The figure of the ‘missing’ dead body comes to be the central filament of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) and The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974); a fine thread that weaves together the narrative, characters, cinematography, representations and allegories within the individual films as well as among them. On its most base level, the ‘missing’ dead body signifies death – its prominence and promise even in the banality and ennui of the everyday. However, because this is a ‘missing’ death, one that is essentially unexplained, unaccounted for and in conflict with the official stories and understandings of death, its incidental and sinister appearance on both the protagonist’s and the movie camera’s visual radar overwhelms and traumatises. For the protagonist, there results in a traumatic sense of loss – either a partial or complete loss of one’s agency, belief in the social system, trust in the institutions that govern, feeling of security, and identity. This tone and spirit of the protagonist inevitably translates onto the respective film and, in turn, becomes allegorically representative of the tone and spirit felt by society at the time. Thus, these films in their recreation and enactment of a differentiated, singular traumatic event are then able to explore and elucidate the varied symptoms and crippling side effects of psychological trauma as endured by individuals, nations and cultures dealing with trauma that’s pertinent and inherent to their own historical milieu. This reading of the films in terms of trauma theory is facilitated by the fact that all three protagonists either subtly or manifestly exhibit the signs of mild psychological trauma, all the way down to post-traumatic stress disorder. Accordingly, this essay will map out the symptoms and effects of trauma as they come to affect the behaviour and actions of John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) in Vertigo, Thomas (David Hemmings) in Blowup and Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in The Conversation.
Analogous to the developments of trauma theory and other psychoanalytical approaches to cinema was Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “crisis of the action-image” and the resulting extended affection-image. Deleuze in his two-volume study, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, examines the history of cinema and, through that, ambitiously maps out a typology of images and signs. He notes that for the first half of its existence, cinema had been content to reproduce human perception of movement as ‘action’, however, at certain points in history, that is the Second World War and its devastating aftermath, this schema for perception was thrown into a state of crisis and so to was its cinematic representation. A new mode of cinema emerged and instead of being a traditional sensory-motor drama, where perception-image flowed smoothly onto affection-image and then action-image, these cause-and-effect links are now loosened, sometimes, even broken. This is because as the character encounters a unique situation, however ordinary or extraordinary, that is beyond any possible action or to which he or she can’t react for it is too powerful, too painful or too beautiful, the image follows accordingly and too lags behind, becoming trapped in the lacunary interval, the ‘any-space-whatever’. Some cinemas, such as post-war Italian Neorealism, revelled in this entrapment and explored its possibilities with the creation of crystal-images and other incarnations of the time-image. Meanwhile, American cinema, even during its New Hollywood wave, remained traumatised by the gap and was unable to move beyond the affection-image. Deleuze recognised that, for Hollywood, this crisis of the action-image – the opening up of the interval between perception and action – was a traumatic event, yet companionably, it was also a new ideal cinematic economy through which Hollywood was able to represent and deal with the traumas of the Vietnam War. 
Although Hitchcock’s Vertigo appears just a few years prior to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and a decade before the beginning of the New Hollywood wave, it still ostensibly deals with the themes of male subjectivity, paralysis and figurative castration. This loss of masculinity and sense of impotency, according to Robert Samuels in Hitchcock’s Bi-textuality, is the result of the realisation that male attempts to control and master the representation of the female subject are ultimately futile. This feeling of lack then motivates the male subject to find new forms of representational plentitude, forms that are even more misogynistic, sadistic and masochistic than before. Moreover, the character of Judy Barton (Kim Novak) in acting as a canvas for male representations of femaleness and femininity comes to highlight not only the constructed nature, but also the performativity, of gender and sexuality. Judy is also the ‘missing’ dead body in the film as well as the catalyst for the narrative and the prime cause of Scottie’s post-traumatic stress disorder.
Scottie’s first encounter with a traumatic event is, however, during the film’s opening after the title sequence. A close-up of a man’s hands grabbing onto a steel bar soon zooms out to reveal the San Francisco skyline at night and Scottie with his policing partner chasing a suspect. During the chase, Scottie jumps across from one ledge to a roof but fails to get a solid grip. He eventually starts falling but then latches onto the rooftop’s drain. It is there and then that he discovers he suffers vertigo when looking down from heights. Scottie’s partner tries to help him up but then loses his balance and falls to his death. This scene ends with a close-up of Scottie precariously hanging on with dumbstruck expression on his face: this image is both a hyperbolic and literal illustration of the affection-image, Scottie cannot react because what he has just seen is too tragic and, even if he could, it is physically impossible for him to do so. Naturally, it is highly fitting to find such an exemplar of this image in Vertigo, as Deleuze, in theorising the crisis of the action-image, employed a number of Hitchcock’s films to enunciate this concept. This first scene along with the next one in Midge’s apartment elucidate how Scottie has pre-existing acrophobic tendencies as revealed by his sudden onset of vertigo, and because the experience resulted in the death of his colleague, it quite rationally fortified his fear of heights. The experience paralyses Scottie and makes him feel feminised, further literalised by his corset: “Midge do you suppose many men wear corsets?” It is also revealed that he voluntarily quit his job and has recurring nightmares of the traumatic event, signifying that Scottie has been paralysed physically, professionally and psychologically. Moreover, it is also curious to note how his vertigo is attached to a fear of femininity, as Samuels explains, a fear of falling in love with the mother-substitute Midge.
Later on, Scottie is hired as a private investigator by Gavin Elster to follow and survey his wife. Little does Scottie know that she is Judy, playing the dual role of Madeleine and Carlotta. Elster knowingly scripts her as the ideal woman, or rather as the type that Scottie desires. It is not so much Madeleine’s physical attributes that Scottie is attracted to, of course her platinum blonde appearance doesn’t hurt and is in stark contrast to Midge’s librarian look, but rather her mental and behavioural attributes: Madeleine’s ‘damsel in distress’ act and her emotional instability. This and the fact that he is being employed again to do a job, to contribute back to society, allows him to attain a sense of agency and masculinity, almost one that is hyper-phallic. This is especially pertinent when he saves her life after her (contrived) act of suicide. Scottie, in this scene, takes on the role of the hero and is able to help Hitchcock fulfil the Kuleshovian montage of perception, affection and action. The rescue is soaked with sexual overtones that spill into the next scene in Scottie’s apartment: Madeleine’s dress hanging in his kitchen, her sleeping naked in his bed and wearing his bathrobe.
All these little triumphs, which Elster and Madeleine afford Scottie, eventually lead to another bout of vertigo and consequently his complete loss of masculinity and identity. When trying to save her life a second time, he is unable to catch up to her running up the bell tower. The audience, through Scottie’s perspective, sees her fall down through the window, and then a shot-reverse-shot confirms (the real) Madeleine’s dead body. Scottie is clearly traumatised by this event as he shivers uncontrollably with a wild look in his eyes, a look reminiscent of his first vertigo attack – suggesting how this new traumatic event has reactivated emotions associated with prior ones. Scottie is unable to respond appropriately and walks away without a thorough inspection of the body. The most obvious signs of his post-traumatic stress disorder, however, come in his sleep. A close-up of Scottie with his head on his pillow segues into a dream sequence as he relives the event; the multicolour tint of the film stock along with the melodramatic score not only create a nightmarish atmosphere but also a dizzying effect.
Later on, in an attempt to work through this trauma, Scottie visits the places that are associated with Madeline – the courtyard of her apartment, the restaurant where he first saw her, and the gallery with Carlotta’s portrait. In fact, Scottie becomes so intent on retracing this event and ‘translating’ this trauma (i.e. to make meaning out of it) that he sadistically makes over his new girlfriend, Judy, to look like Madeleine. Scottie uses her to obsessive-compulsively review the event step-by-step, moment-by-moment, eventually unveiling the conspiracy he was unwittingly accomplice to. Meanwhile, Judy mimetically fulfils the fate that she had subscribed to in the first half of the film. The replaying and repetition of the traumatic event here could be interpreted as being inspired by the ‘missing’ dead body. The dead body is missing because Scottie is mourning the death of the wrong woman and, in achieving closure, he requires the right dead body to mourn over. Scottie wants to intellectualise this event; to understand its circumstances and not just regard it as a supernatural occurrence; to unmask the betrayal and its motive; to reconcile the identities of the real murdered Madeleine, the carbon copy Madeleine, and the actress paid to play her as well as his relation to each of them; and to ultimately be able to see the world objectivity again. The final shot is again an affection-image, but its use here is enigmatic because on the one hand, both the narrative and Scottie’s dilemma have been resolved and the action-image has resurfaced again, yet on the other hand, this event could have further traumatising effects later on despite Scottie’s vertigo being seemingly cured.
At the conclusion of Blowup, however, the protagonist Thomas, after enduring the trauma of discovering a dead body at the local park, has a newfound subjective perspective on the world. Due to the experience, he is able to step outside himself and see the world, not from an egocentric, one-sided ‘objective’ point of view, but rather from a viewpoint that is open to the perils and possibilities of the world. This consequently reaffirms the notion that trauma, in damaging one’s systems of perception and representation, creates new subjects, subjectivities and meanings, and opens the mind’s eyes. In the final scene, Thomas impartially watches the mimes’ game of tennis and when indicated to participate in this seemingly ridiculous activity he complies and shares in their subjective but meaningful experience. This scene, when read through the trauma theory discourse, uncovers how quiet, personal and secretive the symptoms and side effects of trauma can be; how often the general (mis)conception or definition of “trauma” is that of something that occurs only from monumental historical events like WWII or September 11, or of experiences that affect entire nations, communities or collective groups such as colonialism, immigration and diasporas, when in reality trauma is much more pervasive and universal. Trauma affects everyone, can be caused by anything that “shatters the psychic identity” and its symptoms vary considerably – from light melancholy and anxiety through to hysteria and depression. Just as E. Ann Kaplan in her insightful book Trauma Culture explains: “[a] daily experience of terror may not take the shape of classic trauma suffered by victims or survivors, but to deny [this] experience as traumatic would be a mistake … one [should] recognise degrees and kinds of trauma.” Thus, both the film and Antonioni do not explicitly announce the trauma that’s been inflicted on Thomas, but subtly display behaviours, traits and other codes that suggest his degradation. For example, Thomas becomes obsessed with locating the dead body and after confirming his suspicions begins to withdraw from the activities and pleasures which define his identity.
This onset of trauma is a belated one, and the realisation of a dead body and a murder is first suspected in the dubious behaviour of Vanessa Redgrave’s character. She draws Thomas’ attention to the photographs, and eventually he blows them up to discern whether or not such a criminal act occurred. The photos reveal an indistinct shadow, a blob, only interpretable via his imagination. Thomas revisits the park and his suspicions turn out to be correct, yet strangely, the dead body bears a strong resemblance to the gentleman whom Redgrave was frolicking with at the time when the photos were taken. Moreover, the fact that the body was not disposed of earlier and later goes missing along with his photographs implies that the whole event could have just been the product of Thomas’ own inventive imagination. Regardless of this possibility, Thomas still remains disturbed and traumatised by the experience. He feels betrayed by the persons, who could commit such a crime in his backyard, who have such little regard for the laws of society. Thomas’ frustration is further perpetuated by his business partner’s disinterest in the story, which again illustrates the personal nature of trauma as well as alluding to the notion of “empty empathy”.
Blowup is a film where its aesthetic is entirely influenced by the interval afforded by the crisis of the action-image. When in this interval, it does not remain trapped in the affection-image but rather goes on to explore the cinematics of the time-image. This is due to its “balade-form”, i.e. the aimless wanderings that Thomas engages it, which according to Deleuze is one of the five instances that result in the emergence of time-images. Additionally, Christian Keathley in the essay ‘Trapped in the Affection Image’ acknowledges two ‘genres’ of art cinema – ‘realism’ and ‘authorial expressivity’, and curiously Blowup fits into both camps. This is emblematic of the fact that Antonioni as an Italian director is both an apprentice of the Italian Neorealists and a renegade of that tradition. His film aims to explore the “contingent daily reality” of its characters but in a way that stylistically draws attention to its construction and disregards the continuity norms of Classical Hollywood. The most notable example being when Thomas returns to the park the second time to find the body missing: a shot-reverse-shot schedule is first set up as he looks down on the bare ground but then it gets discarded.
The third film which will be briefly discussed here is Coppola’s The Conversation. This film discernibly borrows the motifs of unsanctioned surveillance, murder and the ‘missing’ dead body from both Vertigo and Blowup and rearranges them to provide a politically-charged critique and reflection of American society in the 1970s, amidst the Vietnam War. The Conversation fittingly conjures up the claustrophobia and paranoia of the McCarthyism era, of which America’s involvement in the Vietnam War has its political origins in. Coppola explicitly uses the affection-image close-up and the son-sign of a woman screeching to depict Harry’s blackout response to the traumatic event. This screeching son-sign and the screen’s fade to black are used again when Harry discovers the ‘missing’ dead body, or rather, its blood residue. The Conversation, like most films of the New Hollywood period, such as Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967), The Graduate (Nichols, 1967), Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969), Klute (Pakula, 1971), McCabe and Mrs Miller (Altman, 1971), Chinatown (Polanski, 1974) and Shampoo (Ashby, 1975), is infatuated with the affection-image because it is the most potent cinematic image that depicts, and deals with, the traumatic death of the American Dream.
In conclusion, this essay has provided a reading of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Antonioni’s Blowup and Coppola’s The Conversation in terms of trauma theory. It has emphasised that the figure of the ‘missing’ dead body, as a potent symbol of death, is the prime catalyst for the three protagonists’ regression and development of, either mild or severe, post-traumatic stress disorder. The essay employs the films’ intricate narratives and characterisations to elucidate the different theories of trauma and its varying symptoms and side effects. Attention is also paid to the filmic techniques that these directors use in their exploration of the affection-image, also known as the crisis of the action-image. All three directors openly adopt this cinematic image in their representation of a traumatic event and the desolating effects that it has on the protagonist.
Bibliography
Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Jersey. London: Rutgers University Press. 2005.
Samuels, Robert. Hitchcock’s Bi-textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory. New York: State University of New York Press. 1998.
