Orpheus Themes in Vertigo
Source: “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Sir Edward John Poynter (1826-1919); Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958; design by Joel Gunz.
AS THE SON OF THE GOD APOLLO AND THE MUSE CALLIOPE, the hero Orpheus—a magically-gifted singer and lyre player—meets a bizarre death: Bacchic maenads in northern Greece rend his body to pieces, leaving his decapitated head to continue singing as it floats down the Hebrus river. What brought him to this end? He had found that he could not replace his deceased, beloved Eurydice with other women; his abject condition inspired other men too to reject their heterosexuality and it incited the sexually-deprived female devotees of Dionysus (Bacchus) to rage.
These events are paralleled in Alfred Hitchcock’s modernist-mythical Vertigo (1958). For example, while Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) does not take this homosexual turn after he loses Madeleine, he too cannot accept the replacement love of Judy Barton (Kim Novak) or Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes). Deprived of his beloved Madeleine (also Kim Novak), he is left sad, alone and, perhaps, emasculated.[1] Likewise, the twice-dying Eurydice—identified in Greek myth as a nature nymph, typically a Dryad or tree spirit—prefigures Madeleine. When the film’s couple visit the redwoods, Madeleine disappears behind a tree, an event that both foreshadows her death and signals the symbolic linkage with her mythic forbearer’s Dryad status. Scottie even poses as a soft-spoken Latin teacher, lecturing on the scientific name of the coastal redwoods, “Sequoia Sempervirens.” This unusual event can signal recollection of Ovid and Vergil, Roman authors of the epic style whose descriptions of the myth are discussed next; however, the pairing of Scottie and Madeleine with Dante and his wise, underworld guide Vergil offers another intriguing intertextual linkage.[2] Scottie’s emphasis on their “always green, ever-living” quality codes him as an optimistic Orpheus, while Madeleine cuts a pessimistic Eurydice. She stares blankly as if an underworld shade (ghost or spirit) and speaks “of all the people who have been born and have died while the trees went on living.” The film’s evocations of the story run far deeper than this set piece.
The marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice ends on the same day it begins. On the appointed day of their wedding, a poisonous snake kills Eurydice as they walk across a meadow. Vergil and Ovid narrate key expressions of this story. In Ovid’s account (Metamorphoses, Book 10, vv. 1-85), the forlorn Orpheus decides to risk his own death and enter the underworld to win her return to earth. He proceeds through the portal of a cave, negotiating the dangers of the nether geography. Arriving at the palace of the underworld’s monarchs, Hades and Persephone, he treats them to a concert of his bewitching musical skills and asks in return for Eurydice’s release and resurrection. Persephone is charmed, and with her encouragement, Hades agrees to send the shade of Eurydice back with her intrepid husband. However, the underworld hosts impose a prohibition (legem) upon the hero that governs his wife’s ability to complete the journey to earth: Orpheus must walk in front of Eurydice and “not turn his eyes back at her” (ne flecta retro sua lumina, Ovid, Met. 10.51), even to confirm her whereabouts, until the return to the sunlit world is completed. Unfortunately, he fearfully loses the ability to obey their command in the last segment of the journey: he turns and watches the shade of Eurydice “fall back” to its resting place. Charon refuses Orpheus a second boat ride to Hades and Persephone, and for a week the hero nourishes his body only on “worry, anguish of the soul, and tears” at the bank of the Styx before completing the journey to earth alone.
In a pastoral poem titled the Georgics (an influence on Hitchcock’s 1956 The Trouble with Harry, through the film’s source novel), Vergil famously intensifies Orpheus’ state of turbid emotions in the event of his second loss of Eurydice.[3] At the cave opening in this account, a fit of “madness suddenly overcomes the reckless lover” (subita incautum dementia cepit amantem, v. 488), and, devastated by the shade’s disappearance, the grieving hero travels the world’s compass points “seeking out his taken Eurydice” (raptam Eurydicen … querens, vv. 419-29). He experiences extreme sorrow for seven months before meeting his violent end at the hands of the maenads. Similarly, Vertigo’s figure of the wandering and ghost-searching Scottie undergoes extreme loss and grief when Madeleine appears to commit suicide, and the portrayal may be molded on Vergil’s account.
Though the hero’s exploits are only sparsely referenced in the early Greek myth of Homer’s era, over time Orpheus becomes well-attested in Greek and Roman art, literature and even religious ritual where he becomes the focus of a mystery cult called Orphism. Byzantine and Medieval Europe writers and artists used his descent to illustrate the Descensus Christi ad Infernos (Christ’s Harrowing of Hell).[4] He is well-represented in fine art and opera during the Renaissance and early modern periods. His core associations with music and poetry allow his name to become “a symbol of the arts in general and, by extension, social harmony and civilization itself. Artistic depictions of Orpheus most commonly portray him charming the animals and trees with his lyre.”[5] With his popularity glowing ever brightly, Orpheus becomes the most attested figure of classical myth in the early twentieth century, a period of artistic self-consciousness that is part of Modernism.[6] In another mythic layer, we find him joining the Argonaut quest for the Golden Fleece––a theme also available to explore in Vertigo (Scottie following “the Madeleine of the-golden-hair”). As a sailor of the Argo, he produces music to drown out the song of the ship-destroying Sirens as the crew passes by their bluff, a danger Odysseus negotiates differently a generation later. Madeleine, too, suggests a dangerous Siren who leads a man astray, but her Orpheus analogue has no countervailing music to defend himself.
Sources: Liebig educational card, c. 1900; Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958; design by Joel Gunz.
Orpheus is the subject of several of the earliest works of opera, including the novel form’s first masterwork: Claudio Monteverde’s sublime L’Orfeo, which premiered in 1607, with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio. Over seventy operas or related works featuring the singing hero have since been composed and produced in concert halls across the world from 1600-2020.[7] The French composer Jacques Offenbach first produced his canonical Orphée aux enfers / Orpheus in the Underworld in 1858 and then heavily revised it in 1874. With a libretto prepared by Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy, the comic opera presents the hero’s underworld journey as a satiric romp through classical myth at large. Though differing in tone from the somber Vertigo, Offenbach’s work provides an example of how the presence of the singer-musician hero often yields effects of artistic self-consciousness and metatheatre. In fact, Ovid himself features this motif when he makes Orpheus the internal narrator in parts of his Metamorphoses. In this role, the hero relates several stories that apply to Vertigo, such as the tales of Pygmalion—another artist figure—and of Io and Argos, correspondences that I’ve explored in further detail in a 2021 essay.[8]
Vertigo’s mythic hall of mirrors belongs to this Orphic tradition.[9] As detailed below, the film’s French source novel, D’entre les morts (Among the Dead), repeatedly refers to the fabled lovers and thereby invites its readers to reflect on its symbolic resonances in the context of other mentions of classical mythology and images of antiquity peppered through the novel. Orphic referentiality continues in the first screenplay draft, written by Maxwell Anderson (details also below). Though overt mentions of the story appear to drop out of the pre-production when Anderson left the project, there is no reason to relegate Hitchcock to the status of a Modernist who somehow was blind to a central symbol of his artistic era. In fact, he creatively and even brilliantly contributes to the story’s contemporary relevance through cinematic expressionism––doing so in a fashion that stands alongside his reworking of the Pygmalion motif when Scottie remakes Judy. The operation by which the director “puts the audience through” the Orphic trauma defines a key feature of his storytelling and serves as a touchstone of his abilities to signal mythic symbolism throughout the movie and across his oeuvre.[10]
The 1950s was a prominent decade for depictions of Orpheus in cinema. Jean Cocteau directed his arthouse Orphée in 1950. A second French production was released the same year—the touching surrealist-romantic-tragedy Black Orpheus (directed by Marcel Camus), set in a Brazilian favela amid Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival.[11] The Hollywood movie retitled The Fugitive Kind (1959 / 1960, directed by Sidney Lumet) adapts Tennessee Williams’s play, Orpheus Descending (1957), to whose screenplay Williams himself contributed.[12] The melodrama, which is set in the Deep South and stars Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, and Joanne Woodward, did not fare well at the box office (it challenged audiences a bit like the 1958 Vertigo did), but The Criterion Collection digitally restored its print and rereleased it with an essay appreciation. Beyond these productions from the era of Vertigo, establishing the relevance of the story at that time, a game of “spotting the Orpheus and Eurydice archetype in film” offers a cinephilic pastime.[13] Thus, the myth was unavoidably in the air as Hitchcock’s own take on the Orpheus story took root.
Yet, a more direct connection exists between the myth and the movie. Vertigo is an adaptation of the previously-noted 1954 French novel, D’entre les morts (Among the Dead), the work of the prolific team of authors Pierre Boileau (1906 –1989) and Thomas Narcejac (the pen name of Pierre Ayraud, 1908 –1998). That work frequently references Orpheus and Eurydice (particularly the latter); its hero, Roger Flavières, twice loses his lover Madeleine / Renée in a story that provides numerous details that Hitchcock absorbed in his adaptation (Madeleine’s gray dress is an example). The tragic story provided the symphonic key to the film, for, despite its narrative “wandering” (most importantly, Samuel Taylor’s late introduction of the positive figure of Midge) the tone remains somber and mournful. The linkages of the Orpheus myth with Vertigo have provided a topic of fruitful exploration. One scholar has considered the mythic symbolism in a darker psychoanalytic framework, while another very different reading finds in Scottie’s behavior a profound expression of spiritual love.[14] In a variation of the classical myth, but following here the lead of Cocteau’s’ 1950 Orphée, Scottie improves on Orpheus because he proves able to regain Madeleine after she first dies for a brief period when he discovers Judy.[15] In other parallels, Scottie and Madeleine move about in a fashion that repeatedly invokes an underworld journey. Scottie loses Madeleine soon after their first kiss, while Orpheus loses his bride on their wedding day; Scottie loses the restored Madeleine again upon their first intimacies. In the first instance, when Hitchcock presents Scottie retreating from the San Juan Battista mission complex from a high angle shot, in addition to indicating Scottie’s loss of control in this crisis, the perspective initiates a variation of an underworld passage (the “catabasis” in mythic criticism) with multiple stages.[16] The optical effect suggests that he is retreating from the earth, as if reduced to an ant who lives underground, an image supported by the dark interiors of the church and catacomb-like tower staircase. After the coroner’s grim inquest, he suffers a nervous breakdown whose start is represented as an animated nightmare in which he walks toward a dark portal of an open grave. Another dream image presents a somber Elster coupled with the younger, necklace-adorned Carlotta (a role later credited to Joanne Genthon); the judgmental pair is interpolated into the closing scene of the inquest. The couple here suggests a variation of the common figure of Hades in his court aside his wife, the younger Persephone, figures whom Orpheus approaches to seek Eurydice’ release. Finally, reduced to a silhouette, he falls from the mission tower, plunging toward its clay tiles, which dissolve into a void of white light representing an emotional abyss in which he remains after he wakes up. He is thereafter hospitalized as a catatonic patient. His physician tells Midge that he suffers from “acute melancholia, together with a guilt complex.” Upon his discharge, Scottie returns to Madeleine’s former haunts, searching for her, refusing to believe that she is in fact dead. In Vergil’s Georgics, as noted, Orpheus spends a duration again searching for Eurydice after her disappearance; after returning without her, he sobs inconsolably for months.
As mentioned above, the project of identifying presences of Orpheus and Eurydice in Vertigo begins with the film’s source novel, D’entre les morts. In the novel, Flavières writes “A Eurydice ressuscitée [to the rescued Eurydice]” on a gift card that he presents to her along with a cigarette lighter purchased in a jewelry story. Perhaps the gift conveys the Hellish notion of fire that contributes to the symbolism. In Maxwell Anderson’s 1956 screenplay, titled with the Keats phrase “Darkling I Listen,” the first adaptation of the novel for the film project, the Scottie antecedent Roger Kilrain has Eurydice’s name engraved on the lighter itself in his gift. The gift prompts Madeleine to begin a conversation about the mythic lovers, including her line “Eurydice brings fire too. From Hades. Hell fire.” While, in the novel, Flavières stays in Marseilles when he discovers Renée’s presence there, Anderson’s Roger Kilrain brings back his Renee (sic) from Mexico City, an action that more closely aligns with Orpheus’s labor.[17] In the subsequent scenarios developed by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, the gifted lighter motif is not retained, and mention of the mythic figures falls to the wayside.[18] On the other hand, the glowing fireplace in Scottie’s apartment provides an exceptional replacement for the motif of the male protagonist using a fire object to demonstrate his kindling erotic desire; and its enveloping Keatsian poignance suggests that he may be following Anderson’s nudge of the project towards this direction via its demonstrative title.
The film’s production files in Hollywood’s Margaret Herrick Library (which include Anderson’s screenplay) provide a further clue as to how the Eurydice paradigm was retained in a non-literal way. A note dated December 31, 1956, suggests that Coppel continued to work at least casually on the new scenario even to that point in time, for the draft he and Hitchcock worked on together since September was officially completed in November. Thus, Hitchcock remained open to modifications, as he would in fact well into 1957 as the process started up again with Taylor for the (second) screenplay iteration.[19] In that December note, a suggested scene is located inside a psychiatrist’s office where Scottie is receiving therapy. (Hitchcock references, too, completed “psychiatric research” in his December 4, 1956, letter to Maxwell Anderson.) Later, this sequence materializes in the form of the hospital sequence involving Midge and Scottie’s doctor (Raymond Bailey). But in the discarded expanded sequence, a Dr. Reiner tells Scottie that he suffers from a “guilt complex working through your subconscious mind. You consciously blame yourself for her death. You subconsciously must bring her to life—and then you will have no further cause of the guilt.”[20] The mythic theme here becomes now less heavy-handed, but the paradigm of resurrecting a beloved is retained as a motif of therapy.
It is not immediately evident what it means to “subconsciously bring her to life,” and the screenplay would evolve from this technical explanation to the briefer conversation Midge has with Scottie’s doctor about how the patient remains in love. However, the event of bringing the lost lover back evolves cinematically through Scottie’s displayed behavior rather than as the activity of mental therapy. For example, Scottie may be said to remain inside his nightmare’s underworld journey during his hospital recovery, where he searches her out amid the shadows (the “subconscious” theme). He is not available to Midge’s promptings because he is psychically probing the hallways of death for her, a motif paralleling how Vergil’s Orpheus frantically, but fruitlessly, searches hell and highwater for her.[21] Then the sequences after his hospital convalescence flip the interiorized search into an external one. Scottie no less relentlessly than in his shamanistic journey looks for her in visits to her gravesite and other haunts. At the seashore, Madeleine says that she “doesn’t want to die,” and Scottie assures her that he will save her. He remains steadfast to this promise as a Vergilian hero.
If Scottie’s state of tortured emotions is constructed from the idea of retaining the Eurydice theme as a form of psychological therapy, his recovery becomes synonymous with the reclamation of Madeleine as Judy. Intransigent, Scottie wills her physical rebirth in the form of another woman, with the ironic twist that Judy, in fact, acted as Madeleine earlier. This idea is validated by Scottie’s usage of the word “cure” late in the film, for it clarifies Scottie’s goal in driving Judy back to San Juan Bautista. Now that he has successfully brought her back, following the advice of the left-out scene with his psychiatrist, he can now emotionally let her go in the designated remedy; in a tragic irony, her symbolic death takes the form of a physical one. Indeed, the return cures Scottie’s malady of acrophobia, a problem whose needed solution is discussed as early as the first sequence in Midge’s apartment, when Scottie recalls his doctor’s advice that “only another emotional shock could do it and probably wouldn't.” (In the following scene, he also mentions the idea of Elster needing a “psychiatrist, psychologist, neurologist, psychoanalyst, or plain family doctor.”) Scottie says on the belfry, “I loved you, Madeleine,” putting the verb into the past tense, suggesting that he has been released from his debilitating desire. He utters his final cathartic words, “too late, too late, there’s no bringing her back,” just before the murder-guilty Judy falls and escorts the presumably final Madeleine of Scottie’s life to its resting place.[22]
Sources: “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Carl Andreas August Goos, 1830; Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958; design by Joel Gunz.
The ending of the film thus defines an interesting example of Hitchcock’s capacity to express mythic ideas through his own brand of storytelling, and its achievement is the product of his close work with the screenwriters to create the persona of the protagonist. Scottie’s classical heroism is accomplished through states of emotional and physical stress, collapse, and recovery. The portrayal is a noteworthy and original contribution to Modernism’s preoccupations with Orpheus. Hitchcock’s realization of this idea defines, too, an aesthetic improvement over Anderson’s adaptation of Flavières in the figure of Roger Kilrain. Scottie’s character arc effectively recapitulates the Orpheuses of Ovid and Vergil but adapts them for his own purposes. Brutally, Scottie is retraumatized at the moment of his therapeutic victory due to the overlap of psychological and physical events working in tandem. The effect is to locate Scottie in the climactic event of turning back to Eurydice: he is relieved to be finally re-entering earth, manifesting his hope that his loss complex is near resolution, but the very expression of this human impulse leads to his second forfeiture of her.[23] Thus, the character arc remains tragically operatic to the end, a fitting metaphor for an Orphic journey that effectively begins with the viewing of the Elsters at Ernie’s restaurant prior to their attending an opera. Incredibly, though Scottie does not attend this opera in the fashion that his character predecessors in D’entre les morts and “Darkling I Listen” do (events where Madeleine is first glimpsed), he nevertheless becomes centrally cast in a variation of Carmen or the like.
At the film’s conclusion, indeed, Scottie physically appears to be a shattered semblance of himself, and is, perhaps, ready to fall from the ledge to follow Judy. If so, he might utter Madeleine’s name as his body is torn asunder, just as the severed head of Orpheus recites the name of his lover as it floats down the river: the result not of angry Bacchic devotees, but of the unexpected presence of a Catholic nun in the belfry—another priestess of a dying and resurrecting hero-god. However, the film is uninterested in showing the audience Scottie’s resulting state and concludes on an ambiguous note. Possible endpoints—his return to madness, or his death by plummeting down, or the completion of his interrupted cathartic rehabilitation—coexist within the viewer’s imagination.
The motif of tragically looking back is suggested in another late sequence. Judy, dressed as Madeleine, asks Scottie to clasp her necklace. He sees her wearing it in a mirror and in effect loses Madeleine a second time, for Madeleine is dissolved permanently into Judy. Here, the mirror also “looks back” at its viewers, allowing the audience to participate in the famous Orpheus event. Scottie becomes frozen temporally and spatially when he notices the Carlotta necklace. Similarly, Ovid’s Orpheus becomes “stunned” at the cave portal in response to losing Eurydice. Ovid editorializes the event by stating that this reaction is the typical effect of a catabatic traveler who meets the three-headed watchdog Cerberus, a terrifying encounter that turns the intruder into “a stone” (Book 10, vv. 64-67).[24] Evidence for the notion that Hitchcock might have ruminated on this aspect of the myth is found in the placement of a statue of the motif in Mrs. Bates’ bedroom in Psycho (1960), an object that Lila Crane (Vera Miles) finds. The startled Orpheus stands with Cerberus beneath his legs.[25] Scottie has symbolically encountered the monster of his own three-headed lover: Judy, Judy as Madeleine, and Madeleine as Judy.
Source: Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, 1960; design by Joel Gunz.
Fiction, opera, poetry, and theater, especially of late as filtered through feminist perspectives, have provided opportunities to explore the range of Eurydice’s possible subjective states in her parts of the story, even as Hitchcock’s focus on Scottie retains the traditional perspective of the story as told from the male hero’s perspective, emotions, and choices. For example, Sarah Ruhl’s 2004 revisionist play Eurydice introduces the figure of Eurydice’s father with whom she is reunited in the underworld. The primary experiences then involve her choices and emotions about whether she wishes to leave him again and return with Orpheus; at end, she forces her husband’s backward look by calling out to him, an event that is partly motivated by fear about returning to the world and by her ambivalent desire to remain with her father. Thus, her female agency undoes the marriage that first separated her from this dear possession of filial love. Ruhl’s play was successfully adapted into an opera in 2021 (its original opening was delayed by the responses to Covid), with music composed by Matthew Aucoin in a production directed by Mary Zimmerman. Zimmerman’s impressive credits in theater and opera include many classical themes and textual adaptations, such as one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Broadway play that garnered her a 2002 Tony Award.
At the same time, it is possible to appreciate the contributions that Hitchcock makes to Judy’s persona as a Eurydice analogue, a development in line with the director’s most admirable literary sensibility, namely the ability to view most all his primary characters with understanding and respect. To be more specific, Vertigo invests in the character of Judy as Madeleine, and her exquisite construct of Mrs. Elster occludes a full appreciation of Judy’s personal perspectives and emotions. Most importantly, an exception to this occlusion is made in a moment of personal crisis. Alone in her apartment, Judy looks into the camera (a position in a Hitchcock film that is an empowering stance, given that she is then gazing at the director himself), rips up her goodbye letter, and accepts Scottie’s overture to begin a romantic relationship. Her presumed first lover––the “snake-in-the-grass” Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore)––abandoned her but she chooses not to abandon Scottie, a suitor with whom she has (apparently) fallen in love during her pretense of doing so for the sake of the murder plot. Her fate is thus a Sophoclean tragic and ironic one, and one that accrues more pathos and poignance than the more passive victim Eurydice of Ovid and Vergil. In the tripartite grammar of classical Greek tragedy, she first demonstrates aretê (performative virtue) as a skilled actress in the deceptive plot. But then her skills become a form of hubris (excessive pride) when the reality emerges that the woman she is playing will be brutally killed because of her maneuvers (her scream denotes this awareness). Though she in part redeems herself through her act of love that renders her vulnerable to police arrest and judicial execution, her tragic fall, or atê, is experienced literally as a fall from the tower: she pays for her moral crime in a place of God in a retribution that features one of His emissaries. Here a nun (the uncredited Margaret Bacon) spooks her near the spot where the true Madeleine was murdered (and she screams again).
In shaping her story in this way, it can be said that Hitchcock follows the lead of one of Broadway’s most successful classics-literate playwrights, and a 1939 essayist on how American realist drama can and should incorporate Athenian tragic principles: namely the author of the first screenplay adaptation, “Darkling I Listen,” Maxwell Anderson, a figure who, as noted, opened the door, too, to the Keatsian possibilities of the story.[26] For example, Anderson endows his Renee character with a stronger tragic arc then is found in Boileau-Narcejac’s Renée, a figure (in the second part of the novel) of post-WWII survivalism. Renée simply runs out of luck when Roger finds her, for the alcoholic and increasingly unstable Flavières at end strangles her in a fit of possessive madness before she can complete her plan to abandon him again. By contrast, the despondent Renee escapes her own more nobly drawn but also overly controlling Roger (Kilrain) and throws herself off Golden Gate Bridge unable to accept her current life of reliving the persona of Madeleine, especially given her earlier role in her murder. In turn, Judy’s fall from the tower also resolves her guilt but her powerful demeanor just prior to this accident presents her as courageously attempting to maintain control over the crisis in a resolve rooted in her proven feelings of love and even devotion to Scottie––an image of a doomed-to-disappear Eurydice fighting with every breath to return with her changed (that is suddenly turned-around) Orpheus.
Hitchcock understood that the important narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice belonged to the core of his own tale of ill-fated characters. He integrates the myth, not academically, through specific reference, but in ways that strongly support the film’s aestheticized design and intensify the viewer’s emotional investments. The result is an extraordinary expression of a story’s “metamorphosis.” If I may speak here for the charitable audience of this complex and sometimes polarizing film (versus “Bacchic audiences” who would happily render the transgressive Scottie limb from limb for his self-centered interactions with women), we Vertigophiles cannot help but keep looking back and emotionally re-enacting the painful ritual. However many times this viewer experience casts us into the Orpheus catastrophe, we’re enjoined into a quintessential Modernist event that simultaneously idealizes and condemns the past as a condition of the present.[27]
[1] In the nightmare scene of Vertigo, Scottie is presented as a disembodied head. It is tempting to consider how the late-career Hitchcock might have had fun with this image in his trailers for Frenzy (1972). A mannequin of him is seen floating in the Thames near where a murdered woman in the film is found. A close up of his head then speaks to the fourth wall from his prone position. Other promo material for the film includes production photos showing the director holding a plaster copy of his head in his hand. The macabre motif is an ironic Orphic image because it is not sexually deprived Bacchic women who kill a man, but a sexually frustrated man—Barry Foster—who kills women.
[2] In Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, part of his early Italian epic poem, The Divine Comedy, translated by Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1982) the author’s poetic persona is paired with the shade of Vergil in the role of a guide. The thirty-five-year-old Dante famously begins his descent into Hell with the verse “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way” (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita); here it is Scottie whose life journey is starting a second course while Madeleine evokes the visionary poet as a kind of Sibyl figure. Dante only briefly mentions Orpheus in his poem (Canto 4, v. 140); he remains silent and is seen in a grouping of philosophers that includes the Roman Seneca: in the redwood trees sequence, Scottie is suddenly a font of wisdom with his Latin tree identification. Leah Shwebel, “Dante’s Metam-Orpheus: The Unspoken Presence in the Divine Comedy,” Hirundo: The McGill Journal of Classical Studies 4 (2005-2006): 62-72, discusses the many markings of the heroic poet in Dante, especially as inflected by the Ovid and Vergil passages referenced here.
[3] Steven DeRosa, Writing with Hitchcock (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 134, discusses how, in John Trevor Story’s novel, also titled The Trouble with Harry, “the tramp is heard by the main characters ‘mumbling something from Virgil’––a likely reference to the poet’s Bucolics or Eclogues.”
[4] John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Syracuse University Press, 2000), 126, notes: “The cross traditionally carried by Christ in the harrowing of hell has been replaced by a harp, but its symbolic significance is the same. Both Orpheus’ lyre and the cross had magical power over the kind of the underworld, and both had been interpreted as manifestations or symbols of Logos.”
[5] Reid, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, II:774. For this forest image one can think about Scottie’s aforementioned appearance among the redwood trees in his descent-evoking day with Madeleine, a scene with its own eerie music.
[6] Jane Davidson Reid, with the assistance of Chris Rohmann, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 2:773-80, catalogues hundreds of appearances of Orpheus in twenty-six detailed pages. For a study of the poetic figure of Orpheus, see Charles Segal, Orpheus and the Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
[7] The most recent is Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, premiering at the Los Angeles Opera, a work discussed below. In a visit to London in the summer of 2022, I attended one of three operas dedicated to the Orpheus theme in production at the same time! The popularity of this mythic theme and of Vertigo perhaps drink from the same sustaining well. Gluck’s canonical Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) inverts the tragedy when the goddess Amore is so impressed by the lovers that she restores Eurydice after Orfeo turns to look at her. The opera features the well-known aria, “Che farò senza Euridice?" ("What shall I do without Euridice?"). Vertigo’s belltower nun has no such redemptive powers, though it is possible to imagine a revisionist operatic treatment in which she does.
[8] Mark W. Padilla, “Reading Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo Through the Myth of Io and Argos” in Haunted by Vertigo, edited by Sidney Gottlieb and Donal Martin (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2021): 17–37.
[9] Bernard Herrmann’s inspired score perhaps reflects the composer’s wish to honor the hero’s musical legacy, even though he more directly keys his score to Wagner’s Medieval operas. Vertigo’s score is often labeled Wagnerian because experts establish that it references Tristan und Isolde, specifically when Herrmann’s “Scène d’amour” melody quotes the Liebestod. The musical homage for example is featured in the film’s “Resurrection” sequence when Scottie and Judy begin to make love in her apartment. Tristan uses Medieval legend, but its connected themes of love, loss, and death are Orphic in nature, too, and Hermann was surely aware of the mythic legacy of the Vertigo project. Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), discusses the Herrmann score. Brown, as discussed below, authored an essay on the Orpheus myth in Vertigo.
[10] I am guilty of creating a bit of a cottage industry on the exploration of mythic correspondences and classical imagery in Hitchcock. In addition to the essay on the figures of Io and Argos referenced above, see Mark W. Padilla, Classical Myth in Four Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); “Hitchcock’s Textured Characters in The Skin Game,” Hitchcock Annual 21 (2017): 1–39; and Classical Myth in Alfred Hitchcock’s Wrong Man and Grace Kelly Films (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019).
[11] For a discussion of Cocteau’s Orphée, see Martin M. Winkler, Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 181-294. Irving Singer, Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 139, in his chapter on the director’s trilogy of films on the Orpheus theme, argues that “Cocteau creates images that are visual equivalents to the figurative devices that distinguish written poetry from prose. For him cinema is a modern extension through different technology of what poetry has been attempting all along. His reliance upon the fertile meaningfulness of classical mythology issues organically out of that [carpenter-like] conception.”
[12] I follow here Winkler, Ovid on Screen, 253-54. He discusses, too, other films in the Orpheus mold. It may be noted that Bernard Herrmann, composer of Vertigo’s score, controversially noted late in his life that Vertigo should have been set in steamy New Orleans and that the suave French actor Charles Boyer (in place of James Stewart) should have played Scottie. In this vein, it is interesting to think about locating Vertigo in the context of a Gothic Deep South whose venues the characters of Tennessee Williams’ often inhabit, another way to think about the film’s relationship to the playwright. In Vertigo, Scottie’s throbbing desire, the phallic symbol Coit Tower, and the curvy Novak evoke Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), whose original Broadway production included Barbara Bel Geddes (Midge in Vertigo) and Judith Anderson (Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca). The action of Cat is set in an old plantation of the Mississippi Delta, owned by Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon. The steamy film adaptation directed by Richard Brooks and starring Paul Newman (Professor Armstrong in Hitchcock’s 1966 Torn Curtain) and Elizabeth Taylor was released in 1958, the same year as Vertigo, but was a box office hit. Williams’s 1957 play, Orpheus Descending is also set in the steamy south, and relates to the Gothic South themes into which Herrmann tuned.
[13] See Jan Twarog, “Great Movies Inspired by The Myth of Orpheus And Eurydice,” June 9, 2020, Taste of Cinema; accessed February 17, 2021. http://www.tasteofcinema.com/tag/orpheus-and-eurydice/. The haunting Hiroshima Mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) is apropos in the Vertigo context given their shared mood and year-apart release.
[14] See Royal S. Brown, “Vertigo as Orphic Tragedy,” Literature/Film Quarterly 14.1 (1986): 32-43. Brown, in an insightful discussion of how the Orpheus myth is transferred from the French source novel to the film, focuses on initiation rituals that track Scottie’s progression from the symbolic state of a femininized Dionysian infant (embodied by Midge as Scottie’s “life mother”) to a masculinized Apollonian manhood whose psychology objectifies the feminine. These rites of passage advance Scottie through four developmental stages in ways supported by Herrmann’s score and by the alternation of “mythic” versus “non-mythic” sequences. In contrast, Walter Poznar, “Orpheus Descending: Love in Vertigo,” Literature/Film Quarterly 17.1 (1989), 60-64, argues against Brown’s idea that Scottie’s “vertigo is a symbol of the yearning for and fear of death.” Rather, in “placing … spiritual meaning on Scottie’s love,” he valorizes Scottie’s pursuit of the idea of Madeleine for it expresses “an extraordinary personal realization of the possibility of love between a real man and a real woman.” Poznar expectedly distances his reading, too, from the analysis of Robin Wood, while Brown expands on Wood’s assessment by incorporating Wood’s views into an Orphic framework. In Wood’s groundbreaking readings of Hitchcock, subsequently republished in revised form as Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989; 1965), Scottie’s “love for Madeleine becomes identified with his death-yearning” (p. 115); his vertigo is a symptom of his “desire for annihilation” and “to die in her place” (p. 118). Robin Wood’s essay, “Male Desire, Male Anxiety: The Essential Hitchcock,” in A Hitchcock Reader, second edition edited by Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague, 223-233 (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009; 1986), develops his psychoanalytical applications, especially as applied to ways in which the “desire drive” facilitates through romantic love the dominance impulses of the heterosexual man in his patriarchal culture.
[15] Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) includes the story twist that Orphée (Jean Marais) fails to maintain interest in his recovered Eurydice (Marie Déa) and finds the female character Princess / Death (Maria Casares) more intriguing. This theme is resonant with Vertigo’s presentation of Scottie, in the sense that the plainer Judy can evoke the recovered Eurydice but cannot match the appeal of the original, but dead, Madeleine.
[16] The etymology of the term “catabasis” is from two Greek words. Cata (or kata) means “down” and basis is from the word “to go.” For example, the opening of Plato’s the Republic begins with Socrates saying “I went down [katebên] yesterday to the port of Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon,” an adumbration of the parable of the cave story that will follow later. Hence the mythic term is ancient in its origins. This essay links several words using the cata- prefix. In addition to catabasis, there is “catacomb” (used in the next sentence, a word in fact from the Latin catacumbae (under-cemeteries); “catatonic” means “downward stretched” (or a downward tone held in tension with another); “catastrophe” means “overturn” and was used in the Greek to reference the conclusion of a tragedy or the turn of its plot, as, here, when Judy falls to her death or Scottie sees the necklace. Inversely, the term anabasis is the motion of “going up,” as when Orpheus leads Eurydice up from Hades, and as found in the word “analysis” (a breaking or loosening up, as in this essay’s analysis of the Orpheus theme) or “psychoanalysis” (the process of breaking open the soul). Cata and ana evoke together the film’s vertigo image, the disorientation of Scottie going up and down Midge’s stepladder.
[17] The north-south geographical axis in these versions perhaps evokes the notion of the southern space as exotic and foreign, a variation of the catabasis idea. It may be noted in this context that Flavières apparently practices law in Dakar (French Colonial Senegal) after Madeleine’s suicide and whence he returns after the armistice. Dakar, Marseilles (a port city known for its ethnic mixes), and Mexico City juxtapose the urban “norms” of Paris and San Francisco. When Flavières sees the crushed body of Madeleine before the old church at Seines, the narrator states that “he hated himself for being alive––if you could call it that. It was more like being in hell”: Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury, Vertigo / The Living and the Dead (New York: Dell, 1956), 73. Flavières mentions that he left Paris for four years by travelling to the southern French city of Toulouse, and then when he returns conveys to his doctor that he had a “practice in Dakar” (pp. 86-87).
[18] Anderson had seen Strangers on a Train (1951) and, given the object’s importance at the movie’s start, may have enhanced the lighter scene to connect with that film in his project for Hitchcock. But Hitchcock surely felt uncomfortable repeating such a motif in this overt way and agreed with the decision to leave the scene out. I argue in a developing monograph that Maxwell Anderson’s impact on the film requires much more theorization; many more of his screenplay / scenario contributions were retained in the final version than is often appreciated, and Anderson’s own standing as a deeply learned humanist-dramatist provided an important creative mentor to Hitchcock in some oblique ways. For example, it was Anderson’s title from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Darkling I Listen” that alerted the director to the Romantic opportunities in the story (Keats and Shakespeare defined two of his life-long favorite authors), a notion that remained in creative conflict with Hitchcock’s tendencies, however, to work inside a Freudian and Symbolist framework. See on this issue Krohn, Hitchcock at Work, 184-90. In this project, the pre-production bucks a number of myths about Hitchcock’s sometimes dismissive relationship with writers whose earlier contributions to a project were wholly ignored. Indeed, it is hardly logical given the way literary influences operate that the director could erase themes and ideas from earlier scripts from his mind; in the case of Vertigo, the Anderson traces are far more than palimpsestic. Important discussions of the making of Vertigo are found in Dan Auiler, Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, forward by Martin Scorsese (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), and Charles Barr, Vertigo (London: British Film Institute, 2002). The Keats title, “Darkling I Listen,” is, for example, marked in the film production when, as noted, Madeleine, hides behind a redwood tree and seems to disappear inside it, as if registering her Eurydice-like Dryad identity. In Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, the speaker refers to the perceived bird above him as a “light-winged Dryad of the tree / [who] In some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, / Singest of summer in full-throated ease (vv. 7-10).” The imagery of this canonical poem that Alfred and Alma surely knew evokes the “melodious plot” of Elster and Judy during the summery days of the film narrative.
[19] Hitchcock originally hired Anderson to provide him a screenplay without the first step of a detailed scenario, a hurry-up measure that the two men, in their correspondence, later agreed was a mistake. (Hitchcock, albeit a seasoned professional, was adapting to his new Paramount role as producer-director and juggling both this project and the ultimately unrealized Flamingo Feather, set in South Africa and developed by Angus MacPhail.) After Anderson’s submitted screenplay was put to the side, Hitchcock hired Coppel to rework the scenario; he then went back to still-under-retainer Anderson to produce a new screenplay based on this new premise. But Anderson in early 1957 dropped out of the project (albeit compensated with a handsome sum for his initial work), and Hitchcock hired Samuel Taylor to complete this step. The importance of Anderson’s “Darkling I Listen” for later drafts is much underappreciated in the scholarship on Vertigo, an aspect I seek to correct in a related project.
[20] The December 4 letter from Alfred Hitchcock to Maxwell Anderson is housed in the Vertigo files in the Margaret Herrick Library, Folder 195. The folder contains several script ideas, some in Hitchcock’s own handwriting. A cover note dated February 4, 1957, states that these documents were “Removed from Mr. H’s desk” on that day. Perhaps the insertion of a psychiatrist figure offered a way forward both to include and to hide the Orpheus and Eurydice theme. In MLH Folder 84-f.979, Hitchcock writes in “Notes to Sam Taylor” that he wanted “Additional closeups of Scottie to portray guilt complex.”
[21] There is precedence in Hitchcock for this image of Scottie’s convalescence. The (Jungian) phrase “guilt complex” hearkens back to Spellbound (1945) in its references and imagery to the troubled mind’s labyrinth. Its corridors relate to these invoked “halls of death.” One can recall here two, in the 1956 The Wrong Man, the ‘darkened world’ of Rose Balestrero, who is “buried under some kind of landslide... of fear and guilt” that is also a “maze of terror.” I am grateful to my editor, Joel Gunz, for these parallels.
[22] Scholars sometimes attribute film events to Hitchcock’s own personal experiences and emotions. Apropos here, Marilyn Fabe, “Mourning Vertigo,” American Imago 66.3 (2009): 343-367, argues that the compulsive need to rewatch the film and the desire to visit its shooting sites and referenced locations both stem from the same audience effect: the desire “to cling to the film” results from Hitchcock’s decision to “leave the audience in a painful state of … suspense.” This possibly “sadistic” manipulation suggests the director’s own inability to resolve loss, such as has been clinically found in sad patients whose weak attachment to a dead mother leads to the inability to truly love or mourn her. “… in a process not unlike projective identification, Hitchcock, by shocking us with Judy's precipitous death, perhaps transfers (projects) into the audience his own terror of devastating loss, mixed with uncontrollable feelings of aggression against the women who elicit his passion” (p. 365).
[23] I am grateful to my editor for recalling an apropos discussion of the late Ken Mogg of Scottie’s turning back to the nun. According to Mogg, the line, “I heard voices,” was looped by Kim Novak. See https://hitchinfo.net/main.html.
[24] Ovid’s implication is that such an underworld traveler would unlikely prove to be as brave as the hero Hercules, who intrepidly descended into Hades and kidnapped Cerberus to complete his twelfth labor.
[25] The bronze in Psycho is a copy of La Douleur d’Orphée / The Pain of Orpheus, by the French artist Charles Verlet (1953-1927). Orpheus, having dropped his lyre in fright, reaches up to the gods for help as he straddles a small Cerberus. Verlet’s inspiration for the piece must be Ovid’s phrase that Orpheus suffered “cura dolorque animi lacrimaeque” (worry, anguish of the soul and tears, Met. 10.75) when Charon bars him from reentry across the Styx at this moment. Note the overlap of the French title word Douleur and the Latin dolor! In the Psycho image, the intrepid Lila seeks the return of her sister Marion, but she will find in her catabasis to the fruit cellar only a skeleton of Mrs. Bates—not the promising shade of her loved one; grimly, her return from the underworld will be in the form of her mutilated body inside her buried automobile: though from Phoenix, she will not rise again as a living person.
[26] I discuss this larger role of Maxwell Anderson’s literary relationship with Alfred Hitchcock in a forthcoming manuscript. His published essay is titled “The Essence of Tragedy,” and is included in a collection of essays titled The Essence of Tragedy Other Footnotes and Papers (Washington, DC: Anderson House, 1939). Interestingly, two of his t plays completed in the decade in which he wrote “Darkling I Listen” were set in ancient Greece (Barefoot in Athens, 1951) and Rome (The Golden Six, 1958). On the eve of his death, his last Hollywood project was doctoring the script of the 1959 Ben-Hur. Anderson knew Shakespeare and Keats very well from a young age and his favorite Athenian tragedian was Sophocles. He owned copies of his plays as well as a copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, the first guide on how to compose proper tragedy. Anderson studied the “Greek language,literature, and philosophy” as part of his English literature curriculum at the University of North Dakota from 1908-1911 in eight courses from the classics professor Gottfried Hult: Alfred S. Shivers, The Life of Maxwell Anderson (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 38, On p. 265, Shivers happens to observe that Greek tragedy was often on his mind in the 1950s; in 1953 Anderson wrote consoling letters to a colleague who had lost his wife to cancer, offering the advice that he himself “invariably found consolation in the works of the Greek playwrights.”
[27] I am sincerely grateful for the important editorial advice of the editor, Joel Gunz. Throughout he helped clarify and augment the analysis, though all errors remain my own. This essay is a modified part of a longer manuscript I am developing on Vertigo currently titled “Classical Vertigo: Mythic Shapes and Contemporary Influences in Hitchcock’s Storied Film.” The points that the essay references as under development (e.g., the Golden Fleece and the role of Maxwell Anderson in shaping the story) are discussed there.
