Vertigo, a psychological thriller set in that most vertiginous of cities, San Francisco, is a powerfully romantic film and, at the same time, a brutal deconstruction of romantic love. As Spoto has observed: "Never have exploitation (disguised as love) and self-annihilation (disguised as self-sacrifice) been so tragically presented in a film with fatal results." The hero's simultaneous desire and dread for what Hitchcock implies is an essentially incestuous and hence forbidden imago from the past is given brilliant and haunting visual expression through his ambivalent camera movements-especially the combination of forward zooms and reverse tracking shots. Spoto: "The emotional landscape of Vertigo, with its haunted and hopeless pursuit of an empty ideal, is Hitchcock's ultimate statement on the romantic fallacy....It is...a work of unsentimental yet profound compassion, and a statement of transcendent faith in what cannot be and yet what must, somewhere, be true." -Marilyn Fabe