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Hitchcock said: “What I’ve tried to put in my films [is] what Edgar Allan Poe put in his novels: a completely unbelievable story told to the readers with such a spellbinding logic that you get the impression that the same thing could happen to you tomorrow. And that’s the key thing if you want the reader or viewer to substitute himself for the hero — since people are, after all, interested only in themselves or in stories which could happen to them.”
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Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt.
(Anne Carson, “Short Talks”)
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Another way to think of Plato’s cave is as a condition in which people live entirely in representation and interior space, in a universe constructed by humans, ultimately inside the imaginations of those who came before, an operation that suggests nesting Russian dolls and a certain crampedness of the imagination after a few generations.
(Solnit, River)
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Judy’s gray suit as worn by Novak was originally designed for a different actress, Vera Miles. A trebling (Miles“ Novak“ Judy(“Madeleine; a quadrupling?))? Novak objected to the dress because of the color — Edith Head recalled, "I remember her saying that she would wear any color except gray." Might she also have objected because the suit was not hers?
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An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.
(Bresson, Notes)
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According to the website howmanyofme.com, which uses an algorithm that takes the population according to the 2010 census and the relative popularity of a person’s first and last names and determines the probable number of Americans with that name, as of 6/22/2012, there were probably 21 Gabriel Blackwells in the USA. I was able to find a handful of them without much effort at all.
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Terror lurks not only in the dark shadows or in solitude. sometimes we can be most alone, most threatened, furthest beyond help, in the middle of a crowd of normal, friendly people.
(Taylor, Hitch)
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What we need to know — what Scottie needs to know but doesn’t investigate — is not what we think we need to know: who Madeleine Elster was. Madeleine Elster is the film’s MacGuffin.
If Judy Barton sees her [staged] rescue — Scottie’s dive into the Bay — as a [real] gesture of devotion, then when she wakes in Scottie’s apartment, she’s already to some degree under his spell. “He kept the child and threw her away,” Pop Liebel’s line about the man who kept Carlotta, has already been twinned to Elster’s real story: Elster will throw Judy away once his plot is accomplished, and she has already realized this by the time she meets Scottie. Scottie, though, doesn’t throw her away, won’t, and it is this that she falls in love with. This explains her actions in the second half of the film, her acquiescence to Scottie’s increasingly disturbing demands — she can’t help herself any more than Scottie can. But one thing, the most important thing, will yet be left unexplained: why does she jump from the mission’s tower? What is she afraid of, held so tightly by Scottie, her tormentor and her protector? Whatever causes her conscience to jump at shadows is also the clue to her identity before Elster and his plot. What we need to know in the end isn’t who Madeleine Elster was, but who Judy Barton has been.
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An incomplete double reading list:
“The Student of Prague,” H. H. Ewers.
“William Wilson,” Edgar Allan Poe.
The Devil’s Elixirs and “The Doubles,” ETA Hoffmann.
“The Double,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
“Love and Mr. Lewisham,” H. G. Wells
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde.
“At the End of the Passage,” Rudyard Kipling.
“The Horla” and “Peter and John,” Guy de Maupassant.
“Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges.
Despair, Vladimir Nabokov.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick.
“The Secret-Sharer,” Joseph Conrad.
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison.
“Goodbye, My Brother,” John Cheever.
The Double, Jose Saramago.
“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Robert Louis Stevenson.
The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares.
The Dark Half, Stephen King.
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare.
The Affirmation, Christopher Priest.
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There is the Gabriel Blackwell in South Carolina who was jailed for domestic abuse. His wife, so far as I can tell, was the victim. I don’t know what her name is; they don’t release those details sometimes. He seemed, in any case, already too infamous to pull such a prank.
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There is the Gabriel Blackwell in Trinidad, a professional cricketer. The only information on that Blackwell was written in an arcane code I could not break, in match scores and the miscellaneous statistics of a sport I had never so much as pretended to understand. This, as much as his Trinidadian nativity, eliminated him from my serious consideration.
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There were three Midwestern Gabriel Blackwells — a chef, a student, and an intern at a political office. Their abandoned social media profiles, their inscrutable pictures, and the brief mentions of them on obscure “professional” blogs gave each one the weight of a fragrance. If it were any one of them, I felt sure I would never know. They all seemed similarly likely to be fictions or fakes.
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And there was still this other Gabriel Blackwell, a man who, according to the reviews, had written two books about himself, two books that seemed also to be copies of other author’s books, a man who had now disappeared. He had released his last book two years ago. Madeleine E. had been “in progress” then. Was it still in progress now?
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Twenty-three hundred people go missing in America every single day. During the time it took you to read that sentence, another person has gone missing. At any given moment, the odds of any one of those estimated twenty-one American Gabriel Blackwells going missing are a little less than one in a billion. If you have a more common name, the chances that you will go missing in the next hour are much higher.
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In art, to reduce is to perfect. Your disappearance bestowed a negative beauty on you.
(Levé, Suicide)
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Changing your name is no guarantee that a sudden accident won’t befall you.
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I felt like I had no choice. I had to find him. I had to know if it was real. What else could I do? It would always be another reason not to write the book. Did he exist? Was he someone I already knew?