The Hitchcock Gaze

In her 1975 work called “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey analyzed the inherent misogyny present in classical Hollywood cinema, basing her arguments on fundamental concepts in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.  Mulvey argues that cinema offers a number of possible pleasures and one of them is scopophilia (p. 713). She explains this term as “pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation  through sight.” (p. 715). Through darkness in the auditorium and the brightness of screen, the film allows the socially unaccepted behavior, scopophilia, flourish and  Hollywood cinema establishes a hierarchy where male is the spectator and female is the subject. So, Mulvey calls attention to male gaze. She states that male gaze is caused by the desire for pleasure of the objectifying male subject and styles the women accordingly (p. 715). However, sight of the female body in film not only arouses scopophilic pleasure but also threatens the evocation of castration anxiety (p. 718).  There are two ways that this anxiety is warded off in film are: fetishistic scopophilia (“disavowal of castration by the substitution of fetish object for the feared object” p. 718) and sadistic voyeurism (the investigation of fetish object to reenact the original trauma). Lastly, narcissism combines with the voyeuristic curiosity and male spectator identifies with the main male protagonist to fulfill his fantasies through the gaze.  “Vertigo”, one of the most important films of Alfred Hitchcock, both embodies and examines Mulvey’s arguments. 

Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film directed and produced by Hitchcock and based on the 1954 novel D’entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac. The film is about a retired detective, John Scottie Ferguson, who became a private investigator and follows his old friend's beautiful wife, Madeleine, who is so-called possessed by an old noblewoman. Madeleine attempts suicide but in her first attempt, Scottie “rescues” her. After this rescue, we see that Madeleine was unconscious about her sucide attempt and Scottie fell in love with this woman despite knowing nothing about  her. However, in the second attempt, Scottie cannot help her because of his acrophobia. Madeleine’s death devastates Scottie and he tries to find another woman looks like Madeleine, that he can shift his erotic obsession. He encounters Judy who looks like Madeleine but has a very different style. Eventually, he tries to change Judy and to create Madeleine who is turned into an erotic object for Scottie. This film is an example of visual pleasure, it displays voyeurism and makes the audience partake in it. 

Firstly, I want to discuss how Hitchcock represents women in Vertigo. The first woman the audience encounters is Midge Wood, the former fiancee of Scottie. It is clear that she is still in love with Scottie. She is a quite passive character and she is willing to drop everything to help Scottie. When Scottie was looking for a local historian from San Francisco, Midge left everything she was doing at the time and took Scottie to her friend, Pop Leibel. However, because she cannot satisfy Scottie’s determining male gaze, she is not loved back.  She paints herself into the portrait of Carlotta Valdes to make him realize she is the real who wants him, but Scottie was lost in his own erotic obsession and cannot see Midge. In the last scene where Scottie is in the sanitarium, she says “ah Johnny-o, you don’t know I’m here do you? But, I’m here.”

Madeleine, on the other hand, is the “perfect image of female beauty and mystery” (p. 720). She wears gorgeous gowns, has smooth skin and a lady-like attitude; but she appears passive in almost everything she does. She needs a male figure to save her, she is a woman who will make her savior feel his masculinity. The audience actually sees this objectification the first time we meet Madeleine: Scottie sees her profile and flawlessly pale, smooth skin. This objectification repeats itself in hotel as well. 

The first time Scottie sees Judy also reflects the same objectifying profile shot. Although Judy is a more active character than Madeleine, she is also shown as a prey. When Scottie breaks into her hotel room and asks her personal information, Judy gets scared and backs away from him. Scottie forces her to look like Madeleine and she entirely allows herself to be the object of his active and obsessive control. Not resisting this control, Judy asks “If I do what you tell me, will you love me?”, a very heartbreaking scene. Mulvey defines Judy as a woman whose “exhibitionsim, masochism makes her ideal passive counterpart to Scottie’s active, sadistic voyeurism” (p.720). 

Scottie, who is meant to be the protagonist, is in fact very passive too. Scottie is able to stalk people without consequence because he is a detective and backed by the certainty of legal right. He plays a passive role in most cases and these cases evokes castration anxiety in Scottie. These cases are the fall of the fellow police officer, real Madeline and Judy and made Scottie feel powerless. His inability to prevent these events from happening hampers his masculinity.  

Lastly, Hitchcock's  films are often considered to be misogynistic due to his representation of women in his films. Peter Ackroy stated that “[The women characters] were blond. They are icy and remote. Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated”. So is it possible for a woman to watch Hitchcock films and enjoy? Tania Modelski, feminist scholar, says a “woman can enjoy these films only by assuming the position of masochists”. 

Bibliography 

Ackroyd, P. (2015). Alfred Hitchcock. London: Chatto & Windus. 

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, pp. 711-722

Modelski, T. (1998). The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall.