Students Take Film Analysis to New Heights
Spoiler alert: This article will discuss the plot of Vertigo. If you haven’t seen the film, shame on you. Go watch it immediately and then meet me back here.
“The films that make you happy aren’t always the ones that force you to think,” says Douglas Bruster in discussing the work of Alfred Hitchcock. In the former category he puts lively thrillers like North by Northwest (“every dad’s favorite film,” according to Bruster), which is clever and well-crafted but essentially a mid-century Mission: Impossible. Solidly in the latter camp is the dark and philosophical 1958 classic Vertigo. Starring Jimmy Stewart as Scottie, a troubled former police detective infatuated with an elusive mirage of a woman, and Kim Novak as both the fantasy figure “Madeleine” and her real-world doppelganger Judy, Vertigo explores often uncomfortable themes of love and obsession against a symbolically rich San Francisco backdrop.
It is Vertigo’s brooding complexity and vast potential for interpretation that inspired Bruster, a professor of English at UT Austin, to teach a class devoted to its analysis: “Vertigo in Context.” In the spring of 2023 he guided a group of honors students through a close reading of the film and the creation of A Collage of Spirals: Analyzing Hitchcock’s Vertigo, an exhaustively researched and beautifully designed volume of essays exploring its artistic, cultural, and psychological elements.
Bruster’s research and teaching focuses on Shakespeare, drama, and literary history. After years of grading final papers and watching them pile up in his office uncollected by their authors, Bruster wanted students to have something more substantial to show for their work, something they could share with family and friends. He provided them with benchmarks for how to accomplish the book project but ultimately gave them free rein in terms of its content. Students not only came up with their individual essay topics and titles, but also the structural and visual design of the book. The essays are organized into four sub-categories: “Culture and Society,” examining the peculiar social landscape of 1950s America; “Scene and Setting,” which looks at the film’s aesthetic properties; “Theory,” which approaches the film from different theoretical frameworks; and “Characters and Acting,” a contextualization of the actors portraying the film’s central characters in the public perception of the time. Imagery from the film is used throughout to highlight chapters and illustrate the ideas discussed.
Students tackled an array of subjects in their essays. Some explored the meanings behind Hitchcock’s use of circular motifs and Catholic imagery. Some drew on influences like gothic fiction and Freud’s concept of the uncanny. Others brought observations specific to their studies and interests. A linguistics student focused on Kim Novak’s use of contrasting dialects in her performance of the upper-class Madeleine and lower-class Judy characters. Visually inclined authors scrutinized the film’s colors schemes and costume designs.
“It was really organic,” says Bruster. “I almost cried when I looked at the final results, I was just so very proud of what the students were able to do and how talented they are.”
In addition to the essay collection, students also produced a shot catalog detailing length, setting, camera angles, and other cinematographic elements for every shot in the film (1,154 in total). This was used both to reference specifics in the essays and to guide classroom discussion. As the class dissected the movie scene by scene, Bruster found himself explaining mundane details of mid-20th-century America life, like how phonebooks worked, to his often baffled students.
“1958 might as well be the Roman Empire,” he says. “It’s so distant.”
Even more foreign to the young audience were many of the cultural differences, including the restrictive gender expectations of the day, as well as the more languid pacing of the storytelling itself, a reflection of a less instantaneous era.
Perhaps the most culturally startling moment comes toward the end of the film. Having lost Madeleine and found Judy, who shares Madeleine’s features but none of her regal glamour, Scottie fixates on transforming Judy. Pleading with Judy to dye her auburn hair to Madeleine’s icy blonde, he utters the line that made Bruster’s students gasp, “Please, it can’t matter to you.”
“I don’t think the line was written in an unthoughtful way,” says Bruster. “We are supposed to be watching a man immersed in his obsession. This is a film that’s been attempted to be remade a half dozen times under one title or another and it’s never succeeded. And it’s because that kind of obsessive moment, perhaps one of the last gasps of a particularly male moment in culture, is frozen into tragedy on the screen.”
In some cases, students’ unfamiliarity with the past allowed them to approach Vertigo from a vantage point unavailable to earlier audiences. For instance, to those who knew Jimmy Stewart through his long career of playing more or less decent fellows, his casting as Scottie would have instantly rendered the character more sympathetic. But for a generation without such associations, Scottie can come across as a threatening and controlling person with a real potential for violence. Such is the perspective of one student author, who argues that Scottie can be seen not just as a hapless victim of others’ plots but also as the cause of his own suffering who in turn inflicts suffering onto Judy/Madeleine.
In addition to referencing the spiral motif seen throughout the film, the title of the student anthology — “A Collage of Spirals” — aims to remind the reader that Vertigo is a film resistant to any single interpretation. It must instead be approached from multiple perspectives and disciplines without the expectation that these will converge into a unified whole.
Whether he’s teaching Hitchcock or Shakespeare, Bruster strives to encourage students to think deeply about the work rather than simply absorbing and reproducing the ideas of previous critics.
“It’s always my goal as a group to render ourselves capable of entering into a conversation with these great works,” he says. “And I think the class gave them the kind of experience that maybe more of our classes need to provide, which is taking research so seriously that they’re collaborators with the professors rather than disciples or apprentices. That we’re doing something together.”