ipl-logo

Women In Hitchcock's Vertigo

1024 Words5 Pages

I think few people would disagree that Hitchcock was the expert of suspense, his films have generated a lot of critical acclaim over time. However, the women in his films rarely come across well, most of the time his female protagonist are scheming, deceitful and manipulative. Hitchcock’s filmic narrative is rampant with misogyny, his female leads are always punished or killed off, to show spectators that his women always end up getting “what they deserve.”
In order to answer the question “Is Kim Novak’s portrayal of Madeline/ Judy in Alfred Hitchcock’s (1958) ‘Vertigo’ one of a Damsel in Distress or Manipulative Feme Fatale?”, I have researched and read a lot of books and papers to broaden my knowledge and address the question. ‘Vertigo’ made during the ‘Golden Era’ (1930-59) is a story of fixation and manipulation, the thriller that can be viewed as a romance, follows the narrative of Scottie and Madeleine/ Judy. Their lives are intertwined by several deceptions on both parts.
One of the first books I looked at was “Intimate Violence, Hitchcock, Sex and Queer Theory” by author David Greven. …show more content…

The essay takes a psychoanalytic stance to demonstrate “the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.” I found the paper extremely useful, having read it before and having revisited the paper I found that, while possible being slightly outdated due to it’s lack of other view points such as that of a queer spectator, the essay has a core four perceptions that runs throughout the film fetishized scopophilia, castration complex and powerful women, voyeurism and the notion that she famously coined the “male gaze”. Analysing both Kim Novak’s portrayal of both characters and her as a performer using the above ideas discussed in Mulvey’s essay really helped me develop some of the arguments that my essay question brought

Show More
Related
1456 Words | 6 Pages

In contrast to the twentieth century we still see some of this in our current day and ages. Contrasting portrayals of men and women in films leave us with the fact that we haven’t changed. Men and women are sought to have different gender roles within

Read More
766 Words | 4 Pages

1. In the novel, women are portrayed as mean and feared beings. They are somewhat compared to as evil monsters. An example of this in the passage is on pages 4 and 5. It says, “They sense she’s glaring down at them now, but its too late.

Read More
1028 Words | 5 Pages

Gender roles and marriage- a thematic approach Alfred Hitchcock was a successful English film director and producer. He was often known as “the master of suspense.” He filmed psychological thrillers, one of these thrillers include “Rear window” which in mostly all of his films, he portrays women to look and act a certain way. Two significant themes portrayed throughout this film include marriage and the gender roles within the film.

Read More
1647 Words | 7 Pages

This is suggested by Helen Simpson who stated that Carter centralises ‘latent content of fairy-tale’ is that women are objects of male desire hence patriarchal discourse establishes male supremacy to which Carter does this to challenge contemporary perspectives on the place of women by revealing the oppression that society inflicted. The Marquis is an overt example of male ownership of female bodies. Similarly, where Atwood exposes the harsh realities of oppressive patriarchy through the female body, Carter utilises the construct of the Marquis in the eponymous story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as a grotesque embodiment of patriarchal control. In her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Laura Mulvey coined the feminist term ‘male gaze.’ She argues that men are the audience and women are to embody the male perspective of women as objects of satisfaction.

Read More
994 Words | 4 Pages

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, published in 1962, tells the story of men in a psychiatric ward and focuses on two characters called McMurphy and Bromden, and their defiance towards the institution’s system. A critical factor in this novel are the women. The 1960’s played a significant role in changing the norms of social issues, and the perfect idea of women was changing too. Women were no longer just stay at home wives, but had their own voice in society, and many people did not agree with these untraditional views. Kesey’s representation of women in this novel illustrate them in a poor light that makes it obvious that they don’t fit the ideal womanly persona.

Read More
1431 Words | 6 Pages

With Rear Window (1954), Alfred Hitchcock proved himself to be one of the best directors of suspense thrillers filled with mystery and humour. He himself called the film his most cinematic one because it was told only in visual terms (Morrow), but it was also a challenging “editing experiment” as the entire film was shot from one place, Jeff’s apartment that overlooked his backyard. The Film follows L.B. Jeffries “Jeff” (James Stewart), a photographer confined to a wheelchair in his apartment after breaking his leg at work. He spends his days watching his neighbours and eventually suspects that one of them killed his wife. His caretaker, his girlfriend Lisa and his detective friend, at first unconvinced of his suspicion, eventually join him in his voyeurism and help him to solve the crime.

Read More
433 Words | 2 Pages

The movie Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock is considered by many critics to be one of the best American films. However, because the movie has an overly complicated plot, a confusing way of portraying characters and ideas, and several plot holes, it should not be. These elements take away from the movie and make it harder to understand and enjoy. The plot of Vertigo is more complicated than it needs to be and takes longer to build than necessary.

Read More
482 Words | 2 Pages

The film Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock employs various clever camera movements and sequences which seem to portray the main character’s state of mind. Right from the opening sequence the cinematography in this film had me intrigued. The viewer is show the red filtered eyes of a mysterious woman which zooms into a black void where animated colored rings spin and zoom to a menacing and mysterious sounding score, all of this provides the foundation for a film about illusions. The film also does a good job at using an unreliable main character who is oblivious to the trickery going on around him. The character of Scottie is flawed through his naivety and his investment in romance.

Read More
934 Words | 4 Pages

In Laura Mulvey’s article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she writes about the relationship between voyeurism, cinema, and gender. She begins by describing the concept of scopophilia, which means to gain pleasure from looking. She writes that scopophilia is inherently active/masculine, and that pleasure is derived from looking at other people as mere objects. On the other hand, the passive/feminine is derived from the experience of being looked at (pg.188). Mulvey sees this binary relationship between viewer and object being viewed as a part of our culture, and the greatest example of this is found in cinema.

Read More
1173 Words | 5 Pages

These quotes exemplify the dichotomy presented by the press. Although some articles conjure an image of feminine grace, there are still questions as to whether her overtly sexual film persona is too controversial for the time. By mentioning this contradiction, intrigue into the contentious material grows as does her

Read More
1000 Words | 4 Pages

Ridley Scott’s ‘female buddy movie’ Thelma and Louise centres around issues of male dominance and the freedom of release from society. Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) are women suppressed by the men in their lives. They take a vacation to escape for a few days and after an attempted rape and murder they end up fugitives on the run for their lives. This unintended event ends up being for them the best adventure of their lives, as they are able to divest from the rules of society and become the independent women they are. By subverting the traditional role of gender in the genre, the film shows how feminism impacted the film industry by challenging Hollywood and the gendered myths and social patriarchy, providing women with a voice, and changing how spectators view how women are looked at through women’s eyes and their experiences.

Read More
1743 Words | 7 Pages

This essay will critically examine on how the female figure is represented throughout a very “selective” media outlet (the film industry), and how society is depicted in the film medium. The chosen media text for analysis is The Hunger Games, a theatrical adaptation of the novel written by Suzanne Collins and directed by Gary Ross. The film is centred on Katniss Everdeen - a teenage girl who volunteers on behalf of her sister, to fight in the annual Hunger Games- and the male District 12 tribute, Peeta Mellark, with whom she shares quite an intense past. Both characters embark on a journey that will test their physical and emotional boundaries, while being hunted by the other 22 competitors who all fight for the same objective: survival.

Read More
774 Words | 4 Pages

However, film critic, Robin Wood, argues that ‘since Psycho, the Hollywood cinema has implicitly recognised horror as both American and familial’ he then goes on to connect this with Psycho by claiming that it is an “innovative and influential film because it supposedly presents its horror not as the produce of forces outside American society, bit a product of the patriarchal family which is the fundamental institution of American society” he goes on to discuss how our civilisation either represses or oppresses (Skal, 1994). Woods claim then suggests that in Psycho, it is the repressions and tensions within the normal American family which produces the monster, not some alien force which was seen and suggested throughout the 1950 horror films. At the beginning of the 60’s, feminisation was regarded as castration not humanization. In “Psycho” (1960) it is claimed that the film presents conservative “moral lessons about gender roles of that the strong male is healthy and normal and the sensitive male is a disturbed figure who suffers from gener confusion” (Skal, 1994). In this section of this chapter I will look closely at how “Psycho” (1960) has layers of non-hetro-conforming and gender-non conforming themes through the use of Norman Bates whose gender identitiy is portrayed as being somewhere between male and female

Read More
1521 Words | 7 Pages

The construction of a self-conscious female gaze is the prime objective of feminist theatres everywhere. British feminist theatre practice as elsewhere is an attempt made by women to claim their rightful space in the creative realm of theatre that was deliberately denied to them by patriarchy. The public gaze on women was always the male gaze, one that always wished to see women as objects. It was an ideological position that patriarchy sanctioned as the normal way of looking at women. Women were always the secondary sexual objects for the gratification of male sexual fantasies.

Read More
1240 Words | 5 Pages

Abstract: In most parts of the world, females have always been the victim of oppressive patriarchy and male chauvinism since ages. This problem has been represented by many people through various forms of creations be it art, literature or films. Films are the most popular visual mediums of entertainment through which a large segment of people can be approached. Like literature, a film is also a work of art which mirrors the society, it also depicts the reality of the society though it has some fictionality in it.

Read More

More about Women In Hitchcock's Vertigo

Related Topics

Open Document