U Vertigo Madeleine is an imaginary woman, a woman who exists primarily as a picture/portrait for Scottie, a fantasy intensely created by a man who, in the course of voyeuristic observation, projects his own fascinations more and more into the object of desire.
Placed at a 'safe' voyeuristic distance, Madeleine is a privileged figure of hurried interpretation: an object-idea that gets its profiling from two men, Elster who conspiratorially postulates that mesmerizing image as a powerful lure, an irresistible story and incarnation, and Scottie who has to accept it not only as one's own 'creation', but also as an expression of the deepest, long-denied longing and obsession. As a 'realization', i.e. an impersonalization of the ideal, Madeleine is scopically appropriated by Scottie, who in turn is in a state between trance and hypnosis.
In contrast, Judy is just an ordinary, real woman, a woman from whom all traces of male romantic incorporation have been 'expelled', she is a 'realistic' representation of the protagonist who is deprived of the signifier 'upgrade' (which at the same time results in a specific 'mimetic' effect: maybe that's what the star itself 'really' looks like, Kim Novak, probably most leading actresses too when they are 'deprived' of fetishistic redescription by directors or the commercial industry of Hollywood). In the inevitable comparison with the ethereal Madeleine, Judy seems vulgarly 'material', even obscenely mundane in her sexual availability: a desublimated image par quintessence, a traumatic presence that Scottie must forcefully erase through the reconstitution of the lost object.
As a buckle, and then at the end a decisive break between Madeleine and Judy, those two "extremes" in the male romantic-patriarchal concept-presentation of femininity, stands the mediator, symbolic woman, the "paradigm" against which the fictional development in Vertigo must play fatalistically: two faces, two names, two appearances of the protagonist - played by Novak - will be contextualized through the micro-story of Carlotta Valdes, whose spirit 'possesses' and determines Madeleine's fate. The symbolic woman - due to the inherent process of 'depathologized' idealization - is always a dead woman, a sociologically and culturally postulated 'historical' figure that mobilizes the death drive, which is why Scottie's engagement has a necrophilic dimension from the very beginning. Carlotta's entire history that is 'purified' visualized in her portrait - with which Madeleine must identify - actually symbolically structures the film's imaginary, the promotion and presentation of the heroine through the double visor of both Scottie and Elster, the first author of that fateful combination.
If it is Vertigo a film about three modes of how a woman is published in a scoping field under the supervision of an aggressive romantic male fantasy, then it is Psycho a realization that, through the dynamics of negative determination, proposes three ways of how the mother manifests herself in a narrative deviating from the normative oedipal trajectory. Therefore, both films have a tripartite segmentation, just as the sublimation points in the visual-narrative sequence are concentrated around death scenes, so in both variants we have two fatal outcomes and one unsuccessful one, but with the difference that in Vertigo woman object, au Psycho the subject of violence and Thanatos.
The murder scene under the shower establishes Mrs. Bates - with a telling Hitchcock's framing where her shadow is inscribed in the 'film screen' - as an illusion of fiction, as an imaginary mother, that is, a phallic, gluttonous, punishing mother whose violence is expressed through dislocated rape, violence against the 'competing' woman and the narrative itself, which must radically change focus of interest.
The murder of the private detective Arbogast, on the other hand, confronts Mrs. Bates metonymically with the Law, whom she assumes and thus occupies the position of the absent father: the obscene symbolic mother. Hitchcock further sanctions this extension of the mother's domain in the following scene showing Norman carrying Mrs. Bates into the basement: in a virtuoso camera placement that rises and strategically reproduces the intonation of God's perspective, the transition from mother to Name-Mother is 'transcendentally' verified, ironically underscored again by the next shot, a cut to a small Protestant church, God's house, from which the official policeman, the ineffectual sheriff, emerges.
And finally, when Lila Crane enters the basement, the real mother is also revealed, a monstrous combination of the corpse of Mrs. Bates and the body of the homicidal son Norman: the mother "took care" of her child so much that she completely sucked him in, the symbolic distance between them is lost, The other psychotically internalized the subject.
While in Vertigo the entire narrative is devoted to a constant game of similarities and essential distinctions between the three 'ontic' concretizations of a woman in a space under the strictest visual control, until then in Marnie this theme finds its reflection, elaboration and staging in the shot of the heroine after she changed her hair color.
Hitchcock's shot - when it is strategically positioned, like the one at the very beginning of the film - can be multi-perspective, can come from both inside and outside, can be 'paged' like a book, strictly functional and superiorly polysemic: close up Marnie's face gains its iconographic and meaningful power by addressing, in the director's obsessive handwriting, the gender enigma in a triple vision. On the first, 'most obvious', 'accessible' level, the shot of the heroine - especially after the movement has turned into a pose - functions as a portrait of an imaginary woman. Although there is no confirmation (say, in the 'duplicating' counter-shot) that Marnie is here standing in front of the mirror, its presence is implied, necessary to carry out the primary identification of the heroine: she is reflected in her own image, she is projected in her own image, she imagines itself as an idealized whole.
However, the shift from imaginary diegesis to non-diegetic symbolic reconstruction and, considering the position of Marnie in the author's oeuvre, recapitulation, again redefines the frame: Marnie, through a special emphasis in mise-en-scène, staged (i) as a symbolic woman. This long-prepared-delayed picture is the director's visual paradigm, the cultural-poetic idea of his heroine, how she should look, how she must be framed in order to maintain the necessary signifying intensity: in the constant rise of fascination, Marnie is now at the end of the chain and stands , retroactively, in the place of all Hitchcockian blondes, as an aesthetic 'essentialization' of accumulated experience, as a powerful summarization of the author's style.
But this is also a shot of seeing the internal visual limit: pleasure, Marnie's pleasure, woman's pleasure, female pleasure in its sexual or orgasmic dimension. Because of this, a third woman can be seen in the frame, in addition to the imaginary and symbolic one, the one who is outside the two mentioned orders. After further layering within the frame, Marnie, in the center of crystallization and focusing, is revealed as a real woman.
But this real Marnie is not like Judy, she is not a woman who suddenly appears in an undeniable 'realistic' materiality, she is not a 'real' person behind a male creation, she is not a mere - biological - basis beneath a certain fiction. Unlike Judy, who as a 'real' person is extremely vulnerable and accessible, even more fully exposed to the romantic-voyeuristic pretensions of Scottie, the real Marnie, on the contrary, is essentially inaccessible and hidden just like that. Close-up he is unable to explain, but only to indicate: this is not a portrait of Marnie as she 'really' is, there is nothing 'biographical' in the precisely defined frame, no real person behind the mask offered by the heroine's complacency or Hitchcock's brilliant stylization.
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