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There is the same thrill of one-way glass. as in hearing the sound of your voice recorded. Or catching sight of yourself in the background of a photograph. Or passing yourself in an electronics storefront — a peep of a view as your image walks toward you. For you are always a secret to yourself. But there are glimpses and hints and clues.
(Ross, Mr. Peanut)
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Man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow; others will outstrip me on the same lines: and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious incongruous and independent denizens.
(Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
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If Heraclitus is right, then every new sentence introduces a new character. The Gregor Samsa who awakens to find himself changed into a monstrous vermin is not the same Gregor Samsa who lifts his head to see his vaulted brown belly — that Gregor Samsa is already and will always have been a monstrous vermin. In literature, the period gives us a way to say that something has changed, a moment has passed. In life, what are the periods?
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Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.
(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)
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[INT: Ernie’s Restaurant (NIGHT)]
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Hitchcock: “Miss Novak arrived on the set with all sorts of preconceived notions that I couldn’t possibly go along with. You know, I don’t like to argue with a performer on the set; there’s no reason to bring the electricians in on our troubles. I went to Kim Novak’s dressing room and told her about the dresses and hairdos that I had been planning for several months. I also explained that the story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact on the screen, once the picture is completed.”
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On the other hand, Vertigo was undoubtedly a film in which the leading lady was cast as a substitute for the one Hitchcock had in mind initially. The actress we see on the screen is a substitute, and the change enhances the appeal of the movie, since this substitution is the main theme of the picture: A man who is still in love with a woman he believes to be dead attempts to recreate the image of the dead woman when he meets up with a girl who is her look-alike. Seated next to Grace Kelly, and viewing the scene in which James Stewart urges Kim Novak to put her hair up in a bun, I realized that Vertigo was even more intriguing in light of the fact that the director had compelled a substitute to imitate the actress he had initially chosen for the role.
(Truffaut, Hitchcock)
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Just as his admiration for Grace Kelly had been a part of Stewart’s decision to make Rear Window, here again the actress who would become his costar seemed to be cruciaclass="underline" Stewart — indeed, like Hitchcock himself — did seem to have become more interested in the picture when, at the last moment, the original female lead stepped down.
(Auiler, Vertigo)
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Men don’t want Midge. They don’t even want Judy — an honest-to-goodness girl from Salina, Kansas. They don’t even quite want Madeleine, for all her vulnerability. Nor do they want Carlotta — it’s “Madeleine” who wants to be Carlotta, the tragic heroine of her own obsessive story. Men want the space between Madeleine and Carlotta; between reality and illusion lies the dream. The imagination set free. They can slip out of their names and into the maze of desire.
(Judith Kitchen, Only the Dance)
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Marlene Dietrich, preoccupied with appearances to the extent that she demanded a full-length mirror be hung next to the camera so she could check her look under each lighting scheme, said, “It is a woman’s job to sense the hungers in men and to satisfy them without, at the same time, giving so much of herself that men become bored with her. It is the same with acting. Each man or woman should be able to find in the actress the thing he or she most desires and still be left with the promise that they will find something new and exciting every time they see her again.”
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Often things begin as a fake, inauthentic, artificial. But you get caught into your own game and that is the true tragedy of Vertigo. Appearances win over reality.
(Zizek, The Perverts Guide to Cinema)
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Vertigo was released on May 9, 1958. It earned back its costs, but only barely. Reviewers compared it unfavorably to other Hitchcock movies. Universal Pictures took note: While other Hitchcocks made the rounds on the revival circuit, Vertigo collected dust in a film vault. Robin Wood wrote his chapter on Vertigo from memory. By the time the film was restored and rereleased, the negative’s colors had faded so much that the restoration was compared to Ted Turner’s “colorization” of classic black and white movies. (The U.S. law instituting the National Film Registry was the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, prompted by — among other things — Turner’s purchase of the MGM archives (which would have included North by Northwest, already in color) and his systematic “colorization” of those films.) Even after the critical turnaround and the rerelease’s better showing at the box office, Universal still seems cool to the movie. There are several versions of Vertigo available on DVD and VHS, but only one on Bluray. At the time of this writing, the Bluray is available only as part of a 15-disc boxed set, “Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection.” It would seem insulting to summarize The Birds, Psycho, or Rear Window—who doesn’t know what happens in those movies? But with Vertigo, one never knows when it will disappear again, or what will be lost.
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Scottie Ferguson is a detective for the San Francisco Police Department. I have the distinct feeling that he is the Chief of Detectives, if there is such a thing, but I don’t think it’s ever really said whether he has any sort of supervisory role in the department; he may just be a detective. We do hear, from his friend Midge, that he once had ambitions to become Chief of Police, but we never find out at what rank he retired. While chasing a fugitive across the rooftops of downtown San Francisco, Scottie doesn’t make a jump from one building to another, inadvertently causing the officer who stops to help him to fall to his death. As a result, Scottie develops acrophobia and a debilitating vertigo. He suffers some physical injury too, but we never learn the extent or even the nature of that injury. Worried that he’ll never again be able to perform the functions of his job, Scottie quits the force and enters an uneasy retirement. A man named Gavin Elster calls him to ask if they can meet.
This Elster is a college friend of Scottie’s (who nonetheless can’t remember Elster). Bored, not especially curious but having nothing better to do, Scottie goes to see Elster, who tells him that his wife, Madeleine, has been wandering during the day, perhaps quite far from the city. Not only that, but she seems not to realize that she has been wandering — she can’t recall where she has been or what she has been doing. Elster wants to know that she’s safe, he tells Scottie, perhaps also that she is not cheating on him (though Elster says it isn’t that that he’s worried about). Scottie declines. He changes his mind when he sees Madeleine.