Now, since I just wrote up my conception of a lousy sequel
to Citizen Kane, I guess I really must
come up with a crummy sequel to Vertigo. You know, just so it doesn’t get jealous that Citizen Kane still gets all the attention. So here it is, my post
about my conception for what could be the soon-to-be notorious sequel disaster:
Vertigo 2:
A bunch of self-important critics recently helped Vertigo usurp the throne as the (supposedly) greatest movie
ever made (from the BFI Sight & Sound poll from this year). Well, I like Vertigo, but it’s hardly the greatest movie ever made. And
being an art form, the greatness of movies is really a subjective thing anyway,
where there are no absolutes for quality ranking so much as there’s personal
taste. But this gang of treacherous conspirators plotting to depose Citizen
Kane and supplant it with Vertigo got on my nerves, even though I don’t really
consider Citizen Kane to be the
greatest movie ever made either. (I mean, it’s great and all, but fake bird
footage from King Kong as the
stock footage for some outdoor party? Is that supposed to be some kind of a
joke? Couldn’t they have just gone to Catalina and shot second unit there?
Maybe they even did, but still put in that obviously phony bird stuff to ruin
it. And I mean, Citizen Kane
isn’t even in 3D! And where’s the video game, if it’s so great?) So here I will
seek to kick Vertigo down a
couple of notches in people’s minds with the conception of a really bad and
silly sequel: Vertigo 2.
Now, just to make this sequel as bad and insulting to the
source as possible, this movie would use that lame “found footage” trope used
in so many movies, from Cannibal Holocaust to
The Blair Witch Project, and
every low-budget horror movie imaginable these days as a lazy excuse for why
the footage looks crappy, only this time it would be mixed with an element of
purported realism that would horrify any true film aficionado: it would claim
to have been made by Hitchcock himself as a low-budget experiment, but never
released (!!). Now that would turn everyone against it immediately and ruin Vertigo for lots of people right there. Oh, but there’s
more…
Yes, in this movie, the Jimmy Stewart character, played by
someone else (who does a bad Jimmy Stewart impersonation the whole time) “to
save money”, hopelessly insane and still obsessed with the Kim Novak character,
would get revenge against the guy, Gavin Elster, who orchestrated the plot to
make Stewart into an unwilling witness to his wife’s “suicide” in the original
movie. So, realizing the truth at the end of Vertigo, and losing Kim Novak in the process, Stewart swears
revenge and sets out for retribution against this former friend of his. And
when he catches the guy, he threatens to expose him to the world unless he does
whatever Stewart tells him to. And what do you suppose Stewart wants him to do?
(Well, he’s completely warped and obsessed by this point, so…) That’s right: he
wants him to make himself into the exact recreation of Kim Novak’s character
from Vertigo (just like what he
did to Kim Novak in the original movie). So at each new step: dyeing his hair
blonde, putting on the dresses and makeup, Gavin Elster objects, just to have
Stewart punish him in some way, like disposing of some of his fortune, sending
more evidence to the police, etc. So he’s forced into going along with it all
until the end, where Stewart’s character brings Gavin Elster back to California
and pulls the villain, dressed up like Kim Novak, to the top of the tower at
the mission to get final and lasting revenge for everything! Oh, but just then
Jimmy Stewart’s acrophobia and vertigo return, and when he gets dizzy, the bad
guy pushes him off the tower and he falls to his death. Oh, but this is
witnessed by nuns who see everything this time, and when Gavin comes down from
the tower, he’s nabbed by the cops who arrest him for murder and tease him for
being dressed up like Kim Novak’s character, calling him a “pervert”, and
telling him: “The boys are going to just love you in prison!” And they decide that to punish him
further for the whole affair, he must continue to dress like Kim Novak in
prison. The End.
There: how’s that for a fitting end to the story? Not a good
one? Oh, well. Then I guess it’s a good thing nobody’s ever going to make: Vertigo
2!
(BTW: I like Vertigo,
and I’m not actually seeking to ruin it. I just love the idea of really bad
sequels to great classic movies, as a joke.)
