Vertigo is the perfect example of patriarchal cinema as defined by Laura Mulvey.
Firstly, it is a highly scopophilic movie in that the audience, the spectators derive immense pleasure from the act of watching. When Scottie is hired as the detective to watch over Madeleine, so begins our embrace of his identity. Soon we follow Madeleine everywhere, her figure and face is constantly at the center of our frame, the constant object that we watch intently. The camera cuts up her body—displaying each part with objective flatness—the flowers she holds, her platinum hair put into a bun, the back of her gray suit, her face displayed in perfected beauty. In essence, we allow ourselves to become perverted stalkers (not too different from Peeping Tom), seeing her as only parts of a whole—a physical being without personality traits that define her.
After Scottie meets Judy, he attempts to put these cut up pieces of Madeleine together again. He buys Judy Madeleine’s gray suit, forces her to dye her hair platinum blond, then tells her to put it up into Madeleine’s bun, assembling Madeleine together as if she were a doll or puppet or puzzle. Even when Judy tries to resist Scottie’s nagging, she is helpless to his influence. Therefore, allowing a woman to be looked at here, serves another purpose: it renders her helpless to the male gaze—Madeleine is literally constructed under the male gaze.
Vertigo is also a movie about castration, in that one of the dual plotlines is Scottie’s recovery from his feminine, helpless state. Mulvey argues in her article that the Policeman is a symbolic representation of all that is masculine. Therefore, the fact that the first scene shows the Policeman tumbling off the building and Scottie’s reaction of fear and acute sense of vertigo, establishes the psychological fear and trauma not of heights, but of castration.
Throughout the film, Scottie regains his manhood by stalking Madeleine—by submitting her to the male gaze. As Scottie discovers that Judy is actually Madeleine, he violently rebels against her—he rebels against the representation of the castrated man. In the scene in which Scottie is pushing Judy further and further up the stairs, Scottie is also conquering his fear of castration simultaneously with his fear of heights. It seems as if the more violent and vicious he is towards Judy, he gets further up the stairs, and he is closer to redeeming his manhood. The last scene in which Judy plummets off the building to her death is then symbolic of Scottie’s full redemption in that Judy, the image of the castrated man is banished forever.
Midge is the other image of the castrated man, a supposed Oedipal “mother figure” of the story. She serves an alternate purpose as a contrasting woman in the film. While Midge is always around Scottie, she is never subjected to his gaze (no matter how much she wants to be). In fact, his male gaze constantly ignores her.
In one scene, Midge shows Scottie a painting of herself as “Carlotta Valdes” from the art museum. This scene is extremely crucial in that Midge frames herself as Scottie’s object of desire—she attempts to force her gaze unto him! A painting, just like a film or a looking glass brings us out of one frame (the male gaze of the film) and into another alternate frame (the female gaze of the painting) and for this one scene, Midge has control over the gaze of the movie. Hitchcock almost seems to be making a joke when forcing us to look at the satirical painting and subjecting us temporarily to the female gaze, before Scottie turns away in disgust, suggesting that the female gaze ultimately fails.
Vertigo also functions as a text for the Film Noir genre. Both the film's syntax and semantics follow the genre traditionally. The contrasting shadows of the cinematography especially present in the scene in which Scottie and Madeleine walk into the forest, the dangerous beauty of Madeleine, and the darkened atmosphere that blends dream with reality are structural characteristics of Film Noir. In addition, Judy is treated as a woman who has the wrong morals--her beauty and significance as an object of desire brings about both Judy's and Scottie's downfall. In order to preserve the good, Judy dies in the end, preserving the "moral" man in Scottie. Film Noir in itself is a genre that is incredibly male--it regards beauty and women as something that will bring about the male down downfall--referring to the original downfall of man in which Eve "seduces" Adam in eating the fruit of knowledge, expelling them to earth.
Hitchcock uses the scopophilic male gaze, the rejection of the female gaze, the Freudian fear of castration, and the syntax and semantics of Film Noir to create a film that exploits the male fantasy.
