Spirals

Vertigo begins with many different spiral images which signal loss of control, sexuality, and death, a sense more strongly felt in the famous “vertigo effect” shots when Hitch’s camera both tracks backward and zooms out. More spirals, like the many staircases, also represent moving from safety to the unknown, loss of control, and in Freudian theory, sex.

The inability of Scotty to make it up the stairs can be seen as part of his castration and inability to consummate sexual relations, also seen in the image of the vortex.

-BrightLights photoessay: The Stairs

-BrightLights photoessay: The Vortex