In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey illustrates “the
look” in Vertigo, which “[oscillates]
between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination” (2092). Through his use of subjective camera,
Hitchcock draws the audience in via ego
libido, the process by which viewers come to identify with the
protagonist. Without dramatic irony, the
audience is as clueless (and later, mesmerized) as Scottie is about
Madeleine/Judy. Her role as fetishistic
object is flipped when Scottie discovers a familiar necklace on Judy, exposing
her as a conspirator in a plot in which he was merely a pawn. Scottie sees to it that she is punished
immediately, thus providing Mulvey with a perfect example of the twofold
“deeper problems” belonging to the looked-at, passive female.
Lost in Mulvey’s analysis of Vertigo is the non-example of female
“to-be-looked-at-ness:” Midge. Rather
than contradict Mulvey’s concept of “the look,” Midge strengthens it by
demonstrating the effect (or better, ineffectiveness) of the female attempted look. Her overt activity is in contrast with
Madeleine’s subtler machinations; the audience, having already identified with
Scottie as the protagonist, fails to consider Midge as an effective agent in
the plot of Vertigo.
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| Midge's First Appearance |
Midge is certainly presented as an
active character, even from the moment of her introduction. The camera cuts from an earlier scene in
which Scottie is hanging from a gutter, having just witnessed the fall of
another police officer, to a shot inside of Midge’s apartment. A long shot shows Scottie and Midge together,
the former passive, the latter active. Psychologically
and physically damaged, Scottie balances his cane while resting (his legs
spread out on an ottoman); Midge, meanwhile, is leaning over her desk, busily
sketching a strapless bra. Keeping with
female undergarments, Scottie cries out and reveals the source of his pain:
“It’s this darned corset. It
binds.” Tongue-in-cheek, Midge responds,
“No three-way stretch? How very
un-chic.” The content of their conversation
continues to emasculate Scottie, as Midge directs it towards Scottie’s
failings: “Well, what are you going to do once you’ve quit the police force?”
Scottie regains some control in the
active-passive tug-o-war when he abruptly changes the subject to Midge’s love
life. “Aren’t you ever gonna get
married?” he asks, countering her seeming handle of the conversation with a
question outside of her control. In
fact, she turns the question of marriage back onto Scottie with her answer:
“You know there’s only one man in the world for me, Johnny-O.” Midge is still in love with Scottie (whom she
affectionately calls “Johnny”), but try as she might, she cannot successfully
gaze upon him.
Midge’s gazes, unlike Scottie’s,
are fraught with disappointment. Though
he is being played by Madeleine/Judy and Gavin Elster during his entire
voyeuristic assignment, Scottie (and the audience, by extension) at least has
the illusion of control. When Midge
drives by Scottie’s house at night, she realizes she is not in control. Rather than look upon an objectified Scottie,
she finds him more deeply involved in the case of Elster’s wife than she
prefers. Midge sees Madeleine walk out
of Scottie’s house and infers more than what actually happened. During this whole scene, Scottie is basically
absent, unable to “bear the burden of sexual objectification” (2089). His brief appearance after Madeleine leaves
only spurs Midge’s exit, whose attempt to gaze through a car window ends much
differently than it does for Scottie.
Scottie as sexual object does not
work at this point of the film (nor does it work during his first exchange with
Midge) because the audience has already identified him as protagonist and,
consequently, they have identified themselves in him. Mulvey states, “As the spectator identifies
with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his
screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls
events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a
satisfying sense of omnipotence” (2089).
If the audience has not already identified with Scottie during the first
scene in which he, through first-person camera perspective, sees the death of a
comrade, they surely identify with him as he follows Madeleine in his car and
on foot to her mysterious destinations.
Once Scottie speaks to Madeleine
and begins to develop a relationship with her, the audience (now invested in
Scottie’s obsessive pursuit) could make the mistake of forgetting about
Midge. Though directed at the
looked-upon female as spectacle, Mulvey’s statement about female static-ness
gains new meaning when applied to a character like Midge, who is trying to
drive the plot in a certain direction: “her visual presence tends to work
against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in
moments of erotic contemplation” (2088).
Scottie, at least, believes that his flow has been disrupted when Midge
invites him to her apartment midway through the film. Annoyed, he asks her, “Since when do you go
around slipping notes under men’s doors?”
He is bothered partly by her imposition on him, but also by the idea of
a woman being the aggressor in a relationship.
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| Wanting to be the object of gaze |
What really unsettles Scottie during
this visit, though, is Midge’s painting of herself in the style of Carlotta
Valdez. In a move that predates
McRobbie’s Post-Feminism and Popular
Culture, Midge seeks empowerment by objectifying herself, or at least
attempting to. The subjective camera
reveals Scottie’s gaze—Midge is sitting in nearly the same pose as her painted
self, minus the old-fashioned dress, the bouquet of flowers, and most
importantly, the identical necklace of Carlotta/Madeleine. The intentionality of the gaze is what angers
Scottie; that he is being forced to gaze negates any looked-at-ness for which
Midge is aiming. Anything intentional is
unacceptable in Scottie’s eyes, even if it is the name he is called. When he first talks to Madeleine he gives his
name as “Scottie,” but explains that friends call him “Johnny.” By calling him “Johnny,” Midge is presumably
using the name she has called him for years, but she is also feigning a
closeness to him distinct from Madeleine.
Midge would never know how she differs from Madeleine in her
interactions with Scottie, but the audience sees a woman actively trying and
failing and another woman, mentioned by Mulvey, who figures as both a
fetishistic and punishable object. Like
many examples from classic Hollywood cinema, neither is too flattering to
women.
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