"Fetishistic scopophilia," as Laura Mulvey writes in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, "can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone."(Visual and Other Pleasures p.19) Existing outside of the flow of time, capable of capturing perfect erotic moments, purely visual; the photograph is the perfect fetish of scopophilia. Through Marcel Duchamp's Given: 1) The Waterfall, 2) The Illuminating Gas and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo this essay will exam the male and female relationship or position within the act of fetishistic scopophilia and its devastating results.
In Vertigo the detective Scottie follows the supposedly unaware Madeline through San Francisco. In shot-reverse-shot fashion the audience sees Madeline through Scottie's eyes. Take for example the cemetery of Mission Delores. The frame captures Scottie looking straight ahead, a tight frame leaving small slits of unfocused cemetery space to each side of his stare (shot). Madeline looks down at a tombstone the side of her face pierced by Scottie's look (reverse shot). Madeline leaves and Scottie is brought back to reality. He rushes over to a crisply focused tombstone bearing the name Carlotta Valdes.
From the cemetery Madeline drives up to a space with the illusion of life: The Legion of Honor Art Museum. Here she sits on a bench and examines a painting on exhibit. As shot-reverse-shot continues, the audience again sees through the eyes of Scottie. He stands and examines Madeline. To his left is a painting of an aristocrat who mimics Scottie's pose of mastery; or perhaps it is Scottie who mimics the aristocrat (shot). The two look over a decadent space supported by Roman columns and filled with objects of their Imperial activity (reverse shot). Renaissance paintings with their mastery of perspective, finely crafted tapestries, delicate furniture, and Madeline are all passive, dead objects of the museum; positioned for the spectator.
