Vertigo (Paramount, 1958). Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor, from the novel D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Photography by Robert Burks. Editing by George Tomasini. Music by Bernard Herrmann. Title sequence by Saul Bass, with spiral figures by John Whitney. Costumes by Edith Head. With James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, Henry Jones.

CONTENTS

Prologue: A Hand on a Bar

PART ONE — GRAVITY

• The Roof, and the Rescue That Was Never Filmed
• The Corset and the Cantilever
• A Window Full of Cranes
• The City That Cannot Lie Flat

PART TWO — THE GAZE

• The First Mirror: A Door Opened Three Inches
• Fifteen Minutes Without a Word
• The Woman Who Was Already a Copy
• Salt Water: The Rescue as Undressing
• Rings: A Cross-Section of Time
• The Green Sea and the Chord That Will Not Close
• The Dream, or the Film Dreaming Itself
• The Tower That Does Not Exist
• The Verdict: Not Guilty of Anything
• Mozart, and the Long Corridor

PART THREE — MANUFACTURE

• The City of Near-Misses
• The Letter She Tore Up
• The Second Mirror: A Room Rented by the Week
• Gray Suit, Blonde, Pinned
• The Kiss That Turns the Room
• The Third Mirror: The Necklace
• Ascent

Coda: What Remains at the Ledge

PROLOGUE: A HAND ON A BAR

The first image is not a face and not a city. It is a horizontal bar of iron, and a hand closing around it.

We do not know whose hand. We do not know what is being fled or pursued, or what crime has occurred, or whether one has occurred at all. The film has not yet told us anything, and it will not tell us this. What it gives us instead is a condition: the condition of holding on. A second hand joins the first. A body hauls itself up out of the frame, and the chase begins — three men across the rooftops of a city at dusk, running along a surface that was never built for running.

Everything that follows is an elaboration of that grip.

By the end of the sequence, one man is dead on the pavement, one has escaped into the dark and will never be seen or named or mentioned again, and the third is hanging from a gutter with the whole city arranged below him like a diagram of his own fear. The camera goes down that drop and comes back up, and goes down again, and the ground swims toward the lens while receding from it, which is not how vision works and is exactly how terror works. Then the scene ends. It simply ends. We are given the fall of the policeman and the hanging of the detective, and we are not given the third thing, the necessary thing, the rescue. The film cuts away from a man who cannot possibly get down, and when we next see him he is sitting in a comfortable chair in a woman’s apartment, complaining about a corset.

This is the first and largest hole in Vertigo, and it is not an oversight. It is the film’s foundational proposition, stated in the grammar of absence: there is no way down from where you are, and yet here you are, alive. Survival is the thing that cannot be shown, because survival, in this film, is not a solution. It is the injury.

The credits that precede this — arriving before the roof, before the bar, before the hand — announce a different film. They open on a woman’s mouth, held so close that it is no longer a mouth but a landscape of lip and shadow. The frame slides up to her eyes, which move left, then right, searching for something outside the frame that is not there. Then the image floods red, and the camera enters her right eye and finds, inside it, a spiral, turning. The word Vertigo rises out of her pupil.

It is a promise. The promise is that we are about to see the world from inside a woman’s looking.

The film breaks that promise within ninety seconds and keeps breaking it for two hours. What we are given instead is a man’s looking, exhaustively, obsessively, with the camera glued to his shoulder like a second head. The woman whose eye we entered will spend the picture being watched, followed, rescued, dressed, undressed, painted, remembered, reconstructed, and finally corrected — and she will be granted her own point of view exactly once, for perhaps ninety seconds, in a hotel room, in silence. Then it will be taken back.

That is the shape of the thing. A film that begins inside a woman’s eye and then evicts her from it.

What follows in these pages is not an account of what happens in Vertigo, which the reader knows, and not a judgment of it, which would be beside the point. It is an attempt to read the film as it presents itself: as a study of supports. Of what holds a body up over a drop. Bridges, corsets, gutters, ladders, staircases, bell towers, the arms of other people, the fiction of a beloved. All of them engineering problems. All of them provisional. The film’s title names a fear of heights, but a fear of heights is not what the film is about, and the film ...