Hauntological Perplexities: Spectrality, Theodicy, and Vertigo

Abstract

Well now, Johnny-O, was it a ghost? – Midge in Vertigo The protagonist of Vertigo suffers a severe trauma in the first scene, tips into catatonic madness around the midway point, and doesn’t fully recover until the final moments of the story, if indeed he recovers at all. Scottie is a haunted character throughout – haunted first by the memory of witnessing a colleague’s violent death and later by his attraction to Madeleine, who herself pretends to be haunted by a ghostly presence and is actually haunted by perilous love for the man she has been deceiving since the beginning. More broadly, the film mirrors these perplexities by cultivating a powerful aura of detachment from the realm of reason and rationality, generating a dreamlike atmosphere fostered by its implausible events and eccentric structure as well as such secondary elements as its hypnotic titles and destabilizing music. All of these factors point to hauntology as a useful tool for illuminating this resonant and elusive work. As posited by Jacques Derrida, hauntology contests and displaces its near-homonym ontology, imagining the figure of the specter as an unfathomable intruder that is, as the philosopher Colin Davis puts it, “neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive,” presenting an otherness that is both manifestly present and ultimately inexplicable (Davis 2005, 373). Fredric Jameson sees a strong charge of irony in this Derridean idea, but that aside, I find it a suggestive and productive analytical concept. A major reference point for Derrida’s hauntology is Hamlet’s complaint that “time is out of joint,” suggesting that the esthetics of hauntology are characterized by a temporal displacement through which, in the words of the philosopher Liam Sprod, “the past invades, or haunts, the present with its return,” bringing back “the ideas, images and ideals of a past age, which now grate and creak against the joints of the present” (Shakespeare 2012, I:5; Sprod 2012). Time is very much out of joint for Scottie Ferguson, whose well-ordered life has been disrupted by forced retirement, allowing him to spend increasingly long periods discovering and inhabiting a delusive situation designed to persuade him that the spirit of a woman long dead has taken possession of a woman who is now haunting him – “available Ferguson,” as he whimsically calls himself – in turn. Madeleine’s unearthly beauty seduces him into