I was an undergraduate at Portland State taking a seminar class on psychoanalysis and art when I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It was 1998, forty years after the movie’s release, and a year after my first trip to San Francisco, where Vertigo was shot. Before this, I had a cynical view of filmmaking. All that was accessible to me were blockbusters, which seemed to serve the single purpose of wasting time, and I was beginning to see movies as a second-rate art. Vertigo changed that. It felt like something I could perform an autopsy on. I could look inside its guts and start to make sense of the pieces. Vertigo opened a new path for me. Peering into it, I could see something human in the San Franciscan landscape.
Years later, in 2013, I would move to San Francisco, but before that, I lived in Brooklyn, where I had a partner who became increasingly toxic. She had borderline personality disorder and was an addict. Our relationship became codependent and unsurprisingly, she split me black. It was like, without reason, I went from being her hero to being seen as the central source of all that’s negative and disgusting in her life. This was followed by the typical narcissistic discard. The irrational situation was too much for me to handle, and I decided to get as far away as possible. I returned to the west coast, bypassing my hometown of Portland for the Bay Area.
As I said previously, I had only visited San Francisco once before, in 1997 with my friend Heather, but back then I hadn’t seen Vertigo. Even before seeing the movie, I had a strong love for the city. But after seeing it, San Francisco became a more potent thing, full of real and cinematic emotions. I spent my first months in the Bay Area exploring the city and visited most of the sites from the film: Mission Dolores, The Empire Hotel (now The Vertigo Hotel), The Palace of the Legion of Honor, The Palace of Fine Arts, the top of Nob Hill, Scottie’s apartment on Lombard Street, Coit Tower, Claude Lane, and the site of the demolished McKittrick Hotel. I visited the iconic location under the Golden Gate Bridge, Old Fort Point, where Kim Novak jumped into the bay in a fake suicide attempt. Much of the area was fenced off, possibly because of the movie, or because the Golden Gate Bridge and its surroundings have historically been magnets for suicides, as documented in the 2006 film The Bridge.
I knew what to expect from most of these sites. But there was one location I visited that was an entire mystery to me. At the beginning of the film, Gavin Elster tells Scottie that his wife sometimes sits by the lake in Golden Gate Park. Elster mentions her looking at some pillars that rest on the far shore. “You know,” he says, “Portals of the Past.” Like Mrs. Bates in Psycho, Rebecca in Rebecca, George Kaplan in North by Northwest, and the real Madeleine Elster in Vertigo, Portals of the Past is never shown in Hitchcock’s film, only mentioned. Because of its lack of visual inclusion, I’d never given the location much thought, but I decided to track it down regardless. Across the small Lloyd Lake in Golden Gate Park, I found a columned entryway surrounded by vegetation. It’s displaced, like some kind of René Magritte painting. Once part of a Nob Hill mansion that was destroyed during the earthquake and fire of 1906, the entryway was relocated to the lakeside as a remembrance and rechristened Portals of the Past.
Portals of the Past
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the title, Portals of the Past, summed up much of Scottie’s problem in Vertigo. Everything relies on the past. In the film, he’s diagnosed with acute melancholia. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes melancholia as when someone is chronically looking back at the past and obsessing over an unidentifiable loss that they can’t make sense of. Unlike someone who is mourning, someone who suffers from melancholia can’t put the pieces together. They’re unable to process the past and move on. They’re stuck in the past. After Scottie’s release from the mental hospital, he wanders San Francisco, trying to figure out what happened. He’s stuck contemplating Madeleine’s death. This ultimately leads him to Judy, who he uses as a canvas to retrace his steps, to make sense of his loss. Once she’s transformed into Madeleine he mentally returns to the scene of his loss, San Juan Batista. Then, when he puts Carlotta’s necklace on Judy and uncovers the lie, his neurosis is broken, and he’s “free of the past.”
But something I never understood in all my years of watching this film was why Judy went along with this cold transformation of her identity. Why does she accept the abuse? At the beginning of the film, Scottie acted as a caretaker for the imposter Madeleine (Judy), who is herself believed to be possessed by the past (a ghost), but in the second half of the film the roles are reversed and Judy becomes the caretaker for the mentally unstable Scottie. The codependency of their relationship is flip-flopped. Judy goes along with Scottie’s requests because she believes doing so can return them to the honeymoon phase of their relationship. She too is obsessed with the past and wants to step back in time. She wants to return to the good times, but as with all abusive relationships, those days will never return no matter how hard the caretaker tries. And when that caretaker can no longer provide security for the dependent or is no longer needed, they are discarded, as Judy is at the end of the film.
Wandering San Francisco, reflecting on Vertigo, I unpacked that I too was a survivor of a domestic psychic violence. Like Judy, I was used, manipulated, and discarded. Unlike her, I was also physically assaulted. But what separates the film world from reality is that in our realm, there is usually no healing or conclusion. My abuser will likely repeat her destructive patterns infinitely, moving in and out of dysfunctional relationships her entire life. I don’t believe she’s this way by choice. I think it’s connected to the fact that she also was once a victim of some kind of abuse. In that vein, let’s not forget that Scottie, in the first half of the film, is the one being manipulated and used (by Elster). It’s because of this I can’t condemn Scottie or my former partner in an extreme fashion. I believe in accountability, but I realize we live in a world of damaged people who end up damaging other people. I see this in Vertigo and I repeatedly see this in the real world.