Vertigo

The Madeleine that Scottie first sees is a perfect anima figure. Pale blonde, gray suit, walking through art galleries in slow motion, gazing at a portrait of a long-dead woman she may or may not be possessed by. She is haunted, ethereal, doomed. She floats. She speaks in fragments. She drives in circles around the city and ends up in the same places Scottie is. She is, in other words, designed.

She is designed by the husband and by Judy together as a trap for Scottie. But the design works because the design is exactly what Scottie's interior would have produced if his interior had been given materials. The anima projection cannot land on just anyone — it requires a surface tuned to the projector. The conspirators have, by accident or careful study, tuned this surface precisely.

Jung wrote about the anima as the bridge to the unconscious. Properly related to, she leads the man into wholeness. Improperly related to — projected onto a woman who is identified with the figure — she becomes possession, infatuation, and finally tragedy. Scottie cannot relate to Madeleine. He can only adore her. The film documents this distinction with unusual precision. He follows her in his car. He saves her from the bay without speaking. He watches her sleep. He never quite has a conversation. The figure does not survive conversation. The figure survives gaze.

When she dies from the tower, what Scottie has lost is not a person. He has lost the figure that organized his interior. The breakdown that follows is the appropriate response to anima dispossession. He has been emptied of what was projected. He cannot bear what is left.

When Scottie meets Judy, he sees both the resemblance and the difference. Judy is the woman behind the figure. She is a brunette. She has a Kansas accent. She has lived a small life. She is plain in the way Madeleine was perfect because Madeleine was the costume Judy wore to perform a role for which she was paid.

Scottie does not want Judy. He wants the costume back on the body. The dress shop scene is one of the most psychologically violent scenes in classical Hollywood. He picks out the gray suit. He picks out the shoes. He insists on the exact dye for the hair. Judy resists, then complies, because she has fallen in love with him and believes that becoming Madeleine again is the only way to keep him. She agrees to be erased.

This is the anima trap from the woman's side. Judy is not innocent — she helped commit a murder. But the film does not let Scottie's pursuit of her be a moral correction. His pursuit is its own crime. He is, in the most literal sense, willing to overwrite a real person to restore his projection. The crime of the conspirators was the original murder. Scottie's crime is the second, slower murder of the woman he is allegedly in love with.

When Judy emerges from the bathroom in full Madeleine costume — green light, soft focus, the camera trembling — the scene is filmed as ecstatic reunion. It is also revealed by the structure of the film to be necromancy. Scottie has reanimated a corpse. The corpse has Judy inside it, suffering, and Scottie does not know or care.