Question

In film Vertigo (1958) and in the film The Big Short (2015), we meet characters who are recovering from some kind of trauma. Explain how these experiences affect the character and influence the direction of the narrative?

Answer 1

In the movie Vertigo, James Stewart, the protagonist, is by an incident of the past, affected as a result and is shown to be suffering from acrophobia and vertigo. In the movie, Alfred Hitchcock has used the dolly zoom affect especially to cater to and accentuate the phobia and fears of James Stewart, and also to give the audience an insight as well as the vision and perspective into his vision.

As the dolly zoom gives a sense of disorientation and distortion. This helps in the alignment of the protagonist and the spectators. There have been a lot of discussions regarding the narrative of Vertigo wherein people have said that the narrative is shaped like a spiral as is the sense of vertigo.

The Big Short is a movie in which the economic collapse that can be put onto Burrys shoulder, who in an attempt to escape it creates more of a mess that too at the cost of his shareholders money.

The entire narrative in order to depict the anxiety and the tumultuous and greedy time, is constantly shuffling and constantly changing to give the viewers no attachment either to a single character or a single story line or a single thought process in the entire movie. It is predominantly to showcase the con fusion. It gives an account of what happened, as the story is based on true state of affairs, but it gives so in a way that gives perspective and culminates into information that one needs to piece together. Personal characters are not given time to develop for this precise reason.