![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Was it a ghost? Was it fun?
I just got back from seeing Vertigo (1958) in 70 mm at the Somerville. I hadn't seen it since high school despite reading the source novel between then and now. My mother feels this movie would be infinitely improved if James Stewart fell from a great height at the end.
I am rapidly coming to the disgruntled conclusion that it may be impossible for me to see Psycho (1960) in a theater anywhere in this town and not have the audience laugh inappropriately, because there were people tonight who snickered their way through Vertigo just as loudly and mystifyingly as they did through The Birds (1963). Judy's painful, resigned "If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?" isn't a comic beat—it's the nightmare of every relationship, that no one loves you for yourself, that you are desirable only if you're a pin-up, a fantasy, a stand-in for the real thing, made in Judy's case even crueller by the fact that the "real thing" was a fiction in the first place. But people laughed. And I screamed a little into![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel's shoulder. He thinks it's the melodrama of the story that people cannot respond to seriously, but I don't understand it. It's like going to the opera and laughing because people are singing. I'm well aware of the values of camp and irony as modes of reinterpretation, but they're not the only filter in the world. I don't find Vertigo a pleasant story, but that doesn't mean I can't take it on its own terms. Too much of Scottie is believable for it to play as comedy.
I think my mother is probably right, though.
I am rapidly coming to the disgruntled conclusion that it may be impossible for me to see Psycho (1960) in a theater anywhere in this town and not have the audience laugh inappropriately, because there were people tonight who snickered their way through Vertigo just as loudly and mystifyingly as they did through The Birds (1963). Judy's painful, resigned "If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?" isn't a comic beat—it's the nightmare of every relationship, that no one loves you for yourself, that you are desirable only if you're a pin-up, a fantasy, a stand-in for the real thing, made in Judy's case even crueller by the fact that the "real thing" was a fiction in the first place. But people laughed. And I screamed a little into
derspatchel's shoulder. He thinks it's the melodrama of the story that people cannot respond to seriously, but I don't understand it. It's like going to the opera and laughing because people are singing. I'm well aware of the values of camp and irony as modes of reinterpretation, but they're not the only filter in the world. I don't find Vertigo a pleasant story, but that doesn't mean I can't take it on its own terms. Too much of Scottie is believable for it to play as comedy.I think my mother is probably right, though.
no subject
It surprised me. I don't even think it's an especially mannered delivery—she sounds naked, a kind of desolate hope. She's voicing the subtext, but I think it's important: there has to be no ambiguity on the part of the audience that Scottie knows what he's doing to her. And she agrees and everything goes the express route to a very specifically feminine kind of hell.