The dark side of blondeness: Vertigo and race

Abstract

Ever expanding, the field of Hitchcock studies continues painstakingly to excavate the Master’s movie house. Yet there is one part of this house that has not been much inspected – we might call it the race closet – where the director’s complex and admittedly obscure attitudes towards nonwhite subjects can be found. If, as Richard Dyer has definitively shown, whiteness is invisible because it simply represents humanness itself, it follows that race is invisible in the Hitchcock text, given its pervasive orientation within a particular classed (upper-middle to aristocratic), racially homogenous, ‘white’ world. That said, race matters belong to the alternative spaces within Hitchcock films, the dialogical counterbalance to their pristine, coherent racial and class composition. Like the queer knowledge that perpetually threatens to erode the stability of the Hitchcock text, race and its forms of knowing hover over and haunt their domains. The subject of race – and ethnicity – in the director’s output is a complex question, one that far exceeds the concerns of this essay;1 here I focus on the linkages between Vertigo (1958), arguably the director’s most canonical work, and representations of race and passing in American literature and films of the mid twentieth century. In Toni Morrison’s influential study Playing in the Dark, she argues that an Africanist presence haunts American literature and culture,2 and I locate this inexpressible yet palpable presence throughout Vertigo. I trace the film’s overlaps with sentimental race melodrama, rooted in the mother–daughter relationship, and argue that its critical analysis of constructions of idealized white female beauty dovetails with that found in African American literature of the period. I put Hitchcock’s work into dialogue with Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, the different literary and cinematic versions of Imitation of Life, James Baldwin’s writings on the cinema, Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, and Judith Butler’s queer reading of Larsen’s novel.