Vertigo by Katalin Makkai

Author:Katalin Makkai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Rear Window: Reconciled to knowing

The most significant psychoanalytic insights into Hitchcocks movies have been gained by training psychoanalytic concepts on his conspicuously rigorous use of subjective point-of-view narration.3 In its focus on the erotically charged aspects of looking and story-telling, psychoanalytic film criticism has illuminated the role in Hitchcocks movies of the scopic dimension of masculine sexual fear and desire in shaping the images of women as objects of desire or fearsome phallic mothers (or, as in Psycho, objects of desire and phallic mothers). In short, it is as a theory of sexual difference and erotic power, of romance and terror, that psychoanalysis has been put to work. As I have noted above, Hitchcock was one of the two leading examples (along with Josef von Sternberg) of the cinematic male gaze in Laura Mulveys invention of that concept in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey there brings Jacques Lacans development of Freuds idea about the scopophilic dimension of the ego, its intertwining of looking and knowing along an axis of desire, to bear on the relation between the domineering, sadistic component of masculine specular identity (the eye/I of sight) and the submissive, masochistic image of the woman who is its target, and sometimes its casualty. Mulveys most general aim is to demonstrate that images of women in film provoke castration anxiety in the male spectator and thereby set in motion pictorial and narrative operations geared to allay that anxiety – to reaffirm masculine authority beyond the shadow of a doubt – by bringing the threat of castration back under perceptual control. Her deep cinematic point, however, is that the male protagonist in classical Hollywood narrative cinema serves, in virtue of his power to control the direction of the gaze and the trajectory of the narrative, as the idealized surrogate for the male audience members who have come to the theater to gaze desirously at images of women but who are at the same time made anxious by the prospect of looking at s/he who is castrated or castrating. By means of identificatory mechanisms that Mulvey explains in classical psychoanalytic terms, the moviegoer can both suffer and master the anxiety attendant upon his scopophilic desires by imaginarily taking on the agency of the idealized protagonist. The movie screen, in this light, becomes the shield of Perseus on which the fearsome image of woman can be both gazed at and protected against.

Rear Window, made five years before Vertigo, is exhibit A in Mulveys argument. Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) is wooing L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart), a middle-aged adventure photographer who bears the stump nickname “Jeff.” Since Lisa is beautiful, funny, and smart, Jeffs inexplicable commitment to evading marriage to her suggests some underlying sexual anxiety on his part. The castration anxiety at the core of Jeffs ambivalence is symbolized by his cast-bound leg, which is simultaneously helplessly erect and immobilizing. The emasculating injury that has put Jeff in a cast also sets the narrative of Rear Window in motion: because his broken

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