Uh, no. If that were the case the movie wouldn’t have gone to such pains to point out the psychological conditioning of the Marine, and the effect that had later. That was a Vietnam-era debate. We didn’t have that debate after WWII or Korea.
I don’t have a lot to add here except for two points: 1) I suspect a lot of people’s discomfiture with the film stems from their unease at identifying with Jimmy Stewart’s Scotty, an unconventionally weak, even symbolically emasculated man (in his vertigo, which is a particularly silly and diminishing condition and psychoanalytically suggests fears of success and sexual conquest); and 2) I also had a long spell of ambivalence about the merits of this film, but what always had me coming back for repeated viewings was Bernard Herrmann’s score, perhaps the finest of his distinguished career.
It would take a music expert to fully explicate what makes this score so superlative, both in its stand-alone appeal and in its filmic context, but it works on both levels. It seems to me, though, that any thorough analysis of the score would probably note two things: that Herrmann’s modernist, angular, and repetitively hypnotic rising-and-falling arpeggios (as in the opening credits theme) anticipates similar work by Philip Glass even as it suggests the disorienting sensations of vertigo; and that his use of lushly beautiful melodic leitmotifs (for the romantic bits) and vigorous, rhythmic leitmotifs (for vertigo and violence), along with his tonal and harmonic resolution of tension recall similar aspects of the works of Wagner and Mahler.
Reviewers, maybe. But critics – again, serious critics – are something else entirely. A reviewer talks about whether or not he (or she) thinks the movie has merit, and takes a guess at whether you, or a general audience, will enjoy the movie. A critic is more of a literary analyst: he (or she) doesn’t say whether the movie is “good” or “bad,” but evaluates the movie’s themes and architecture, and makes some suggestions about what the viewer should be thinking about when watching it. Perhaps these suggestions of elements to ponder are about things internal to the film; or perhaps they are contextual, making comparisons either to other, similar films (or books, or paintings, or political history, or whatever), or to other works by the same filmmaker (director, writer, producer, actor, etc).
A serious critic who writes about the centerpiece theme of Vertigo does so not because of what Hitchcock tells us about obsession, but because of what Vertigo’s obsessions tell us about Hitchcock.
This is a bit of a hijack, but:
This is a little unfair, I think. This film, by design, gives us a vacant “hero,” an almost blank canvas, onto whom the audience can project itself. Bruno is where the interest of the film, and by extension the audience, is centered. Guy, by intent, cannot distract from this, because the film asks us to consider our own response in a similar situation. Guy (whose very name is synonymous with “generic man”) is, in effect, an empty window frame through which we, the audience, perceive Bruno, who, if you consider the film’s architecture, is, in a reversal of standard thriller format, the story’s protagonist.
But why? Why do we care what Hitchcock thinks? Do we necessarily look to see what a book says about an author? Is that helpful in any way? Unless the ideas presented are glaring, I rarely look back at an author and think “What was he thinking?”
I am really trying to understand your post, and it’s one of the best and simplest breakdowns of critics & reviewers I have ever heard. That being said, like many people, I don’t have much respect for either critics or reviewers; they create nothing, only judge other people’s work as if they had any right to or any knowledge. Granted, some of them DO have a right, but many seem like the proverbial man who pisses on art he doesn’t get.
This is getting a little off-topic, but why are reviewers and critics seemingly so important in the world of art? Shouldn’t works be able to stand or fall on their own? Help me out here.
But that doesn’t excuse Granger’s thorough lack of charisma. Everyone expects the Joker to outdazzle Batman. But you still want a “hero” that’s not so tediously wishy-washy.
And thanks for the comment, Lantern. The McGuffin is usually referred to the specific the plot element to send the wheels of the narrative spinning. In Vertigo, it’s more of a meta-McGuffin, since the narrative, unlike most of Hitch’s films, never gets resolved. The killer goes free, truth is revealed but provides no solace, and nothing is tied up in cute bows the way the immaculate Alfred was used to doing (even in his TV shows, he had the after-the-fact codas in his in-person bookkends). That’s why the mechanics of the murder doesn’t bother me as much, because the murder (an admittedly flimsy set-up too dependant on uncontrollable variables) is really simply an excuse to bring Scotty & Judy together. It’s a bit like Antonioni’s Blow-up; if we’re looking for a more satisfactory Answer, then perhaps you’re asking the wrong Question.
I didn’t get any impression the first half of the movie showed training that was specific to Vietnam. Rather, it showed (or at least purported to show) the conditioning that Marines have always gotten, with several references to how timeless an institution the USMC was.
I don’t know what “debate” you’re referring to. I figure the movie could easily have been set in 1951, with all the same craziness and indoctrination, and the main character shipped off to Korea where he writes for Star and Stripes and meets an old buddy and gets tangled up in some sniper-nightmare business wth the same basic result.
The reader/viewer/etc. is a critic or reviewer, too. And in a lot of ways, there isn’t any “on their own” for a film or other work of art to stand or fall on - you’ve seen other films. You’re going to compare them to each other, intentionally or not. You’ve already said yourself - you hate the stiff older acting style, you compared the helpless Judy to a Bollywood damsel-in-distress, etc. In a lot of ways, you may be the most important reviewer/critic, at least to you! And then you posted here, asking for others to explain/defend their positive reviews.
Understanding the “auteur” point of view isn’t necessarily important, no. But it can help you understand - or think you do - more about why a film became what it did. Hitchcock had a history of obsessing over and remaking his beautiful “cool blonde” starlets. Here he seems to lay that all out on film for us to see, with the conceit of a twisted “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back… pity the film doesn’t end there” story over top.
It’s definitely a hijack, but it’s your thread, so if you don’t complain, I won’t. 
Be warned, though: If it grows, and attracts more attention, it will take over your thread, and turn it into a bitchfest far away from your original intent. There are few things people like to complain about more than by saying “people who talk about art seriously are pretentious blowhards, and the whole thing is a fraud.” But, leaving that aside for the moment:
I would say that reviewers (as I defined them above) are not important in the world of art. They are important in the world of consumption, which is something else entirely. They are supposed to act as a guide to whether or not to patronize some event (movie, gallery show, concert, etc). The critic, by contrast, assumes that you are interested in the event, and will probably attend; he (or she) writes as a guide to the experience itself.
Think of the critic (again, going by my definitions above) as a professional audience member. He (or she) has devoted significant time to the discipline in question, and has, one hopes, accumulated some expertise, beyond that of the more casual patron. They have made it, in other words, something of a career. I may have seen a lot of movies, probably between four and five thousand, but that’s a fraction of the number of movies one could possibly have seen, and, more to the point here, that one would expect for a serious film critic. (Unless the critic is a specialist, in which case his moviewatching total is lower, but which encompasses, say, all of the British comedies made between 1935 and 1960.)
With this expertise, the critic brings knowledge and perspective. Most people, reviewers included, look at a film comedy and decide they like it based solely on whether or not it makes them laugh. A critic will look at a film comedy and consider it, its style and tone, in comparison to Wilder, Sturges, and Tati; and then will write about it with that in mind, for a reading audience who cares about things like that. The reviewer will look at Clouzot’s Wages of Fear and say, “Yeah, it’s a nifty suspense thriller, a little long maybe, but worth seeing, check it out.” The critic looks at the same movie and talks about first-world industrial policies as they exploit third-world resources, and will contrast the reception the movie got at Cannes (won the Grand Prize) with the reception it got in the United States (“surely one of the most evil ever made” – Time magazine).
Neither the critic nor the reviewer is necessary, really. But while the latter is essentially irrelevant, contributing nothing to the experience of watching the film (or reading the book, or whatever), the critic, for the person who is interested in such things, can bring additional information to the table, and potentially expand the interested viewer’s experience and understanding of the film (or book, etc).
Note: The interested viewer. If a movie, to you, is a disposable commodity, a delivery system for entertainment, then the critic is just as irrelevant to you as the reviewer: probably more so, actually.
Does that help?
If nobody discusses the work, then the work might as well not exist. Works can’t stand or fall on their own without an audience, and reviewers and critics are the audience. You might not be interested in theory, and may not see any value in discussing the importance of the male gaze in Vertigo and how it shapes the film, or the directorial choices, but you are interested in discussing the film. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have started the thread to invite people to present their analysis/arguments. You would just say, “The film fails” and move on with your life. Critics (not the people at Rotten Tomatoes, but people who are actually write criticism) just spend more time doing it than a person who watches a film or reads a book for purely entertainment purposes.
ETA: Or, um, what Cervaise said.
I think it’s simply a matter of text vs. subtext. Everyone sees and appreciates text on its various merits, and they ascribe the value of that text in direct proportion to those individual qualities they personally asign as greater or lesser importance to them. That in itself can be a tricky kettle of fish–for while you and I might both value “good acting”, we clearly have very different ideas of what good acting constitutes.
But beyond the text, subtext opens an entire world of possible interpretations. There are plenty of schools of thought as to how to “read” a text–feminist interpretations vs. Marxist vs. “auteurist”, etc. Seeing things through different prisms of thought and interpretation is easier when you have people (professional or otherwise) who can articulate a reading that is thoughtful, internally consistent, and perhaps diametrically opposed to what you’re used to looking for or valuing in a work of art. And being exposed to these ideas, regardless of how much merit you think they have, can often fuel your interest in viewing art beyond how you’re used to looking at it.
A critic’s primary job isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) to tell you what’s simply Good or Bad. A quality critic will help you learn how to see not only an individual work of art but an entire medium in a new way or from a different perspective. Good critics will be able to identify works that are innovative or ahead-of-their-time, or appreciate works that are devalued because they don’t align themselves to what’s conventionally thought of as “good” at the time. Hitchcock is a great example. Nobody (except perhaps the French) saw him as an Artist on the level of Griffith or Bergman or Chaplin at the peak of his career. They saw him as a fun craftsman who got people worked up in suspense movies. Very droll and very dismissive. We now know he did much more than that, and contemporary impressions of him were incredibly facile because people were used to seeing Art (with a capital A) through a very narrow perspective. But knowing what Hitchcock liked and thought and then revisiting his works can add color and dimension to his movies that aren’t as noticable if seen in a vacuum. A film should always stand up as text and not just subtext (the themes hardly matter if the movie sucks), but sometimes the subtext is where the meat really is and the text will only look superficially disappointing if that’s all you value.
Personally, I love Vertigo; if I could be stuck on a Desert Island with only 5 films, it would be one of them. But I appreciate why some people won’t like it or connect to it or find value to it. I don’t need them to love it; I just don’t want them to merely dismiss it (or any “classic”) as a product of some trendy intellectual group-think with little to actually substantiate that long-held sentiment.
Critics DO have knowledge, though. Roger Ebert - a true critic if ever there was one - knows more about the history and art of filmmaking than just about anyone else I can think of. That’s the point: a critic makes a study of the field of his or her criticism. I’d wager that Ebert knows more about film than a fair handful of working directors out there. He certainly “gets” the art a lot more than, say, Michael Bay (or, y’know, insert the name of your least favorite hack director in place of Bay).
Ebert also functions as a reviewer - the “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down” and zero-to-four-stars scale side of what he does, but that’s just because such things are what the market demands. He has written often about how much he wishes he didn’t have to give out star ratings.
The anonymous blurbsters (in the vein of the infamous Jeff Craig of something called “60 Second Preview”) are reviewers - they do not contribute to the body of discussion about a given film. They exist solely to let studio publicists claim that their movie is, “critically acclaimed” even when the real critics hate it.
When talking about film critics, one important point is that films are enormously complex undertakings involving hundreds of people working for months or perhaps even years. Even if we are talking about the people who have a major creative role in the film there might be a dozen or so highly skilled professionals . Sorting out their contributions and how they interact with each other is a major task and requires a lot of knowledge of different disciplines. So while the act of consuming a film is sometimes less demanding than ,say, reading a book, the act of making one is certainly not. Films are among the most complex artistic products out there.
If anything I think critics are too narrow in their focus and knowledge relative to the complexity of filmmaking. A lot of film criticism appears to be an offshoot of literary criticism where the main themes of the film are analyzed from a variety of perspectives: Freudian, feminist and so on. That sort of thing can be interesting though often it’s not my cup of tea. However there are many other potentially interesting aspects of filmmaking that critics don’t seem to know much about.
For example many don’t seem to know a whole lot about the nitty-gritty details of filmmaking especially the technological side. But one of the most fascinating things about cinema is that it uses constantly improving technology which changes the artistic possibilities available to the filmmaker. I don’t know that many critics who could talk knowledgeably about the artistic impact of digital grading or surround sound. I think movie criticism would be better if there were more technology geeks among critics.
Critics often don’t know that much about the business side of making movies either. But a lot of films are commercial products which aim to make money. Even non-commercial films have budget constraints which affects what can be filmed. When it comes to commercial films a lot of economic factors shape their design: the release date and the likely competitors, the commercial history of its stars, the past commercial success of similar films and so on. All these are constraints against which filmmakers must operate while expressing their artistic vision, and understanding how they do this seems to be an under-explored area of film criticism.
My relatively brief foray into Film Theory showed me that film critics aren’t all interested in the “literary themes”. In fact, those themes make up a very, very small part of what theorists seem to be interested in. I mean, I’m no expert–I only had one course–but I have a few (massive and expensive sigh) film theory books, and the essays and articles cover everything from the business considerations to how the latest in sound technology changes the way the audience interacts with the film. I wrote a paper on screwball comedies, and it had nothing to do with the feminist themes present in the films, but rather focused on the use of a star’s persona and how it interacted with relatively tight constraints imposed by the studio system and the expectations of the subgenre (Okay, I wanted an excuse to write about Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story).
So while people in this thread are discussing themes of feminism, misogyny, obsession, and psychoanalysis of Vertigo, it’s possible to find reams of work about the film that has nothing to do with “themes” and everything to do with nitty-gritty theory, which, in my experience, encompasses the considerations you’re pointing out.
OK. My exposure to film theory is even less than yours and my impression is more from reading print critics in ,say, Village Voice rather than academics. Could be I am wrong, and there is a lot of interesting work on the technology and business side of films I am not aware of.
Vertigo is a beautifully filmed story with beautiful locations and actors. But it never caught on with me like Rear Window, which is my favorite Hitchcock film. For me the most memorable part of Vertigo was Barbara Bel Geddes unrequited love. Stewart knowingly lusts after a woman he suspects is a murderer instead of this nice woman. Rear window, by comparison, is perfect. My second favorite is Notorious.
You’ve inspired me. I’ve got all three films at home. Next time I have six hours free, I’m diving in!