No Second Chances: Fiction and Adultery in Vertigo

Abstract

Many of Hitchcock’s films have moments of farewell to reason, points where an amiable, unobsessed person leaves the movie for good. This person is often a woman, and in Frenzy, for example, she is about to be brutally murdered. These departures are always stylistically marked, lingered over, so that we feel their weight even if we scarcely seem to notice them, and perhaps we don’t need to notice them consciously. Vertigo has one of the most beautiful and enigmatic of such moments.