Vertigo Themes

Love in Vertigo isn't pretty. It's kind of sick, actually—it's based on deception, delusion, and obsession. Relationships end in abandonment or death. Elster murders his wife. Scottie falls in lo...

Everyone knows that appearances can be deceiving, right? Right, except it seems that our boy Scottie didn't get the memo. Vertigo tells the story of how Scottie's taken in by appearances—how he's...

When Scottie sees his fellow policeman fall to his death, he's disabled not only from acrophobia, but also by a crushing sense of guilt. Even if he doesn't say so explicitly, we sense that Scottie...

Although it was marketed as a tale of the supernatural, Vertigo's only that in a superficial sense. That's because the ghosts all turn out to be created by characters' deliberate playacting. All th...