The Spiral of Time: the Crystal-Image in Herrmann's Music for Hitchcock's Vertigo

Time is a central - if not the central - dimension of Hitchcock's Vertigo, as noted by Richard Goodkin (1991), who compares the film to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu; by Marker (1995), who has interpreted the idea of vertigo in the film as a metaphor for 'the vertigo of time'; and by a number of authors who have applied Gilles Deleuze's ([1985] 1989) concept of the crystal-image to key sequences in the film where past and future coalesce together and become indiscernible (Pisters 2003 and Stone and Cooke 2016). In this article, I discuss some of the ways in which Bernard Herrmann's music for Vertigo is crucial in delineating the complex temporality of the film, more specifically by first opposing and then merging two different layers of temporality - one of them future-oriented, the other one past-oriented. I argue that this process can be illuminated using the concept of the crystal-image, which according to Deleuze expresses not only the nature of time in general but also the more specific nature of musical time as the fundamental interweaving of a future-oriented component (the gallop) and a past-oriented component (the ritornello). I further show that these two temporal directions in Vertigo's music can be associated to ideas of linear and cyclical time (Kramer 1988 and Berger 2007), this way suggesting a new interpretation for the recurring metaphor of the spiral in the film, namely as a spiral of time that combines the future-oriented arrow (linear time) and a past-oriented circle (cyclical time).