"Did he train you?" Did he let you rehearse it? Did he teach you how to say and how to do it? ”
At the end of Alfred Hitchcock's Ecstasy, a wounded man let out this roar from the bottom of his heart. At this point, we are fully on his side. At first glance, the film is about a man falling in love with a woman who doesn't exist, and after the truth comes out, love gives rise to hate, and roars at the woman pretending to be the person of his dreams. However, the story is far from simple. A woman is in love with a man in reality, so while cheating on him, she also cheats on herself. And because the man is obsessed with the person in the dream, in the end, not only failed to find the dream, but even the person in front of him was lost.
There is also a deeper meaning behind the rich connotation of the film. Alfred Hitchcock is known to be a very controlling director, especially for women. The actresses in his films always reflect the same characteristics: they all have blonde hair and are all out of reach iceberg beauties; their costumes are subtle combinations of fashion and fetish complexes, which bind their bodies like shackles; they charm men, and the men they charm often have physical or psychological defects. In addition, every woman in Hitchcock's films is sooner or later humiliated.
Kim Novak
Ecstasy is not only one of Hitchcock's most remarkable films, but also one of his most confessional works. The film confronts the dominant themes in Hitchcock's art, showing his use, fear and manipulation of women. Scotty (James Stewart) in the film is the incarnation of Hitchcock himself. This man has both physical and psychological weaknesses (back problems, fear of heights), and he is madly in love with the phantom of a woman who is the standard "Hitchcock girl". Unable to get the perfect woman he had in mind, he found another woman and went to great lengths to reinvent her, dress her, train her, change her makeup and hairstyle until she looked exactly like the woman he desired. He cared little about the Tao Pi himself in his hands, and he was happy to sacrifice her as a sacrifice to his dreams.
But it's not hard to guess that the woman he's tried so hard to transform and the woman he desires are actually the same person. Her name is Judy (Kim Novak) and she is hired to play the dream girl "Madeleine", assisting her employer in a murder plot. Scotty was initially unaware of the plot, but when he realized that he had been deceived, he was furious and shouted out the opening words: "Did he train you?" Every word was like a knife in his heart, for this passage spoke the harsh truth: he thought he had created a perfect woman for himself, but in fact she was shaped by another man. The man took away not only Scotty's woman, but also Scotty's dream.
This is where the core moral contradiction of Ecstasy comes from. At the end of the day, what another man (Gavin, Tom Helmore) does to this woman is just what Scotty wants to do. In the process, the real woman, Judy, betrays Gavin and shifts her heart to Scotty. In the end, she played Madeleine not for money, but for the sacrifice of love.
Emotions intertwine and climax in the same shot, creating one of Hitchcock's most iconic scenes of any of Hitchcock's films. Scotty, a retired San Francisco detective, is entrusted by Gavin to follow Madeleine and involuntarily falls in love with her, and Madeleine dies suddenly. Later, Scott meets Judy by chance, who looks exactly like Madeleine, but is more secular, not as elegant and refined as Madeleine. Scotty certainly didn't realize that Judy and Madeleine were actually the same woman. He began to pursue her in a deformed way, and she gradually developed sympathy and concern for him, so when he asked her to transform herself into Madeleine, she agreed. Once again, she played the same role.
The most brilliant scene in the film takes place in a dimly lit hotel room, where the only light comes from the neon lights outside the window. Judy came on an appointment, but Scotty wasn't satisfied because she didn't look like Madeleine enough. He wanted her to wear the same suit as Madeleine and comb her hair exactly like that. His eyes burned with a fiery and persistent flame. Judy realizes that Scotty is completely indifferent to her personally, that he sees her only as an object. But because she loved him, she accepted his indifference. She hid in the bathroom to reapply the fat powder, then opened the door and walked out. A cloud of green smoke wrapped around her body, and as she walked toward Scotty, she seemed to emerge from the fog. This fog seems to be caused by neon lights outside the window, but it is actually a dream effect created on purpose.
Novak's face was filled with pain and hope of pleasing the other, while Stewart's face reflected a strong desire and the pleasure of satisfying the desire to control. When Hitchcock switches the camera between their faces, we can't help but feel like a knife: they are both slaves to a fictional image, and the man who weaves this image, Gavin, is not present at this time, and he created Madeleine only to escape the murder of his wife.
When Scotty embraces "Madeleine", even the background of the picture changes, and behind the two people appears no longer the room they are in reality, but the image in Scotty's subjective memory. The background music by Bernard Herman sounds as if to pour out a longing that cannot be escaped and cannot be relieved. The camera camera revolves around them desperately, like a wheel that recurs in Scotty's nightmares, until the viewer feels in the dizziness that human desires are ultimately futile, and no matter how much we force it, life cannot give us happiness after all. This shot is extremely rich in both spiritual, artistic and technical aspects, and perhaps this is the only time in his entire artistic career that Alfred Hitchcock fully shows himself, showing all his passion and sorrow. (The woman in the dream is named Madeleine, which also happens to be the name of a French cookie; in Proust's pen, it is madele of cookies that evoke memories of childhood loss and longing.) Is this just a coincidence? ）
Alfred Hitchcock placed the emotions common to people such as fear, guilt, desire, etc. on ordinary characters, and used pictures rather than words to develop them to climax. The innocent person accused out of thin air is his most commonly used character, a character that evokes a deep sense of identity in the minds of audiences far beyond the superficial superheroes of today's action movies.
Hitchcock's films are characterized by two features, the use of striking imagery and the placement of the main imagery in ambiguous backgrounds, which have resulted in his remarkable visual style. In Ecstasy, he portrays James Stewart's fear of heights in unmistakable images. One shot at the beginning of the film shows him clutching a ladder[1] and looking down at the street below. Subsequently, a set of flashback footage showed the reason for his withdrawal from the police force. On the church clock tower, he was terrified, and in order to express his perspective, Hitchcock used an internal model of the clock tower to shoot, moving the camera farther away while the lens focal length was closer, thus creating the effect that the walls were both approaching and receding, a contradictory sense of space that was extremely nightmarish. This shot was Original hitchcock and is now a classic in the history of cinema. On the other hand, Hitchcock's use of a more covert technique to cleverly hide the concept of "whereabouts" in the film is also worth our attention. Scotty always drove from the high places of San Francisco to the lows, never from the lows to the highs, and in addition, he truly "fell" into love, which also implied "falling".
There's another reason Why Ecstasy is a great movie, and few people talk about it. From the moment we learn the truth, half of the film's focus shifts to Judy, where her pain, her loss, and her predicament are revealed. Hitchcock manipulates the course of the story with great skill, and when the two characters climb the church's clock tower, we develop a sense of identification with both of them, while worrying about both of them, and judy is even more innocent than Scotty in a way.
After the release of a restored version of Ecstasy in 1996, Kim Novak talked to me about his experience shooting the film: "Hitchcock gave me extremely precise instructions on how to move and where to stand. I think in some shots I can see that I am resisting his orders, insisting on myself. I felt like my performance was about to explode, as if to imply that I wasn't going to go along with it — I was here, I was me. ”
When watching Ecstasy, be careful not to see Novak's Judy as an object like Scotty did. In fact, Judy is one of the most sympathetic female characters in all of Hitchcock's works. In one film after another, Hitchcock enjoyed the tireless trampling of the female characters he had created, insulting their bodies and minds, and destroying their hairstyles and costumes as if to whip his own fetish. He has never had any pity for the female victims in the story, but Judy in Ecstasy has almost received his sympathy, which can be regarded as a rare example. When the film was first released, Novak was accused of playing the role too stiffly, but she was right. If you were suffering unbearable pain, how would you act and speak? Think about the question, then look at Judy and you'll find the answer.