Midwest Modern Language Association

Reflections of Ophelia (And of "Hamlet") in Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo"

Authors(s): James M. Vest
Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring,
1989), pp. 1-9
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association
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 Reflections of Ophelia (and of Hamlet)

in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

James M. Vest

Fantastic garlands did she make . ..

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;

Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element. (Hamlet IV.vii.167-178)1

In many of Hitchcock's films water is associated with mutability and death.

The Pleasure Garden, The Manxman, Rich and Famous, Jamaica Inn, Foreign Corres-

pondent, Lifeboat, To Catch a Thief, and Psycho, among others, insist on that con-

nection, as do the made-for-television A Dip in the Pool and Hitchcock's last, un-

finished feature The Short Night.2 In the publicity short for Frenzy, it is the direc-

tor himself who floats buoyantly down the Thames. More typical, and certainly

more archetypally convincing, are those films in which Hitchcock shows a beauti-

ful woman finding watery death in a manner that recalls floating heroines of lit-

erature and legend. The image of a drowning beauty underlies the mystery of

Young and Innocent, Rebecca, and Frenzy as well as the dramatic denouement of The

Skin Game. In Vertigo in particular, water couples with the idea of the suicide of a

beautiful young woman in ways that precisely reflect images of Ophelia.

Alfred Hitchcock grew up on Shakespeare, and throughout his career was fond

of citing Hamlet in interviews. Among the first projects announced in 1946 by

Hitchcock's fledgling production company was Hamlet with himself as director.3

In Vertigo (Paramount, 1958) Hitchcock came closest to realizing his ambition of

filming a modern Hamlet.

Recumbent in San Francisco Bay, Kim Novak strikes a patently Ophelian pose.

Citing the lines quoted above from Hamlet IV.vii, Donald Spoto noted this paral-

lel but did not pursue the connection (Art 316). The deeper implications of

Spoto's observation for this film and for Hitchcock's aeuvre have not been sys-

tematically developed in subsequent criticism.4 A more careful look at the Hamlet-

Hitchcock connection, and particularly the Ophelian aspects of Vertigo, is long

overdue. In this essay, attention will be focused, as appropriate, on three sources

of Hamlet imagery: the Shakespearian play, pictorial representations of scenes

from Hamlet, and pre-Elizabethan tales of Amleth the Dane.

Floating, skirt outspread, hair disheveled, surrounded by flowers, Kim Novak

James M. Vest 1

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 is shown to be Ophelian in both posture and purpose.5 The insistence on flowers

in Hitchcock's scene specifically recalls elements of John Everett Millais's cele-

brated painting of Ophelia in the stream. Novak's wafting scarf resembles the di-

aphanous, dark trailing veil emblematic of Ophelia's madness in lithographs by

Valmont and others.6 Yet rather than showing her horizontal as in the Millais

painting or vertical as in the Valmont lithograph, Hitchcock has chosen to photo-

graph Kim Novak on the bias, her body slashing the screen diagonally. That pose

is directly related to the many diagonals which, throughout Vertigo, graphically

depict the fine line between reality and imagination, between life and death, from

the treacherous slope of slanted roof in the first scene to the splayed, falling bodies

that punctuate the picture to the end. It also recalls the Hamlet lithographs by

Eugene Delacroix, which accent slanted, diagonal lines of Ophelia's body. Each

time the actress strikes a similar pose thereafter -in John Ferguson's arms as he

brings her back to shore, in his apartment, leaning out of her car, as they touch

and kiss - the pathos of this scene is recalled and the Ophelian motif reinforced.7

In Vertigo Kim Novak plays Judy Barton, who, at the insistence of shipping

magnate Gavin Elster, agrees to impersonate his wife Madeleine. Her role is a dual

one, since this pseudo-Madeleine imagines herself to be her self-destructive great-

grandmother Carlotta Valdes. The Ophelian nature of that identification is indi-

cated not only by the flowers that she carries and then thoughtfully tosses onto

the water (cf. Ham. IV.v.173-184 and IV.vii.165-182) but also by the graveyard

scene, when she visits the tomb of Madeleine's ancestor, "the beautiful Carlotta,

the sad Carlotta ... the mad Carlotta," whose fate she seems doomed to share. A

connection with Ophelia's funereal stream is suggested when she mentions earlier

falls into water: "I've fallen into lakes out of rowboats ... I even fell into the river

once trying to leap from one stone to another." The flowers, the madness, the

graveyard reflections, the affinity for death by water all recall Ophelia's peculiar

role in Shakespeare's play.

Other parallels with scenes in Hamlet involving Ophelia develop in the context

ofJudy's relationship with John Ferguson (played by James Stewart). In this film,

where both space and time are out of joint, the Hamlet-like hero is a vertigo-

stricken detective hired by Elster, ostensibly to protect his wife from her suicidal

tendencies. The fact that this is in reality an elaborate plan to kill the real Mrs. El-

ster is eventually revealed to John Ferguson and to the audience. Thereafter Judy's

role-playing and her involvement with John become the chief subject of the film.

Ophelian echoes abound in their relationship. Recovering in John's bed after

being fished out of the bay, Judy-Madeleine-Carlotta talks to herself incoher-

ently, then emerges from his bedroom, hair down, distant, and somnambulistic,

much as Ophelia is often played in her mad scenes. She presents "a document in

madness" yet, like Ophelia, nevertheless succeeds in inspiring a certain kind of

sense in the mind of her listener (Ham. IV.v.176, cf. IV.v.5-13). Later, when the

couple are approaching San Juan Bautista, the trees overhead are shown to pass by

as if viewed by one floating in a recumbent position, recalling Ophelia's entry into

2 Reflections of Ophelia

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 the tree-lined stream. In John's dream his face is shown to be careworn and wind-

blown, much as in Ophelia's description of Hamlet's disturbed appearance

(II.i.77-100). Ophelia's parting reference to a coach (IV.v.71-72) is reflected in

the reappearing buggies and carriages associated with the mission settlement. The

nature of Ophelia's death is the cause of much debate in the churchyard scene that

opens Hamlet's final act, and similar concerns inform scenes in Vertigo, notably

those at the inquest (held near the churchyard) and outside the Elster residence

where the new owner of Madeleine's car asks, "Is it true that she really ... ?"

At the bidding of the male authority figures in her life Judy, like Ophelia, plays

multiple roles. First seen as Laertes's playful sister and then as Polonius's dutiful

daughter, (Ham. I.iii), Ophelia agrees to play the disenchanted lover and to bait

Hamlet before a concealed audience (II.i-ii and III.i). In her on-stage contacts

with Hamlet, she plays "straight-man" to the prince, setting up his one-liners in

the "nunnery" and playlet scenes (III.i-ii).8 In her rantings (IV.v, vii), the pre-

viously proper Ophelia assumes something of the fickle, ribald character attrib-

uted to her by Hamlet. Her scenes with Hamlet and her mad scenes are played be-

fore a courtly audience, and her entry into the water is presented as a dramatic ta-

bleau by a royal spectator of that scene (IV.vii).

It is significant that in the film Judy-Madeleine-Carlotta does not die in the

water but is rescued by her spectator, John Ferguson. The idea of falling, so cen-

tral to Hitchcock, pervades the bay-side sequence of the film. Both actors must

jump and fall, she on a floral cue, then he. Her leap, supposedly toward death, is

vertical, head-up, life-oriented. Hers is actually a recreational plunge since, as she

later acknowledges, she is "a wonderful swimmer." John's dive (shown as a diag-

onal) is also re-creating in that it represents his first positive step toward over-

coming his acrophobia: he survives a drop from a height and thinks he has saved

her life in the bargain.

The order of events in Shakespeare's play is reversed in Hitchcock's film. In

Hamlet traditional notions of love introduced in the opening acts give way to

violence and madness (III.i-IV.v), then to drowning and burial (IV.vii-V.i), at

which time the theme of love is reintroduced: "I lov'd Ophelia. Forty-thousand

brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum" (V.i.264-66).

In Vertigo death is posited first: Carlotta has died a century ago. We are taken to

the cemetery before we visit the bay. Thus Carlotta's death is followed by

Madeleine-Carlotta's apparent attempt at drowning. That scene is followed by

"mad scenes" in John's apartment and on the coast, which eventually give way to

love scenes. In the end, like Hamlet, John Ferguson finally makes up his mind and

asserts his own needs, with tragic results. Both stories conclude with an expres-

sion of love intimately linked to death.

In Shakespeare's prose sources, the Amleth tales of Saxo Grammaticus and

Franyois de Belleforest, the Ophelia figure is presented as a friend from Amleth's

past who is used by the murderous king to try to trick the hero into revealing the

true nature of his apparent mental disequilibrium.9 Astutely managing to satisfy

James M. Vest 3

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 the king while remaining absolutely devoted to Prince Amleth, she performs her

traditional role (indeed her only role in the prose tales on which Hamlet is based),

that of faithful decoy. Some of that subterfuge persists, in an inverted way, in Ver-

tigo. Under directions from Gavin Elster, Judy-Madeleine plays upon a weakness

of John Ferguson's to set in motion Elster's plan for murdering his wife. She ful-

fills the quintessentially Ophelian role of decoy, apparently diverting the hero

from the truth while actually remaining devoted to him. This peculiar role is re-

called when John says to Judy, in a curt rehashing of Hamlet's tirades about hon-

esty and painted women in the "nunnery" scene (Ham. III.i.103-51), "You were

the copy. You were the counterfeit . . . I loved you so, Madeleine."

When Kim Novak plays Judy rather than Madeleine, her gait appears more bal-

anced, more down to earth, and her demeanor is more assertive, even caustic.

Eventually, however, Judy's posture and attitude change. She accepts John's

flowers, and they stroll past lovers reclining together, diagonally, by a lake,

couples whom she alone sees. In John's apartment she allows herself to go diag-

onal as she succumbs to his desire to resurrect Madeleine. She asks, "If I do what

you tell me, will you love me?" Her situation is reminiscent of Ophelia's when

she confronts the monomaniacal Hamlet, from whom the most she can expect is

slanted non-sequiturs: "I loved you once ... I loved you not" (III.i.115-19).

Finding themselves in equally hopeless positions, both Ophelia and Judy try to

please. Polonius's daughter suppresses her selfhood as she attempts to fulfill the

tyrannical demands of her father and her beloved. Judy allows herself to become

Madeleine once more, for John. Dressing herself like Madeleine, dying her hair

the color of Madeleine's, Judy walks down the dark corridor of Madeleine-Car-

lotta's suicidal vision. John awaits her in her room, which is now bathed in an

eerie light, recalling the blue-green light seen at the beginning of his vertiginous

dream. When Judy re-enters the room in her final apparition as Madeleine she is

enveloped in an aureole of green-blue mist.10 In their long embrace, the pair turn

fluidly as the room rotates slowly about them. The atmosphere is aqueous, with

furniture and then a carriage languidly floating past. The scene recalls not only

events at the mission but the surrealistic wandering and meandering, the pursuit

and evasion, that have characterized their relationship.11 It is as if they are under

water again, as if, like creatures "native and indued unto that element," they have

together assumed a "mermaid-like" posture that is anticipatory of death (Ham.

IV.vii. 174-78).

Ophelian echoes also resound in the situation ofJohn's girlfriend Midge Wood

(Barbara Bel Geddes). She is portrayed as the faithful, neglected childhood sweet-

heart, devoted to a man who has trouble talking straight to her. While the James

Stewart character is known to his other friends as "Scottie," to Midge he is

"Johnny-O," an intimate appellation recalling Ophelia's suggestive "Call him

a-down-a. O how the wheel becomes it" (Ham. IV.v.169-70). Like Ophelia's

"snatches of old tunes" (IV.vii.176, Folio var.; cf. "old lauds" in the Second

Quarto), Midge's classical musical selections are always cut short. A gifted artist,

4 Reflections of Ophelia

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 she paints a portrait of herself as Carlotta Valdes, thus demonstrating her identifi-

cation, conscious or subconscious, with the self-destructive Carlotta. In her final

appearance in the film Midge is shown in the psychiatric hospital, walking down

an ominously darkened, vacant hallway similar to that characteristic of Made-

leine-Carlotta's suicidal dreams. She wants to replace Madeleine in Johnny-O's

heart and, like Ophelia, is cast off by him and despairs.

Vertigo, like Hamlet, is a story about a man under severe mental stress who ap-

pears to see ghosts and to have difficulty acting in time: John "Scottie" Ferguson.12

Between the two major episodes of his story Ferguson is exiled, like Hamlet the

Dane, among the "mad" (Ham. V.i.144-50). Returning to live among ostensibly

normal folks, he contemplates his beloved's open grave and visualizes himself,

Hamlet-like, entering into it (cf. Ham. V.i.235-47).13 He consistently dresses in

dark clothes, and in his dream-vision appears with unkempt hair and cavernous

eyes, as Hamlet is traditionally portrayed (cf. Ham. II.i.77- 100, as well as picto-

rial representations by Delacroix, Lehmann, Manet, et al.). Like the dark prince,

his exaggerated determination to regain what he has lost and to manipulate others

leads those around him to death or despair.

The role of Hamlet, like other roles in Vertigo, is diffused, fragmented, and set

spinning. Observing Madeleine-Carlotta's leap into the Bay, John is forced into

the role of Gertrude-like witness and then does the queen one better by prevent-

ing the drowning. Nor is he the only Hamlet-figure in Vertigo. Judy, who plays so

many roles in this story, also resembles Hamlet in one important way. Her origins

are presented in terms of the traditional Hamlet-Orestes paradigm: "That's me

with my mother and that's my father. He's dead. My mother married again, but I

didn't like the guy." By making Judy over into Madeleine, Ferguson is forcing a

tragic resolution to her life,just as Hamlet's attempts to make over Ophelia, Rose

of May, in light of his own image of a weed-filled garden lead to her derangement

and death.

For Alfred Hitchcock, Hamlet remained a source of profound dramatic and per-

sonal inspiration. Although the Hamlet first announced in 1946 never material-

ized, the haunting figure of Ophelia manifested itself repeatedly in Hitchcock's

work and in his personal life. The director's preoccupation with willful manipula-

tion, both as theme and as technique, so clearly visible in Elster's and Ferguson's

possessive manipulation ofJudy, has an analogue in the machinations of Polonius

and Hamlet involving compliant Ophelia. The same attractive, tractable figure

may lie behind Hitchcock's lifelong obsession with the "Nordic" blond (his

phrase, quoted in Spoto Dark Side 431), an acquiescing beauty who could be made

over in his own image, who could be convinced to dress and move as he wished,

to play a variety of roles according to his whim before being set adrift. It also may

have suggested the director's own metamorphosis into moribund floater for

Frenzy, where the scene of Hitch gliding down the Thames - perhaps the direc-

James M. Vest 5

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 tor's most complete and self-conscious identification with Ophelia-was orig-

inally intended as his ritual cameo appearance in that film (Haley 118).

The idea of a potentially fatal plunge is a leitmotif in Hitchcock's films. No-

where is it more overpowering than in Vertigo, where it functions as a central,

unifying metaphor. It undergirds the action from the opening sequence on the

rooftop, to John's falling into Midge's arms in her apartment, to Judy-Madeleine-

Carlotta collapsing into his, to the falling sequence in John's dreams, through the

three leaps that define Kim Novak's role in the film. Falling symbolizes instability

and powerlessness, loss of control and balance in both a physiological and an exis-

tential sense. In Vertigo it serves as a correlative to the collapse of reason and of so-

ciety. "If I'm mad, that would explain it, wouldn't it?" asksJudy-Madeleine-Car-

lotta, tottering on the precipice by the sea. In John's dream, his room dissolves

into a floral arrangement that rearranges itself into a spiraling descent through

space toward the rooftop of a church. Nature is reeling in Vertigo. So is civiliza-

tion. Something is fatefully rotten in a social order that allows a Carlotta, a Made-

leine, a Judy to suffer so. In Vertigo, society itself is shown de-composing like the

nosegays. Civilized ideas of social norms, of marriage, of trust, ofjustice, of living

and letting live are systematically jolted by the multiple falls which characterize

this film.

Photographing Kim Novak in the water diagonally, Hitchcock resorted to one

of his favorite visual themes - the struggle for life depicted as a bias shot, , la Dela-

croix. In three oil paintings of Ophelia in the stream and in his lithographic en-

graving of the same scene, Delacroix showed his subject with hand extended, as-

suming a dramatic diagonal.14 Delacroix's Ophelia is not dead but still grasping

the willow branch that bonds her to life. Even as she lets go, she is reaching out in

a primordial gesture of vitality. That gesture of the hand and body which is char-

acteristic of the struggle for life in films from Blackmail, Young and Innocent, and

Saboteur to Dial Mfor Murder, North By Northwest, and Psycho, is conspicuously ab-

sent in the waters of San Francisco Bay in Vertigo.

Emerging from the water holding her diagonally in his arms, John Ferguson

resembles a modem John the Baptist. At San Juan Bautista, searching for Judy-

Madeleine, John's eye turns quickly from the baptismal font to the belltower

steps. This movement is indicative of the fact that the identity-changing immer-

sions in Vertigo are not performed with traditional revivifying holy waters, as the

final lethal appearance of the nun makes clear. They are not associated with

church but rather with Judy's memories of childhood falls into lakes and streams,

with Elster's docks, with the pond where lovers embrace, with the tears in Judy's

eyes. Most of all, they are connected with the murky bay scene where Kim Novak

(who actually feared water) was directed to play a drowning girl.15 The result of

these immersions is indeed comparable to a descent toward "muddy death" (Ham.

IV.vii.182). Traditional baptismal rites are "maimed" in Vertigo, as are the burial

rites in Hamlet (V.i.212ff).

Of the six main characters who are killed in Hamlet, only Ophelia is allowed to

6 Reflections ofOphelia

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die out of sight, offstage. When Judy takes her final plunge from the church

tower, her fall and landing are not shown. The lingering image of the real Made-

leine's fall, like that of the detective who plunges to his death in the opening scene

and the representation of John spiraling downward in his dream, has no visual

correlative here. Judy simply disappears as she has previously disappeared to be-

come Madeleine and as Madeleine disappeared repeatedly during John's associa-

tion with her. Like Ophelia and like Midge, she vanishes from the scene.

A final sequence showingJohn with Midge was cut from the released version of

the film (Spoto Art 335). Vertigo as we know it ends with an "impossibly high-

angled looming view" ofJohn Ferguson alone on the tower platform (Zirnite 2).

We look down on him as he looks down on death. In his situation we recognize

that of Hamlet confronting the dead in the churchyard. Seeing the broken re-

mains of one he once loved-and manipulated-he encounters the void in him-

self. Will hejump? Will he again take up life? The audience is left to reflect on his

story, on Hitchcock's, and on our own, and to conclude as we will.16

Rhodes College

Notes

1. The text of Hamlet cited throughout this essay is the Arden Shakespeare edition, Harold Jenkins,

editor. All line and scene references are to that edition. Page references to the First Quarto Hamlet are

to Furness, ed. The Variorum Shakespeare.

2. For the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's The Short Night and commentary on it, see Freeman

71-250.

3. Spoto Dark Side 310-11; on the role of Shakespeare in Hitchcock's education see Spoto Dark Side

28-29; for the director's views on Shakespeare, see Truffaut 74 and 263 as well as Samuels 241.

4. Villien, who follows Spoto's Art closely, insists on the importance of flowers and the outspread

skirt in this film (293-96; cf. his remarks on Topaz: 331); Wood, whose influence on Spoto was

great, speaks of Vertigo as generally Shakespearian in structure (Hitchcock's Films 77-78); Radcliff-

Umstead summarily compares male-female relationships in Hamlet with those in Vertigo (24).

5. On the social and pathological symbolism of Ophelia, see Showalter Female Malady, 10-13 and

91 and "Representing Ophelia"passim; cf. also Lyons (67-74) on the iconography of Ophelia. Some

of the paintings and engravings discussed in this essay may be seen in Showalter, Lyons, and Raby,

three particularly valuable sources for modern interpretations of Ophelia to which the present study

is indebted. Stage directions indicating that Ophelia's hair is disheveled appear in the First Quarto

only (Variorum ed. 2:74); but she is traditionally played that way.

6. Cf. portraits by Ducarme, Dev6ria and Boulanger, et al. inspired by Harriet Smithson in the role

of mad Ophelia; see Raby 72, 179-82; on the Millais Ophelia see Merol 79-80; on those of Valmont

and Delacroix see Raby, frontispiece and 43-78, 179-82.

7. Diagonals as they relate to spirals and the concept of laterality in Vertigo are discussed by

Durgnat 292-93.

8. Novy has written convincingly about the specifically histrionic inferences of these exchanges.

James M. Vest 7

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 9. See Gollancz for both the Saxonian and the Belleforestian versions.

10. On the care Hitchcock took with the coloration and filtering of light and with movement in this

scene, see Truffaut 245, Spoto Art 330-31, and Samuels 246.

11. Spoto develops the idea of circularity and wandering as unifying metaphors for Vertigo in Art

300-27.

12. The name Ferguson is based on a Norse model (cf. *Ferg6's son, reminiscent ofJutish Fengi's

son, i.e., a descendent of Feng6, Amleth's murderous uncle/step-father in the prose tales on which

Hamlet is based).

13. In the Amleth tales, it is the hero's own grave which he discovers on returning from exile; on

Ophelia's grave as analogous to Hamlet's own death-in-life experience in Shakespeare's play, see

Neely 103-04 and Coursen 145.

14. See Delacroix Opera, figs. 332 (1838), 415 (1844), 764 (1859), and color plate no. il (1844). The

lithograph (1843) is reproduced in Raby 171. Some of these pictures may also be seen in Raby, Sho-

walter, and Lyons.

15. Statement by Kim Novak in an interview, c. 1982, cited in Villien 293.

16. This essay is indebted to a Faculty Development Grant from Rhodes College, which facilitated

research; to my wife Nancy and daughter Cecelia, without whose patience and perceptiveness it

could not have grown; to Patricia Ferrara, Mikle Ledgerwood, Valerie Nollan, Catherine McGee,

Chris Caldwell, Torbj6rn Sall, and Joe Rees, as well as the staffs of the university libraries at

Duke U., UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Asheville, and of the Buncombe and Madison Counties, NC,

public libraries, whose assistance and encouragement were invaluable; and especially to my former

students in Paris who said, "Allons voir Sueurs froides - let's go see Vertigo."

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