Vertigo

Watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo after De Palma’s Body Double was very, very enlightening. I knew the latter was heating up Hitchcock’s nachos, but to such a degree? Funnily enough, I had attempted to watch Vertigo twice before I was finally able to finish and truly, unexpectedly enjoy it. Of course, it is smart, and the use of color and storytelling through costuming and atmosphere was compelling and rich with symbolism. These vibrant, supernatural greens. These bright, familiar, and ordinary reds. These pristine and spectral whites, greys, and blacks. Underneath, however, the utterly captivating 1950s Hollywood glamor and Technicolor is something so grave and so perverse: Scottie watches Madeline. He falls in love with this enigmatic, mysterious woman. Eventually, he loses her, but then finds Judy, and instead of loving and knowing her, he transforms her into not the woman he became obsessed with but the woman who fell from the bell-tower. Somehow, it’s haunting and beautiful, all at once. It’s nasty. Still romantic, in all its depravity.