Stella Castelli

Notes on Vertigo: Camp Sensibility & Madness

In her seminal essay “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag asserts that “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Expanding on the sensibility of camp, Sontag’s illustrious and plentiful notes maintain that first and foremost, the aestheticism of camp is a formal category which harbours the ability to elevate the format of a given genre towards the effect of excess. Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic masterpiece Vertigo makes skilful use of these camp aesthetics when visually staging Scottie’s descent into madness. While the entire motion picture’s visuals are meticulously arranged and colour coded, it is the sequences that engage with his innermost, increasingly fervent meanderings in particular, that take on the colours, figures and shapes of camp sensibility. Deploying a distinct score and dreamlike imagery that challenges the categories of the real and the sane, Scottie’s descent into madness is distinctly set apart from the rest of the film through its campy formatting. Furthermore, taking into consideration that Sontag’s 7th note contends that “[a]ll Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice” and that “[n]othing in nature can be campy… Camp is still man-made.” The flamboyant visual representation of Scottie’s imagination not only highlights the notion of lunacy but even more compellingly, the fact that the plot of Scottie’s love story and, by extension, Madeleine is thoroughly artificial, man-made and stands as pure mimetic performance. Read through the lens of camp, the cinematic visualization of madness in Vertigo thus exposes its own stylized theatricality in a metatextual gesture of celebratory self-reflexivity.

About
Dr. Stella Castelli is a senior lecturer at the English Department of the University of Zurich. She holds a degree in English and American Literature as well as Theory and History of Photography from the University of Zurich. In 2020, she successfully completed her doctoral dissertation titled Death is Served: American Recipes for Murder - A Serial Compulsion exploring repressions of death and their symptomatic reappearance in contemporary American culture. Her current research engages with mediations of the humorous in literature and media. Further research interests include critical theory, visual culture, the gothic and the aestheticism of camp.