Even amid a staggering body of work, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo stands out for the sheer tragedy of its story. A private detective begins a tortured, obsessive affair with the woman he’s been hired to tail. She commits suicide. For weeks afterward, he languishes in a gray fog of depression, until he meets someone who could be her doppelgänger. What follows is one of the most depressing sequences in all of cinema, as the detective (played with twitchy, nervous intensity by Jimmy Stewart) attempts, with increasing desperation, to remake this new woman (Kim Novak, with bewildering and bewildered seductiveness) in the image of his dead love.
While unrequited love has motivated a vast array of movies, books, and songs, Vertigo illustrates, with heart-crushing specificity, the harrowing torment of love requited and withdrawn. As hard as it is to want what you can’t have, there’s something even more existentially fucked in realizing that you had the thing and then lost it. The fruitless attempt to recapture it can poison successive relationships, casting a shadow long into the future…