Vertigo, Etrog’s Spiral, The Shining and Traumatic Memory

Abstract

In preceding sections in this book I have traced the effects of a hermeneutic spiral, which replaces the hermeneutic circle that gives the false impression that it leads to full understanding. Knowing that interpretive acts are created by cognitive processes that are prone to subjectivity, various kinds of attributional errors and bias blind spots, I have begun to illustrate how cognitive processing errors color our understandings of Vertigo. In this section I test the limits of Ross’s “inexhaustibility by contrast” by deliberately playing the role of a critical outlier who sees a correlation between two cultural objects that certainly have no connection. Sorel Etrog was a Romanian-Canadian sculptor whom Hitchcock would not have known. Nevertheless, understanding Etrog’s experimental film Spiral helps us to conclude that Hitchcock was a genuine existentialist.