Released in 1976, the same year as Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, Obsession is Brian De Palma’s purest Hitchcockian tribute, and sets the stage for his many reworkings of the Master of Suspense. However, this reimagination of 1958’s Vertigo is far from a conventional or traditional adaptation. De Palma doesn’t merely transplant the vision of Hitchcock’s classic era into the 1970s and screenwriter Paul Schrader doesn’t simply provide us with an alternative version of Vertigo either. Instead, Obsession plays as a simulacrum, attuned to a cinematic universe in which the Hitchcockian image now precedes reality, rather than providing the critical distance needed to dissect it. Closer in spirit to the Roman Forum of Las Vegas or the Main Street of Disneyland than to a typical directorial tribute, De Palma’s film attempts to capture the texture of a reality that has already been thoroughly and inextrixably mediated through Hitchcock’s images, which means that it is also not really a conceptual extension of Vertigo so much as an immersion in the cultural memory of Vertigo, presenting Hitchcock’s masterpiece first and foremost as an object of cinephilia than as a text with a specific psychoanalytic thesis in and of itself. In De Palma’s shared visions, James Stewart’s Scottie becomes the model for the cinephile in his capacity to situate fantasy in the fleeting space between image and reality, a situation that Obsession expands into a manifesto for how to desire in an emerging postmodern image sphere.
Of course, we can still only fully understand Obsession in juxtaposition with Vertigo, which as Slavoj Zizek has explained, is possibly the Master’s most Lacanian film in the way it posits that desire is not attached to a specific object but to the perceived lack, gap or mystery that keeps the object at a distance. On the surface, Scottie’s relationship with Midge, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, seems to satisfy many of the criteria for a romance, but she is too present, too available and too knowable to properly stimulate his desire. By contrast, he first encounters Madeleine, played by Kim Novak, from a remote distance, as possibly haunted by the ghost of an irretrievable past, and already somewhat absorbed into death, meaning that when she reveals herself to be Judy, a normal everyday woman, his desire stumbles, meaning he has to reconstruct her Madeleine-esque distance to restore it. His failure to do so paves the way for one of Hitchcock’s most brutal endings, revealing, as it does, that once the other’s distance has revealed to be a fabrication of our desire, our desire for them also becomes irretrievable, leaving us with an irreversible psychic loss.
On the face of it, Obsessio follows a roughly similar trajectory. The action begins in 1959, the year that Hitchcock’s film gained traction, at the home of New Orleans real estate magnate Michael Courtland, played by Cliff Robertson, on the night that his wife Elizabeth, played by Genevieve Bujold, and his daughter Amy, played by Wanda Blackman, are kidnapped by gangsters demanding an extraordinary ransom. In the ensuing police chase, the car containing Elizabeth and Amy crashes into Lake Pontchartrain, with no apparent survivors, and from there the action jumps forward to 1976, when Michael has tentatively managed to get his life back together, with the help of his best friend and business partner Robert LaSalle, played by John Lithgow. However, Michael and Robert’s great business venture, the Pontchartrain Estates, remains undeveloped, as Michael has dedicated the block of land to a memorial park to his wife and daughter. Upon travelling to Florence, where he met Elizabeth, for business, Michael meets and falls in love with a young woman, Sandra Portinari, also played by Bujold, who reminds him uncannily of his wife and daughter – and for good reason, since Sandra actually is his daughter, kept separate from him all this time by Robert, who has recruited her assistance in finally closing the Pontchartrain Estates deal. When Michael and Sandra return to New Orleans, and announce their intention to get married, the clock starts to tick as they move ever closer to the cusp of the incest taboo.
There are some clear overlaps with Vertigo here but also some major differences – notably, the fact that this confusion and projection of identity is grafted onto what initially appears like an even more schematic psychoanalytic drama. Yet the strangest fact about Obsession is that Michael’s eventual discovery of Sandra’s identity doesn’t produce catastrophe, as occurs in Hitchcock’s film, but restoration, reunion and, ultimately a happy ending. More specifically, whereas Vertigo is structured around three ontological regimes – reality, fantasy, demystification – Obsession is situated almost entirely within the second regime, fantasy, which expands until it constitutes almost the entire film, eclipsing “realistic” narrative and character development in the process. Typically in a Hitchcock film this fantasy sequence is transitional and unstable, but De Palma attempts to inhabit and stabilise it for as long as possible, encouraging us to give ourselves over unqualifiedly to Michael’s obsession, and rewarding us for doing so in one of the “happiest” endings of his career.
In other words, the “Madeleine phase” of Vertigo becomes the driving principle of Obsession, as De Palma situates the affective and aesthetic vitality of his vision so thoroughly in the fantasy structure of the narrative that it feels more realised than reality. By contrast, the “real” world is quite perfunctory and conventional narrative logic doesn’t really add up; it doesn’t make sense, when you pause to think about it, that LaSalle should engage in such a long con just to get the waterfront property back. The explanatory elements of Schrader’s screenplay are grudging necessities, token concessions to convention, before De Palma can return to his preferred state of reverie, and for most of its running time Obsession demonstrates remarkably little interest in disentangling the minutiae of this criminal conspiracy or exploring the implications of the father-daughter romance. Hitchcock’s rigorously “realistic” universe won’t permit Scottie to remain within the fantasy sphere but De Palma’s filmic textures are entirely constructed from fantasy.
What we see, then, in the shift from Vertigo to Obsession, is a transition between late modern and early postmodern cinema. In Hitchcock’s world a precarious distinction remains between reality and fantasy, truth and image, world and representation, even if facing it costs Scottie his entire existence. Yet De Palma signals that this world can now only be understood as a period effect by mapping the timeframe of Hitchcock’s film into his own – the opening scenes unfold in 1959, the year after Vertigo was released, and the main narrative takes place in 1975, the year before Obsession was released. By the mid-70s, De Palma suggests, the distinction between fantasy and reality has ceased to ramify, since everything exists in a network of representations and reproductions anyway. Hitchcock’s austere psychoanalytic parable thereby gives way to the logic of the simulation, whereby the fantasy becomes productive, a copy that replaces the original and becomes more resonant than whatever “reality” preceded it. Unlike Scottie, Michael is not exactly “wrong” to believe that Sandra is a reincarnation of his wife, since she truly is a continuation of his wife, just in a way he can’t conceive at first, and the revelation of which doesn’t produce the kind of angst we might find in Hitchcock. In true postmodern fashion, De Palma dares to dream that hyperreality might be more fulfilling than the “real thing,” that fantasy might sustain us as much as the object, a consolation Hitchcock never permits his audience.
That’s not to say that Obsession is defeatist or exhausted in its vision of the image economy either, for in its own way it is also a transitional text, certainly postmodern in its concessions to simulacra but also possessed of a residual modernism in its effort to “make them new,” to extract something of sincerity from them. It is as if Walter Benjamin’s aura had been transplanted from the original to the copy, by way of De Palma’s sensuous aesthetic, possibly the most decadent of his career. For Obsession is a case study in hyperbolised mood, languor, atmosphere, as if the aesthetic itself were strained to its limits to produce a hysteria that sits somewhere between ecstasy and terror. The lens is perpetually smeared with vaseline, as if the camera is brought to the brink of tears by the sheer act of looking, much as Michael is often barely able to speak through his glistening pupils, so overwhelmed is he by the visual intensity of the world before him. Vilmos Zsigmond’s camera is always sliding across images, whether through long circular pans, endlessly inventive tracking-shots, or seamless zooms across multiple planes of space, all testaments to the insatiable pleasure of the gaze. The one thing that Sandra is “missing,” and that Michael has to teach her, is his former wife’s Bryn Mawr gliding gait (as opposed to the Italian sashay), and as he teaches her Zsigmond’s fluid camera leads the way, carving out a silky sinuosity of space.
Far from demystifying images, then, this immersion in postmodern fantasy restores the sanctity of the image, as if the simulation provided us with an authenticity greater even than that of the original. We first glimpse this sanctified image field when Michael meets Elizabeth restoring frescoes – their first conversation hinges around the question of whether the image on the bottom of a palimpsest is any more “real” or “true” than the image painted on top. Full sanctity comes when Elizabeth takes him to the church where she imagined Dante and Beatrice as a child, and places him in the position of Dante, imbuing him with the poet’s insatiable and unconsummated gaze – the unrequited love that fueled the creation of one of the greatest fantasies in the literature in the form of The Divine Comedy, as Michael acknowledges by describing his own second marriage to Elizabeth as his “Vita Nuova.” The simulation thereby becomes invested with the revelatory potential of the divine and so displaces the revelatory power that Hitchcock assigns to psychoanalysis.
This movement away from psychoanalytic explanation, in a narrative that seems so dependent on it, is one of the most striking features of De Palma’s film – comparable to the role of Oedipa in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in its suggestion that psychoanalysis, arguably the dominant grand narrative and secular religious institution of the United States at mid-century, has started to lose its hegemony in the postmodern era. Like Pynchon, De Palma doesn’t exactly reject the explanatory power of Freud and Lacan outright so much as question its unassailable authority and open it up to quotation, parody and play. For even as Obsession retreats from psychoanalysis closure it revels in psychoanalytic tropes – repression, doubling, melancholia, sublimation – adopting Freud and Lacan’s worldview as an aesthetic rather than guiding the audience towards a definitive diagnosis. You might say that De Palma is fascinated above all by the cinematic potential of Freudian structures, and their apotheosis in the Hitchcockian dream-sequence, but less confident in Freud’s actual ability to categorically explain them. In any case, virtually all of Obsession takes place within one such dream-sequence, and one of the fundamental qualities of dreams is that they don’t interrogate their own logic – they may well contain psychoanalytic material but they aren’t an interpretative mechanism in themselves, at least not as we’re experiencing them. A dream always presents itself as the totality of reality.
This dissolution of psychoanalysis as a hegemonic hermeneutic paves the way for Obsession’s fundamental thesis about the fate of time and history in an emergent postmodern sphere. For psychoanalysis is a depth model and depends upon a linear model of historical time, asserting that the present is not self-contained; it is the product of a past that persists unconsciously within it, and the business of therapy is to work backwards from the symptom towards the forgotten, repressed or displaced event that created it. Hence Freud’s archaeological metaphors, in which analysis becomes a kind of excavation, digging through successive strata of symptoms to restore submerged psychic history. No doubt these symptoms may be extraordinarily complex, and fantasy may distort the past until it is almost unrecognizable, but the premise of Freudian psychoanalysis is that this distortion itself has a history that analysis can eventually reconstruct, and that surface and depth, present and past, and manifest and latent content remain ontologically differentiable.
Part of the brilliance of Vertigo is the way that Hitchcock attaches this depth model to the cinematic logic of images. Scottie is initially haunted by the ghostly image of Madeleine, which is almost supernatural in its free-floating detachment from the rhythms of his quotidian world, and yet as the film proceeds the conditions of production of this image become manifest: Judy performed the image, Elster coordinated the image, and Scottie’s vertigo was exploited to make him the ideal recipient of the image. Scottie may come to understand this temporal production of the image but that doesn’t make him able to restore the initial allure of the image, since Hitchcockian time depends upon a strict distinction between present and past. No such distinction occurs in Obsession, which is absolutely saturated with the past even as it possesses a diminished historical consciousness. Michael is obsessed with the past, De Palma is obsessed with the past, New Orleans is suffused with the past, Florence is suffused with the past, Bernard Herrmann’s score cites his past work on Vertigo, and yet the point of the project is not to reconstruct the historical process linking the past to the present, as occurs in psychoanalysis. Instead, there is no position outside the ever-increasing images of the past from which the past can be fully recovered – and this, Fredric Jameson argues, is the key trait of postmodernism.
What unfolds is thus a shift from Freudian repression to postmodern simulation, and from the logic of metaphor to the logic of metonymy. In a Freudian depth model one image disguises something beneath it in a metaphorical relation but in a simulacral model one image leads by association to another image that shares equivalent ontological status; the progression of images never reverts back to an originating reality that can stabilise it. There is something schematic and logical about the progression of Vertigo, even amidst its dreamiest moments. By contrast, Obsession unfolds primarily through metonymic association, giving it an improvisational quality that sits eerily alongside its hyper-aestheticised tableau. This is De Palma’s version of what Gilles Deleuze described as the trip-ballad, the wandering troubadour-like spirit of post-war European cinema. Deleuze identified this associative narrative structure as a response to the dissolution of historical time and yet De Palma takes us to its next iteration, in which historical time has been tentatively reconstructed as a spectacle and simulation (again, Michael’s instruction to Sandra on the right way of walking and wandering feels pivotal in this respect). And of course, De Palma’s ultimate historical object is Hitchcock himself, who exists here as a metonymic chain assembled from the most recognisable signs of his auteurism: doubles, fatalism, elaborate camera movements, the return of the repression, obsession itself.
The film’s reduction of psychoanalysis to a free-floating collection of signifiers is thus merely the precursor to its reduction of history to a free-floating collection of signifiers, a process that crystallises around the Pontchartrain Estates conspiracy that drives the action. For De Palma and Schrader arrange this historical thesis around three distinct iterations of New Orleans, one of the most “European” of American cities, in which the sedimented strata of the past are peculiarly vivid and visible, and whose historical residue plays a particularly marked role in its contemporary urban texture. The first of these iterations is the actual, historical New Orleans, the material traces of the Old South, most of which constellate around the abduction scheme: the Pontchartrain ferry that Michael takes for the ransom drop, the abandoned wharf where he flings the suitcase of cash, and the rusty industrial bridge where his wife and daughter supposedly both perish. These are real historical spaces and yet they only operate here as lines of flight into the conflict between Michael and Robert’s different yet equally postmodern ideas of how space should be organised. No sooner do we glimpse these ruins and figments of the Old South than they are relegated to the rearview mirror in the name of the proposed Pontchartrain Estates development.
Through this development proposal Michael and Robert come to embody two different yet inextricably related responses to the disappearance of historical time under late capitalism. Robert wants to return the Pontchartrain Estates site to circulation as real estate – for him, land is merely a repository of future profit, meaning that its historical and memorial connotations are irrelevant. Even the fact that Michael’s wife and daughter supposedly perished nearby doesn’t ramify with him; what happened there in the past has no bearing upon what capital can make happen there in the present. This is clearly space divested of any organic relation to the past. Initially, Michael seems like a corrective to this position, arresting the atemporal circulation of space by converting the site into a memorial to Elizabeth and Amy. Yet the paradox of the film is that Michael is not preserving history any more than Robert – he is converting it into an image, and De Palma signifies this by always shooting the Pontchartrain Memorial Park (as it becomes) from the same sweeping angle, as if it exists only as a sightline. The first image we see in 1975 is this recurring shot of the park, history now congealed as a luxurious image, as the first swellings of the Vertigo theme begin to emerge in Herrmann’s score. Ironically, Michael’s resistance to Robert’s spatial abstraction produces another distinct postmodern form: the themed historical space.
These three iterations of New Orleans thus chart a passage from an authentically historical landscape, to the capitalist reification of that landscape, to simulacral memoralisation as a kind of false consciousness, a thwarted effort to restore an organic connection to the past. And it is this false consciousness that drives the narrative and transforms Florence into a radically intensified version of Michael’s supposed “solution” to the quandary of the city. For Florence exists here not as a vibrant contemporary city nor as a genuine historical entity but as an aesthetic repository of the past, with Elizabeth/Sandra at its centre. Michael moves from a memorial park in New Orleans to what is effectively an entire memorial city in Europe – Deleuze’s trip-ballad, and its anxieties about the dissolution of European history, now remade entirely as postmodern nostalgia-image. Florence is a place where history has become a delirious circulation of signs, a circulation that reaches its climax in the extraordinary final scene, when Michael and Sandra meet each other for the first time as father and daughter, at the New Orleans airport. So embedded is the film in its fantasy by this stage, though, that it barely makes sense to speak in the temporal terms of a “first time” or the spatial terms of a specific airport. Instead, this is Deleuze’s any-space-whatever, the traumatic zone of the trip-ballad, but transformed into a canvas for fantasy.
It is here that De Palma stages his final departure from Vertigo, replacing Hitchcock’s distinctive spiral with a seemingly neverending circling shot around Michael and Sandra, as they tremble on the precipice of the incest taboo. The spiral of Vertigo is a depth motif, with each rotation taking Scottie to a new ontological regime, the superimposition onto his eye in the opening credits indicating that the excavation of the psychic past will involve psychological transformation and revelation. By contrast, De Palma’s orbit discloses no deeper layer, no profound revelation, no collapse of fantasy because fantasy has already been collapsed into reality. Michael and Sandra’s real relationship becomes a non-event, since De Palma has removed the stable perspective outside the spiral from which Hitchcock enjoins his audience to diagnose Scottie’s obsession. And in doing so, he collapses any sense of historical linearity – rather than moving from past to present, Michael inhabits both at the same time, meaning it doesn’t much matter whether Sandra is his wife or his daughter.
This means that Obsession leaves a strange taste in the mouth – Michael and Sandra end up fulfilled in ways that are not possible in Vertigo and yet there is something disqueting and thwarted about their fulfilment, not least because the film has spent so much time foreshadowing the “twist” of their real relationship that it displaces any sense of revelation when it finally arrives. Somewhere, submerged, Obsession ends as a tragedy, perhaps an even more profound tragedy than Vertigo, in which Robert’s effort to transform history into exchange value and Michael’s effort to transform history into simulation produces a cinematic image that is nostalgically gentrified but oddly devoid of presence. Obsession doesn’t ultimately escape Vertigo’s crisis of being haunted by the past – it takes it to a second remove, and is haunted by the impossibility of being haunted by the past, the impossibility of engaging with the past excerpt through hypermediated representations. To ensure that Hitchcockian history is not erased De Palma reinvents it as simulation, and that paradox and ambivalence marks the inception point of his golden period as a director.