(Doniger, The Woman)
…
I called the airline to see if I could change my reservation. I wanted to leave as soon as possible. All I wanted was to be home. The representative asked if I had “elevate gold status.” I didn’t understand what she was saying — elevate? — but I told her that I didn’t think so so that we could get on with it. She asked for my confirmation number. I gave it to her. There was a flight leaving in two hours. I could just barely make it, maybe. I headed for the BART stop on Market. She asked for my credit card number. I reached into my coat pocket. My wallet was gone. I checked my pants and the pockets of my bag. On the other end of the line, the representative told me I ought to retrace my steps. She asked me if there was anything else she could help me with. I hung up on her. I would not be retracing my steps. If I couldn’t get out of San Francisco that night, I would stay in my hotel room until I needed to leave for my flight.
…
At 00:51:25, Madeleine asks Scottie, “Have you ever before?” She means “Have you ever [fallen into San Francisco Bay] before,” but, because of the elision, one might as well understand her to be asking “Have you ever [fallen] before?”
…
Hitchcock gets on a bus. He just misses his bus. He takes a drink. He walks past the camera carrying a cello, a violin, a trumpet. He is on a train, in a wheelchair, behind closed doors. He is in a class reunion photo and a weight-loss ad. These blink-and-you-miss-it cameos were a kind of signature for Hitchcock, whose real signature typically included a small caricature of his profile. But one gets the feeling that his most famous interviewer, François Truffaut, an early proponent of the so-called “auteur theory,” probably thought such appearances were unnecessary — as the man ultimately responsible for them, regardless of whether his image was projected alongside their characters, Hitchcock was in every one of his films. In his Notes on the Cinematographer, another one of Truffaut’s heroes, Robert Bresson writes, “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.” There is no hiding what Hitchcock is not at liberty to hide: that he has created something in his own image. Unless his image hides something else, something more important.
…
The girl you love? She is not a creature of the earth, she does not live in the world, but in you yourself as the high and pure ideal of your art, which inspires you, which breathes from your works, which is enthroned above the stars.
(E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Doubles”)
…
Robert Bresson writes: “Things are made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which I regard them.” He writes: “Your genius is not in the counterfeiting of nature. but in your way of choosing and coordinating bits taken directly from it by machines.” He writes: “Shooting is not making something definitive, it is making preparations.” He writes: “Don’t show all sides of things. A margin of indefiniteness.”
…
Vertigo Vertigo Vertigo
The book begins with a young couple buying their first home. We are not told what year it is, but it seems clear that the book is set in the early 1950s. The husband, a veteran, has come back from some unnamed conflict to a prosperity that seems new to him and an accompanying happiness, or at least contentment. Over the course of this opening chapter, we see he is a hard worker, spending most of his time away from home. When he is home, he wants things a certain way, and his wife, our narrator, tries her best to accommodate him, often going out of her way to do so. We begin to suspect, with his (now pregnant) wife, that something is off about this behavior, but, like her, we want to assume the best — that he is merely trying to provide for his new family, that he is used to military discipline and expects it in others, that he is under stress in a job he was ill-prepared for. Our narrator, stuck at home, occupies her time listening to the radio and daydreaming of visiting the places her husband has just come home from — really, any departure from the life she is leading now seems like a dream, but she finds herself daydreaming about especially those places he has told her about. He never tells her about the days he shot at others or others shot at him, only about the days after, the days when people were walking around in the streets again, as if for the first time, when everyone was so welcoming and friendly, and though no one had anything, they wanted to share what little they could find with each other and with him. This is a world she wants to experience.
A neighbor, older perhaps by a decade than the young wife, begins to take an interest in the narrator. She invites her over for cards and often invents excuses to visit her at home, excuses that seem transparent to us but seem perfectly reasonable to the narrator. One afternoon, the neighbor has the young wife over for tea, and she introduces her to some of her friends, whom the young wife learns are swingers. Our narrator is embarrassed and even a little intimidated, and she runs back home and promises herself she will never talk to the neighbor again. Every time she sees the neighbor’s driveway filled with cars, though, she imagines herself in the neighbor’s house, in the arms of a stranger. She tells us it isn’t that she wants another man (although we get the sense her husband and she rarely have sex, and that this disappoints her), but that she just wants something new, something different.
It begins to dawn on us that the husband may be gay, and that he is certainly having an affair, and that neither he nor his wife wants to admit either. Our narrator has a child, a baby girl, and we skip ahead thirteen years, presumably because the narrator is busy raising her daughter.
Now the daughter is thirteen and the narrator is older than her neighbor was at the beginning of the novel. That neighbor has apparently moved out in those thirteen years, because when we come back to these characters, they are talking about their new neighbors, a young couple, the husband a veteran just like the narrator’s husband, and the wife as straitlaced as our narrator was. But something has changed in our narrator in those thirteen years. She criticizes her husband now, constantly, and she asserts herself. He seems different, too: less rigid and less determined to get his way, maybe even defeated. It is almost as though the two have switched roles. The daughter, though we don’t even learn her name and can form no clear picture of her, we know is close to her father and carelessly cruel to her mother, who resents the bond her husband and her daughter have formed. We also know that the husband has a lover, a relationship the narrator tolerates, though as a consequence, she won’t let her husband touch her at all. The narrator believes this is why her daughter prefers her husband: because she believes that her mother is withholding affection from him, when it is the narrator who cares enough not to tell her that her father is having an affair with another man, an affair that cost the father his career, such that now the mother has to work because the husband can’t.
The job our narrator has taken is at a mannequin factory, where she paints eyes, eyebrows, lips, and nostrils on finished mannequins. The rest of the book is a long description of the wife painting the details of her husband’s face — he was and remains an attractive man — onto mannequin after mannequin. The only variations in the narrative are when a mannequin comes out slightly warped, and our narrator has to work harder to make the finished product look right. These slightly-irregular mannequins will be sold to downmarket stores, the kinds of places our narrator now shops because it is all she can afford. In the last scene of the book, she finds herself buying clothes for her husband even though he does not need them because she has seen them on a mannequin that looks — even if only subtly (she does not mold the heads, after all, only applies the finishing touches, and this was one of the irregulars) — like her husband.