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David Cooper, Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002. 176 pp. $54.95.
Does the world really need an analysis of every musical cue in Vertigo? Given the obsessive interest in Hitchcock's masterpiece, the short answer, at least for musical academics, is probably yes. Initially a flop, Vertigo is now a classic, a status enhanced since its dramatic re-releases in 1983 and 1996 after a long absence from the movie scene. Vanishings and resurrections are exactly what Vertigo is about, and the echoes and strange permutations of its music since 1958homages, pastiches, symphonic suites, "installations," and much else-are part of its Proustian allure. An exploration of fetishism, Vertigo has become one itself, for movie fans, film scholars, English professors, gender specialists, and many others. Why shouldn't musicologists get in on the act?
Indeed, music is so central to Hitchcock's conception that one wonders why we didn't get a book on it much sooner. Hitchcock told Bernard Herrmann that he wanted more music in this movie than in any of his others, and he got his wish. Vertigo opens with triplets spiraling in contrary motion, plunging the audience into the cinema's most beautiful nightmare. Obsession, Vertigo's theme, receives its definitive sound in Herrmann's endless circlings, recirclings, and suspensions. By the time the haunted prelude becomes the furious whirrings launching the terrifying rooftop chase, we are hooked. For the next two hours, Scottie Ferguson's obsession becomes ours.
In earlier Hitchcock films such as Rebecca and Notorious, sound and silence existed in tense counterpoint. Vertigo, however, is driven by music practically from beginning to end. Herrmann's sounds constitute an independent force, a seductive fever enveloping audience and characters. Critics use musical metaphors to describe the film even when they are not writing about the music (David Sterritt, for example, calls Vertigo "a symphony of attraction-repulsion feelings projected by Hitchcock onto his characters.") Indeed, it is hard to think of any movie more dependent upon the seductiveness of its score. The violent sections alone-the "vertigo" chord and its many dizzying offshoots, the nightmare dissonance hurtling Scottie into an open graveare sensational enough to give the score permanent notoriety. But the melancholy beauty of the love music is even more gripping, repealing forever two conventions: the notion that movie...