By Jolin Yu, Class of 2025

Editors Note: Final research essay for VI Form English elective, “Cold War, Cool Culture,” taught by Mr. Eslick on Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo.

Introduction

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo opens with a chase: a San Francisco police detective, Scottie
Ferguson, clings to a rooftop as he watches in horror his partner plunges to his death below. This scene embodies the essence of the film—its obsession with heights and falls, with control and instability, with the fragility of perception. Much like Scottie’s dizzying descent into a maelstrom of psychological and emotional turmoil, 1950s America sat on a precipice. At the height of Cold War paranoia, cultural anxieties surrounding control, conformity, and identity reverberated across all levels of society. Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece offers a profound critique of these anxieties, using its protagonist’s destructive obsession to mirror the era’s fear of instability and its relentless pursuit of ideals unattainable.

This paper argues that Vertigo critiques patriarchal control and societal constructs of identity and power, using Scottie’s obsessive recreation of Madeleine as an allegory for Cold War anxieties. Through its subversion of traditional gender dynamics, disorienting cinematography, and narrative structure, Hitchcock’s masterpiece exposes the fragility of male fantasies and the human cost of cultural repression. By situating the film within its historical and psychological context, this analysis reveals Vertigo as a layered critique of 1950s societal norms and their enduring implications.

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