Much has been made of the objectification of Kim Novak’s Madeline/Judy by James Stewart’s Scottie in Vertigo. While this is much justified based on the behavior manifest and the narrative itself, it misses a fundamental and perhaps more significant subject/object relationship. Laura Mulvey describes in her landmark paper Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema the means by which the apparatus of cinema creates a subject/object relationship between the audience(subject) and the female character(object). Scopophilia is defined as the pleasure that is derived from looking at the human form as an object. Film plays on this desire by allowing us to look into the lives of others and objectify them without the guilt associated with voyeurism. In essence, then, spectatorship fulfills a voyeuristic fantasy. Not only does the audience act in the role of the subject, as a viewer of the object from their seats but they also project themselves onto the male subject in the film who in turn sees the woman as object. This converts spectatorship into a form of narcissism. The female in the film is then an erotic object for the character in the film and an erotic object for the spectator. By looking at this subject/object relationship in Vertigo one can see that the Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy conglomerate becomes the object of the spectator/protagonist mediated by the apparatus.
There is a significant scene in the film that demonstrates this relationship. After having jumped in the bay to save Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy, Scottie takes her back to his apartment. We, as audience, are introduced to the apartment through a slow pan from right to left. The camera starts on Scottie putting logs into a fiery fireplace (and we could discuss the phallic nature of this, but I digress). He sits on the couch, and glances up. He sips his tea and looks. He is looking at something and based on his expression, his gaze is indulgent. The camera pans to the left. It passes over the doorway to the kitchen and frames clothes hanging on a line, to dry. They are Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy’s clothes. This clearly indicates to us that she is no longer wearing them. The camera pan continues and settles on the bedroom door, open, and revealing Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy lying on the bed. She is naked, though under the covers. She is asleep. The camera cuts back to Scottie. Who looks some more. It cuts back to Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy. The phone rings and Scottie runs to answer it. Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy suddenly awakes. More of her body is revealed and Scottie gazes as he speaks on the phone. Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy is fully framed and glances down. That glance is ostensibly for her realization that she is unclothed.
The audience plays their dual spectator role through the course of this scene. In the seats of the theater they are subjects observing the action. Simultaneously, they identify with Scottie. Narcissistically they place themselves in the place of him. The pan is in the role of Audience/Subject. We are looking around the room to see what Scottie’s apartment looks like. The shot/reverse shot cutting between Scottie looking at Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy and what he sees (Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy) places us in his place as the protagonist/subject of the story. In the case of seeing Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy in the bed we are as audience allowed the scopophilic fetishism of looking at the partially covered body. The voyeuristic fantasy is fulfilled (it helps that initially the camera is placed far from the object through a door, heightening the voyeurism). Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy’s glance downward when she awakes in the bed, though narratively indicates realization that she is naked, serves the audience in this relationship to remind them “hey, I’m naked under here.” The audience converts the character into an actress (Kim Novak) and an object of their gaze, a fetish devoid of narrative device.
This is also a time of narcissistic identification. When the camera panned across the kitchen doorway to reveal the drying clothes it opened the door to identification with the protagonist. There is no one else here. And Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy is asleep on the bed. It is implied then that Scottie is the one to have undressed her. In doing so he of necessity saw her naked before placing her on the bed. His look to her in the bed is not one of spying, but of reminiscing. It stops the narrative and invites the audience to fetishize the form of Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy and to reminisce with Scottie on that experience of undressing the female form. Our identification with Scottie in that moment places the Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy as the object of creative memory gaze: the look into a memory not shown on screen but experienced by the subject/protagonist and created by the subject/audience.
Vertigo is often regarded as Hitchcock’s finest film. It is a remarkable study in the nature of obsession. It also is an exquisite study in the use of the male gaze and the subject/object relationship. The film makes Kim Novak/Madeline/Judy an object to be desired and fetishized and gives ample opportunities to relish that gaze. The audience spies, watches, looks, and truly obsesses in their seats and alongside Scottie and the protagonist/subject. The female loses her identity and becomes merely a form to be desired and gazed at. She has no volition, she is there, while we and Scottie gaze on her, and we are absolved of the guilt of voyeurism by the apt cinematic apparatus.
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