Male Gaze Essay - Vertigo PDF

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An essay focusing on the male gaze in Hitchcock's Vertigo...

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Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is a film about a detective named Scottie who is asked to follow and keep an eye on his friend’s wife as they think she is possessed. This investigation leads to Scottie developing feelings for Madeleine before he sees her plummet to her death. Later he sees a lady with a very close to resemblance to Madeleine but she says her name is Judy. He becomes very controlling over her and wants her to dress exactly like Madeleine to fulfill his imagine of his ideal woman. With the story being centered around Scottie following Madeleine and spying on her, it depicts the active male/passive female binary and the audience sees the majority of the film from Scottie’s point-ofview. This brings the male gaze into the film and how Madeleine is there to be looked at. This essay will focus on the link between gender and gaze in Vertigo whilst discussing the validity of Mulvey’s theory of the gaze. In Laura Mulvey’s paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema she talks about the idea of the cinema offering different kinds of pleasures to the audience through the concept of the “male gaze”. The first of which is scopophilia in which Sigmund Freud associated it with “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey, p.717, 1975). In Vertigo, a scene which certainly stands out is when Scottie goes to the restaurant to get his first glimpse of Madeleine whom he would be keeping an eye on. The scene begins with Scottie sitting at the bar gazing over at the table where she is sat from a distance. The shot scans across the room before it focuses on a table where a blonde woman in elegant dress is sitting, and it slowly moves closer whilst romantic music starts to play, reinforcing that she is in fact Madeleine. It then cuts to Scottie’s point-of-view who is watching her from the bar, but then he has to turn away as she makes her way to the exit, too close for him to continue watching without attracting her attention. “He is not the only one to be captivated. The scene has also indulged, in a pointed way, two other forms of gaze. First, that of the camera/director, in the voluptuously elaborate shot that first discovered Madeleine. Second, that of the audience: when Scottie has to look away, we are privileged to go on looking at Madeleine in close-up” (Barr, p.10, 2002). Although the film focuses on Scottie’s point-of-view, there are moments where the audience get to see more than he does, such as the close up of Madeleine when Scottie turns away. Mulvey talks about how the “spectator identifies with the main male protagonist” (p.720,

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1975), but this cannot be applied when the audience knows more than him. Mulvey then goes on to talk about the idea of males and females split into the binary active/passive. “In their exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed” (p.719, 1975). The main focus of the film is Scottie following Madeleine, so there are a lot of shots from his point of view gazing at her. Charles Barr talks about a shot pattern that reoccurs when Scottie is looking at her from afar. The scene where he is watching her at the graveyard, ten shots of him looking at Madeleine are intercut with ten shots of his point-of-view. This pattern is repeated in the gallery with five shots of Scottie this time intercutting with five shots of his point of view (p.42, 2002). These two scenes display Madeline being looked at for the pleasure of Scottie and the audience, as well as showing her off. Mulvey explains that women’s appearance is coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness (p.719, 1975). The fact that a lot of the time Scottie is watching her, the character of Madeleine is definitely to be looked at in Vertigo. There are obvious problems to Scottie’s role in the film. “Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero” (Mulvey, p.723, 1975). Scottie is a detective so he should be working on the right side of the law but stalking Madeleine and manipulating her when she is Judy is anything but right. However, Mulvey explains that his position in society covers up his wrong doings. “True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness – the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the left” (p.722, 1975).

The active/passive binary

overshadows anything else as whoever holds the gaze holds the power and indeed Scottie holds the power in Vertigo. When Scottie sees Madeleine “die” and discovers a woman named Judy who has an uncanny resemblance to Madeleine, he comes across as very controlling and manipulative. As he was infatuated with Madeleine, he desperately wanted to recreate her image in Judy. He “forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish” (Mulvey, p.723, 1975). With this fetish that he has, he will not stop pestering her until she agrees to talk to him and he starts

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interrogating her. “Let me take care of you Judy” he insists after they have been out for a meal together, as he is too attached and infatuated with her to let her go. When Scottie takes her out to buy her new clothes, she has a different preference to him but he forces her to agree to a dress that Madeleine wore, saying that none of the others were right for her. He is determined to recreate the image of his ideal woman is Judy even though she is very apprehensive about it. As previously mentioned, the spectators identify themselves with the main male protagonist and women disrupt the narrative through eroticism but women also imply castration which has to be punished through either voyeurism or fetishism. Their sexual difference is what threatens men with castration. “The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (Mulvey, p.721, 1975). When Madeline “dies” and Scottie finds a woman called Judy with a huge resemblance to Madeleine to later find out that they were in fact the same person, she gets her punishment. At the end of the film they return to the tower after he feels betrayed where he thought Madeleine died and Judy falls to her death. “Probably no male human is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals” (Freud, p.711, 2010). It is the difference in women to men that puts them in danger of castration therefore the punishment is feasible. When Madeleine has lost control and attempts to commit suicide by jumping into the ocean, she is weak and Scottie is able to take power over her by rescuing her after stalking her and watching her from afar. He then begins to become infatuated with her. There is a moment at the beginning of the film where Scottie’s vertigo renders him weak and powerless as well, when he steps up a ladder and looks downwards, catching a glimpse of the distance to the ground and faints. Also before Madeleine’s “death” his condition gets in the way and he was unable to save her. “The tower becomes a visual equivalent of (his) symbolic castration. Scottie’s persona is further weakened in the court room, where he is once again emasculated, called incapable, and reminded of his vertigo and the fact that he could not save the woman” (Dima, p.79, 2012). As his vertigo makes him weak and affects his masculinity, he is seen as more feminine, comparing him to Madeleine when she was weak

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and helpless. To conclude, Mulvey’s theory about the male gaze is valid in several instances when it comes to Hitchcock’s Vertigo and there are several links between the gaze and gender throughout. The main theme of this film is Scottie following Madeleine and longing after her. It is at least forty minutes into the film before he comes face to face with her. “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” (Mulvey, p. 723, 1975). The restaurant scene is a very pivotal point in the film as this is when Scottie first sees Madeleine and where his infatuation begins with her. The active/passive binary applies to Vertigo, as the majority of the film is from Scottie’s POV which makes him the active male and how Madeleine’s main purpose in the film is to be looked at makes her the passive female. Scottie’s position in society covers up his wrongdoings and puts Madeline in the wrong. The power that in the male holds, which is a lot in Scottie’s case as he is a detective, puts him on the right side of the law despite his acts of perversion. As women imply castration, they need to be punished through voyeurism or fetishism, and the death of Judy is a punishment of her betrayal to Scottie earlier on in the film when she faked her death as Madeleline. Word count: 1590

Bibliography

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Barr, C. (2002). Vertigo. London: British Film Institute. Dima, V. (2012). A Fantasty of One’s Own: Rooms in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Baudelaire’s Prose Text. Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 45(4), 69-84. Freud, S. (2010). On Fetishism. In T. Corrigan, P. White & M. Mazaj (Eds), Critical Visions in Film Theory (pp. 710-713). United States: Bedford/St. Martins. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In T. Corrigan, P. White & M. Mazaj (Eds), Critical Visions in Film Theory (pp. 715-725). United States: Bedford/St. Martins.

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