Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Power and Freedom
Power and freedom are held up as privileges men had in
the past, but presumably do not have in the present. While discussing
his nostalgia for the San Francisco of the past, Gavin Elster tells
Scottie that he misses the days when men had “power [and] freedom.”
Later, when Scottie is researching the story of Carlotta Valdes,
the bookshop owner and historian Pop Leibel tells him that the wealthy
man who abandoned Carlotta and kept her child was able to do so
with impunity because men in those days had “the freedom and the
power” to do such things. Scottie yearns for the time when he felt
he was the master of his own destiny, before his brush with death
on the rooftop. The words freedom and power again
are spoken by Scottie as he drags Judy up the stairs of the bell
tower.
Tunnels and Corridors
Tunnels and corridors repeatedly represent the passage
to death. The first tunnel image appears when the camera reveals
Scottie’s perspective as he clings to the rooftop gutter. The camera
shoots straight down the side of the building, creating a tunnel
effect. While visiting the sequoia forest, Madeleine shares a recurring
dream in which she walks “. . . down a long corridor.” Nothing but
darkness and death await her at the end of the corridor. She also
dreams of a room in which there is a corridor-like open grave. When
Midge walks away from Scottie for the last time, it is down a long
sanatorium corridor that darkens around her. This passage marks
a kind of death for Midge as she loses hope of rekindling her romance
with Scottie.
Hitchcock turns the tunnel-to-death motif on its head
in the corridor outside Judy’s apartment. Judy emerges at the end
of the hallway after her transformative trip to the beauty salon.
Rather than retreat down the corridor, she comes forward as Madeleine
in a kind of resurrection scene. The next tunnel Judy travels through
is in Scottie’s car, when he takes her back to San Juan Bautista
to retrace the steps of her crime. As they drive toward the mission,
tall trees on either side of the road combine with dusky lighting
to give the impression of a tunnel.
Bouquets of Flowers
In one scene, Scottie follows Madeleine to a flower shop,
where she purchases a small nosegay. Its fragile perfection is an
ideal representation of Madeleine herself. The bouquet appears again
several times, most notably when Madeleine stands at the edge of
San Francisco Bay, plucking petals from the flowers and tossing
them into the water. The destruction of the bouquet mirrors Madeleine’s
fixation on self-destruction as she prepares to drown herself in
the bay. After Madeleine’s death, Hitchcock provides a graphic depiction
of Scottie’s nightmare in which a brightly animated bouquet swirls
about and then violently disintegrates—a symbolic representation
of Madeleine’s death. When Scottie spends the day with Judy before her
transformation into Madeleine, he buys her a single flower to wear
as a corsage, not a replica of Madeleine’s signature bouquet as we
might expect. It is a visual reminder that Judy does not possess the
ideal perfection of Madeleine, but merely a small seed of it.
Spirals
Spirals evoke the literal and figurative feelings of vertigo
that hound Scottie and Madeleine/Judy. The opening credits feature
a spiral emerging from a woman’s eye. When Scottie looks down from
the roof at his fallen colleague, the dead man’s limbs are splayed
in the shape of a spiral, indicating that events have spiraled out
of control.
As Scottie observes Madeleine in the museum sitting in
front of Carlotta Valdes’s portrait, the camera zooms in on the
back of her head to reveal a tightly wound spiraling bun, an exact
replica of the style worn by Carlotta. The spiral foreshadows the
dizzying chaos into which Madeleine will lead Scottie. The most
physically jarring spiral is the one formed by the winding stairs
of the bell tower as revealed from Scottie’s perspective. As he
chases Madeleine up the stairs attempting to halt her apparent suicide,
his acrophobia takes over and the camera shoots straight down the
stairwell. His vertigo has made him powerless to save the woman
he loves. The very structure of the film suggests a spiraling circularity:
Scottie falls in love with Madeleine, loses her to death, then falls
in love with Judy/Madeleine again, only to lose her to death as
well.
