Ecstasy, a 1950s classic by Alfred Hitchcock, is the most candid and confessional work of his "art of control." This psychodrama is full of mystery, supernaturality, love and murder, with many different perspectives of interpretation. But at least the two themes of male voyeurism and female self-gaze in the film exist at the same time.
The movie "Ecstasy" recounts Scotty's mysterious behavior of spying on his wife Madeleine during a manhunt after suffering from a fear of heights after witnessing a colleague fall from a tall building and falling to his death, and is used by Gavin to hire him as a private investigator to spy on his wife Madeleine.
The "Madeleine" that Scotty comes into contact with is actually very similar to her Judy pretending, Gavin tries to use his fear of heights to provide cover and evidence for his wife to kill, scotty and Judy are reduced to tools.
In the film, Scotty falls in love with the disguised character in the process of constantly stalking and peeping at "Madeleine" (or more directly satisfying his voyeuristic desire for the perfect woman in the mind fiction), and when Madeleine dies, after Judy's disguised identity disappears, Scotty develops a strong desire to gaze at all the visual images connected to Madeleine in a deep sense of self-blame and fear.
Unable to fall in love with the real-life Judy and only to get in touch with her for "we'll see each other often", he forcefully changes Judy from her outfit and hairstyle until she completely becomes the image in his eyes that craves to gaze – the full "Madeleine".
Later, when Scotty discovers the truth about his use, he forces Judy to repeat the scene where Gavin killed his wife and climbed the tower that day, causing Judy to fall off the tower in fear and die, while Scotty's fear of heights is unexpectedly cured.
At the beginning of the film, what jumps into the audience's eyes is a close-up of a woman's face, and then the camera continues to zoom in close to the large close-up of the eyes, with eerie music, forming a strong sense of persecution, while the various vertigo illusions that appear in the eyes greatly stimulate the audience's curiosity and desire to watch movies, and also highlight the "gaze" and "vertigo" themes of the film.
< h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Scotty's gaze of desire</h1>
The first half of the film is rarely dialogued, and most of it is based on Scotty's subjective perspective, reflecting Madeleine's strange behavior in constant tracking and peeping.
When Scotty first met her at Ernie's restaurant, following the subjective perspective of the hero, through the layers of carved door frames, the camera slowly drew madeleine closer from the panorama, with soft and soothing music, the pace of the camera gradually slowed down, and made her first appearance in a long green dress, lining the restaurant's red velvet wall, like an oil painting.
The director effectively employs cross-cutting, with the camera switching between Scotty's gaze and Madeleine's slow movements.
We can notice that Madeleine's shots are mostly sideways, there are scenes similar to Western jewelry paintings, combined with Scotty's line of sight through the door frame, it just constitutes a beautiful Western oil painting, which effectively satisfies the hero's desire to gaze.
When Scotty tracks Madeleine to the cemetery of her great-grandmother Caladovada for the second time, everything and Madeleine is shrouded in a faint soft light, and as the camera draws closer, we follow Scotty's gaze through the layers of trees, tombstones and trails, directly to the heroine.
The distant churches, trees and other heavily covered frames and the setting of light once again put the heroine in a Western oil painting.
In Scotty's gaze, she seems to be always in a shroud of a faint soft light, creating a kind of crabapple mood, constantly chasing, but always seemingly inaccessible.
In Scotty's extensive gaze, Madeleine seems to have been objectified, becoming a pure landscape, processed into a perfect artistic image, which further stimulates Scotty's visual desire.
Of particular interest here is Scotty's love for "Madeleine", not her love for her in real life, i.e. Judy, but a strong desire to gaze at the visual images of the perfect female landscape she has imagined in her mind.
This can be seen in Scotty's actions later in the film after Judy's disguised identity disappears.
After Madeleine's death, Scotty repeatedly saw her shadow in others, transforming from a fascination with Madeleine's gaze to a fascination with all the visual elements she possessed, all of which had a "reproduction" meaning in all the visual images that made her alive.
Scotty kept going back to the places where he had tracked and stared at Madeleine, and in the Ernie's Restaurant, the Florist, the Palace of Honor in San Francisco, the bouquet of flowers that Madeleine liked to hold before her death, her blonde hair, and her green car would make Scotty think of Madeleine.
Scotty's eyes cannot see the object of his desires, and he hallucinates from staring at these pictorial elements, obtaining a psychological satisfaction.
This arguably psychological fetish complex is more fully illustrated in his contact with Judy, who, after being used by Gavin, originally wanted to disappear from Scotty's life completely, but reappeared in his vision because he could not resist his love for Scotty, trying to make Scotty fall in love with her in real life, rather than pretending to be Madeleine.
However, Scotty's series of modifications to her and finally the strict requirements for her hair color and style made her feel that Scotty wanted only Madeleine.
In fact, she was regarded as a substitute for satisfying the desire to gaze at the perfect image conceived in her mind.
His first request to meet with Judy was simply "we'll see each other often."
As he sat down to dinner with the real-life Judy at Ernie's restaurant, his eyes were fixed on another strange woman with Madeleine's blonde hair and gray suit.
She brings Judy under her control, takes her to buy the same silver-gray suit as Madeleine did before she was alive, and asks her to have exactly the same hairstyle as Madeleine, at this point, the fascination in his eyes for these elemental elements that are merely referential has far exceeded the fascination with real people.
When Judy had her haircut, Scotty walked around the house uneasily, looking out the window, including opening the door and gazing down the corridor, which showed his eagerness to quickly transform Judy into the object of his visual desire.
When Judy completely transforms into Madeleine, the director lets her out of the faint blue light and shadow, the camera switches between her dreamlike posture and Scotty's wide-eyed condensation time, and once again the gradually slowing pace of the shot makes the film audience feel a strong desire to watch with the protagonist's perspective.
The next kissing shot illustrates the connection between love and the visual senses even more deeply.
When judy's everything is the same as Madeleine's, she has been completely transformed into the object of Scotty's visual desires, and the two have the possibility of a long kiss. And as Judy said, "You don't want to touch me." ”
Here, the director uses a 360° camera technique when shooting, and the visual image of the camera rotation allows the audience to see the combination of fear and love, like the impulse of death, the impulse to let go and fall and the fear of death coexist.
The rotating shot seems to symbolize the situation of both attraction and rejection of the object you love, and Judy has been completely attracted to it, completely reduced to the object of Scotty's visual desire, so she is finally destroyed.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > women's self-gaze</h1>
As prominent as Scotty's gaze theme is the female self-gaze.
One of Madeleine's strange moves is to gaze at the portrait of her great-grandmother at the Palace of Honor in San Francisco, where the director uses a montage technique to switch the camera between her hairstyles, bouquets and jewels that are exactly the same as her portrait, giving us a glimpse of Madeleine's vigorous imitation of the portrait.
As Gavin puts it: "Madeleine often wore her great-grandmother's old jewelry during this time and stared at herself in the mirror. It was as if she had entered another world and become another person. ”
As long as Madeleine exists in the film, the director strives to use soft light, music and unique framing to shape her into a perfect landscape form.
In Madeleine's repeated gaze at herself, she has taken the initiative to identify herself as a landscape being.
In the scene of Psiddi's castle, in the immortal towering redwood forest, Madeleine seems to be in an illusion.
The blend of tree shadows and misty light, the landscape covered with a milky white mist, madeleine's confused eyes, trance and helpless posture in a white trench coat, all distinguished her from the real thing.
On the banks of the San Francisco Bridge, Madeleine moves dreamily slowly, sprinkling petals into the river for a long time, and as the rhythm gradually slows down again, Madeleine slowly tilts into the river, a scene that easily reminds us of Naxos, who fell in love with her reflection in the water.
All of Madeleine's strange actions reveal a woman's intense desire to gaze at herself, and made it possible for Madeleine to establish a sense of self-identity in her gaze at her great-grandmother, the aristocratic woman who jumped into the river at the age of 27, so that she tried to imitate the figures in the portrait.
All of her moves were an attempt to find some similarity between herself and her great-grandmother, who rented the Maggie Trek Hotel, which was her great-grandmother's former home, and the pseudonym she used was her great-grandmother's name.
In this reflection of her attempt to establish self-identity, she sees herself as an object of viewing, gaining a sense of inner unity and self-identity from repeated gazes at "herself."
Of course, she actually established a false identity, ostensibly a way of obtaining self-unity, but in fact an illusory inner world of self-unity.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the audience's desire to peek</h1>
Most of the filming of the film is from Scotty's point of view, which is the psychological identification between the audience and Scotty, and at the same time, the desire object Madeleine is given the characteristics of the landscape, and the audience's voyeuristic desire is fully satisfied with a slow camera rhythm.
There are many scenes of car tracking in the film, and the visuals are cleverly placed within the frame of a car window.
There are also often shooting methods from panoramas to a building and then into a small window to shoot indoors, which largely satisfies the audience's desire to peek at the theme of privacy.
Another example is the scene where Scotty first meets Madeleine at Ernie's restaurant, in order to satisfy the audience's desire to watch, when the hero withdraws his gaze, the camera does not change, but continues to move with Madeleine, showing her graceful posture like a landscape.
When Madeleine walks with her husband, this scene also cleverly uses the mirror as a peeping prop, in Hitchcock's films, the mirror is usually used as a prop to show the voyeurism, through the double peeping of the mirror can cause the audience to enjoy the movie.
Through the male protagonist and the audience's desire to peek at the heroine, the heroine has been objectified and has become a pure landscape; the self-identity she strives for through self-gaze is also an illusory inner world based on the false role of permanent alienation.
In Hollywood movies, it is also a world of gender inequality, and the director must set visual scenes and storylines according to the psychological desires and needs of the audience, and it is the audience that satisfies the subconscious impulses such as entertainment and catharsis in the audience.
The establishment of this gender mechanism is precisely based on the audience's (especially male audience) desire to watch, after they and the male protagonist reach a psychological identity to establish a common perfect visual image, under the stimulation of strong visual desire, with the director's clever editing techniques and suspense techniques to complete the cathartic process from desire suppression to continuous voyeurism.
Reality is created as a myth, and movies become "dream machines."
And the dream master Hitchcock, his works, especially "Ecstasy", fully satisfies the subconscious impulses of the audience to entertain and vent, and creates a psychological mechanism of escapism and dream addiction with fake and real realistic image effects - this is Hitchcock, or perhaps the mystery of the aesthetic logic of Hollywood film dominating the world film industry.