Cigarette #3: I need you to be Madeleine for a while.

On the porch after watching Vertigo, 2:35am

Dorothy Parker was once at a dress rehearsal for one of her plays when the director began bellowing for the leading lady to find herself a brassiere. “God no,” said Parker. “You’ve got to have something in this show that moves.” It's hard to imagine Hitchcock saying that about Kim Novak’s famously liberated chest on the set of Vertigo, but he certainly could have. Her body is the single exception in a picture where everything else, from pacing to scenery to soundtrack, is meticulously controlled.

Vertigo is about mistaken identity: Kim Novak is mistaken for someone who has an identity. In reality, she is a beautiful but pliable young woman who gets made over, first by the murderer Tom Helmore for the purpose of seducing Jimmy Stewart, then by Jimmy Stewart for the same reason. (I refer to actors and not characters because a film about the perils of pretending to be someone you’re not, in addition to whatever else it might be, is a commentary on performance. It’s as if, not content with calling us all voyeurs in Rear Window, Hitchcock had to accuse us of being delusional too.)

A lesser film might have gone for the simple moral that trying to remodel a free woman into a perfect replica of your dead lover won’t work, that what is dead stays dead. But in Vertigo, it does work. Novak proves to be a willing victim (“If I let you change me, will you love me?”) and an apt pupil, replicating the dead Madeleine to Jimmy Stewart’s exacting satisfaction. Stewart himself does plenty of heavy lifting to communicate the vast rottenness behind any attempt to control another person completely. His expression as he demands Kim Novak put her hair up in Madeleine’s style has all the perversity of a rapist’s.

While digging around in the archives of Yale's Finest Publication, I found a review of Vertigo by Emmy Chang that includes this knock-out sentence: "Stewart's experience as he looks at Kim Novak is of not physical but moral vertigo, the feeling we have when the right thing to do appears as far away to us, and as shattering, as that distant pavement." This moral vertigo is never more acute than when we've convinced ourselves that we're in some kind of control.

The plot is so implausible (how could the murderer be certain that Jimmy Stewart wouldn’t make it up the stairs in time? how could Jimmy Stewart possibly fail to notice that Madeleine and Judy are the same woman?) that the viewer would call it harebrained if everything else about the movie didn't scream self-control. Funny that Hitchcock was able to make an excellent film about the dangers of exerting power over others only by manipulating his audience so thoroughly.