Greek and Roman Mythology
Perhaps the most obvious mythological influence on the
film is the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the musician Orpheus
loses his wife, Eurydice, to death and ventures into the underworld
to rescue her, only to lose her again. Vertigo plays
off of two central themes of this story. First, Scottie’s Orpheus
character attempts to save Madeleine, the Eurydice character, from
drowning in the San Francisco Bay. He succeeds, only to lose her
in a “suicide” off the bell tower. He then gets a second chance
to save Madeleine from death, this time by recreating Judy in Madeleine’s
image. He achieves this resurrection, but then loses her again when
she plunges from the bell tower. And just as in the Orpheus myth
it is Orpheus’s fault—his failure to follow the instruction not
to look back at his beloved as he leads her out of Hades—that he
loses Eurydice again, so in Vertigo it is Scottie’s
flaws that lead to his losses: his acrophobia causes him to lose
Madeleine and it is his insistence on recreating a dead woman that
leads him to lose Judy.
The Roman myth of Pygmalion and Galatea is also a clear
influence on Vertigo. The sculptor Pygmalion (Scottie
in the film) uses his art to create a sculpture of the perfect woman
(Vertigo’s Madeleine) and then tragically falls
in love with his creation. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion,
which was later adapted into the musical My Fair Lady,
also echoes here, particularly in the scenes in which Scottie, as
a Pygmalion Professor Higgins, attempts to transform Judy,
his Eliza Doolittle, into a proper lady, but without any of the comic
effects of the play.
Scottie can also be seen as Tristan, the ill-fated lover
of the medieval legend Tristan and Isolde, who
marries a second woman named Isolde when the true Isolde of his
passions weds another. That legend ends with the death of Tristan
and the suicide of his beloved, just as Vertigo ends
with Judy/Madeleine’s accidental death and Scottie’s living “death”
in the wake of tragedy.
