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In Truffaut's 1962 interview with Hitchcock, Truffaut makes the observation that “Vertigo unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a contemplative rhythm that contrasts sharply with your other pictures, which are mostly based on swift motion and sudden transitions.” Hitchcock replies, “that's perfectly natural since we're telling the story from the viewpoint of a man who's in an emotional crisis” (Truffaut , 186).
Using Lacanian theory, as well as recent work by Tania Modleski on female subjectivity, I would like to elaborate the way in which Vertigo—while avowedly told from “the viewpoint of a man who's in an emotional crisis”—also outlines the impossibility of a woman occupying the space culturally designated as “feminine.” I will further suggest that much of the terror that male protagonists face in Hitchcock films is brought about by their “slipping” into a femininized space as the result of incertitude about their masculine subjectivity.
My argument will rest on some cardinal aspects of Lacanian theory. A sketch of these points is in order: For Lacan, a man needs to believe in femininity in order to believe in the unity of his masculine subjectivity. Lacan states, “the subject is only ever supposed. It is its condition to be only supposable. If it knows anything, it is only by being itself a subject caused by an object….” (Lacan , 164). A woman representing the feminine is the object that causes a man to feel like a masculine subject. Femininity does not exist except as a cultural construct, nor does masculinity, and yet