The Blackness of Judy Barton

I watched Vertigo this weekend as it should be viewed, on a huge stage with an audience of around 500 people. To my surprise, there were many people that have apparently never seen Vertigo, as they gasped when (spoiler alert) the real Mrs. Elster “jumps” to her death from the tower.

What intrigued me during this particular viewing of the film, is a parallel that can be draw that is evident to me now.

Judy Barton embodies the black experience in America 2016.

Now bare with me, and no, I am not talking about Kim Novak the actress…

It seems in his epic, infamous hatred of women, Hitchcock has written a white character in 1958 America that functions as people of color do in 2016 America. Judy Barton is caught up in trying to improve her life out of poverty in Kansas, and gets swept up in a nefarious plan with a rich white male in the big city of San Francisco. She is used as a pawn to enrich her “boss” or oppressor and once the task is accomplished, she is given some jewelry and some money and discarded as her white male boss flees the country after committing a crime.

I’m not there yet on how her experience is like the black experience in America, though in the above, I think you can call to mind poor people of color who were talked in no income, no asset loans by predatory lenders to fit into the mold of the American Dream, only then to have it yanked out from under them when the mortgage they inevitably couldn’t afford came due. They become indebted and lost their houses, while the lenders who conspired to commit this loan crime escape scot-free and profited off the multiple foreclosures by selling off the debt in bundles.

The place in the film where Judy Barton reminded me of the plight of black people in America, was the scene that led to her death at the hands of a white man she loved- detective John Ferguson. Ferguson being the last name of the man who killed her aside…Lets review.

John made a promise to reward Judy Barton for letting him remake her into an image he created- Madeleine Elster. Not the real Madeline, but the image he became obsessed with.

Black people in America are policed by white hegemony — respectability politics. We are promised no harm will come to us by police if we

“Stop resisting.”

We are promised that if we don’t sag our pants, if we don’t wear braids, if we don’t play loud music, if we don’t carry skittles, if we use a lane change signal, if we go to college, if we excel at sports etc, we will be fully integrated and accepted into white society (who holds the money and power/influence - like Elster and Ferguson) like Judy Barton, we want to participate and be accepted/loved. We are told if we do all of these things, and straighten our hair, speak with a hidden dialect, in other words erase all signs of our invidiual blackness and conform to white normative beauty standards, dress and way of life — we will be accepted, and tolerated and perhaps even loved by white people and have a seat at the table.

Judy Barton embodies this fully as she lets John Ferguson, change her clothes, hair, makeup, way of life to embody the ghost she helped create to previously fool him. This is another part of the analogue comparison, black people, in being told and forced to assimilate into white society, have had to create the ways in which we can assimilate. In this way like Judy we are both victimized and vilified. Just as Judy had to find a way to look like Madeline Elster, we’ve come up with straightening hair products and relaxers to make our hair emulate whites. Madame C.J. Walker, one of our famed first black millionaires made a career out of making the world’s first hair straightening formula. So like Judy, we played a small part (thought out of necessity to survive and thrive like Judy) in creating the tools used to emulate the oppressor, thereby playing a part in our own victimization. Imagine me forcing you to shoot yourself, and making you build the gun with which to do it. That is the position Judy is cornered into and where people of color perpetually live in America today.

In the final scenes of Vertigo, John Ferguson is physically dragging, pushing and pulling Judy up the stairs of the bell tower, manhandling her while he lectures her on her wrong doing. Does women of color being physically abused by white males while being yelled at about why they deserve the treatment ring a bell?

After she is physically assaulted by Ferguson, we see him getting increasingly infuriated. I have been racking my brains to try to put myself into the mental place of whites and figure out exactly why the police, and the far right seem to HATE people of color. I think I have come up with one possible explanation. I’ll be clear that there is no excuse for racism, or bias, but in dissecting and exploring reasons, perhaps some solutions may come to the surface as we dive deeper into the topic.

It would seem to me that Ferguson is livid with Judy because she has failed in her assimilation into the full personage of Madeline Elster. He is angry that no matter what she has done to allow him to completely change her, once he saw the necklace (in the case of Barton is was the necklace of Madeleine Elster and Carlotta that she was given) it reminded him that Judy is Judy and not Madeline. This made him angry.

With black people and the police, or the justice system, or white people on the street, it seems everything is fine until they are reminded that we are black and other, anything that reminds them we are NOT white, drives them to distraction and leads them to the anger that ends up killing us, just like the fate of Judy Barton in Vertigo. All of the things I mentioned — braids, language, our cultural expressions remind whiteness that we are an other, we are not white, and that sets them off as we may revel in our beautiful otherness.

I think there is another part to this that is also mirrored in the film. “White” people as they are known in America were once ethnic groups. Whites were Irish, Polish, Russian, French, Greek, etc. All of that has been erased into the label of “whiteness” which has also erased their culture. I am not the first to suggest this for sure, but I will reassert that there is a deep jealousy in the fact that regardless of how hard whiteness has tried to force blacks to assimilate into white culture, and despite our trying to be Judy Barton at times, it has largely failed. We have retained out beautiful blackness regardless of any sort of white mimicry and that drives whiteness mad. In our retention of our racial culture, they are reminded of how they have abandoned theirs…

So Judy Barton in her desperate futile search to embody Madeline Elster and succeeding then failing miserably (by the oppressors standards) directly mirrors black men and women being forced into white normative thinking, dress, lifestyles and then being criticized for not being what they are not…white. This “failure” to ape whiteness leads to an effort by whiteness to eradicate the thing that reminds whiteness of its own culture it has abandoned. That leads to the murder of unarmed people of color walking down the street.

The lesson we learn from Vertigo is the lesson we as blacks in America have learned by the Ferguson moment. Be yourself. Never try to be someone else because it doesn’t pay. Know that being yourself is dangerous in a world that rewards being anything other than your original self, but do you anyway. You can be murdered just as quickly for being you and walking down the street, so be you anyway.