Falling Into History: Vertigo (1958) and The Time Lapse of Character

Alongside of modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!

—Karl Marx, Capital¹

The spectral illusions, shifting identities, and narrative ironies in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) produce a spatial disorientation that, as I have argued in a previous essay, address significant problems of social class.² Here I wish to move from space to time, addressing the subtler, but in many ways more provocative, temporal disorientations in Vertigo, all of which bear upon the film's extensive historical allusions.³

The natural ally to such an inquiry is, of course, Marxist criticism. By the 1980s, however, when the film was reissued and when literary and film theory (often of the "data mining" sort) was overtaking the formalist criticism upon which the film's reputation had been built, remarkably few Marxist interpretations of Vertigo surfaced,⁴ while semiotics, post-Structuralism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and recursions to formalism proceeded apace, presumably outmoding Marxist ones. Although Vertigo can be read productively through other lenses as a complex tragedy of personal love and death, the film is simultaneously refracted through large-scale political economies, from the feudalist to the capitalist, and a Marxist lens reveals the film's surprising truth: that neither Scottie nor Madeleine is the film's problem, that the tragic flaw, the moral vertigo, that possesses and destroys the self, lies not in any individual but in generational time, in history.

History as Guilt

Marxism explains how capitalist economies dangerously separate personal consciousness—the sense of one's private self—from work the individual performs within the public sphere. A person feels alienated even when immersed in collective progress. Not even the professional middle or bourgeois classes can escape the feeling, which often manifests itself as an unnameable guilt. One is both integrated into the social economy (at the level of doing one's job) and yet is thoroughly disconnected from it, lost in resentment (because nearly all the gains of capital flow upward to a ruling class). In short, people do not own their own work, which constitutes a large part of their personhood. So almost any working citizen is simultaneously responsible and derelict: there and not there. Detective John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) experiences this sort of dissociation, a free-floating class anxiety that is yoked to an episode of crushing but nearly inscrutable guilt. It is not merely a personal neurosis, however. The "ghosts" of former, unresolved conflicts in the history of San Francisco, loom like partial and forgotten selves. They accumulate in the film beyond any character's full apprehension, until Scottie begins to feel a vertigo in time itself. Although far exceeding his individual person, that temporal vertigo subsumes and implicates him.

By the end of the opening rooftop chase, Scottie is in acute existential crisis. He dangles by his fingers from a sagging rain gutter some ten floors above an alley. His police colleague has just plunged to his death in a heroic but foolish attempt at an impossible rescue. The subjective shot of his partner's body sprawled below explains the immediate cause of Scottie's subsequent guilt. People below stream into the alley to inspect the dead officer; no one looks up toward Scottie in his precarious isolation. He survives only to become a cog in another mechanism, whereby Scottie himself obsesses over rescuing a woman beyond his reach: Madeleine (Kim Novak), who, by the same logic, is apparently reaching toward and retreating from a void in her own past. She suffers from fugue, a dissociative psychological state in which the subject may change identity and "wander" in self-alienated reverie, yet with no memory of the episode. Fugue generally stems from trauma (Stout 18-19), but the foundational traumas in Vertigo are increasingly hazy after the opening scene. Scottie is driven by more than beauty or sex to follow Madeleine so obsessively. He...