Accept Reject. Notebook Feature. To be considered desperate is a trap from which there is no clear escape. Denial is fairly fruitless once consigned to that space, all past and future actions painted with the same sour glaze.
And nothing is quite so unconvincing as insistence to the contrary. These dilemmas of misplaced affection are often couched in the language of literacy: reading too far into things and between the lines, being written off, poorly translated and, ultimately, taught a lesson. Much of the comedy and pathos of unrequited love is found in such moments of misinterpretation and the kind of humiliation that spreads across the face like a brush fire.
Being defined as romantically inept can also pollute the image in ways beyond simple embarrassment. The more cues missed and conversations misunderstood, the more legible one becomes in the eyes of others. Each fresh mistake leeches away at your mystique as though there are just two ways to be—dull and available or attractive and opaque. That hierarchy of worth is a falsehood, a cruel flourish of social life.
It also happens to be a principle endorsed by the films of Alfred Hitchcock. There are few better ways to accentuate the intoxicating mystery of a protagonist than by demystifying and making feckless fools of her minor female peers—typically cast as frank professionals, self-sufficient spinsters, or coded queers. Or consider Lil Mainwaring Diane Baker in Marnie , the prickly sister-in-law of publisher Mark Rutland Sean Connery , whose fondness for him leads her to do much the same.
Both women are assured and quick-witted, moving with an air of relaxed competence. It is not an example of misogyny, but an overblown, beautiful and tragic deconstruction of it. Vertigo is not the last word in misogyny, but a feminist deconstruction of it.
Topics Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock features. Reuse this content. Yet, Midge does not die like the other women; she is not granted an ending. And, the difference between Midge and the other women is that Midge is independent, meaning not romantically or financially bound to a man. She is not given the dignity of an ending, of some closure; standing alone, she effortlessly dissolves as Hitchcock moves into the next scene. Can it be possible Hitchcock did not realize the implication about women and their worth he was making when he created an independent, intelligent, talented women, then undercut her by portraying her as completely undesirable, and finally allowing her to simply disappear without a word or care?
The answer is no, he is not careless. Hitchcock did not make Midge disappear, the studio did. Hitchcock filmed a final scene for Vertigo , one that was only discovered in the s. Unfortunately, Hitchcock lost his last scene when his cut of Vertigo was censored. Amid the subliminal and subversive messages intentionally communicated by Hitchcock lies a unplanned message: women who are not attractive to men and dare to exist without a man deserve to be discarded.
Yet, apparently that shopkeeper, like Johnny, struggles with some illusions. Inadvertently, Hitchcock proves the shopkeeper wrong by making Midge disappear, successfully abandoning a woman in Vertigo for all the world to see.
You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. Midge's character is complex both sexually and symbolically in Freudian and feminist interpretations. While it is easy to envision her as a life-mother figure which contrasts nicely to the death-mother persona of Madeleine , she can also be understood as, what film historian Walter Poznar calls, a "typical young liberated rationalist"--an established woman with a basic insensitivity to Scottie and to the potential for feminine values.
Her self-inverted portrait represents the cruelty and pragmaticism of her imperceptive interests, and has served to disgrace and humiliate Scottie's idealized obsession. Midge's portrait scheme is a throwback to the callous, manipulative intentions of Gavin and his yearning for freedom and power: a longing for the past, when a man could seduce and violate a woman Carlotta and, for that matter, Judy , force her to have a child, and then abandon her.
Midge immediately suspects promiscuity when she spots Madeleine exiting Scottie's apartment--she can't even conceive of his romanticized, ideal fascination, nor the mysterious and beautiful quintessence magnified in the enigmatic Madeleine.
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