Vertigo

I think when everyone sees Jimmy Stewart's character and meets him for the first time, you want to love him. He just seems like a normal, average, decent guy. As both the movie and his obsession with Madeleine progress, you start to second guess yourself and eventually say to yourself, "this guy is one, creeeeepppppy sob." You identify with him in the respect that yes Madeleine is beautiful and you really could easily fall in love with the image of her. She is what he and the audience desires. He is simply doing what his friend asks him to by following her around and it quickly turns into an obsession that eventually he cannot control and one that consumes him. This is part of what the scopophilia refers to. He starts to receive visual pleasure in watching her and also we as viewers receive this same pleasure watching the film.
Madeleine reminded me of Laura in a way that we fall in love with the image or idea of her, and yet we never really learn who she is. She was just so visually relaxing and I didn't get a feeling of pleasure but more of a feeling of relaxation and relief when I saw her. Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) quickly falls in love with her and when he meets Judy, she reminds him of Madeleine, but it is not enough for him. He also becomes obsessed with transforming her into an exact image of Madeleine and wont stop until every detail is exactly as he remembers from her. I guess Madeleine represents an ideal image of what society finds glamorous and beautiful.
Midge represents the opposite. She seems very normal and plain, wears glasses (which personally, I prefer) and just isn't what you see when you look at 50's glamour girls. She is very normal and I really liked her in the beginning and even when she flips a switch, you still are like ahhh weird but.......she can't be that weird. I like her because she seems like she tries to keep Scottie grounded throughout the film as a friend/almost motherly figure. She then tries to find information about what Scottie is doing and then attempts to find more and more information about the case Scottie is working on and eventually realizes that she will never get it out of him. Her painting of her face on Carlotta's body really jarred me and freaked me out, but I still liked her.
Vertigo is one of the most interesting/freaky/disturbing movies I have ever seen. I saw it once a while ago and didn't remember many details going into this viewing of the film. I am a pretty big Hitchcock fan and was excited to see this on the list.

Laura

Laura was probably one of the more interesting and unsettling movies I’ve seen in a long time. Waldo Lydecker was such a little weasel. I felt very uneasy about him from the beginning of the movie. His qualities included more than just a slight pinch of flamboyance. He just seemed to me like Laura’s homosexual best friend and certainly protected and advised her as if she were instead of a lover. As the film went on, he pulled Laura’s strings and seemed to just control Laura’s actions like a puppeteer. He would write the columns on the men Laura had been seeing and picking apart their flaws. Laura would listen to these, laugh and almost agree with Waldo, and never really got mad at what he wrote.
Shelby Carpenter was the most normal to me out of the three. He embodied the typical player or pig-headed male having many women to amuse himself with. Shelby also seemed to display a hint of homosexuality (no not because it was Vincent Price), although I couldn’t really figure out why.
McPherson, although he seemed pretty normal, he could have been the most messed up one. When he snooped around Laura’s place sniffing her perfume, going through her drawers, and going through her closet, he just seemed to become obsessed with her.
Laura herself was never really a person. You got three ideas of who she was, but you never really knew who Laura was. You get perspective from Waldo, the intelligent, puppeteer-like, but sexually inferior man, Shelby, the mindless doofus, and McPherson, the rugged, manly man. You get their ideas and what they shape what they want Laura to be, but Laura never really has an identity or an original personality. Laura, dead or alive, is just a name and nothing more.