Last week in Arts One we discussed Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” along with Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Yesterday in class I asked students to write down what they thought Midge’s role in the film was, and whether her character fits in some way with Mulvey’s analysis. I’m sharing their thoughts here, as well as a couple of my own.
Students’ comments
Not an object of male desire
- Midge can seem a fairly unimportant character because she is not mysterious or “sexy” like Madeleine is
- Because she is not/no longer an object of desire for Scottie, she loses her identity: women in the male gaze in cinema only are significant insofar as they are objects of that gaze
- She ends up alone in the film, walking down the hall in the hospital by herself, sadly, in the last scene where we see her. After that she disappears from the film entirely.
- She could serve to distance us from Scottie b/c we sympathize with her and dislike how Scottie treats her
- An alternative view: that she broke off their engagement (according to Scottie) might give the audience a reason to forgive Scottie’s lack of attachment to her
- She is a mother figure, taking care of him, not an object of sexual attraction
- We talked in class about how in the first scene that we see them together, Scottie looks at the bra she is drawing and asks what it is, and she say: “It’s a brassiere. You know about those things, you’re a big boy now” (7:30).
- She also says, when she is with him in the hospital after his breakdown: “please try,” “you’re not lost, mother’s here” (1:26:45).
- There are other places in the film where we could see her taking on a kind of motherly role that we didn’t discuss in class…I’ll let students find them!
- She represents a mature kind of love, whereas Scottie wants a more mysterious woman and a sexual passion kind of love
She might be a threat to Scottie because she is an independent woman
- She doesn’t need his help like Madeleine does; she is an independent woman with her own job, unmarried. She helps him rather than needing help. Not the typical female role at the time.
Represents rationality, reality
- She is rational, a sort of touchpoint for reality whereas Scottie is living in the realm of fantasy and falsehood by being attracted to Madeleine and then trying to make Judy over into his fantasy
Shows how Scottie is an object of attraction
- That she is attracted to him, wanting to have a relationship, shows him in an enviable male position of being adored by a woman
My thoughts
I just have one other things to add, that I didn’t get a chance to bring up in class yesterday. Otherwise, the things I have in my notes are already mentioned above.
Midge is herself an investigator
She is intelligent, inquisitive:
- She takes him to see Pop Lieble at the bookshop, who provides information on Carlotta; it is her connection that gets Scottie that information (I think one of the students also said this in what they wrote)
- She investigates Scottie to some extent, like he investigates Madeleine:
- she asks him what he is going to do after quitting the police force
- she asks him why he wants to know about Carlotta
- she asks him what he is up to when he disappears for awhile
- she investigates the Carlotta painting and understands enough of what is going on to paint herself as Carlotta
- So here too, she is not playing the typical female role but taking on more of a male role as observer, investigator
The sacrifice of paradise (Midge), for hell (Carlotta’s poltergeist).
I’m thinking you might be suggesting that Madeleine is Carlotta’s poltergeist? That’s an interesting reading, if so. Certainly Scottie ends up in hell as opposed to the paradise he seemed to have hoped for with Madeleine. He doesn’t seem to think of Midge as paradise, but perhaps if he could have loved her it would have been. At least, much better than how he ended up!