The Meaning is in the Response
...and how you're getting higher art all wrong
I had a huge issue with the greatest film of all-time.
Similar to da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or Joyce’s Ulysses, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psycho-thriller film Vertigo has recently gathered a growing “top of its genre” status in recent years. Over the past two decades, this film has arisen from near obscurity to almost universal international acclaim. Similarly, Vertigo has worked its way up to being my second favorite film of all-time (Casablanca, #1). However, in spite of my blossoming love for Vertigo, there remained a lingering discontent with my understanding of the greatness of the picture. No, my qualms weren’t related to comprehension of the plot or its characters, or having any dissent about its place among the greatest films ever. In fact, I couldn’t even place what special factor was eluding me. Was there some hidden meaning the critics hadn’t put into words? Something just didn’t click. I just knew that in front of me, there was a concept or method behind that magnitude of greatness that approximated something divine, something more. But, what was its “secret sauce”? What makes Vertigo so great?
But, like the aforementioned greats, these iconic works of art take on a mythical, almost divinely-possessing status—and I wanted to know exactly what that ‘x-factor’ was in the case of Vertigo.
Here’s a little about how that went….
There’s no better place to start than the nuts-and-bolts—that being, the technical details of the production and overall presentation of the film.
I began to watch Vertigo through various experimental ‘handicaps’ and limitations in order to examine individual aspects—such as watching it in black-and-white, with the sound muted, or just audio-only (haven’t tried backwards yet). But, all this experimentation did not lead to any satisfactory answer in my quest.
So, in circling back: Was there some aspect of the plot, character development, or the setup of suspense that I had missed? Nope. No apparent leads there. More dead ends.
And then, almost accidentally, I turned to philosophy—a tangent, academic lens. Would philosophy possess the precise answer to my dilemma? Nope! (I guess Aristotle and Socrates had little to say about ‘Vertigo’ or Hitchcock in general). Even a book written about the philosophical aspects of ‘Vertigo’ (The Philosophical Hitchcock by Robert B. Pippin) turned up blank. Apparently, no re-watch, no Google search, no book could explain it away.
This whole quest certainly helped me understand how the film could exceed on any rubric, but ultimately, it failed to lead me to the ‘key’ beholding the answer.
During this time, I was taking an entry-level Social Psychology class to satisfy my ‘social-sciences course’ requirement for the semester at my university. It was halfway through the spring semester, when one day we were on the topic of ‘how we assign meaning to social-objects’ (In the social-psych context, ‘social-objects’ refers to anything we assign meaning to: a chair, relationship, mental illness, etc.). This class period not only gave me the right answer to my Vertigo dilemma, but also brought forth a different way of thinking about how we experience and form our relationships with art in general.
On the whiteboard in the front of the classroom was written “the meaning is in the response”—at first, a phrase I only took note of because of its certain inclusion on the final exam coming later that semester. Yet throughout the lecture, this simple line that I was to remember for a test began to relate to the challenge I was encountering with this film. Here’s what I mean:
What this “the meaning is in the response” line did for me is reframe my thinking towards our relationship with art—or, ‘social-objects’ in this case.
The greatness of Vertigo doesn’t lie within the concepts or technicalities of the piece—but rather, the experience that it produces in response to those elements by the people who engage with the work.
…And that goes for any song…sung; word…written; or palette…painted. There’s no singular conceptualization or artistic innovation that rules above them all. These works gain this level of praise because of the stories surrounding them, how they made audiences feel, and ultimately how they change our modes of perception. That’s kind of the higher goal of art anyway, isn’t it?
It’s no use trying to pigeonhole greatness to a few sentences that could fit on a notecard, if that greatness already exists in the response it produces by those who are there to witness it.
Came for James Stewart, stayed for the Vertigo discussion. I'm a sucker for all movies Alfred Hitchcock and I've seen Vertigo myself but never thought about it more than for just the entertainment. It was really fascinating to read how more about the genius behind the film rather than the "juicy" topic of the stars' private lives and I feel I have gained from reading. Thank you for sharing.