The ending of Vertigo sums up all the qualities that made Alfred Hitchcock such an important filmmaker. Often regarded as his best work and considered by many to be the greatest film of all time, it's safe to say every modern thriller has a little bit of Vertigo in its synthesis. That's because the 1958 movie followed many conventions of the traditional film noir while improving on the genre for the perfect balance between a harrowing mystery and a beautiful love story. Clashing the two elements through a succession of twists, Vertigo leads to a shocking, unrelenting ending typical of Hitchcock's work.
The movie follows Scottie (James Stewart), a detective who forced himself to retire due to his acrophobia — that is, a great fear of heights, which is constantly symbolized in Vertigo through the use of spirals. He reluctantly accepts a mission from a dear friend that turns out to be not as simple as he anticipated. Assigned to follow his friend's wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), and investigate her puzzling daily activities, Scottie becomes increasingly obsessed and infatuated with the woman, unaware that the person he's following is just impersonating his friend's wife in a shocking murder scheme.
How Scottie Discovered Madeleine & Judy Were The Same Person
The first of many twists in Vertigo happens when Scottie witnesses Madeleine falling to her death, only she's not who he thinks she is. The body is that of the true Madeleine, but the woman Scottie has fallen in love with is still alive. When the two meet again in Vertigo, Kim Novak's character introduces herself as Judy, and while she looks much different than Madeleine now, Scottie is quick to see the resemblance. Since Scottie is still the man Judy fell in love with, she feels guilty for betraying him. On the other hand, Scottie does everything to make Judy look and act exactly like her impersonation of Madeleine.
Judy even drafts a letter to Scottie explaining how Madeleine's husband, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), took advantage of Scottie's acrophobia to scheme his wife's death. But she makes the terrible mistake of ripping up the note. As the competent detective he is, Scottie eventually finds out Judy and "Madeleine" are the same person because of the former's necklace. It's the same one that appears in the painting of Carlotta Valdes, the mistress that the fake Madeleine was obsessed with.
In one of the moments that make Vertigo hold up today, Scottie tells Judy she "shouldn't keep souvenirs from a killing," but that's precisely what he does by trying to recreate Madeleine in his makeover of her. Another way to interpret the necklace's symbol is that Judy subconsciously wore it because, deep in her heart, she wanted Scottie to find out the truth. The necklace ties past, present, and future together, since it once again seals the fate of Scottie's obsession with death, hinting at Judy's own fall at the end of Vertigo.
How Judy Dies
To understand what leads to Judy's death at the end of Vertigo, it's important to dissect the circumstances of Madeleine's death first. Due to Judy's resemblance to Gavin Elster's wife, he hires her to impersonate Madeleine, primarily to fool Scottie. Judy, as Madeleine, leads Scottie into the bell tower, where the character's fear of heights prevents him from seeing what really happens at the top. Elster's plan was to murder his wife and make it look like a suicide: he pushes the real Madeleine from the bell tower, while Scottie thinks the hysterical woman has taken her own life.
When Scottie reunites with Judy after Madeleine's death and uncovers the truth through her necklace, he drives her to the same bell tower where Madeleine was killed. Scottie takes Judy to the top to understand what exactly happened when Madeleine died, but Scottie's acrophobia mixed with his anger makes him absolutely hysterical. When a nun approaches the two to investigate the noise, Judy takes the indistinct figure for a ghost and, in terror, jolts backward. She falls to her death, recreating the scream that will forever haunt the place.
What Happened To Gavin Elster
Gavin Elster is the true villain of Vertigo, plotting against his own wife and one of his best friends. He hires Judy to impersonate Madeleine as someone who harbors dangerous secrets and is obsessed with the suicidal death of Carlotta Valdes. He contacts Scottie to follow her at all times, tricking him into falling for her fabricated secret affairs, taking advantage of his friend's acrophobia in order to replace her wife's fresh corpse in Madeleine's apparent suicide.
Since Vertigo ends right after Judy's death, it's left in the open whether Gavin Elster ever pays for crimes. Although Scottie survives in the end and discovers the whole truth, the only other witness who could prove Elster's wrongdoings was Judy. Moreover, the nun who witnessed Judy and Scottie's argument might as well blame Scottie for Judy's death, turning him into an unreliable witness for Elter's crimes.
Why Vertigo Had An Alternate Ending
Officially, and famously, the movie's last shot is of a horrified Scottie looking down from the top of the bell tower, but Vertigo has an alternate ending that leaves room for more interpretation. In the version of the movie released overseas, Vertigo cuts to Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) carefully listening to a news report on the radio about the plans of extraditing Gavin Elster from Europe to the U.S. Then Scottie enters without saying a word and the two share a drink while looking out of the window.
Although the news report might push a closed ending too hard by revealing Elster's fate, there's something about the silence that haunts the scene that makes it an ending just as effective. While the original version ends abruptly after Judy's death, forcing the viewers to draw their own conclusions, Vertigo's alternate ending offers more time with Scottie and his shock. It also provides Midge's character with a proper conclusion, showing how she still supports Scottie after all that happened.
The True Meaning Of Vertigo's Ending
Vertigo, which tops all of Alfred Hitchcock's movies, is about finding love through sightseeing. It only takes fragments of a person to fall in love with them, and Madeleine's fragments can be found wherever Scottie goes; it overwhelms him. Scottie's biggest mistake is failing to realize how impossible it is to truly know someone only through fragments, which causes the ending's major problem: to replace the fragments of Madeleine with Judy's true image, Scottie needs to give up the perfect image that was given to him beforehand.
To overcome nostalgia as his primary truth, Scottie must jump a cliff toward the unpredictability of love, but his fear of heights prevents him from making up his mind in time. The beauty of Vertigo's suspenseful bell tower ending is how it forces the audience to contest every single thing they have seen. As the credits roll, it's important to chew on not only the movie's final moments but its full trajectory, dissecting what's real and what's not, what's important and what is just a trick.