Several regular readers have brought up Vertigo recently so I thought this would be a good time to publish this paper I wrote in college. (Actually, I would have done it sooner but I just figured out how to transform my old WordPerfect files from gibberish into usable Word documents.) It was originally titled “Generic Rupture and Identification in Vertigo.”
Vertigo is a movie (1) brimming with rupture. Each rupture in the film is a moment where our narrative expectations are undermined. These moments are both visual and structural shocks to highly conditioned Hollywood movie-watchers. With each rupture, we effectively have to readjust our understanding of the movie, and redefine what kind of story it is. For what makes Vertigo so effective is the way that it continually confuses us about its genre. Each rupture is a disturbance in our embedded understanding of a specific genre of classical Hollywood film. With each rupture we must decide what genre the film “really” is.
Posted by myownworstcritic 
