s ultimately faced with his own strong belief of upholding the law, and his equally passionate feelings for a woman who has deceived him and yet, now offer the only real hope of redemption and his only compromised opportunity for a perfect love. And as he contemplates his decision for either justice or love, he is cruelly robbed of that decision as Judy accidentally plunges towards her own demise. In the end, Scottie is cured of his romantic illusions and at the same time, of his vertigo. But it’s a cure that leaves him staring into the great abyss.A nun represents God, and if the ending is abrupt, the resolvement of Judy’s involvement in the murder of the actual “Madeline” is to symbolize the cliched notion that criminals may escape the hands of the law, but not from the hand of God. Her apparent accidental fall may be even more symbolic in the sense that she is re-enacting what she was asked to do by Elster, to pretend to fall to her death to mask the death and murder of his actual wife. The terrific irony here again is she is not acting, but really doing it this time. Falling to her own death, which is as real as Elster’s wife death was. With that, the film concludes with the everlasting image of Scottie standing at the bell tower, looking down on the lifeless body of his de-mystified obsession, a woman who never existed for him. A woman who was manufactured for the purpose of a diabolical crime, and a woman who was in turn, re-manufactured by the very same man she was supposed to deceive.Hitchcock also captures Scottie's emotional and mental state through the motif of falling. the fact that Scottie is seen to drive down the hills of San Francisco and its surrounding regions and never up, in addition to the emotional vortex that Scottie and Madeleine/Judy are uncontrollably pulled into, all add to the constuction of a world from which the death of Judy seems inevitableThere are some films, however whic...
