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[INT. Sanitarium Bedroom (DAY)]
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In the breakdown sequence, it is Carlotta in Elster’s arms, Carlotta missing from Carlotta’s grave. Why does my mind always insist that it is Madeleine? Or rather, Judy?
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Midge: You don’t even know I’m here, do you? I’m here.
(01:27:13)
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In Boileau and Narcejac’s novel, D’Entre les Morts, there is no Midge. As of 01:29:00, there is no Midge in Vertigo, either.
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For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
(1 Corinthians)
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Here I come to view a voiceless ghost.
Yes, I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;
Through the years, through the dead scenes, I have tracked you.
(Thomas Hardy, “After a Journey”)
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Stranger still, my wife is a woman I have never actually seen.
(Dick, VALIS)
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My girlfriend and I watched a documentary called The Woman Who Wasn’t There, about Tania Head, a woman who claimed to have been on the 78th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11th. For years, she maintained that she had escaped the tower that day with the help of Welles Crowther and an unidentified fireman. Her husband, a man named “Dave,” was, she said, in the North Tower; he did not live.
Head claimed that she had been badly burnt in the attack, and that her right arm had been nearly severed. After a lengthy recovery, she joined a group named World Trade Center Survivors’ Network and even acted as its public face for several years, giving speeches about her experience to other support groups and leading tours around Ground Zero. In 2007, however, a reporter for the New York Times discovered that Head had not been married to “Dave”—had probably never even met him — had not been injured in the World Trade Center attacks, and had almost certainly been in Barcelona, Spain on September 11th, 2001. Yet she had recounted her gruesome story again and again, in great detail — severed limbs, dead bodies, the stuff of nightmares. She would have been one of only nineteen people on or above the 78th floor that day to have survived had her story been true.
The documentary was directed by Angelo J. Gugliemo, Jr., a member of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network who had known Head for several years. Though I expected talking heads moralizing about the horrible fraud Head had perpetrated, there weren’t any. Even among the survivors interviewed, there wasn’t much outrage at this woman for taking the spotlight the way she had. This was not a story of someone desperately seeking attention, though it easily could have been. Instead, the way Head’s story is told asks a much more interesting question. Not How could someone do this? but Why would someone want to do this? Why would someone want to put herself in this position, a position that required her to act out and relive memories of terrible suffering over and over? Not only had she chosen to pretend to have been at the World Trade Center that day and to have barely escaped with her life, having seen and experienced things that scarred her forever, but she had then also chosen to become someone who had lost her husband in those same attacks, someone who had then become someone who was called upon to talk about those experiences again and again and to try to comfort those who had also (really, actually) suffered.
Yes, she was calling attention to herself. The film might have focused on that aspect of the story: the filmmakers could have shown us one of Tania Head’s moving speeches about 9/11 and then cut to the reporter who had found out the truth, telling us where she had been (Barcelona) and what she had been doing (she was on vacation from an MBA program). Instead, the only speeches Head gives that are shown in the film have had their audio taken out or overlaid with other audio. Sometimes, we see her about to speak and then cut away just before she begins speaking. Most of her story is told by other survivors, her former friends in the Survivors’ Network. When we cut to Spain, it is to hear from Tania’s childhood friends, not those who would have known her in 2001. The question “Why would someone do this?” in the mouths of the people interviewed, is less an accusation than it is an honest expression of puzzlement — why? Why would Tania Head — or Alicia Esteve, her real name — why would this woman want to be in my position, they seem to ask. Why would she want to go through something so awful — and then go through it again, and again, and again — if she didn’t have to? The acting out of suffering can be — must be — a real suffering; why not spare oneself the pain?
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There’s a deeper truth in fiction, because memory is faulty.
(Priest, The Affirmation)
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Indeed I am convinced that the most erroneous assumptions are precisely the most indispensable for us, that without granting the validity of the logical fiction, without measuring reality by the invented world of the unconditioned, the self-identical, man could not live; and that a negation of this fiction. is equivalent to a negation of life itself.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
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What if the whole first half of Vertigo is just the fantasy Scottie has while in the sanitarium? Scottie, in pajamas, grieving for the death of the policeman or shocked by his near-death experience, sits in his chair (Midge hovering over him — a cousin? a sister?) daydreaming he’d met a woman named Madeleine and then that woman had died. What if there is no acrophobia, no vertigo, no Madeleine? What if, from hanging from the gutter to waking in the sanitarium, nothing that happens is “real” and everything we see is something Scottie has made up to explain to himself how he has come to be here, in this sanitarium? He feels responsible for the death of a man: the policeman, a colleague, perhaps a friend. It must be a difficult thing to come to terms with. Judy’s letter may seem to close off this possibility, but Judy’s letter is itself a fantasy. When Scottie meets Judy on the street, she might as well be anyone — any woman can stand in for the woman of a man’s fantasy. There would be no coincidence in their meeting, no accident of fate bringing them together, only a madman on the streets and a woman who finds she can’t get away from him.