#9 ‘Vertigo’
Misogyny in a Trench Coat, Shot Like a Dream
Let’s spiral down the staircase of male delusion and land squarely in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—a lush, hypnotic thriller about obsession, control, and the absolute gall of men thinking women are blank canvases for their fantasies. It’s hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, and, sure, if your definition of “great” includes gaslighting, stalking, and transforming a traumatized woman into your dead ex, then yes—this is your masterpiece.
James Stewart, in full creepy uncle mode, plays Scottie, a retired detective with a fear of heights and apparently also a fear of letting women exist outside his imagination. After being hired to follow a friend’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), he spirals into a voyeuristic romance that quickly turns necrophilic in tone, if not technically in act. When Madeleine dies—more accurately, when the first version of her dies—Scottie promptly falls apart, loses his mind, and then finds a new woman to mold into his lost fantasy like she’s a department store mannequin with a pulse.
And here’s the real horror: he succeeds.
This is a film that treats female identity as not just malleable, but utterly disposable. Judy, the woman Scottie meets after Madeleine’s “death,” is actually the same woman—an actress hired for a con—but Scottie doesn’t care who she really is. He wants her to be her again. He drags her to salons. He tells her how to wear her hair. He dresses her, criticizes her, literally shapes her body into his idealized corpse-bride. And when the transformation is complete? The movie acts like his pain is what matters.
Kim Novak delivers a quietly devastating performance, trapped between desire, guilt, and the crushing weight of male fantasy. But she’s not allowed to be a real character. She’s a mirror. A ghost. A vessel. And Hitchcock, bless his camera, seems entirely complicit. He shoots her with such fetishistic detachment you’d think she were made of glass. Vertigo isn’t just about male obsession—it is dripping with it, behind and in front of the lens.
Stewart’s Scottie isn’t a tragic hero. He’s a predator who can’t distinguish love from possession. And yet the film invites us to sympathize with his brokenness, his yearning, his vertigo. Judy’s terror? Her autonomy? Her literal death at the end? Just footnotes in his tortured narrative.
Visually, of course, it’s stunning. Bernard Herrmann’s score is an erotic dirge. The editing, the color design, the dizzying dolly zoom—they’re all technically brilliant. But let’s not mistake Vertigo’s dream logic for depth. This isn’t a profound exploration of love and loss—it’s a cautionary tale of what happens when men mistake desire for entitlement and call it tragedy.
3 out of 5 spirals
(One for the cinematography. One for Novak. One for the sheer audacity. The other two fell off the tower with what was left of Judy’s identity.)
