This is important shit, people. Read it:
The British Film Institute’s magazine, Sight & Sound, which has listed Citizen Kane as the #1 greatest film for the last fifty years, now says that Citizen Kane is #2. The new #1 (I feel like going into The Prisoner here) greatest film of all time is now Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958). Hmmm…well…okay. I mean YES! I think VERTIGO is a GREAT MOVIE!
James Stewart is brilliant as a fucked-up-in-the-head detective who transforms a live woman (Kim Novak) into a dead woman (Kim Novak). And vice versa. The movie is great because, at its core, it deals with the hauntings of past unrequited love in the psyche of Stewart (as Every-Fucked-Up-Man), and how that leads him to become a tad ‘disturbed’ in his relations to women and to his job as a private investigator.
The dead woman’s death was ruled a suicide, a leap from a church tower, but Stewart blames himself, in that his fear of heights prevented him from climbing the spooky stairway in time to stop her. So he seeks solace in transforming the lookalike live Kim Novak into the exact image of the dead Kim Novak. It is probably Stewart’s greatest performance as the psychologically ‘quirky’ American male, as opposed to the rock solid All-American Cary Grant (also a Hitchcock star) type of American male. Stewart’s characters, I’ve always thought, were always just a little bit ‘off’–including a lot of his Western roles. But enough of this synopsis shit (as Sean Connery might have put it in The Untouchables); it is imperative now to look into the DEEP INNER MEANING of VERTIGO, and the DEEP INNER MEANING of the British Film Institute crowning it the new #1 film of all time:
VERTIGO, folks, is about NECROPHILIA, plain and simple. Stewart wants to make love to a corpse. (Remember, this is a Hitchcock flick. The guy who did Psycho.) Your true love dies. You run into someone who looks startling much like her. Then you have her dye her hair, change her hairstyle, clothes, make-up, etc., etc., and, lo and behold, you have your own true love again, as though she had risen from the graveyard, to have and to hold. And to do other things to also.
It’s sort of like that routine I think all men, excepting Heathcliff, have gone through–I know I have–when we meet a woman who reminds us of a past love. We get kind of…flakey. But do we put the make on the dead? Make love to the dead? No. Not like Stewart In VERTIGO. He has a genuine “oh babie, you look just like a corpse I once loved” leap into the netherworld of a desire one just simply doesn’t speak of over drinks at the bar with the guys.
Stewart’s fits of vertigo perhaps make him feel more ‘grounded’ with a dead woman. (Couldn’t resist that one, folks.) His fear of heights becomes a fear of looking at the truth. The dead Novak’s alleged suicide is actually staged by her husband, who has already murdered her, with the live Novak being an imposter and an accomplice.
Of course, this film does NOT have a happy ending. After Stewart discovers the truth, his vertigo goes away and the live Novak becomes the dead Novak again. Well, now wait. Is that MAYBE a happy ending? Or, what if the live Novak does not return to the grave? Is that a happy ending? What does all this psychological shit mean, folks? Just how fucked-up is Stewart’s character? This movie is VERY VERY DEEP. And great fun.
And it’s much much better, and much more fun, than all this vampire/zombie crap that has possessed our attention. Could it be that maybe those people at the British Film Institute are saying something to us? Let’s see–America has a love affair with bringing about death and destruction; we have a ghoul with the hairstyle of a corpse running for President; the planet is going to die; we do not explore space anymore; we drill into the ground for energy instead of lifting our heads to the sun; and no one can reach the top of the stairs because the Rich don’t want us to see the view, let alone look down at the less fortunate. And we fuck the dead. So obviously, here is our New #1 All Time Greatest Movie affirming those passions. Or should I say, lusts? Pre-versions?
Well, I am not a shrink, and I don’t think even a shrink could pin down VERTIGO . And that’s what makes it a Great Movie. To be viewed late at night with the lights out. And not with popcorn, folks, but with those ritual and elegant condiments that befit a ‘classic’ feast. Lifting us all to a great height from which we can say to ourselves, as Stewart said to Novak at the end: “You were a very apt pupil!”
Peter Buknatski
Montpelier, Vt.