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Vertiginous Looking

You know, the thing I most dug about watching Vertigo was actually not something I could have only gotten from Vertigo, but rather something I could only have gotten from Vertigo from watching it with Visual Rhetoric eyes. It was this: in weird movies (my use of "weird" is intentionally and ironically pejorative) people are always doing things that don't make any sense.

In Vertigo, there is no good reason for Scottie to 1) follow Carlotta/the wife 2) follow her so closely 3) get so engrossed in her story 4) spurn Midge... (and speaking of Midge, there's no good goddamn reason for her to literally paint so unflatttering a portrait of herself).

BUT it's in these bizarre, only-happens-in-the-movies events that we find a lot of what we talk about in Viz Rhet- being total engrossed by an image, advanced identification due only to watching something, the curiosity an image provokes, the supernatural power of persuasion, etc. Hitchcock does this all the time, and it's fascinating that in the play of neurosis/psychosis and the image in things like Rebecca, Marnie, Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo that we not only see textbook cases of our field of study, but also come to forget that the events we're watching were, even at their starting, so unmoored from reality.

Submitted by magnoliafan on Tue, 2007-04-03 06:48.
magnoliafan's blog

Unreal reality
Ryan's picture
Submitted by Ryan on Tue, 2007-04-03 10:28.

This is an interesting point, Lars, because so much of what we readily accept in film never happens in real life. However, I think we have been watching movies and their tropes for so long that we have started to reincorporate them into our lives (this is part of Baudrillard's hyperreal argument.) I could now imagine someone hired to play detective who mimiced Scottie's reckless behavior because that's the image of detectives they had fostered. Nathaniel and I are pretty sure that we talk like stand up comedians because that's what we've seen on tv.


Unreal Reality TV
Amylea's picture
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-04-03 10:37.

Ryan:
I wonder how much of the phenomenon you describe (I, too, sound frighteningly like Dave Barry from reading too many of his columns as a child) can account for the melodrama of reality TV? When in Rome, act as a Roman; when on TV, act like your favorite TV character--particularly the angsty teen soap kind. The ridiculous fights and "drama" of reaity TV happen because the actor-participants have expectations of what their narrative should look like.
Of course, smart editors hyperbolize it. And the viewers mimic it, and the editors hyperbolize it, in a lovely cycle of ever decreasing reality. (Assuming we believe in such a thing).


Totally
magnoliafan's picture
Submitted by magnoliafan on Tue, 2007-04-03 10:51.

Does Burke have anything to say about this? Is this identification or something? I feel like there's a word for it. Enculturation? None of these quite fit.

L-Train


Socialization? Name of the
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Mon, 2007-04-09 14:10.

Socialization? Name of the Father? Ideal Ego?

Hey, just for fun, let's put a viz spin on the this question: there's been plenty of work done on the spiral of thinness in which the camera only sees the thinnest and so folks get thinner and thinner to emulate the thin reality of the image. Nothin' special there. So . . .

Bam! Toss in some Lacan and Let's kick up a notch!

It's not only that conforming to the rules established by the "father" forms our worldview, but that seeing the father as an ideal ego is what inducts us into the symbolic order. Without someone to identify with, without assumign the Name-of-the-Father onto myself, I can't access the symbolic order. Seeing the father gives me a way in which to understand the desire/touch of the mother. The visual is the first narrativizing. It is from the visual that language, first experience aurally, is made relevant.

Not to try and ground the useful mythology of psychoanaylsis in reality or anything, but I wonder what the studies on the learning cycle of children born either blind or deaf look like. Do they enter community or even language in different ways? Does it matter?