BlinkDash

Judy is introduced wearing Madeleine's green—and with a green florist's vehicle parked at the curb behind her. But when she tries to assert her own identity (i.e., not Madeleine), she chooses a lavender outfit. A bold and distinctive (if somewhat garish) statement of her selfhood, it fits Judy's slightly trashy personality perfectly. Near the climax of Scottie's nightmare, his disembodied head floats amid flashing colors of green and purple; he hasn't met Judy yet, the one who will remind him so strongly of Madeleine, but his dream seems to be a portent of his confusion between them: green, purple, Madeleine, Judy… When (in a radical departure from the structure of the source story) Hitchcock tips his hand and explains the mystery to us, but not to Scottie, two thirds of the way into the movie, it's through Judy—who's wearing the green associated with Madeleine.

In Scottie's dream, Hitchcock splashes the screen with saturated colors that represent the conflicting psychological forces at war within Scottie, bombarding him (and us) with splashes of pure color and emotion: blue/guilt, red/caution/danger, green/Madeleine/romance/illusion, purple/Judy, yellow/Midge... Carlotta's bouquet turns into a whirling Escher graphic that flashes green, a taunting and torturous reminder of Madeleine. And after his breakdown, the greenery outside his window seems to loom hauntingly behind him, like the ghost of Madeleine in the forest ("This is where I died…."), as unconsoling as Midge's anti-depressant prescription dosage of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A bouquet of roses—green growth tipped with garish bursts of blood red, the false promise of romance bursting at the ends with red flares of warning—seems to mock Scottie's pain, but he sits in the corner, helpless.

Judy's purple willpower doesn't last long. After a couple dates, she decides to let Scottie make her look "just a little" like Madeleine. Her vibrant purple outfit is replaced by a green skirt with a tan blouse, as Scottie searches for the exact gray suit Madeleine wore when she was killed. From Scottie's point of view, Judy's become kind of a half Madeleine and half Midge at this point. But what about Judy herself? Scottie basically refuses to acknowledge Judy's right to exist.

Hitchcock told Truffaut that he had Judy live in the Hotel Empire because of its big, green neon sign. From inside Judy's room, the whole room is suffused with that green light, filtered through fine-mesh curtains. As Judy emerges from the bathroom, competing her visual transformation into Madeleine, she is bathed in green and shot through a hazy filter that recalls the soft, dreamy lighting of the garden sequence. Once again, Scottie has withdrawn from reality and into a romantic fantasy. As he kisses Judy/Madeleine, the camera circles dizzyingly—vertiginously, you might say—around them and the whole world bursts into green—green, the color of rebirth, of growth. Everything seems to be complete for Scottie once again—except for a disturbing blue flashback to the Mission. But Scottie shrugs it off and obsessively embraces his Madeleine—even though she's really Judy. Green floods the frame once again. At this point, Scottie is more responsible for snuffing out Judy than he is for Madeleine's death. Indeed, he's smothered Judy to death with Madeleine.

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