Real And Imaginary Circumstances – Kim Novak In Vertigo | The Great Acting Blog

Subscribe | @GreatActingBlog

 

 

 

Like all great art, a hidden truth is revealed when the real and the imaginary combine, and the viewer experiences the clatter of connection between the two. And there is no more powerful example of this than Kim Novak’s performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It’s a performance that was brought about by the actor’s visceral identification with the character – and one which has created indelible moments of cinema.

Novak plays what we at first think is a dual role. There is Madelaine, the blonde, enigmatic, sensitive wife of an industrialist. Then there is Judy; a brunette living in a rooming-house, she is simpler and more local. James Stewart accepts an assignment by the industrialist to follow Madelaine, and during the course of his work, Stewart falls in love with her. Madelaine, however, after she admits she is in love with Stewart, runs up a church tower and apparently commits suicide. The loss causes Stewart to have a nervous breakdown and he is institutionalised. After his release, he wanders the streets and stumbles upon Judy. Fascinated by her likeness to Madelaine, he starts a relationship with her. Unbeknownst to Stewart however, we learn that Judy and Madelaine are one in the same person: Judy had been hired by the industrialist to impersonate his wife as part of a murder plot – the suicide had been faked. Judy’s love for Stewart however, was certainly not faked, in fact she is still very much in love with him but cannot admit who she really is. The tragic irony is that Stewart is still intoxicated by Madelaine’s memory, and he pressurizes Judy to become Madelaine. He takes her shopping for the same, grey suit that Madelaine wore, and he takes her to a salon to have her hair dyed blonde and fixed like Madelaine’s. Judy, despite her unhappiness, goes along with the transformation because she wants Stewart to accept her.

Novak believed she was destined to play in Vertigo because the character’s crisis mirrored her own crisis with Hollywood. She, like Judy, was forced to sublimate her true identity and become the projection of a fantasy instead. As she stated in an interview:

“I identify so very completely with the role because it was exactly what Harry Cohn and what Hollywood was trying to do to me, which was to make me over into something I was not. In the beginning, they hire you because of the way you look, obviously, and yet they try to change your lips, your mouth, your hair, every aspect of the way you look and the way you talk and the way you dress. So it was constantly fighting to keep some aspect of yourself, trying to keep some of you. You feel: There must have been something in you that they liked, and yet they wanted to change you.”

During a big moment in the film, Novak’s performance reaches it’s apogee. James Stewart’s transformation of her from Judy to Madeleine is almost complete but not quite. A slight adjustment to her hair is required – she protests but Stewart insists. Novak complies and goes into the bathroom to fix it. While she’s in there, Stewart is tense and nervous. Unsure what to do with himself, he sits on the arm of the sofa. The neon outside projects green light on to the window. Suddenly, he hears the door to the bathroom click. He rises and turns, while Bernard Herrman’s score rises too and intensifies – the moment of truth has arrived. Novak emerges from the bathroom. At first she is shrouded in a haze of green light, ghostly. Slowly, she moves towards Stewart.  He gazes at her, relieved and mesmerized that now she is the perfect realisation of his fantasy. She moves closer and closer towards him, until she delivers a beat of cinema one can never forget: she stops, and looks at Stewart. We see the yearning in her eyes, the desire, the love, and we see the pain and the tension and the pleading in her face. It’s as if she were saying “I’ve become all that you’ve asked me to become, now can you love me?”

It is a brilliant, potent, painful, beautiful moment of acting, and comes from deep within Novak. In an instant and for an instant, she reveals to us the very machinations of her soul, the profound longing that resides there. It’s the highest form of acting: when the human face becomes poetry.

The echo of Novak’s own life can be heard clearly in this scene. It’s touches off on a problem of profound importance to her – namely the threat to her own identity. Like Judy, she was locked in a paradox: she could only be accepted if she pretended to be someone she was not. Novak/Judy form the basis of something that might be. They offer the possibility of fulfilling the fantasy but are not yet the fantasy itself. How can they be? A fantasy is not real, it’s just an idea inside someone’s head. A fantasy, by definition, needs to be created.

Nevertheless, this is where the parallel between actor and character ends. For Novak, being somebody else’s fantasy was never going to be enough, she wanted truth:

“What I always wanted to be was a realist, so I wasn’t just playing a character, it’s me. I give you myself, I give you my guts. I just don’t want to turn it on. I give you who the character is. Here it is. It’s who I am. I want to connect with you. … All I want is to be loved.”

Novak’s hunger for truth and meaning meant that she diverged from her character in Vertigo and so avoided the same tragic fate. Judy falls to her death from the top of a church tower in a reprisal of the faked suicide, whereas Novak herself took control of her fate and quit Hollywood to become an artist – she always believed painting to be her true calling. In Vertigo, however, her own experience and the imaginary circumstances of the film connected to create a clatter which has reverberated throughout cinema.

The lesson must be this; following our own personal truth, rather than trying to please others, is the route to safety.

 

RELATED READING
60 Years Later, Kim Novak Reflects On Vertigo

 
MOST RECENT POSTS
Be Extraordinary And Accept Adversity
Be Comfortable Not Knowing
Paradox Of Creative Work
How To Be An Optimist
Acting Intentions – Gyöngyvér Vigh In Adoption
A Lesson From John Malkovich In Bitter Wheat

 

Subscribe To The Great Acting Blog