18 - Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock

Summary

In “A Closer Look at Scopophilia: Mulvey, Hitchcock and Vertigo,” Marian Keane contests the view that in Vertigo the camera allies itself exclusively with the male position. She argues that Vertigo, like all of Hitchcock's films, concerns a search for identity and what Stanley Cavell has called “the identifying and inhabitation of a feminine regoin of the self.” If this is true, Vertigo has a close affinity to so-called women's films, in particular to the genre Cavell terms “the melodrama of the unknown woman.”

At the end of Vertigo, Scottie (James Stewart), like the Louis Jourdan figure at the end of Letter to an Unknown Woman, awakens to the realization that he has failed to acknowledge the woman he loves. In both films, this realization comes poetically too late. Then are we to count Vertigo as a member of the unknown-woman genre? If not, what does its exclusion from the genre, or rejection of the genre, reveal about the unknown woman melodramas, about the Hitchcock thriller, about the concepts of genre and authorship as instruments of film criticism, about the conditions of being human (Cavell's deepest concern, and that of the films we both study)?

In the chapter that follows, I address such questions obliquely, letting my thoughts emerge out of detailed readings of two sequences in the film.