that, fear of landing. One cannot separate the stages (or at least one who jumps cannot), but I think it’s safe to say that, if man had wings, his fear of heights would fast become a thing of the past. At the same time, not only birds and insects but also cats, and probably most animals, don’t suffer from a fear of heights, except when falling. Instincts being what they are, it seems that only through fear itself can the animal fall, short of unforeseen accidents or divine intervention. We have all walked a narrow path over an abyss and noted how our balance is effected for the worse by looking down. We all suffer from vertigo, if only in the most extreme of cases, and everyone knows why you “don’t look down.” But if it is not part of our instinctive programming, then it follows that it is only conscious fear of painful death (that damn landing!) which causes our vertigo. And this fear, I suggest, is linked to the suicidal impulse. Our own fear and folly will precipitate us over the abyss, when if only we had been fearless and detached we would have made it across.

Vertigo leaves Scottie Ferguson hanging over this abyss, looking down. It never bothers to save him, however (the only man seen to try, a policeman like Scottie, falls to his death while Scottie watches in guilt-racked horror). We never see his deliverance. To all appearances, he is hanging for the rest of the film; the narrative might be thus interpreted as Scottie’s unlived life, flashing before his eyes as his fingers give way and the plummet begins. Certainly Hitchcock’s approach to the material would support this reading, a reading which is irrelevant, beyond its charm, to any further readings. Either way, Scottie never for a moment ceases to hang on by his fingertips. The abyss i s constantly beneath him for the entirety of the film, until the very end, by which time we have come full circle. Once again Scottie is teetering, now not by his fingers but on his toes, like a diver over a waterfall, working up the courage to dive. And dive he must; Scottie’s final precipitation is inevitable now. It is the nature of his compulsion to return to the edge, and in the end, gazing is not enough. If he has taken all this time to work his way to the abyss, then it is expressly in order to jump.

What precipitates Scottie into madness (as for so many of us) is, ostensibly, the love of an unobtainable woman. In actual fact, however, it is the war that rages within him between his fear and his desire for this obscure object. It is here that the schizophrenia begins: the split in his psyche (familiar to us all) when self-hatred works secretly away at eroding all the finer promises of true love. Scottie lives in a state of anxiety over the fact that he is a coward. His own weakness caused another man’s death, and the trauma has rendered him impotent. He cannot even climb a stepladder without reliving the terrible moment—terrible not because it led to the man’s death, but because it revealed to Scottie his own impotence: his inadequacy as a man. Like the cowardly lion, Scottie is basically a good sort who lacks courage. But though he appears to be seeking redemption, seeking to regain his lost heart, he is in fact seeking the exact opposite. Since it is his weak heart that torments him and allows him no rest, he sets out to kill his heart. In the end, like the true obsessive, he is heroically fated to succeed. Had he simply let go at the very start he might have saved a life or two, and he would certainly have saved himself a whole lot of trouble and heartache. But then, there would have been no schizophrenic journey, no uncovering of the truth, and no movie.

As a schizophrenic in denial, Scottie is naturally and inevitably (as if by Fate) drawn to a schizophrenic mystery to investigate. An old college acquaintance, Gavin Elster, emerges from the past seeking Scottie’s aid. An emissary from the unconscious, a trickster figure of basest intent, Elder is an omen of things to come. Scottie will be taken on a mystery journey into Wonderland, but it will all be fake. (As such, he is taken not to Wonderland but to Disneyland, where all the sights and sounds, the magic, are simply meant to distract him and keep him from being “disillusioned.”) Elster spins a dimestore novel yarn about his wife: that she is suffering from delusions of being someone else, of being taken over by an ancestor from her past, a beautiful woman whose torment led to her suicide. (By today’s New Age light, it would be seen as a past-life regression.) She, like Scottie after her—these works of fiction seeking a semblance of reality!—is caught in an endlessly recurring spiral that leads to a single act; she relives her life over and over, and each time it ends in suicide. The wheel of karma has become the hub of damnation.

No wonder Scottie buys this fairy tale hook, line and sinker: he is caught on the same wheel himself, and eager to get to the hub. Scottie’s job is to follow Madeline (who believes she is Carlota, but is really just Judy, acting a role), to go where she goes, and this of course quite literally (and fatally) he does. She is the white rabbit that pops out the hole and drags Scottie (by the balls) down to the lowerworld. And he is powerless to resist. All he can do is keep on her tail and make sure nothing happens to her. He has no idea at this time that he is merely a pawn, and that a white rabbit is certainly no lady, is at best merely a ruse. Elster has designed his plan in order to engage Scottie as an unwittingly false witness. Elster intends to murder his wife and make it appear suicide. To do this he uses Scottie—the passive witness with the fear of heights—knowing that he will be powerless both to prevent the act and even to properly witness it. Scottie will testify to what he saw, which was Maddy going up the bell tower, and then a second later plummeting down. He won’t see the switch, never realize that another woman was murdered; he will not look at the body. (Even more improbably, no one will show him a photo of the real Madeleine during the investigation.) Scottie will remain in the dark for the majority of the movie, and all this time of unknowing, of his being deceived, is time in which his psychosis will fester and gestate, until it explodes into tragic action.

The Hero pursues the Heroine like a shadow, only from a safe distance. He becomes a stalker, passively spying on the object of his desire (though also of his private investigation), fascination, and finally his total obsession. From the very first, the “romance” exhibits schizophrenic qualities: passivity, distance, morbid fascination. Scottie is unconsciously seeking his anima now, and the dreamlike sequences that take over the film are enactments of—the human myth-drama par excellence—the longing of the soul for its mate. The dogged and tormented questing knight chases after the phantom lady in white, keeping ever out of sight; too shy to approach her, he yet pursues her, through art galleries and graveyards. Elusive vision of beauty and whispered promise of happiness, repeatedly he loses sight of her, but never for long. Each time she returns, his heart quickens to see her; she haunts him, enslaves him, ensures (as of course she is paid to do) that he never have the slightest chance of shaking the spell by which she holds him. He is ensnared, and doesn’t even know it.

These sequences are some of the loveliest and most hypnotic, the most purely cinematic, ever captured on film. They reveal Hitchcock’s intentions as lying far outside the limits of the ordinary thriller, or even the psycho-thriller. Hitchcock is aiming for the quality of dream, of trance, and by so doing he is (I think advertently) suggesting the dissociation and growing psychosis of his protagonist. Scottie is being drawn into the illusory melancholy of his assignment, and as such he quickly moves from being the stalker to being the stalked. The fact that the heroine’s elusiveness, her mystery and desirability for Scottie, are all related to her melancholia, her being so lost (which in turn relates to her insanity), is what makes Scottie’s fascination so fatal to him. Many a man has fallen for the allure of the lost or fallen woman, and made insane bids to save her (and so win her for himself), without ever paying for it with his life, or even his sanity. But Scottie is not so lucky. Heartbreak is rarely fatal, but Vertigo is one of the rare cases.

The schizophrenic obsession is something beyond mere romantic-sexual infatuation, however. The schizophrenic obsesses not over the love object itself, but rather with its “fallen” nature. He seeks not so much to save the beloved as to damn himself through her. It is the fact of the heroine’s mysterious allure being entirely based on deception, on false impressions (so characteristic of the schizophrenic experience), that makes Scottie’s falling in love with her so fatal: a sublimated death wish. Yet Judy plays this part beyond the realistic capabilities of any actress, even one complicit with a murder plot. (Judy’s performance goes way beyond Kim Novak’s, of course; for one thing she has to improvise; for another she doesn’t get a second take.) There seems no doubt that Judy becomes Madeline, just as her Madeline gets lost in the memory-role of Carlota. All these layers of illusion exist in Scottie’s mind, in any case. They are symbolic (symptomatic) of the mystery itself—the elusive, unknowable female as it recedes ever further out of his reach. From the very start, Scottie is doomed by his predilection, which is to attain not merely the unattainable (all quests come down to that), but rather to claim what does not even exist. Madeline is the concatenation of Scottie’s own schizophrenic mind. When Judy-Madeline throws herself into the San Francisco bay, Scottie is there to save her: he does not hesitate for more than a heartbeat. But he merely saves the actress, who, aware of his presence all along, knew he would come to save her. This is not the feigned suicide attempt that is really a cry for attention; in this case it is a subterfuge to ensnare Scottie into a murder plot. (Meanings abound: suicide is sublimated impulse to murder; murder is last resort of failed suicides.)

Had Scottie turned away, or simply sat down and watched idly from a safe distance (as he has always done until now), then Judy would have been forced to save herself and Scottie would have perceived the truth (though Judy’s wiles and Scottie's gullibility make a powerful combination for deception, so that’s debatable). In true schizophrenic fashion, Scottie is passive when he needs to act, and acts when he should stay put. Like any man whose sexual infatuation has scrambled his brains, only more so, Scottie can only act compulsively. He gets into trouble no matter what he does or doesn’t do.

His first act is to take the unconscious heroine home, lay her on his bed, and take her clothes off. Vertigo must have been, at the time of its release, the only American movie in which the hero undresses the heroine before they have even formally met. Beyond any doubt, this is the real beginning of Scottie’s obsession. Scottie is allowed to lay eyes and hands upon his naked desire, to have it in front of him for the taking, and yet be forbidden (and not just by movie codes) to act upon his desire. Since Judy is acting a role, it seems possible she is feigning unconsciousness, and is fully awake the whole time while Scottie undresses her and puts her into his bed. This only adds a further layer of perversity to their budding relationship, as it moves inevitably from mere physical infatuation to outright sexual intoxication. Scottie is not merely ensnared, he is poisoned. Yet his pathetic need to sustain the illusion of being the hero (which is his conscious motivation at this time) once again renders him impotent. Instead of allowing himself to be seduced by the wiles of the lying female (and so canceling her spell and ending her dominance over him), he remains “strong,” intent on saving this person who is herself intent on destroying him. And so the evil scheme (of which they are both now part) begins to unfold.

Of course, nothing is ever so simple, and the best-laid plans of monomaniacs (such as Elster’s two-bit schemer with a genius for psychology) never seem to take into account the weirdness of the human heart, and its capacity to snarl things up. Scottie and Madeline (and Judy) fall madly in love, despite or perhaps because of the deception upon which their very relationship depends (and despite the sheer awkwardness of its beginning). Their love is doomed, because both fall in love with illusions. Scottie believes he is falling in love with Madeline, who is herself no more than a role out of a dime store novel. Judy for her part falls in love with Scottie even though he is, or must appear to her, a complete dupe. Hence she falls in love with a Scottie who is operating entirely under false assumptions (about her), a Scottie who is kind and fatherly, and who wants only to save her (when in fact he is ensuring the real Madeline be murdered). In every way, Scottie is in an inferior position to Judy, since he is unaware of her deception, or even of who she really is. Of course Scottie is counting on getting to fuck Madeline once he has saved her, so his motives are hardly pure, either. That is why the missed opportunity of sex between them is so crucial. Once Scottie’s sexual needs had actually been met, even if only momentarily, his head would have cleared, his obsession dwindled, and he would certainly have gotten the truth out of Judy. Only by keeping him in the inferior role can the deception be maintained.

But in his own way, Scottie is deceiving Judy too. From the moment he sees her naked, in fact, it is possible he sees through the whole façade but is simply too enamored of the illusion to give it up; if so, he feigns ignorance. From this moment on, he is really only thinking of one thing, and it isn’t Madeline’s soul. Like all romantic obsessions founded on deception (where egotism disguises itself as altruism), Scottie and Maddy’s romance is doomed to failure, and finally to tragedy. The tragedy kicks in when the deception is allowed to continue too long, even after the romantic illusion itself has been destroyed. Even after her “death,” Scottie is allowed to go on believing in Maddy’s goodness—and her madness. This is bad enough, but add to it the fact that he believes she died due to his own weakness and inadequacy and, under such a hideous weight, it seems unlikely that Scottie will ever be a fully functioning human again. Undone by his character flaws, he has been cut down and trampled underfoot by the horses of love and lust. Nothing short of a miracle could bring him back to himself.

Until this point, Vertigo has kept its schizophrenic subtext occulted, and remains, though by far the most mesmerizing, melancholic work of the genre, a more or less traditional mystery thriller. From the first shots of a catatonically traumatized Scottie sat in a rest home “listening” to Mozart, however (he sees and hears nothing outside his own internal anguish), the movie has veered off into wholly unmapped terrain: the chaotic terrain of schizophrenia. How many movies (at that time or since) have depicted their ostensible hero in a state of total despair and impotence? The normal thing at this point would be to show t he hero in a bar, unshaven, getting drunk, drowning in self-pity and self-hatred, before some clue falls into his path and he regains the momentum of the quest. Instead, Hitchcock allows Scottie to wallow and fester in his melancholy for an unspecified period of time; he shows him to have well and truly given up the chase, to be defeated by the harsh reality of his inadequacy, and to have succumbed to (or taken refuge in) the passivity and misery of schizophrenia. Nor are we given to understand that Scottie actively “recovers,” but only that, over time, he seems to get his wits sufficiently together to get out his easy chair and put the pieces of his life back together (at least to the point of changing his own underwear and fixing his own dinner). During this time, Barbara Bel Geddes’ Mitch has taken care of him. Mitch represents the earthy, dependable female, the real flesh-and-blood woman who loves Scottie selflessly (they were formerly engaged but Mitch broke it off). Consequently she is of no interest to him. Her availability to Scottie, and her resulting undesirability to him, offers further proof of Scottie’s self-destructive need to chase after phantoms.

In any case, were it not for the perverse whims of Fate, Scottie, we might reasonably assume, would have settled into a bitter, melancholic life, perhaps even with Mitch, and so passed the remainder of his days content (if not blissful) in his ignorance. He would never have known that the woman he thought he loved and lost not only never died, but that she never existed to begin with. Instead, he runs into Judy. There’s more to this than mere chance, however: since Judy is still in love with Scottie she chose to stay close by him, if only for the chance of seeing him again. Scottie doesn’t recognize Judy, of course, but he is struck by the resemblance, and once again is fascinated by her beauty; and so he begins to obsess all over again. Since he believes Judy to be a completely different person to Madeline, he believes that he has been given a second chance. In a way he has, but since he is once again blind to the truth (proving that for all his traumas he has learned nothing), he proceeds to repeat the same mistakes all over again.

Essentially Vertigo deals with the schizoid experience as it relates to “romantic love,” i.e., sexual obsession, the desire of the fragmented psyche to find completeness outside of itself, in a perfect opposite match, a sexual partner. To this extent at least, we are all practicing schizophrenics, caught up in the great lie of romantic love, the lie that places happiness and completeness outside of ourselves. Obviously no amount of companionship, no single human being, no matter how deep and lasting our connection to them, can ever fill the void that exists within us, or replace the missing anima or animus. Above all this is because we are seeking a match, we are seeking the equivalent of our own selves in the opposite sex. And yet, since we are looking outside of ourselves, we can only perceive the differences, all the ways in which the object of our desire fails to match up. Scottie first begins chasing phantoms out of an unconscious drive to find the part of himself that will give him wholeness, that will allow him to feel alive again. He is trying to rediscover his strength and his courage, his heart. He has become aware of this need only by being forced to confront his inadequacy, his desperate lack of a will to live. It is only natural, then, that such a realization lead him on a quest for wholeness, for integration of his psyche, his heart, and his mind. It is also perhaps inevitable that he be drawn towards the mysterious female as the image of everything that he is not. Woman is the embodiment of male desire; she is what gives a man courage, what makes a man’s heart beat faster, with renewed vigor. And the fact that he is unconsciously (apparently by “sheer chance”) drawn to the mysterious case of this ghostly female, a female who is lost in the past and lost to herself, shows that Scottie is dimly aware of the true nature of his desire. He is seeking not sexual satisfaction but spiritual communion; and for a time, he even seems to be finding it.

The time Scottie spends with Madeline—after he “saves” her and before she “dies”—most especially their trip to the forest where they gaze at the concentric circles of the cutaway tree trunk and Scottie glimpses his true place in eternity—this is about as close as Scottie gets to happiness, and to the truth about himself—to self-knowledge. For a brief moment, he and Maddy are indeed united, not just physically but spiritually, in the shared understanding of their mortality, their insignificance, their fleetingness upon the Earth. They are both ghosts in search of solidity, strangers in eternity, meeting briefly, just long enough to find themselves for an instant, in love. But Judy and Scottie are both too greedy to be satisfied with a mere moment of true love, and so they play out the deception, all the way to its inevitable, tragic denouement.

When Scottie begins to remold Judy in the image of Madeline, she complies. Most of all it is out of a conscious desire not to lose him; but also at work perhaps is her unconscious knowledge that this is no more than she deserves, after her own selfish manipulations. Judy is allowing herself to be dominated by Scottie where once she was dominant of him. Scottie, for his part, is likewise taking unconscious revenge upon Judy, and it is in these sequences that he becomes openly psychotic. He is a pathetic figure, desperately struggling to reassemble his shattered illusion, to recreate a dead woman using the components of the living—a fitting revenge indeed! For this is exactly the nightmare situation which Judy had acted out for Scottie in her role of Madeline. And in the process of enacting his revenge, Scottie is reducing the flesh-and-blood Judy once again to the pale ghost Maddy.

Hitchcock remarked how essentially Scottie was a necrophiliac desiring to have sex with a dead woman; although this adequately exposes the perversity and dementia of Hitchcock’s hero, it is far too glib and simplistic a description of Scottie’s actual behavior. Scottie is not trying to fuck a dead woman—he is trying to breathe life into his fantasy, to project the longing of his tormented psyche onto a living person, even if he must destroy her to do so. This is the classic quest for the anima, all mixed up fatally with fear of the Other. Of course the Other, or shadow, is a close cousin to the anima, and both concepts relate to the dark side of the psyche, internally speaking, and to the opposite sex when manifested externally. With the anima, the paradox of the Other—as what we both fear and desire—becomes clear. Scottie wishes Judy to become Maddy, the idealized female: both phantom and human, unattainable spirit and irresistible flesh combined in one. Since he was never able to possess Madeline before she was taken from him (and this despite ample opportunity to do so), he is haunted and possessed by regret, and by the desire for a second chance. But Scottie never dared let himself be seduced by Maddy above all because of her terrible, unfathomable otherness. She was never really his, and so he never really lost her; only his fantasy of having her. This is the fantasy he wastes no time resurrecting at the first opportunity.

Judy, on the other hand, is his, body and soul, from the first moment he sees her. Though, so far as Scottie knows, they never met before, Judy has been hopelessly in love with Scottie for who knows how many lonely, anguished months (while Scottie has been pining for ghosts). As a result (and as with Mitch), Scottie has no real interest in Judy, except as a passive object whom he can mold and shape into the image of his desire. This image is effectively his own creation, hence his own self. At this point romantic obsession comes clean and reveals itself as runaway egotism. Scottie couldn’t care less about Judy; he is only interested in satisfying his own longing. Vertigo illustrates, better than probably any movie ever made, the underlying, destructive nature of romantic love and of sexual obsession (which Vertigo exposes as synonymous). It is this above all, I think, that makes Vertigo one of the dozen or so most enduring and profound movie texts in existence. But Vertigo goes beyond the mere denunciation of romantic desire and into a more bewildering task—that of exposing the schizophrenic impulse that lies beneath the ego-drive to destruction.

Scottie, like every other fractured soul on the planet, desires communion with the Other. Also like the rest of us, he is tormented by the rift in his own psyche, by the strangeness, unfamiliarity, and sheer panic that this Other invokes in him. As a result, he seeks out ways and means to make this Other familiar, non-threatening, controllable. In a word, he seeks to dominate it. He desires to possess the anima, but he is compelled by his own fear of it to first of all strip it of its otherness. So, in order to possess it, he must first destroy it. And of course (like the rest of us) he is left with nothing. Scottie successfully turns Judy back into Madeline, but rather than resurrecting Maddy (which of course he can never do), he merely eradicates all traces of Judy; he denies her her true nature. At this point, Scottie has successfully reduced her to a mere actress again, only this time she is at his command, she is his creation, to do with as he will. Does he finally possess her, now he has made her into his likeness? We never find out, since this is also the moment that, as a result of Judy’s all-too-Freudian slip—by wearing a necklace that belonged to Madeline—Scottie realizes the truth, and his perfectly assembled fantasy crumbles to dust in the blink of an eye. This was of course Scottie’s unconscious intent all along: to expose Judy, by forcing her to go through the same process of transformation-deception as before. Into the bargain, he also exposes his own fantasy (to himself): that his beloved female dream-anima is a false and lying thing, a betrayal of all he had longed for. In fact both Scottie and Judy are exposed in this moment, utterly and irrevocably. Love dies.

What had been theirs (for one brief moment among the trees) was the love of soul mates. This love was reduced to mere sexual obsession and, as a result, is now lain bare as out-and-out hatred. At which point, Scottie can only, tragically, see his madness through, complete his work of revenge upon the lying female, and bring about Judy’s death. The alternative would mean admitting to himself his own complicity in the betrayal and deception, thereby acknowledging the schizophrenia that is behind every last one of his actions. This, plainly, he is too far gone to do. Once denial and fragmentation have reached a certain point, they attain a momentum all their own, and any attempts at facing the truth, of putting the pieces together again, are futile. Hence total schizophrenia (i.e., madness or death) is the only conceivable result. This is where Vertigo leaves off, with Scottie back on the brink.

This time he makes it up the bell tower, dragging Judy along with him. As a result—though he proves his own potency by once again acting when he might better have remained passive—Judy falls to her death. It seems debatable, and also perhaps irrelevant, as to whether Scottie does or does not take the plunge this time. Either way he is plainly a broken man. He has successfully killed his heart, and so freed himself from fear. But at what price? He has lost his soul to boot. What has Scottie to live for? If he is finally cured of his vertigo, it is perhaps only and wholly in order to jump. Death ends all traumas.

*