Spot the movie subliminals - Hitchcock's VERTIGO (driving scene)

A new series of short film analysis videos. This one features a sly subliminal sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO. By Rob Ager

[MillionthUsername]

If this scene is saying anything it's that while he is following her she is also seeking him. She's looking for his apartment, and when he sees that he speeds up to quickly park himself so he can break out of the private detective mode and meet her personally again before she takes off. It's establishing that they are destined to meet again and are now intertwined for the rest of the movie. It completes the transition from them being strangers to being entangled.

[lukaszprzek]

The two similar looking green cars at 5:26 could have been intended to symbolize the scene when Novak runs to the top of the tower where the real wife's body is passed off as Novak as the corpse is thrown out of the building.

[Pippinmog]

I never found that scene boring at all. Quite the opposite : )

[LUNATIC]

I was waiting for Steve McQueen to go flying past in a '68 Mustang.

[jamshidbastani]

Hitch is letting Bernard Hermann do his magic. Vertigo's soundtrack is work of genius. The driving scene is about 10 minutes of fantastic music and cinematography.

[AriaMohtadiHaghighi]

- James Stewart casually lets go of the steering wheel a couple of times out of frustration, as if figuratively losing control and being lured/led by the green car.
- Off subject: speed up the scene and you'll get the prototype for the famous chase scene from Bullitt.

[vizuz]

One of my favorite movies. Hitchcock's ultimate masterpiece imo

[henrikhansen]

3:06
She is not going home - she is going to Scotty’s place - which in the story would explain her going round in circles - uncertain where he lives.

[bronzewand]

When I first watched Vertigo, this was the scene that got me completely immersed into the film. The score is just genius

[Majoofi]

What about the awful parking job by both Novak and Stewart?

[freaklives]

As soon as I saw this video's title I thought I knew what you were going to say. But you didn't. What I always thought the subliminal message of this sequence was that SF bay is almost always ahead of her, no matter which way she turns, as if the bay - representing suicide, death - is where she's headed and she can't escape that.

[kendrojr]

This scene isn’t boring at all, it shows the mans obsession

[CZsWorld]

Love how you used Google Maps. I did that in my recent analysis of the IT Trailer.

[Eliel]

one of the few movies worthy to be called a masterpiece, alfred hitchcock`s magnum opus

[markmalasics]

This is all personal opinion. To suggest that there are hidden subliminal "messages" in the film, 50+ years after it's release, is nothing more than a mind grabbing at straws to make some kind of connections between them.

Did you know that before Scottie became a police officer, he worked as a design engineer for Otis Elevator? While there, he lost his job because of a neglect to incorporate improved automatic safety features that would stop an elevator car from falling when power is lost or the cable is broken. Because of this traumatic failure in life, Scotty is now obsessed with driving down hill as he contemplates his dismissal from Otis, a mental state he will live with for the rest of his life.

The car driven my Madeline is green because she has plenty of money.

The route driven by Scotty and Madeline intentionally travels past a park, because Hitchcock lost his virginity on a park bench, and as an homage to that moment of coming of age, he decided to include it, but fleetingly brief, as was his sexual encounter.

During the second scene of the park, on the left there is a convertible car with the top down. Hitch wanted to secretly convey Scotty's desire to see Madeline with HER top down.

At 4:12 on the left we see a blue car parked on the sidewalk. Scotty should have immediately stopped and written the offender a ticket, but Hitch wanted the audience to know that Scotty felt that his career was meaningless compared to finding out where Madeline was driving. So instead of stopping, or calling in to headquarters to have a precinct patrol car come by, Scotty bravely ignored his sworn duty and continued to follow Madeline unabated.

At 4:53 as we see Madline pull up in front of Scotty's apartment building, the bright white line down the center of the road comes to an abrupt stop, although the street continues. This is to allude to the fact that Scotty and Madeline will also come up against abrupt events in their lives. Madeline will become Judy, and Scotty will become docile and helpless. In both cases their lives come to an abrupt change, but also continue forward as the street does. If you missed this, you weren't paying attention.

Finally at 3:04 as Madeline is turning right on Lombard Street, there is a total of 5 cars of various shades of green. Each of these green vehicles represent the money Hitch knew he was going to make on the film, and corresponds one car to one denomination of USA currency: $100 bill, $50 bill, $20 bill, $10 bill and the $5 bill. Hitch considered American singles and two dollar bills to be essentially worthless to him and he frequently used them as toilet paper. Hence, only 5 green cars.

[shawn]

The actor's face seems accurate. "Bitch, where the fuck are we going?"

[hippiecheezburger]

Wow this film is so hypnotic I think that’s the quality about vertigo that makes me love it most, the serenity in some of these scenes, the colors, how it’s on location and real, it does something that you can sense and feel in your subconscious

[CyrusB]

In the musical, The Secret Garden, there's a line that says, "Getting lost is how you learn". We (the audience) are forced to cling to her as a guide after the maze of turns from the previous minutes. Also, Stewart's frustration mimics are own, and makes him more our protagonist. Hitchcock was a genius for so many reasons, this scene certainly being a great example

[andrewgleeson]

This is so dumb. Directors use discontinuity all the time in location shooting because they are curating what the streets look like. Who cares if it is not an actual real path, there is nothing subliminal about that. The whole scene is meant to establish that she is seemingly driving randomly, when in fact she is searching for Scottie's house, and she may have forgotten where it was. This analysis is lazy and dumb. The problem is that these kind of amateur film analysts are too hung up on pragmatic discontinuities, and that is completely irrelevant for this scene. Hitchcock would not expect his viewers to intimately know the street layouts of San Fran while watching. totally misses the point, and the scene is not boring.

[johnnymcauley]

My favourite thing in vertigo is the pallette. How more colours are gradually introduced. Gavin's red office corresponds with the opening sequence. Red restaurant seems impossibly correspondent to Gavin's office, like he's planning the goose chase. The green dress in the restaurant foreshadows the stop and go theme of Johnny's pursuit.