By Jeremy Ambrose

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a great movie for many reasons. I would like to simply focus on one of them and offer this reflection on it, and it is this: the movie fills me with great fear! Vertigo makes me afraid of being a single man.

Let me explain why.

A single man is often single for many different reasons. Some reasons seem of a providential nature and some reasons seem plainly unflattering for the man in question. However, there is one reason which is truly frightening, and every single man needs to look within himself and fear the possibility that he too is single by virtue of this reason: that he has slowly slipped and fallen into an illusion. He must then fear his own judgement, and fear his own vision. He must fear his ability to see from great heights. In other words, he must fear that he suffers from the same condition that haunts Scottie (Jimmy Stewart), as he finds his way through Hitchcock’s twisted plot. That is, he must fear lest he has become a man obsessed by the impossible quest to love a woman who does not exist.

This is Scottie’s problem. Scottie is obsessed with a woman who exists solely in his mind. Admittedly, the woman has been part of a wicked ploy to hoodwink him, his seduction and entrapment being the main goal in order to get away with a terrible crime. So this ‘image’ of woman has been created especially for Scottie. It has been fed to him in ways so subtle and carefully plotted that he is totally clueless, as are the audience, to this devious manipulation. His imagination and his vision are unlocked, played with and preyed upon by a “friend” who has clearly perceived the blind spots and failures inherent in Scottie’s vision. This person recognises just what it is that is entrapping Scottie. He recognises an inability “to see” at a great distance and thus is able to offer him something close up which prevents him from looking further than what is simply a reflection of his own mind’s eye – that is – the woman of his ideal in the flesh. She is exactly what he has longed for in his imagination, only he has been tricked, and she has been implanted into his imagination so that he will long for her. She is his perfect woman, and the great tragedy of the film is that she does not exist! He imagines she is within his grasp, but like all illusions, she is impossible to grasp, and he is left with nothing. More than nothing, he is left with another illusion; the illusion that he almost had what he longed for. His desires have been stirred and his obsession carefully nurtured such that the loss of this ideal results in total breakdown. He is crippled and rendered hopeless. He sought after an idol – laid all his hopes and dreams at the foot of its altar, and thus lost all when the idol was smashed, falling from the top of a belltower.

As grace always provides, a second chance arises – in the person of Judy. It is also a second chance for Judy, after her own guilty involvement in Scottie’s crippling, unbeknownst to him. But Scottie cannot see her. The real woman stands before him, but rather than love her, he can only yearn for the illusion, for the ideal, for she who never existed and never will exist. Thus he tries to remake her. And she, yearning as much to be loved, allows herself to be remade, knowing deep down inside that she is simply an object – an empty palette upon which Scottie paints the image of his ideal, ironically the very image she helped to create. This is tragedy. This is frightening.

Why for us single men? Well, perhaps we will never find ourselves in a plot as thick and ironic as this one – but the most simple truth present in the film is one that universally applies – and a danger that is equally damaging to one’s interior, even if not externally realised in such vivid colours as Hitchcock does. The truth beckons and asks, how many of us men have suffered from the same vision as Scottie has? How often do we men fall in love with women who do not really exist? How often do we then, try to fashion out, carve out our own ideal from one who stands before us, and we place her on a pedestal, not the real woman, but the ideal we have created of her? How often do we idealise a woman without realising that it is not possible to love an ideal? We can love a person, but we can’t love what doesn’t exist… Perhaps we can lust after it, desiring to possess it, but we all know that isn’t love. Do we see the real person, with their strengths and weaknesses, joys and sufferings, good qualities and imperfections? Perhaps we do see all of this, and perhaps that’s the problem… We reject the person because we are not content with anything less than perfection! In other words, we are waiting for a woman who does not exist…

Is this me? I think about my own experiences and personal discernment when it comes to dating girls, and up to this point I have found myself unconvinced that any of them is the right one for me. Perhaps history will absolve me by my own future marriage, if it comes, and then my discernment process would turn out having had been on the right track all along. But what if I am simply seeing imperfections in every girl I meet, and in seeing them, losing interest because I seek what is perfect, at least what is perfect in my imagination? What if I am seeking she, who doesn’t exist? What if I am creating a false idol by seeking this imagined ideal and rejecting real flesh and blood for an illusion? These are the frightening questions of the single man.

They lead me to finally ask, what is Scottie’s fear? His vertigo is the result of acrophobia, a fear of heights – but perhaps there is something deeper at heart, and this fear is actually about the vision of seeing things from a higher place. Perhaps Scottie’s true fear is to see with the eyes of God, in other words, to see things as they truly are. God sees all – strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, flaws and more – and yet He loves. Scottie cannot see from this plane. Dizziness comes to him and his vision is blurred. Perhaps this fear is really about seeing a woman for who she truly is, a woman like Midge who loves him, or Judy who wants to be loved by him. Perhaps this fear is to “see” them as human persons with the fullness of human dignity. Perhaps Scottie suffers from the “vertigo” of a human heart who cannot truly encounter another. All he can see is a reflection of his own ego.

And that leads dangerously to obsession. Every man has a unique ideal based on his own image and likeness. When he tries to create a woman out of this ideal, he tries to create her in his own image and likeness. He tries to be God without being able to see as God sees. So he ends up back in the Garden, grasping at something out of his reach. Single men should be afraid, lest they begin to obsess rather than love, to grasp at rather than give, to see only their own ego, rather than the whole person that stands before them. They should fear that vertigo which begins in the human heart and ends in disaster.