A man’s fixated desire runs on the threat that renouncing it would kill him

Evidence

Vertigo’s horror lies in its unstinting revelation of the artificiality of desire. Scottie can look into the void presupposed by his demands and still, grotesquely, make the demands. That is the difference between Vertigo and many of the film noirs it references, comments upon and surpasses: it is not, in the end, that he is being deceived by a femme fatale, duped into believing that she is something that she is not. On the contrary, he knows full well that there is no Madeleine. But knowledge is nothing, and the explanation for his continued fixation upon a Madeleine that is not even a ghost is the one provided by Zupančič: for Scottie to give up his object would be for him to give up himself, to die. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 119

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s interest in sacrificial death and giving-up-self; the Zupancic point that renouncing the object equals dying dovetails with the sacrifice material in the ADDENDUM article corpus.