Beyond the Sea

Abstract

This chapter works to use Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as a way to open thought about what film is and can be as it is experienced. It provides a detailed analysis of the film’s “sanatorium” sequence, in which its protagonist, Scottie, has been immobilized by grief. It is argued that the efforts of his closest friend Midge to bring Scottie “back to life” with the music of Mozart is part of a motif that links these two principal characters to a classical “past,” conflicting with the dominating social order of the modern present in which they find themselves. A conceptual link is offered between the presence of the color “blue” in the scene, and the various psychological states and identities that Scottie adopts and experiences throughout the film.