Blog Response III: Katalin Makkai's "'Vertigo' and Being Seen"

In her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey famously argued that what drives our fascination with films is how they orchestrate, not only what we see on the screen, but how we watch what we see there - in particular, the meanings we deploy to interpret what's on the screen, and the kinds of pleasure we take in the spectacle as we've interpreted it. More specifically, Mulvey argued that a great deal of film situates the viewer as the subject of a distinctively male fantasy. In this fantasy, women are objects rather than subjects: creatures to be looked at and enjoyed; who are characterized by the absence of agency, authority, and power. The films that indulge in this fantasy characteristically place the viewer in the masculine position: the one who in this fantasy watches and enjoys rather than being watched and enjoyed; and, by association, who acts rather than being acted upon. The pleasure of the viewer is predicated on inhabiting and accepting the fantasy of woman as object rather than subject. This is often achieved by making the woman a spectacle for the viewer, while at the same time leading the viewer to identify with a male hero through whose authority over the woman that spectacle can be contained.

In Vertigo, Mulvey claims, we are led to identify with Scottie's voyeuristic gaze:

"In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from flash-back from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result. he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorienting: the spectator's fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal super-ego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking."

Vertigo, voyeurism, and Jean-Paul Sartre

In "Vertigo and Being Seen", Katalin Makkai also considers the significance of voyeurism in the film. But while Mulvey's main theoretical touchstone is Lacanian psychoanalysis, Makkai instead turns to Jean-Paul Sartre's discussion of voyeurism in Being and Nothingness. In doing so, she self-consciously puts herself in conversation with Laura Mulvey, but comes to different conclusions about Vertigo.

Please read "Vertigo and Being Seen", and answer the question posed to you in the comments below. You can find it on YSCEC, or by clicking on the link below:

Katalin Makkai - "Vertigo and Being Seen"

By the way, the PDF is 89 pages. But don't despair: it's just a normal, 20 page-ish essay. The PDF turned out to be so long because of a quirk of the software I used to make it into a PDF...

Blog Response II: Hitchcock's Vertigo

Vertigo is widely regarded as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest film - and by many, one of the greatest films, period.  For example, it has for 20 years been in the top 5 of Sight & Sound's famed poll of international film critics and directors for the greatest films of all time; and since the 2012 poll, it has occupied the #1 spot. Below, I provide a crash course in the film's most important and influential features, including its most well-known technical hallmarks, as well as its characters and narrative themes.

Blog Response I: Film Noir, the Femme Fatale and "Double Indemnity"

Film noir and the femme fatale

After World War II, many American film critics were enamored with European film and showed a somewhat snobby derision for movies coming out of the American studio system. But at the same time, American movies were flooding Europe, much of which had been cut off from pop culture in America during the war. In France in particular, there was an explosion of goodwill toward the U.S., who was seen as the main architect of France's liberation from Nazi occupation in 1944. Part and parcel of this was a growth of interest in American movies made during the war and after.

As they enthusiastically watched these movies with relatively fresh eyes, French film critics began detecting a dark current in certain American films. Many of these films were so-called 'B movies': movies produced by the B units that studios used for producing low-budget films designed to be filler for the second halves of double features. And yet, these critics saw them as representing the best of American cinema - a new kind of quintessentially modern film they called film noir ('black film').