The museum guard’s walkie-talkie crackled a fuzzy and cryptic message. He performed a series of stretches. What had DeFeo thought of as she sat on the stool, I wondered, this 2000-pound Rose blocking out the light; behind her, her plants dying so that this simulacrum of a plant could live? Eventually, she would come to believe that her heavy use of lead-based paints caused her cancer, and she would attempt to reproduce the physicality, the dimensionality of her earlier works through a kind of trompe l’oeil effect. The story she would tell herself about the process of creating The Rose was that it caused cancer. The facts were coordinates, had only to do with proximity and time.
I found myself unable to meet the “eye” of the composition. Every time I looked at the center of it, I was shunted off along one of its rays. Even when I stepped back into the outer room, next to the placard, I could not focus there. It took me some time to notice how perfect, how precise, the dimensions of each “petal” were. In part, it was this precision that gave the lie to the painting’s title — this did not seem like a rose. It seemed like something artificial. Or, no, it seemed as though artificially perceived, as when something natural, “imperfect” to the naked eye, is seen under a microscope of great power, revealing the fractals and the fractals of fractals of which it is composed, each geometrically perfect and corresponding to a finite set of numbers, seeming as though computer-generated. What if any of this had gone through DeFeo’s mind? Why had she changed the title?
…
After Madeleine describes San Juan Bautista, Scottie, having seen the place in his head, says, “You’ve given me something to go on, don’t you see?” “Something to go on” = someplace to go to. In this way, the trip is entirely engineered, part of Elster’s plan. But what if Scottie doesn’t recognize the details that Madeleine describes? How could Elster have known that Scottie would know what San Juan Bautista looks like? How much of Scottie’s past — in what minute detail — does Elster know?
…
Or: Why is Scottie so insistent Madeleine has been to San Juan Bautista before? She is describing a dream; she says that it takes place in Spain. That Scottie believes the dream he has heard narrated took place at San Juan Bautista is as much Scottie’s invention as it is Elster’s.
…
There’s an answer for everything.
(01:13:55)
…
Two scenes intervene between Cypress Point and San Juan Bautista: one in Midge’s apartment, when Midge reveals her self-portrait-as-“Portrait of Carlotta” to Scottie, and, following it, a scene in Scottie’s apartment, “early dawn” the following day, when Madeleine tells him about her dream. One scene attempts to conceal what it in actuality reveals, the other conceals that which it is supposed to reveal; Midge’s feelings for Scottie are clearest here, where her gesture is meant to be seen as ironic, and Madeleine’s are most calculated in the scene following it, just when she is supposed to be at her most vulnerable. “Supposed to” according to her script, that is, the one written by Elster.
Something else is revealed in these scenes. Where we have been led to believe that Scottie, free, “independent,” has, to this point, been doing what he wants when he wants to do it, the true nature of his actions now becomes clear. His life is as scripted as Judy’s, except that he retains the illusion he is acting out his own will. When he suggests the two of them visit San Juan Bautista at noon that day, he believes he is doing so because he has found the solution to her problem, because he wants to help her. But he is actually doing so because Elster has fed Judy a description of San Juan Bautista, the place where he wants to dispose of his wife’s strangled corpse.
…
How much of Vertigo takes place in Elster’s head before it takes place on screen? How much of it remains in Elster’s head? It isn’t Scottie’s fantasy we’re watching, is it? It’s Elster’s.
…
I arrived in Portland late at night, at a gate at the end of the terminal. Because it had taken me so long to get through security in San Francisco, I was the last passenger on the plane. I had had to stow my bag above a row of seats far behind me, in the only available space in the overhead bins. Because of this, I had to wait until all of the other passengers deplaned to retrieve my bag when we landed in Portland. The crew were gone. I could hear the sound of a vacuum from somewhere. I walked down the jetway alone, into a seemingly empty terminal. The gate areas I passed were unmanned and unlit; I could see through the huge windows out onto the empty runways. A luggage tram, appearing as though its operator had vanished into thin air right in the middle of doing his job, was the only interruption in the field’s perfect, warped grid of lights. There was a couple I recognized from my flight, standing outside of the bathrooms, the husband looking at his cell phone as though in disbelief, the wife clearly ready to be wherever they were due to be. My heart quickened as I passed through the checkpoint — what if I had to go back for some reason? — but I didn’t slow down to check my bag and my pockets to see that I had everything with me. I still hoped to catch the last MAX home. I also hoped there wouldn’t be a traffic cop on the train checking tickets. I hadn’t yet canceled my credit card or my debit card, though I knew I should have. I held out some stupid hope that my wallet was in my bag somewhere, in the folds of a shirt or in the pocket of a pair of pants.
After I got home and dumped out my bag, I tried to remember if there was anything else in my wallet that needed to be canceled. I wondered if I was supposed to cancel my driver’s license. If someone who looked like me got his hands on it, couldn’t he then pass as me? What could he do, as me?
…
[INT. Midge’s Apartment (NIGHT)]
…
Now we can better understand how one can get emotionally involved with the inhabitants of a fictional possible world as if they were real people. It happens only partly for the same reason we can be moved by a daydream in which a loved one dies. In this latter case, at the end of our reverie we come back to everyday life and realize that we had no cause for worry. But what would happen if one lived in an uninterrupted daydream?
To be completely emotionally involved with the inhabitants of a fictional possible world, we must satisfy two requirements: (1) we must live in the fictional possible world as if in an uninterrupted daydream, and (2) we must behave as if we were one of the characters. Once we begin living in a possible world as if it were our real one, we can be disconcerted by the fact that in the possible world we are not, so to speak, formally registered. The possible world has nothing to do with us; we move within it as if we were the lost bullet of Julian Sorel.
(Eco, Confessions)