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Alfred Hitchcock

A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone

The vortex

By Alan Vanneman

See the introduction to this nine-part photo study.

Psycho and Vertigo are the most striking examples of Hitchcock's fascination with the "vortex," the swirling spiral that symbolized dizziness, sexual arousal, loss of control, and even death for him. Images of the vortex included spiral staircases, curls in women's hair, the human eye, drains, and even toilets. (I suppose it all leads back to the vagina — doesn't everything? — but Hitchcock couldn't show that.)

The opening credits of Vertigo feature the close-up of a human eye (Kim Novak's, to be precise). The tint grows garish, and a spiral is superimposed over the iris.

Spiral staircases in Hitchcock's films pick up the theme of the vortex and offer a special sense of danger, as we see in these examples from Notorious, Vertigo, and Psycho.

Hitchcock surely could have written a book on women's hair. Women were the vortex personified for Hitchcock, alluring sirens that drew you irresistibly to your doom. A woman's hair was half her identity, and Hitchcock was fascinated by stylised hairdos that both evoked the vortex and brought it under control, as we see in these near-identical shots of Tippi Hedren in The Birds and Marnie.

The murder of Marion Crane in Psycho features a succession of vortex images. Norman spies on Marion through a peephole that suggests a vortex. We see the peephole, Norman's eye, the toilet (its water swirling because Marion has flushed it to dispose of the evidence of her crime), the showerhead, Marion's screaming mouth, the drain, and then Marion's dead, staring eye. Finally, her body is disposed of in an inky swamp, the final destination of the toilets and drains we have seen before.

The conclusion of Psycho offers another set of vortex images, though not so elaborate as the shower murder. Lila Crane, Marion's sister, performs a complete spiral as she descends from the second floor of the Bates home to the basement. When she finally discovers Mrs. Bates, we see the vortex image once more in the bun in the old lady's hair. When the rotation of her chair brings us face to face, her eyeless sockets are a heartless commentary on all the eyes we've seen before, Marion's in particular. These are the eyes of death, and they're looking at us, and they're laughing at us. The final touch is the shot of Norman's wig falling on the floor. The loose, shapeless hair suggests the final confusion — the walls of gender and identity collapsing.

Click any of the links below for additional categories/motifs, or to return to the intro page:

Houses † Staircases † Women's Hair † Hands † Eyes

The Uncanny † The Vortex † Notorious Sequence

The Man Who Knew Too Much Sequence

ALSO: Check out other fine articles and reviews by the author.