Positively the Same Dame: An Obsession with "Vertigo"

Дата публикации: 30-06-2026 08:00:00

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958).In the history of film criticism, as well as everywhere else, complaints about how there’s nothing new are nothing new. “The prevalence of remakes and allusions among recent Hollywood releases might be taken as a sign of the exhaustion of form in the contemporary cinema,” Ann Cvetkovich wrote in 1991, a year that yielded reduxes of Father of the Bride and Cape Fear; seven years earlier, in 1984—which brought Out of the Past out of the past and into a new adaptation—Frederic Jameson diagnosed in the pastiche of early 1980s neo-noir “the insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode.” The sentiment has been remixed and repeated countless times in the decades since. Nothing is sacred, but some movies are close. In 2023, when a rumored remake of Vertigo starring Robert Downey Jr. was in the works, an article in Variety asked, rhetorically, “You don’t remake a film where the whole hook of the remake is that the original is so monumental, so transcendent, with such a mythic place in the culture that there’s no way it could ever be matched. So why try?”The same question could, of course, be asked of Scottie Ferguson, the protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller, who makes the fatal mistake of trying to remake an unmatchably monumental, transcendent, and mythic woman from his past. It could also be asked of the many filmmakers who have already made their own versions of Vertigo, in some cases—Brian De Palma, Park Chan-wook, Christian Petzold— multiple times over.Some of those versions, like Petzold’s Phoenix (2014) or Park’s Decision to Leave (2022), can be understood as straightforward remakes, with a change of scenery or perspective; others take up “the small scenes, the fragments of the mirror,” as Scottie aptly describes the components of his beloved Madeleine’s dream, and recombine those quotations with other material. Even if a Hitchcock remake doesn’t have the same box-office guarantee as a Marvel movie, paying homage to the master might yield returns in cultural capital. But it could also make you look cheap: Cvetkovich’s comment about “remakes and allusions” was in the context of her revisionist reappraisal of De Palma’s 1984 Body Double, a doubly double reworking of Vertigo and Rear Window. After getting ripped apart for ripping off Psycho in 1980's Dressed to Kill—“De Palma does not so much ‘send up’ Hitchcock as copy him as slavishly as Eve Harrington copies Margo Channing in All About Eve,” Andrew Sarris wrote in his review—De Palma dared even his defenders to point out that he was being derivative not only of Hitchcock, but also of himself; the borrowed camera moves from Carrie and the pneumatic drill on loan from Scarface suggested a filmmaker taking inventory.“What’s so compelling about Vertigo is it’s making a movie about what a director does, which is basically create these romantic illusions and make you fall in love with it and then kill it twice,” said De Palma in conversation with Noah Baumbach in 2013. The overkill in that observation belies a perversely enabling fatalism; filmmakers committed to working in the Vertigo extended universe return to its premise not with hopes of returns of any kind, but with something like the opposite, a hopeless obsession that really can’t end well, or at all. The obsession with Vertigo is an obsession not only with the idea of a lost object but with the whole cultural history of obsession with a lost object: Vertigo itself, after all, was temporarily lost, disappearing from view for decades, in Hitchcock’s private control, before reappearing on video in 1983. Only after re-emerging from obscurity was it considered among the best films of all time, officially snagging the top designation in 2012 via the decennial Sight and Sound poll. Since the medieval poet Petrarch, or perhaps since Dante before him, or perhaps since the mythic stories of Orpheus and Apollo, male figures have been losing the women they love only to recover them through art. Ideally, this recovery sublimates romantic loss into aesthetic gain: Sexual disappointment is temporary, but poetic immortality is forever. And while in theory any loss could be thus sublimated, in practice it has to be a woman.“This text is addressed to those who know Vertigo by heart,” wrote Chris Marker in 1994, concluding an essay in the French film magazine Positif. “But do those who don’t deserve anything at all?” Memories of Madeleine suffuse Marker’s sci-fi cine-roman La Jetée (1962), whose protagonist is selected by his captors for time-travel experimentation, which requires subjects with “strong mental images,” “because of his obsession with an image from the past”—not just “an image,” of course, but an image of a woman’s face that he remembers seeing as a little boy, an image he knows by heart. His desire to see the image again is what drives the film’s plot: an obsession with an image of a woman from the past is, in this and other instances, indistinguishable from narrative itself, or with an illusion of narrative control even when we’re at the mercy of larger forces such as Nazi scientists or our own psychic drives. In the famous example Freud used to describe repetition compulsion, a child throws out a wooden spool, crying “fort!” (gone), then reels it in, crying “da!” (here); repeating this action consoles him in the absence of his mother. In reality, she comes and goes as she pleases; in fantasy, she’s on his leash. At the beginning of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017)—Vertigo if it were a romantic comedy—fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock is playing a grown-up version of fort/da: Haunted by grief for his mother, for whom he sewed a second wedding gown, he’s been dressing up and then throwing out a series of live-in model-girlfriends. Only when he finds Alma, who not only feeds her “hungry boy” but goes on to set the terms of mother–son roleplay, can he be free from his own game. It’s as if Vertigo had ended with the scene where Midge coos “Mother’s here” to Scottie in the hospital, as if this could cure him, as if the woman he longed to see again were literally the first woman he ever saw, and as if he really could see her in someone else.Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958).But the story rarely ends so happily. The plot of Vertigo, itself an adaptation of the 1954 Boileau-Narcejac novel D’entre les morts [The Living and the Dead], was first substantively retold—as opposed to obliquely echoed, as in La Jetée—in De Palma’s 1976 Obsession, where the protagonist, who believes his wife died years before, discovers a woman who looks just like her; as in Vertigo, what seems like a ghost story is the result of a conspiracy masterminded by another man. Most recently, it’s been retold in 26-year-old Curry Barker’s debut feature Obsession, released this year and most directly influenced not by the De Palma film of the same name but by an episode of The Simpsons; it’s also been described by one of its stars as “the Gen Z Fatal Attraction.” And yet Obsession (2026) shares the premise of Obsession (1976) and its source: A man is driven crazy by a woman who is compelled, by real or purported supernatural forces, to play a male-scripted role. (The protagonist also has a besotted, long-suffering female friend, who gets treated even worse than Midge.) Whether or not Barker has ever seen Vertigo, it seems as though he’s made a confusing wish to become Hitchcock and Madeleine at once: possessed by his cinematic ancestor’s spirit, compelled to repeat his thematic itinerary in a trance. Or, perhaps, with his eyes wide shut. A common complaint among detractors is that Obsession’s form is as dark and ugly as its content, and most striking about Barker’s film as a Zoomer rendition of Vertigo—a film about the pleasure and pain of looking, exemplary for Laura Mulvey of the camera’s male gaze—is its lack of interest in images. While Hitchcock gave us picture postcards of San Francisco and its environs, the anonymous streets of the unnamed town in Obsession could be anywhere (they are, in fact, in Burbank). While De Palma’s Body Double doubles down on Hitchcock’s obsession with images—multiplying and manipulating them via TV, VHS, and telescope; tripling the rotations of Vertigo’s famous 360 kiss cam—Barker pivots away from video. Characters use their phones exclusively for calling and texting, as if Instagram and TikTok didn’t exist; versions of Reddit and ChatGPT do, but they fill the laptop screen exclusively with text. Barker’s insistently center-framed shots take a central conceit of Vertigo—that the visual field has been composed so that the viewer sees exactly what they need to see—and literalizes it: We have nowhere to look but straight ahead. When Scottie looks at Madeleine looking at her doppelgänger Carlotta’s portrait, Madeleine’s chignon is done at the back of her neck, while Carlotta’s is at the side; Madeleine’s nosegay sits beside her on the bench, pointed back at Scottie, while Carlotta’s, in her lap, faces forward. He doesn’t notice that this tableau has been set up so that he can take in every detail at once; he doesn’t realize that he has been set up. “I wanted to shoot this center-composed and have extra head space because I wanted it to feel uncomfortable in its loneliness,” Barker told Variety. “There’s something about center-composed that forces you to look and pulls you in in a way that traditional composition may not.” Yet what could be more traditional in the history of cinema, and what more reflective of the vision of Vertigo, than forcing the viewer to look, the filmmaker framing his obsession as our own? Barker’s flat-footed forcefulness betrays a similarly narrow perspective to that of his friend-zoned antihero, who resorts to black magic before really trying anything else.As of this writing, Obsession has earned $370 million at the box office against its $750,000 budget, and Barker has been tapped to direct the next installment of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. Barker has called the 1974 original “really good for its time,” a backhanded compliment that hit some horror fans like a sledgehammer to the temple. Yet perhaps such irreverence is appropriate. “This is a field,” Carol Clover has said of horror film, “in which there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants; a world in which, therefore, the meaning of the individual example lies outside itself.” The same may be true of any image from the past with which we’re obsessed; after all, the woman Scottie knew as Madeleine never existed. It’s fitting, in that sense, that Barker’s favorite TCM is the 2003 remake: the very first horror film he ever saw. Sometimes the original is a copy. As Judy tells Scottie when he accosts her at her apartment, after he’s told her she reminds him of someone he knew before, “I heard that one before, too.”

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