On Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Jungian Alchemy, Queer Synchronicity, and the Nature of Gender

Introduction: More Essays About Vertigo

When one decides to write about a film that has been exhaustively analyzed across decades of criticism and academic study, it’s difficult not to start off with some sort of exercise in hedging. Perhaps, for example, a rhetorical question like, “What can be said about this film that hasn’t been said already?” Vertigo is certainly among the most prominent examples. There are essays about it, and there are essays about essays about it, qualifying it as the kind of artwork that seems to have generated its own subfield of academic study. As film scholar Tim Groves¹ has pointed out, there are plenty of parallels to be found between the nature of obsession within the film itself and the nature of obsession among those who devote their attention to it. In his survey of Vertigo criticism, he quotes Katie Trumpener’s remark that the film “has long been the object of unusually obsessive, self-involved, often autobiographical commentary.”² Groves also notes the tendency of Vertigo’s particularly fixated viewers to identify with Scottie or the four women of the film to an intensely personal degree. I wish I could say that I’m beginning my essay series this way to assure the reader that it will be exempt from these trappings, but in truth, the opposite is the case. Consider this a confession or warning—mine may very well be among the most obsessive, self-involved, and autobiographical examinations of Vertigo that you are likely to read. Nevertheless, even though the primary intention of this project was never to fill any practical gaps in knowledge or serve any particularly useful purpose in an academic sense, the film has been kind enough to take me to some surprisingly novel and unusual places.

For one thing, commentary on Vertigo has focused a great deal on what it reveals about gender, sexuality, and power, yet relatively little has been said of the film’s queerness. On the one hand, this is conspicuous, given that queer-coded characters and subject matter appear in quite a few of Hitchcock’s most well-known works. On the other, Vertigo is arguably the Hitchcock film most prone to being labeled as sexist or misogynistic, and of course, was one of the central examples used by Laura Mulvey in formulating her notion of the male gaze.³ What could possibly be queer about a film whose protagonist so thoroughly embodies the voyeuristic violence of hetero masculinity? But if decades of queer theory have demonstrated anything, it’s that an ostensible lack of queerness in a text or object is not a deterrent to queering it. If anything, it’s a provocation, owing perhaps to the defiant trickster figure that seems to reside deep within the collective queer psyche. While I have become reluctant over the years to queer anything on an intellectual level, every once in a while something seems to leave me no choice, and my personal relationship with Vertigo has only stoked this temptation.

It is, in fact, one of the earliest films I can remember seeing, and its first appearance in my life occurred before I ever had the language to describe or understand its contents. My father has held it firmly in his personal canon for as long as I’ve been alive, and I can trace my relationship with it from the high-definition clarity of my most recent viewing all the way back to murky, fragmented memories of the well-worn VHS edition that was on rotation during my childhood. My sense of gender has followed a similar path of slow coagulation. In my earliest memories, gender was something unnamed, abstract, strange, and mysterious. Today, it is named and slightly more concrete, but strange and mysterious it remains.

It was in 2015 that the mysteries of both Vertigo and my sense of gender finally collided. I had until that point maintained a lifetime of self-suppression and rigorous denial of the fact that I’m trans, and was only just beginning to come to terms with the unavoidable truth. That year, I revisited the film for the first time since high school, and, possibly to cope with a sense of disengagement from my own transness, came up with a reading of it that began as a joke—that the protagonist of Vertigo, John “Scottie” Ferguson, is in fact a closeted trans woman haunted by her unrealized post-transition self. It was the early scene between Scottie and his confidante Midge that nudged me in this direction.

At the beginning of the scene, Scottie bemoans the uncomfortable medical corset he has to wear while healing from the accident that opens the film, asking Midge, “Do you suppose many men wear corsets?” Midge replies, “More than you think,” presumably in reference to the fact that corsets are not unheard of in men’s fashion, whereupon Scottie asks, “You know that from personal experience?” Once I began to read Scottie as a trans woman not yet accepting of her own desires for feminine presentation, this impulse to reaffirm a projected masculinity took on a new meaning. After this moment, Scottie wields her cane, a conspicuously phallic object, and says she’ll soon be able to “throw this miserable thing out the window” and “be a free man,” flinching at the pain in her side before forcing herself to utter the word “man.” Later in the scene, Scottie turns her attention toward a brassiere displayed beside Midge’s desk and asks about it with a kind of transfixed and preoccupied curiosity, as though it reminds her of something she wishes to reconnect with on some level. I also noticed that the famously “boyish”⁴ Midge, a San Franciscan artist with unmistakable bisexual energy, is not only Scottie’s best friend but also her ex, a kind of relationship that countless queer women are all too familiar with.

Eventually, upon one or two further viewings of the film over the years that followed, I began to feel that this reading wasn’t a joke at all. As is well established, the gaze of the film is deeply preoccupied with femininity. From the very first shot during the opening titles—which closely inspects an anonymous woman’s face—to motifs of brightly-colored flowers, to the details of Madeleine’s and Carlotta Valdes’ appearance such as their hairstyle, jewelry, and dresses, Vertigo is brimming with archetypally feminine imagery. The more I allowed my experience of these images to be informed by my own relationship with femininity, rather than by a perspective that would only understand them in terms of heterosexist voyeurism, the more of the film’s queerness revealed itself to me. Madeleine remained an archetype of idealized and unattainable feminine mystique, but from my point of view, she became not so much an object of Scottie’s literal romantic desires as the embodiment of Scottie’s desired self-image. Judy, then, as a far less mysterious and more attainable figure of feminine imperfection, became Scottie’s feared self-image—the kind of woman that decades of internalized misogyny has taught her not to be. While a conventional reading holds Scottie as a symbol of the obsessive heterosexist gaze, in a transfeminine reading it is the internalization of that gaze that fuels her obsession.

This had an interesting effect on my understanding of the eponymous symptom that invades Scottie’s life throughout the film. If, in a basic interpretation, the “vertigo” in Vertigo is a metaphor for some kind of impotence or failed masculinity, and if Scottie’s desire for Madeleine and rejection of Judy are entangled with a desire to cure that impotence, then a transfeminine reading frames that same incapacitating dizziness as a dread of both failed masculinity and failed femininity. This idea deepens when I also consider Chris Marker’s⁵ observation that Scottie suffers from a vertigo not only of space but of time. It is difficult to overstate just how crushing the scale of time can feel when transition is either unattainable or slow to unfold. What is gender dysphoria, then, if not a kind of vertigo experienced in the distance between psyche and body?

Running alongside Vertigo’s latent queerness is its not-so-latent weirdness. Themes of possession, haunting, ghostliness, death, the unconscious, the double, and the uncanny pervade the film, all of which have been acknowledged or investigated to some degree by various commentators. But, for my taste, traditional film criticism tends to adopt a certain kind of rational perspective that feels unprepared to honor just how weird this film is, not simply as a work of art, but as a kind of intelligence. I mean this in a similar sense that a dream or a divinatory system might be an intelligence. Vertigo’s dreamlike quality, including its famously preposterous plot whose twists and turns are riddled with implausible scenarios and coincidences, has earned it plenty of interpretation that frames the narrative as a dream experienced by its hero, but this stops too short of recognizing the film itself as a dream experienced by its viewer. Much like a dream, it has slowly pulled me into that disorienting terrain where interpretation becomes divination, particularly since it has spoken to me so intimately about my past, present, and future as a trans person. It is, in my experience, so rich with archetypal imagery and engages so eagerly with the inner nature of the psyche that it approaches the divinatory capability of a tarot deck. Even the film’s bell tower, which the audience associates with both sudden destruction and sudden revelation, offers a perfect cinematic corollary to the ominous Tower card that appears in several tarot systems across history.

This brings the film into close conversation with what Carl Jung called synchronicity, the coinciding of events that are meaningfully related yet bear no apparent causal relationship. To have any chance of working, Gavin Elster’s absurd scheme relies on coincidence to a similar degree that a ritual magician relies on synchronicity to achieve a magickal result. From Scottie’s perspective, his encounter with Judy is, until the film’s climax, a synchronistic encounter with someone nearly identical to his lost and deceased love. But this dimension of Vertigo has, for me, quite thoroughly broken the fourth wall. British occultist Paul Weston⁶ has used the term “psychoactive text” to describe works that bleed so readily with weirdness as to produce synchronicities in the lives of those who engage with them, naming Finnegan’s Wake and Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger as examples. Having experienced this myself to an unmistakable degree during my time with Vertigo, I would easily place it among them. As I think of Tim Groves’ and Katie Trumpener’s observations about the frequently autobiographical nature of Vertigo criticism, it seems possible that I am not alone in this experience, though it also seems unlikely that most film critics would be willing to describe the interactions between Vertigo and their personal lives as synchronistic.

Intimately connected to Vertigo’s weirdness, meanwhile, is its engagement with the natural world. The possessed and entranced Madeline wanders through cemetery gardens, attempts suicide in the deep waters of San Francisco Bay, and, as if to echo the ghostly white-clad woman in Moritz von Schwind’s Apparition in the Forest, eludes Scottie among foreboding redwoods. Set against Scottie’s stubborn rationalism and ineffectual desires for control, these images collaborate powerfully with the film’s overall sense that human beings are inevitably at the mercy of our natural environment and its confounding, otherworldly strangeness. We are once again drawn toward Jung when engaging with these elements of Vertigo. His ideas were frequently concerned with the human relationship to nature, including the notion that nature and the collective unconscious, both elusive yet profoundly influential over us and indeed intrinsic to our being, are virtually one and the same.⁷ Given all of this, it is appropriate that Scottie’s journey takes place in San Francisco. One is hard-pressed to think of a place situated more firmly at the intersection of the queer, the weird, and the sublimity of nature.

Once I engaged with the film more deeply on these levels—as a queer allegory, a crucible of the weird, and a gallery of nature’s most sublime objects—it responded by thrusting its influence into my world with alarming force. Through a deep and synchronistic involvement in both my waking and dream lives, it began to seem as though Vertigo was analyzing me as much as I was analyzing it. We became mutually porous to one another in a way that imbued it with an eerie sense of agency. Before long, I found myself entangled in a web of realizations about both the film and my experience of gender in parallel with it. During this process, Jung’s way of thinking, and the work of his successors, became the only capable means of handling whatever the film chose to throw at me.

Like much of Hitchcock’s work, Vertigo is a natural target for analysis through the lenses of psychoanalysis and depth psychology, yet most of this examination of the film has tended to approach it through Freud or Lacan. A handful of writers have called upon Jung to unravel some of its symbols, but my relationship with it has pointed toward deeper resonances with Jungian ideas than what the existing literature has captured so far. Surprisingly little has been said, for example, of the striking allegorical resemblances that Scottie’s journey bears to the process of self-realization that Jung called individuation, and in particular the understandings of it that he and Marie-Louise von Franz developed through their interpretations of Western alchemy.

Jungian commentary on the film has also tended to understand Madeleine as Scottie’s anima, the feminine archetype that mediates between the conscious and deeper unconscious minds of a man (the corresponding archetype in the psyche of a woman being the animus). However, for reasons that may be obvious to some, the classical, contrasexual version of this model has a way of either floundering or falling apart entirely when queerness enters the equation. On top of this, an over-focus on Madeleine and Judy at the expense of Midge—which Tim Groves has pointed out is another common issue among writings on Vertigo—oversimplifies our understanding of the anima in the film. As I’ll touch upon in this series, my reading of Scottie’s journey has pointed toward some of the broader complications, nuances, and even revelations that one might encounter when one cultivates a queerer and more subtle understanding of the archetypal feminine.

Traversing a significant quantity of psychoanalytical literature and film theory in parallel with one another has underscored a pitfall that the two territories share—both dream analysis and film analysis are frequently in danger of adopting a style of interpretation-as-argumentation that is limited by its reductiveness and literal-mindedness. I find that attempting to build an airtight case for what a film is “really about,” and ensuring that no detail undermines that case, is among the least interesting ways to engage with the medium. The same is true when interpreting dreams and the images presented by the psyche, as it is often far more interesting and insightful to draw from multiple perspectives without clinging too tightly to one or another. I have drawn much inspiration from James Hillman’s insistence that we not treat the dream world as secondary to waking life, nor reduce it to static, pragmatic analogies. Because I identify so strongly with Scottie through a queer reading of the film, I couldn’t regard her journey as secondary to mine even if I tried. Vertigo has become my own dream, entangled with my daily experience of reality.

This is what I mean when I say that interpreting a film as the dream of its protagonist is quite different from responding to it as a dream experienced by you, the viewer. The former treats the film as an artifact resulting from a series of creative and technical decisions, while the latter, especially from a Jungian or Hillmanian perspective, approaches it as a system of autonomous images that speak with their own psychic reality. Hillman used the word “soul” to describe this image-focused, non-literal mode of reflection, one that engages deeply and even creatively with the complexities of psychic life.⁸ Building on this idea, analyst and scholar Douglas Thomas has upheld a “soul-centered” method of understanding psychic necessity and desire, particularly within the realm of kink and BDSM practices.⁹ Such an approach treats images not necessarily as symbols to decode in straightforward ways, but as living emanations of human experience that are both intimate and expansive in their reach.

This essay series proceeds along a similar path. It is not a literal analysis of Vertigo, but a soul-centered account of the ongoing conversation between the film, my psyche, and my transition. It is a reflection on the images, affects, and symbolic patterns it has graciously revealed to me over several years of my life. Without intending to approach it as such, this project seems to have become an example of what it means to “weird” a work of art, and it comes as no surprise that this has unfolded naturally from my initial desire to queer it. As JF Martel and Phil Ford of the Weird Studies podcast have recognized, there is a special kinship between queering and weirding as interpretive and hermeneutical processes.¹⁰ In my experience, they may address different subject matter, but both reveal latent qualities that unsettle our cultural desire for certainty and control, compelling us to rethink the conventional parameters of beauty and ugliness, purity and abjection, the fixed and the liminal. And in both queering and weirding, we are often left with more questions than answers—yet we emerge better equipped to hold accountable the powers that wish to tame them.

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Notes

1. Tim Groves, “Vertigo and the Maelstrom of Criticism,” Screening the Past, November 2, 2011, https://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-32-first-release/vertigo-and-the-maelstrom-of-criticism. Accessed July 12, 2025. ↩︎
2. Katie Trumpener, “Fragments of the Mirror: Self-Reference, Mise-en-Abyme, Vertigo,” in Hitchcock’s Rereleased Films: From Rope to Vertigo, edited by Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnik (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 186. ↩︎
3. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (September 1975): 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6. ↩︎
4. Groves, “Vertigo and the Maelstrom of Criticism.” ↩︎
5. Chris Marker, “A Free Replay (Notes on Vertigo),” Positif, June 1994: 79–84. ↩︎
6. “Mercurial, Mutable, Mysterious Something – Vayse to Face with Paul Weston.” Vayse, 28 June 2023, https://www.vayse.co.uk/vys0023. ↩︎
7. Carl G. Jung, Letters, vol. 2, 1951–1961, ed. Gerhard Adler et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 540. ↩︎
8. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), x. ↩︎
9. Douglas Thomas, The Deep Psychology of BDSM and Kink: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on the Soul’s Transgressive Necessities (New York: Routledge, 2024), 15–18. ↩︎
10. “On Weirding, and the Virtues of Unknowing Everything,” Weird Studies, October 19, 2022, https://www.weirdstudies.com/133. ↩︎

Editor’s Note: Stayed tuned for the next installment of this essay series—coming soon!