I know that now everyone advocates less use of philosophical concepts for literary criticism and interpretation, in the words of Teacher Chen Shan in class, he directly threw away the paper when he saw the word feminism. However, Hitchcock's film is obvious, and I am embarrassed to say that Hitchcock made this film without any influence from Freud. My feeling after watching this movie is that I dare to pack a ticket hitchcock absolutely before reading Freud.
In fact, I think the brilliance of this movie is also entirely in the contradiction between the heroine in the second half of insisting on herself as the main body (she hopes that the male protagonist falls in love with the "real her") and gradually becoming the fictional image in the male protagonist's imagination. The first half was really lackluster, almost making me drowsy.
To say suspense, this movie is actually not much suspense to say, compared to Hitchcock's "Psychopath" is far worse. I couldn't really believe the nonsense of the husband's so-called ghost possession, and since it was a Hitchcock movie, not a ghost movie, it was natural to understand from the beginning that this was a conspiracy of the husband. At the same time, as the finale of the film noir of the late 50s, the blonde woman is naturally the scorpion woman who deceives male heroes, which is also obvious.
As far as the conspiracy is concerned, this plan is completely inexplicable, and it feels that the husband is completely based on the male protagonist's fear of heights, and killing his wife has become secondary. But even if the male protagonist has a fear of heights, if the family sits on the stairs of the tower instead of leaving, is it not to block the husband on the top of the tower?
I mean, if this movie doesn't have the second half, but only the end of the first half, directly expose the truth, then this will be a detective movie that is not a third-rate detective movie, and it is precisely because of the second half that the lackluster first half is also full of infinite charm and full of new readability.
If the male protagonist in the first half is the absolute camera point of view leader, then in the second half, the female protagonist slowly replaces the male protagonist's dominant viewpoint and becomes the narrator. Generally speaking, there is only one dominant point of view of Hollywood movies, either the full knowledge point or the observation of the whole event under the leadership of the protagonist of the story. But Hitchcock's favorite thing is to play with this subversion and have the ability not to annoy the audience. The narrator of the first dominant perspective in "Psychopath" was inexplicably killed in the middle of the story, which made me depressed when I watched this movie as a child for half a day, and I knew for the first time that the protagonist who the audience acquiesced could also be killed halfway through the movie.
"Vertigo" this movie played this hand again, after the male protagonist found the female protagonist again, he approached this person, hoping to know her identity, but the female protagonist lied to him, when the male protagonist closed the door and left, the camera did not follow the male protagonist to the outside of the house, on the contrary, the camera stayed in the heroine's house. This is in complete conflict with the previous experience of watching the film, where the camera completely moves with the male protagonist's point of view, at which point the heroine becomes the camera leader, the camera enters her heart, and with several flashback shots, reveals the secret in the heroine's heart, it turns out that she colluded with her husband to kill the real wife.
Since then, the camera has been following the heroine, and the heroine at this time has secretly made up her mind to make the hero fall in love with the real her, rather than the "she" who was fictionalized as a wife image by her previous collusion with her husband.
From this point on, when we look back at the first half of the film, we will find different meanings in the previous long and tedious tracking passages. As one of the film critics I have seen before wrote, in these passages, the male protagonist is not only the dominant person in the lens point of view, his actions determine the movement of the camera, and more importantly, the image of the heroine has always been peeped at by him as his subjective point of view.
That is to say, from the very beginning, the heroine does not appear as a self-contained subject, but as an image in the eyes of the male protagonist, and this image is gradually perfected with the deepening of the male protagonist's peeping, that is, a melancholy, noble, dignified and mysterious woman, who is poorly troubled by the family curse, longing for a hero to save herself, beautiful and helpless, really makes every man moved.
However, this image is fictional, not the true self-nature of the heroine at all, but the husband's fictionalized for money and murder to show to the male protagonist, and the male protagonist is obviously a good audience. He not only tracks the peeping heroine all the time, but also displays the most beautiful side of the heroine into a lens picture through the closed perspective of the door frame, the front glass window of the car, and the picture frame, so that the audience (as the recipient of the subjective viewpoint of the male protagonist) deepens the identification with the fictional image of the heroine.
Hitchcock did not foolishly put this mystery mystery at the end of the movie before explaining it, but when the film was 1 hour and 39 minutes old, he told the audience all the truth through the heroine's memories. This is of course partly due to Hitchcock's own understanding of suspense (he believes that not seeing a time bomb suddenly explode is just a surprise, and seeing a time bomb waiting to explode is a suspense), but on the other hand, it is also to make the film's self-reflexiveness more obvious.
As mentioned earlier, when the male protagonist closes the door and the camera does not leave with the male protagonist, the female protagonist becomes the sole owner of the camera, then she dominates the camera, and the camera even directly enters her heart to reveal the truth, and as the audience we also know that the image of the female protagonist to the male protagonist before is completely fictional. This time, the female protagonist does not want to leave this, but hopes that she can dominate the male protagonist's point of view. She wants the male protagonist to fall in love with the real her, not the imaginary image.
However, the heroine's efforts were a complete failure. After coming out of the room, the dominant camera point of view is still the heroine, she still holds the initiative relative to the male protagonist, and at the dinner table, the camera movement is still shifted with the heroine's point of view. The heroine sees the male protagonist staring at a woman who is dressed and hairstyle the same as the image she had imagined before, and she also looks at the woman, at which time the camera switches to the woman, and this shot is still the subjective point of view of the heroine. But the heroine has realized that the hero is still obsessed with the fictional image and has not fallen in love with the real her.
So the female protagonist began to give in to the male protagonist step by step, agreed to the male protagonist to dress her up, and slowly restored her to the appearance of the previous fictitious image. The male protagonist bought her the same flowers, the same clothes, the same shoes, when she finally lost her last bottom line, and even the color of her hair agreed to return to the previous fictitious image, she completely lost the initiative, and the camera point of view was once again dominated by the male protagonist's point of view. When she agrees to dye her hair, in the next shot, she disappears, is completely absent, and becomes the male protagonist waiting outside the barbershop for her to reappear in the image he wanted.
The barber told the male protagonist that it takes a while for the female protagonist to dye her hair, the male protagonist returns to his hotel to wait for her, the camera also follows the male protagonist to the hotel, and then the male protagonist looks out of the window, from the male protagonist's expression, it can be seen that the male protagonist saw the female protagonist, but the camera still did not give the female protagonist, until the male protagonist opened the door, the camera peeked outside the house again with the subjective point of view of the male protagonist, and the female protagonist slowly walked out of the elevator.
It should be emphasized that at this time, the female protagonist reappears as the image seen in the subjective viewpoint of the male protagonist, which is not an objective viewpoint, but the subjective viewpoint of the male protagonist, not the female protagonist herself, but once again becomes the fictional image in the male protagonist's imagination and appears. Since then, the heroine has never dominated the camera point of view again, and she has once again become the image that the male protagonist (the audience) hopes for, and has completely lost herself.
Sadly, the heroine does not care about her own alienation, but is bent on pleasing the male protagonist, and she is not frustrated that her image is developing more and more towards the terrible fictional image that will destroy her, but only asks the male protagonist "Are you still satisfied"? The male protagonist has to ask the female protagonist to pinch her hair again. As a result, the heroine's last bit of her original features were also lost, completely becoming the previous fictional image, and the male protagonist was finally satisfied, and the two of them embraced together.
Unfortunately, this is not a comedy story, and the final result of this alienation of the heroine must be self-destruction. The most ironic thing is that her step-by-step pandering to the male protagonist has allowed the male protagonist to see through the falsity of this image, and he found that this is the innings laid out by the heroine and her husband. So he further asked the heroine to tend to that fictional image—not just dressed, hairstyle, hair color, but coming to the same environment and performing the same event. This finally drove the heroine crazy, and this time, she really lost herself completely, and became the wife she played, and suffered the same fate as her wife - falling from a tower and dying. The male protagonist was redeemed and cured of his fear of heights.
My reading of the whole story is that at the beginning, the heroine is willing to play a fictional image for money and become the object of the male protagonist's peeping, which is the original sin of the heroine. From that moment on she split into the original image in her and the man's eyes. When she falls in love with the male protagonist, she longs to overcome the imaginary image and let the male protagonist see the real her. She once became the dominant person in the lens point of view, because she knew more than the male protagonist, but she could not overcome the image of her in the male protagonist's eyes, so step by step, she once again became a fictional image in the male eye, and lost her self, and lost the dominance of the camera. When she is completely reduced to that image, she herself is completely destroyed, and only the man is the one who is perfect.
Finally, a digression that has nothing to do with the film. I think it is perfectly appropriate, even inevitable, to analyze Hitchcock's film using Freud and feminism as a tool of interpretation, because Hitchcock is clearly actively using this tool to make his film more complex. We say not to over-interpret films, but not even reasonable and legitimate interpretations, and I disagree with "movies are movies", especially for Hollywood movies, the most popular entertainment, the most sensitive to public ideology.
The existence of feminism as an analytical tool is perfectly justified, and it is strange not the methodology itself, but the old pedantry that dogmatically worships methodology as ontology. Instead of using feminist, psychoanalytic, realist, and other concepts as a tool, they worship these concepts as the ontology of cinema, and introduce all films into these concepts far-fetchedly, which leads to the structure that people now have a headache when they hear these concepts. But how innocent are these concepts?