After his film Torn Curtain was released in 1966, Alfred Hitchcock responded to audience queries about a scene in which Paul Newman kills a man by putting his head in an oven (Torn Curtain). In an interview in which he was asked about the scene, he stated, “It has been suggested that the killing of Gromek [an East German agent] by putting his head in a gas oven is a reference to the Holocaust. Who knows? I was deeply affected by film footage of the prison camps I saw at the end of the war.” (Chandler 286). The footage to which Hitchcock refers was a sequence of newsreels taken by British journalists shortly after the liberation of Bergen Belsen. He later edited into a documentary film that the British Government deemed too grisly for release on television. Like much of Hitchcock’s work, the film presents a jarring proximity of horror to quotidian existence, chronicling the discovery that the death camps were situated quite close to bucolic scenes of pastoral German life. (Chandler 286)
If Hitchcock does refer to the Holocaust in Torn Curtain, the reference is staged within a pop-cinema artifact that was first screened over two decades after the end of World War II, not on the heels of the discovery of the devastation of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, or Majdanek. The presence of the likely reference, however, begs a question as to whether Hitchcock’s earlier postwar films may have manifested similar references—especially when this possibility is considered in light of the issue of trauma and its delayed effects. In Mourning and Melancholia—a classic study of trauma—Sigmund Freud outlines two stages in post-traumatic processes. In the first stage, the victim mounts an inquiry into the nature the trauma, in the hopes of understanding and defining it. Unfortunately, this stage is usually interrupted as the trauma is experienced for a second time and the mind struggles to protect itself from danger. It is not until the second stage, in which another line of inquiry is opened up, that the true nature of the trauma can be unlocked. (LaCapra 53)
When considered in light of Hitchcock’s Holocaust references, Freud’s two-stage description of trauma sheds a fascinating light on Vertigo (1958), a film that many critics consider to be his masterpiece. Vertigo is a film about the problem of trying and failing to process a trauma too close to the time of the event, leading to a vicious cycle of recapitulation. Recently, some critics have suggested that it refers symbolically to the mass horrors of the twentieth century. In this paper, I argue that there are grounds for drawing an explicit interpretive connection between Vertigo and the Holocaust. In keeping with Freud’s assertions regarding the delayed, recapitulative nature of post-traumatic processes, I maintain that Vertigo refers to the Holocaust in a less explicit manner than Hitchcock’s later work. In this manner, it stands as a sort of “first inquiry” within the traumatized setting of the auteur’s postwar oeuvre. In addition to its role as a symptom of a traumatic process, the film also presents a diagnostic depiction of this process, as it unfold upon the larger socio-cultural stage of the postwar world. That is: it indicates the presence of a dispersed, recapitulative, crypto-fascist pattern—a pervasive, violent micro-politics of denial, deception, mythologized victimization, and misplaced blame—that trickles down to the very level of interpersonal relationships, tainting the most intimate aspects of human life with the odor of murderous fiction. In doing so, the film intersects thematically with the ideas of several important post-Holocaust thinkers. Specifically, it contains elements that resemble Hannah Arendt’s conception of the “banality of evil” and its insinuation into the fabric of bourgeois existence; Arthur Cohen’s exploration of representation in regards to the Holocaust; and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s theories about the role of the culture industry in consumerist society, as well as their assertions regarding the postwar bankruptcy of dialectical teleology.
Examination of these topics is best begun through a consideration of the film’s narrative form. A striking feature of Vertigo is Hitchcock’s experimentation with traditional Hollywood narrative, as seen in the repetition of story structure throughout the film. With this experimentation, Hitchcock presents a narrative that tropically mimics the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Twice there is a drawn out exposition, a climactic moment of “truth” (put in quotes here because of the lie underpinning its first discovery), and a devastating end that includes horrific death. The connections between the literal plot points in the repetitious structure of the film and the cryptic Holocaust references deserve explicit delineation.
The deceptive power of the story with which Scottie is seduced in the first instance of repetitious exposition bears a strong resemblance to fascist, particularly German, propaganda. Both the narrative of Madeline’s haunting by Carlotta’s ghost and the Nazi’s pseudo-scientific claims of Teutonic superiority hinged around a mythology of intergenerational victimization. In the German example, Hitler and the Nazi party blamed Germany’s social and economic problems on the Allied powers that had implemented the reparations of the Treaty of Versailles, and on the ostensible economic vampirism of German Jews. In Vertigo’s ghost narrative, Carlotta was used cruelly by men and then died of the insanity that resulted from this abuse. Furthermore, in their use of these victim mentalities, both myths appeal to a transcendent notion of essence or soul that persists throughout time. The fascists used propaganda that appealed to the essential German character—the Volk—which supposedly had a trans-historical persistence stretching back thousands of years. This resonates strongly in a scene from Vertigo, in which Scottie and Madeleine examine the marked rings of a great redwood. According to the ghost narrative, Madeleine is a reincarnation of her great-grandmother Carlotta, whose life is a point of temporal origin for the Madeleine’s essence in the distant past. (Vertigo)
Both myths were reinforced through the use of deceptive spectacles. The Nazis used rallies and theatrical props, such as elaborate uniforms, whips, dogs, and other accessories. Similarly, Scottie is duped into believing the Carlotta story through the use of complicated and organized lies and staged events, meant to serve as “proof” of ghostly possession—including the aforementioned tree-rings, and the spectacle of Madeleine-Judy jumping into San Francisco bay. As a result of these deceptive efforts, both the German public and Scottie embrace the victim-minded mythology of the past, in order to work towards an improved future based on direct engagement with the myths; and in both cases, the mythology of victimization is used to cover up an actual crime in which there is an actual victim, different from the victim in the mythology—one who is silenced and helpless at the hands of perpetrators who believe or maintain that they are victims. In sum: both fictions—the fascist myth of racial superiority and the re-incarnative Carlotta narrative—serve as propagandistic and ideological instruments that enable murder. Scottie believes a complicated and absurdly improbable lie, made to seem probable only through the implementation of elaborate schemes to make the ghost story seem true, just as the German people were conscripted with complicated lies made up of false science, spectacle and mythology that center on tropes of victimhood. (Vertigo)
In her essay “The Concentration Camps,” Hannah Arendt directly addresses the phenomenon that occurs both in Hitchcock’s film and in Nazi history: the willingness and/or susceptibility of ordinary citizens’ to belief in improbable, grand-scale un-truths. She writes that “men determined to commit crimes will find it expedient to organize them on the vastest, most improbable scale. Not only because this renders all punishments provided by the legal system inadequate and absurd; but because the very immensity of the crimes guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth.” (Morgan 49) In the case of Gavin Elster’s lie about his wife’s haunting, Scottie’s initial skepticism is quieted by the lengths to which Elster and Madeleine/Judy go to ensure that he believes she is possessed. It becomes easier to believe that a woman is possessed by her great-grandmother’s spirit than it is to believe that a woman would pretend to be haunted by driving all over the city and jumping into San Francisco Bay. In the case of the manipulation of the German people by the Nazi party, there is a similar trajectory of the influence of the lie—gradual acceptance over time of ideas that are categorically ludicrous, until, for the public, it became easier to believe the myth of an Aryan race, the superiority of Germans over all others, and the need for industrial destruction of the European Jewry than it was to believe that the socially acceptable ideologies taking hold over people’s thoughts and actions were based on elaborate, theatrical lies. (Vertigo)
Rationality is inverted in both cases, as the assumption that to lie in such an elaborate manner would be absurd and therefore implausible made the German public and Scottie believe that the lie must be the truth; and yet the implausible turns out to be the truth. This process of inversion can best be understood in the definition of the Holocaust according to Arthur Cohen, who coined the term “the tremendum.” He explains that he calls the death camps “…the tremendum, for it is the monument of a meaningless inversion of life, to an orgiastic celebration of death, to a psychosexual and pathological degeneracy unparalleled and unfathomable to any man bonded to life” (Morgan 192). The vastness of the lie leads to a confusion between fact and fiction, and an inversion of truth and fiction that leads to death in both cases. (Vertigo)
Arendt explains that the need for Hitler to organize his crimes on a vast and improbable scale was a well-known secret:
The Nazis did not even consider it necessary to keep this discovery (that crimes should be organized in an absurdly complicated large-scale manner) to themselves. Hitler circulated millions of copies of his book in which he stated that to be successful, a lie must be enormous—which did not prevent people from believing him as, similarly, the Nazis’ proclamations, repeated ad nauseum, that the Jews would be exterminated like bedbugs (i.e., with poison gas), prevented anybody from not believing them. (Morgan 49)
In the film, Elster does not publish his plan of lying for the sake of murder for all to see, but he and Judy do display their crime within the public sphere—Elster attends the trial where Scottie is humiliated for supposedly failing to prevent Mrs. Elster from falling to her death, and Judy roams freely through the city after she completes acting like Madeleine. There is a sense that the lies are hidden in plain sight, camouflaged by the very magnitude of their ludicrousness and implausibility; but in a further resemblance to fascism, this results in an arrogance that eventually proves fatal to the deceivers. Judy is so confident about the power of her mythological disguise, she wears the necklace that comprises the only evidence of her crime during a date with Scottie. Like the Nazis, she has grown so emboldened by her murderous successes, she loses the sense of any limit whatsoever, and thereby overstrains the limit of Scottie’s suspended disbelief. The lie takes on a countervailing power and an agency of its own, and leads to her demise. During the final scene on the tower, she mistakes the approaching outline of a Roman Catholic nun for the returning spirit of Mrs. Elster, whom she has helped to murder, and then leaps screaming in terror to her death. The victim-mythology of returning spirits that originally served to cover and enable her crime is distorted and inverted. It begins to refer to her crime, thereby exposing the fact that it was always a cover for murder in the first place. The Big Lie becomes a fantastical reference to the truth that it was supposed to hide. (Vertigo)
Despite these similarities to actual history, however, Vertigo only makes passing references to the war, and there are no direct references to the Holocaust. Scottie and Elster are described as being college friends who drifted apart. Scottie only knows that people generally “lost track” of Elster during the war, indicating that at the very least he did not participate in the fight against fascism, and possibly indicating that he helped the fascist cause. The lack of direct mention of the Holocaust indicates a replication of the psychological after-effects of trauma, while simultaneously indicating the problems of representation, and the cryptic, a-signified nature of how lies that lead to murderous deceptions and actions seep into culture as truths and are replicated on a microcosmic personal level. (Vertigo)
There are several examples of repetition of traumatic events throughout the film. First, Scottie relives the trauma of seeing a policeman fall to his death from a great height when he climbs the steps of a small stool in his friend Midge’s apartment in an effort to show that he has overcome vertigo. Repeating the phrase, “I look up, I look down,” he indicates that he has a clear perspective and can see clearly see what lies above and below him. Suddenly, in the middle of this repetitious phrase, he is struck by a vision that reminds him of the image of the policeman falling to his death, and he is rendered unconscious after falling dizzily from the highest step. Scottie is unprepared for the stress of this flashback, and his initially objective vision of the world—referenced in his supposed ability to “look up and look down”—is exposed as a mirage when he is confronted with the stress, which calling into question the ability of human perspectives to cope with the disorientations of trauma. It is for precisely due to his inability to look up and down that Elster chooses him to be a witness and unwittingly accomplice to a murder. This scene is essentially repeated (as it is again at the end of the film when Scottie overcomes the vertigo by confronting the truth behind the lie and forcing Judy to the top of the tower). (Vertigo)
The next pattern that is repeated is the cycle of the deaths at the tower of the mission, where Scottie first sees Madeleine die, looking up at her as she runs up the stairs and then down at her body, and then again at the end of the film, looking up at Judy and down at her body after she jumps. The first time the supposed suicide occurs, the trauma is polyvalent for Scottie. There is the shock of watching a suicide, made doubly painful as Scottie is in love with this woman. There is also the profound disappointment in not being able to prevent the suicide, which is part of the rescue fantasy Scottie holds about the story of the possessed Madeleine. In the opening scene of the movie, Scottie watches the policeman fall to his death and is overcome by vertigo because he has residual guilt about being able to stop the man’s death. He views his charge of Madeleine as his chance to redeem himself, to be the savior to the beautiful, victimized woman in need. With the fall of Madeleine from the tower, Scottie is overcome by the sense of being a complete failure, and feels doubly responsible for being a witness to deaths he might have prevented. When the suicide is revealed as the device of a murder plot, however, Scottie recreates the murder scene with Judy. This time, re-enacting the trauma of seeing the woman he loved die, he overcomes the vertigo as he looks at the deceptions squarely, and forces Judy to the top of the tower. Judy jumps, imagining that she is seeing the ghost of the woman whom she helped to kill, Mrs. Elster. The woman who sought to propagate a myth actually buys into the narrative strain she has created at the end of the film, believing in the reincarnation of Mrs. Elster in ghost form, a soul who would be bound to seek vengeance for her murder. (Vertigo)
Hitchcock’s involvement in film that was not just filtered into the entertainment complex of Hollywood, but film that was intended to show the British public the extent of Nazi atrocities, allows one to see his understanding of the role of film for both positive and negative propaganda. During the war, fascists had used film to support anti-Semitic sentiments and the propagation of the need for the Nazi party to succeed. Arendt described the use of film in trying to change the viewpoints of those who had been brainwashed by posters, films, and public sentiment during the war, saying:
The films which the Allies circulated in Germany and elsewhere after the war showed clearly that this atmosphere of insanity and unreality is not dispelled by pure reportage. To the unprejudiced observer they are just about as convincing as the pictures of mysterious substances taken at spiritualist séances. Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument: ‘what crime must these people have committed that such things were done to them!’; or, in Germany and Austria, in the midst of starvation, overpopulation and general hatred: ‘too bad they’ve stopped gassing the Jews’; and everywhere with skeptical shrug that greets ineffectual propaganda. (Morgan 53)
The truth is too monstrous to be taken as truth, in the instance of the public who has been duped, and in the instance of Scottie, until he realizes how dramatically he has been deceived. (Vertigo)
Interestingly, the idea that cinema has a distinct power that has been used for both informing the public and shaping the public’s consciousness in a manner that best suits the interests of power and capital connects to what Adorno and Horkheimer have to say about the postwar world, specifically in the chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment called “The Culture Industry.” The way in which Hitchcock uses a subversive narrative is both an indictment of Hollywood filmmaking and a use of typical narrative structures of Hollywood films to make a point about their destructive capabilities. In “The Culture Industry,” Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the ability of post-war capitalist societies to organize life through the use of entertainment and leisure time activities, such as film and other forms of pop culture, have led to success in achieving the goals of fascism without the direct use of coercive force, while maintaining the illusion of the autonomous liberal subject. Adorno and Horkheimer go on to argue that in such optical technologies as magazine advertisements, billboards, and especially film, a technology of manipulation has emerged, inviting the passive complicity of the modern subject with the destructive machinations of capitalism. This subject has little ability to rationally resist the effects of mediated ideological entertainment in a critical manner. (Horkheimer and Adorno 253)
The Carlotta-narrative contained in Vertigo contains elements criticized by Adorno and Horkheimer. It is melodramatic, concerned with the doings of the upper-class, redemptive, and holds out the possibility of neat closure with the romance between Scottie and Madeleine. These features of Vertigo, considered in the light of Adorno and Horkheimer’s notions of cinema, seem to indicate that Hitchcock shared a similarly skeptical attitude towards the industry he inhabited, and the general idea that cinema is a potentially fascist technology.
The anti-teleological features of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics connects with Hitchcock’s subversion of a narrative that posits redemptive progress in history through the role of memory and retroactive redemption. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes of a theory that the entire myth of progress within Hegelian and Marxist philosophy was a rosy form of optimism that has become untenable in the wake of Auschwitz:
The mutual indifference of temporality and eternal ideas is no longer tenable even with the bold Hegelian explanation that temporal existence, by virtue of the destruction inherent in its construct, serves the eternal represented by the eternity of destruction. One of the mystical impulses secularized in dialectics was the doctrine that the intramundane and historic is relevant to what traditional metaphysics distinguished transcendence…after Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleak, out of the victims’ fate…such a construction would affirm absolute negativity, and would assist its ideological survival—as in reality that negativity survives anyway, in the principle of society as it exists until its self-destruction. (Morgan 42)
According to Adorno, to assert that eternity is manifesting in history is to affirm the Holocaust as part of a teleological goal, making the suffering of the victim part of a teleological scheme. In Vertigo’s Carlotta narrative, the soul manifests in history, recurring through different phases. The scene in which Madeleine and Scottie examine the cross-section of the redwood connotes the idea that the intra-mundane is part of the unfolding of history, especially as the spirit of Carlotta points out her place in the scheme of history. While the entire Carlotta portion of the film can be seen as teleological, Hitchcock proves this romantic narrative to be illusory, thus asserting a profoundly anti-teleological thematic that hinges around murder. Adorno and Horkheimer’s rejection of dialectical telos could be applied to the final image of the film, where Scottie looks down into the pit in which first Mrs. Elster, and then Judy, have fallen. For Scottie to assemble some kind of myth of progress or redemption out the horror he has experienced would be an affront to the deaths he has witnessed. When Scottie stares down from the tower at the void into which Judy, and therefore Madeleine, has been destroyed, the audience is looking at a crystallized of the human situation, after the Holocaust. (Vertigo)
The confluence of Hitchcock’s narrative thematics and the ideas of the Frankfurt school connect interestingly to Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil. There are parallels between Elster and Scottie, two bourgeois American “everymen” caught up in the recapitulation of a micro-fascist pattern. They occupy similar positions in the class-spectrum, were educated at the same school, and have similar tastes in women. Both Scottie and Elster’s “banal” society, filled with bureaucracy, allows for crime to be rendered un-criminal as it is processed through banal, bureaucratic means. Taken together, these similarities suggest a broad-based banality spread across the fabric of everyday life. As Arendt discussed in her report on Eichmann, there is a kind of “thoughtlessness” to modern varieties of evil. This manifests in the willingness with which Scottie as accepts the notion of the ghost. His conscience functions in a normal way for only a short period of time throughout the film, before he accepts the atrocious lie. (Arendt 184)
Vertigo—initially to be called From Among the Dead upon its American release—is a film that references the horrors of the Holocaust in its depiction of a crypto-fascist pattern that has dramatic implications for how humanity will proceed in the wake of Auschwitz. Through his repetitious use of spiral shapes at the beginning, middle, and end of his film Hitchcock seems to be indicating that these patterns are replicated in bourgeois capitalist life; and that, if there is hope for overcoming such atrocities, it lies in squarely looking into the void at the center of the downward spiral, where the evidence of murder lies crushed upon the ground.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. “Meditations on Metaphysics,” in Morgan, Michael, ed. A Holocaust Reader: Responses to Nazi Extermination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry. New York: Routledge Classics, 1991.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
Arendt, Hannah. “The Concentration Camps,” in Morgan, Michael, ed. A Holocaust Reader: Responses to Nazi Extermination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Carr, Steven Alan. “Mass Murder, Modernity, and the Alienated Gaze.” Cinema and Modernity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Chandler, Charlotte. It’s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, a Personal Biography. New York: Hal Leonard, 2006.
Cohen, Arthur. “Thinking the Tremendum,” in Morgan, Michael, ed. A Holocaust Reader: Responses to Nazi Extermination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor. TheDialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Morgan, Michael, ed. A Holocaust Reader: Responses to Nazi Extermination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perfs. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1960.
Torn Curtain. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perfs. Paul Newman, Julie Andrews. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1966.
Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perfs. James Stewart, Kim Novak. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1958.
