The male gaze and its satirical deconstruction are two obsessions that lie at the heart of VERTIGO. In the male gaze, a man (Scottie) has fallen in love with a woman (Madeleine) who is visually positioned as his "object" of desire. Her appearance, in every way, unflinchingly caters to his gaze. She's gorgeous, passive, and blonde, and needs a literal male savior to rescue her from distress (evidenced as when she leaps into the San Francisco Bay). The man is hired to watch the woman, and the more he watches, the more he becomes obsessed with her, and transforms her into an object of his desire. Madeleine is the scopophiliac bearer of his look, and she works effectively on two levels: 1). to voyeuristically please the masculine protagonist, 2). to provide meta-commentary on Hitchcock's unreal, obsessive catalog of blonde heroines who consistently reveal his desire to portray women not as they really are, but who the auteur desires them to be. 

The trick, the illusion, we learn, is that Madeleine doesn't exist. She's a fantasy, a deconstructed feminine simulacrum who knew all too well her exhibitionist part to perform. In life, Madeleine willingly subjected herself to the male gaze as a potent form of veiled seduction; in death, she rose above this "to-be-looked-at-ness" and became a fully developed, independent women (Judy). Well, for a short moment anyway. Obsessed with his dream of perfection, Scottie soon discovers Judy. Instead of accepting her the way she is ("Couldn't you like me, just me, the way I am?") his determining gaze seeks to transform Judy into Madeleine, through dress and appearance, thereby shifting his voyeurism into fetishism. He doesn't give a damn at all about this woman, Judy, who he reconstructs, as long as she conforms in every detail to his fetishistic simulation. And from the director's perspective, as long as she conforms to the ideal Hitchcockian woman.

VERTIGO is at once arrested by the male gaze and a mockery of its misogynistic control. In one breath the film plays into the countless ways Hollywood has fashioned women as pageant meat puppets. In another breath it brings to light the sadistic voyeurism of masculine creeps in a way that treats these kinds of men as targets of our criticism. Hitchcock masterfully pacifies and provokes, lulls and subverts, and frankly delivers one of the best constructions and deconstructions of toxic masculinity the cinema has to offer.