No one seems to know what became of the headstone. Is it up in some attic in the Mission? In a disused belfry? In a basement, below the ground?
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[INT. Art Gallery (AFTERNOON)]
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PORTRAIT OF CARLOTTA
Artist Unknown
Donated Anonymously
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The “Portrait of Carlotta” Madeleine visits in the Palace of the Legion of Honor was first painted to resemble Vera Miles, the actress Hitchcock intended to play Madeleine. The painting of Miles-as-Carlotta still exists. When Miles announced she was pregnant and Kim Novak was cast in her place, the painting had to be redone, somewhat hastily, by the artist John Ferren, who designed the dream sequence later in the film (the first version had been painted by an Italian painter, Manlio Sarra). And the version that appears in Vertigo does resemble Kim Novak — look at the nose, the cheekbones, look at the jutting lower lip — not perfectly, but closely. Are we then supposed to understand that Madeleine does in fact resemble Carlotta (is Scottie ever shown a photo of Madeleine, the “real” Madeleine?), and Judy, in turn, resembles Madeleine? Or has Judy been chosen not for her resemblance to Madeleine, which would perhaps be dangerous for Elster, appearing at Ernie’s, but for her resemblance to Carlotta, who Madeleine is not, in fact, related to and does not (did not) resemble? Madeleine, then, fated for a different, unique death, while Judy, acting out Madeleine-as-Carlotta, really acts out Judy-as-Carlotta, atavistically, unwittingly, repeating her true ancestor’s/historic double’s story?
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You say your being, your vital joy, have been taken from you by a human presence? By the light of a smile, the gaiety of an expression, the softness of a voice? A living woman leads you, by her attractiveness, to your death?
All right! Since this woman is precious to you — I AM GOING TO STEAL HER OWN EXISTENCE AWAY FROM HER!
I’m going to show you. I can capture the grace of her gesture, the fullness of her body, the fragrance of her flesh, the resonance of her voice, the turn of her waist, the light of her eyes, the quality of her movements and gestures, the individuality of her glance, all her traits and characteristics, down to the shadow she casts on the ground — her complete identity, in a word.
(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve)
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When, in his essay “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” John Berger writes, “Painting brings home. The cinema transports elsewhere,” he is trying to highlight the movement that defines moving pictures. “Movies,” he says, “not because we see things moving, but because a film is a shuttle service between different places and times.” “Ours is the century of enforced travel,” he writes, “I would go further and say that ours is the century of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon. Perhaps it is not so surprising that this century’s own narrative art is the cinema.”
Reading all this, it strikes me that, though we may be said to look at a painting, the same cannot be said of a film — we do not look at it. We may think of a painting’s subject when we look at it, but, in doing so, we are forced also by the experience to consider the texture of the canvas or the wall or the object in front of us, the painted-on surface. We look and see the relief of the oil paint or the wash of the tempera or the flatness of the lacquer. Another way of saying this is one cannot look through a painting as one does a window.
Film is something different. It is projected. What we see is light, not film. The surface onto which a film is projected is customarily ignored; typically, the artist has no say in what her film is projected onto. Film thus better resembles a window than a painting, and better resembles a memory than a window, for no matter how abstract a film gets, it will always be nothing more than a portal into the past: some past person or some past vista or some past event — film invites the viewer to cast himself back into the past, to stand behind the viewfinder and view something happening elsewhere at some other time as though he were present and contemporaneous. It is, in other words, ethereal, evanescent, nonexistent. It is not a thing but a memory.
And yet, most films are not documentaries. They pretend to represent something that never existed as it seems in the film, but which nonetheless did, at one time, exist. When we see Scottie seeing Judy for the first time, we are not seeing Scottie seeing Judy for the first time, but we are seeing Jimmy Stewart. We are seeing Kim Novak. Scottie does not exist, but neither does Jimmy Stewart, and even though Kim Novak still exists at the time of this writing, she does not exist as she did at the time of filming. What we are not seeing is a representation of Jimmy Stewart, a representation of Kim Novak. In no way is Vertigo a thing on the same order as a painting. We are seeing things as anyone on set would have seen them, just with certain parts of the set cropped out, certain moments in time cut from our memories. It is not impossible that someone on set might have a memory of filming Vertigo that includes everything in Vertigo and nothing else. Her memory would then be identical to the film. One cannot say the same of a Monet. One cannot say the same even of a Warhol.
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[INT: McKittrick Hotel Lobby (DAY)]
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“It does seem silly,” or so says Ellen Corby, the actress who plays the unnamed manager of the McKittrick Hotel, in a scene whose importance to the so-called “front” story has always escaped me — the connection to Carlotta is or could be important to Elster’s illusory Carlotta/Madeleine storyline, but why should Madeleine go there and then disappear? And why should Corby’s character deny that she was there? If she really hasn’t been there, then what have we seen? What does any of it mean for Scottie, for Judy? Clearly, Judy can’t allow Scottie to catch her there, but why bribe the manager (if that’s what’s happened) to say that she hasn’t been there at all that day? And if she slips in past Corby, how has she slipped out?
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Corby gives up “Carlotta’s” name when Scottie shows her his badge, but won’t admit to having seen her that day — yes, I know who she is, but no, you haven’t seen her. The effect is of convincing us that Judy-as-Madeleine is Scottie’s fantasy rather than Elster’s, that he is already following a ghost.
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Corby’s manager betrays no knowledge of the hotel’s history—”Carlotta Valdes?” “Yeah, that’s it. Sweet name, isn’t it. Foreign, but sweet.” But not the same name as that of the woman for whom the building was built? Is Corby’s manager even real?
…
Walking back to my hotel, I found a used bookstore that specialized in genre fiction. I wouldn’t have stopped if it had been just another used bookstore — there were many on Valencia — but the lurid painted covers of the paperbacks in the front window drew me in. There were bookshelves from floor to ceiling and old drugstore paperback racks ringing what had formerly been the original oak bar, complete with brass rail. Drawn up next to the bar was an ALF standup and, next to it, Paul Muni from Scarface, but there was no one behind the cash register, or anyone in the shop at all that I could see. The categories the books were organized under were absurdly specific—“Extraterrestrial Vampire Romance”; “Afrofuturism”—but mercifully for me, there was a “San Francisco Noir” section near the front door. The bells on the door had jingled, and I could hear someone walking around in the back — the floorboards creaked — but no one came out. I had to hit the porter’s bell on the bar to get the clerk’s attention. A young woman opened the door opposite the one I’d heard the creaking coming from. She whispered something as she came out, I couldn’t hear what. She sold me a hardbound omnibus edition of Dashiell Hammett’s novels, priced at $10, and then went back into the back room. I took a postcard on my way out.