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Once set down on paper, each fragment of memory. becomes, in fact, inaccessible to me. This probably doesn’t mean that the record of memory, located under my skull, in the neurons, has disappeared, but everything happens as if a transference had occurred, something in the nature of a translation, with the result that ever since, the words composing the black lines of my transcription interpose themselves between the record of memory and myself, and in the long run completely supplant it.
Simultaneously, my recollections grow dull. To conceptualize this fact, I use the image of evaporation, of ink drying; or else water on a pebble from the sea, the sun leaving behind its dulling mark, the salt film. The recollection’s emotion has disappeared. Occasionally, if what I have written in explanation satisfies me (later, on rereading), a second induced emotion, whose origin is the lines themselves in their minute, black succession, their visible thinness, procures for me a semblance of a simulacrum of the original emotion, now grown remote, unapproachable. But this emotion does not recur, even in lesser form.
(Jacques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London)
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He who defines personal identity as the private possession of some depository of memories is mistaken. Memory is no more than the noun by which we imply that among the innumerable possible states of consciousness, many occur again in an imprecise way.
(Borges, “The Nothingness of Personality”)
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When I type an open quotation mark (“) into the search bar at the top right of my computer’s web browser, the browser, anticipating what I will type next, immediately suggests “judy barton,” followed by “gabriel blackwell.” Though this is the result of my own (past) actions, I can’t help but be struck by it.
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It would all be much too complicated and unproductive to go into, since all we really care about on the outside is our hero on the run, not where he is running from and what, if anything, he is running to. The chase itself is the point.
(Taylor, Hitch)
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In life someone may just go mad. suddenly giving way under a strain. But will that be acceptable in a dramatization of these same facts?
(Taylor, Hitch)
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Hitch’s letter to Maxwell Anderson, Dec. 4:
You have to realize one very important fact. Here is a woman who has been an accessory to a murder, she has let herself revert back physically to her original color and style. And yet, she allows a man to recreate her in the image of the dead woman. Here, as you will see, she is taking a terrible risk. After all, she is a woman virtually in hiding. When she renews her association with the ex-detective she would love to pursue their old relationship in her current physical appearance, but naturally, he will have none of this. It is only as Madeleine he wants her. So, you see, Max, the woman must be desperately in love with him to allow him to do this. And this she tells him at the end of the story.
You can see what a chance she is taking because as Renee [the Judy character’s name at this point in the screenwriting process, the name given that character in Boileau and Narcejac’s novel], she is safe both within her identification and being able to stand up to any probe into her background. Because remember that she was Renee before she was turned into a blonde, and was dressed as nearly as possible like Gavin’s wife. So again, Max, you see the woman falling in love with him is of the utmost importance to justify her behavior in section two.
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Out of this narrative will emerge a chalk outline. It is the body of a woman.
(Zambreno, Heroines)
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It is Scottie’s idea to go to San Juan Bautista. It is prompted (as was certainly planned) by Judy/Madeleine’s dream, but the timing (noon) and the date (the next day) are left up to Scottie. If he had not thought of San Juan Bautista? If he had planned the trip for the following week? Gavin Elster, in the tower, waiting with a dead woman, his wife, Madeleine, for hours, perhaps days. How, for that matter, did Elster get Madeleine’s body into and up the tower? Does Judy scream because this has not, after all, been the plan? Are we so sure that she knows she is impersonating a dead woman so that that woman’s murder can be covered up? When she is confronted with this gruesome scene (the sun is shining, it is California — the corpse, many days old, cannot be in very good shape), does she scream not because she has been told to but because she is truly frightened? Why doesn’t anyone go up the tower once the body is discovered on the tiles below? How do Elster and Judy make their escape?
Elster pays Judy off, buys her silence. It seems we are meant to believe this is what has happened, their partnership ended with a transaction. But isn’t it much more likely that Judy, having come upon this man waiting patiently in the tower with the rotting corpse of his murdered wife for an eventuality whose timing, even the likelihood of its occurrence, could not realistically have been planned so exactly, is disgusted with Elster — and with herself — and tells him she never wants to see him again? Any money that changes hands does so by way of an indulgence, a pardon.
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When did Elster kill his wife? Wouldn’t it have to be before he approaches Scottie, before he goes to Ernie’s with Judy, dressed up as Madeleine? If she’s alive, there is always the possibility that Scottie will see the real Madeleine. If she’s dead, there is no such worry for Elster.
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It almost seemed as if she had some presentiment of what would happen. She resisted the trip so strongly. Eventually, though, we got on the plane, we took the BART to the hotel, we checked in. She was tired. She went to the room, undressed, and fell asleep on the bed. I walked up to Union Square — we were staying on the edge of the Tenderloin — and then over to the Argonaut and the other nearby locations. As I had thought, it was no good without her there.
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Earlier in my notes, I had wondered about how Elster could have gotten down and out of the tower unseen. I had wondered how Scottie, stricken by acrophobia such that he could not accompany Madeleine up the tower or move from the step when he saw her go past, could have gotten down. Nowhere did I wonder how Judy could have gotten down, but hers is the most unlikely escape of the three. Judy has been made up and dressed to look like the dead woman just discovered; she cannot be other than dead, must now act out that part, remain confined to the tower, unable to call out or move as though in a grave. If Elster is spotted, he might go unnoticed or unrecognized (no one knows how he is dressed, only Scottie knows what he looks like), invent some excuse or give a believable reason for his presence (“My answering service rang to tell me the police were looking for me”) but if Judy is spotted, all is lost. There can be no such coincidence or explanation for Judy, no blind spot in the crowd below — she looks like the dead woman and is costumed as her, and both of those facts are immediately apparent and infinitely suspicious. Though I want to liberate Judy from Scottie’s stranglehold, the only way to make sense out of her escape from the tower is to once again give the narrative over to him: he has never left the tower. He sits on the steps or clings to the gutter, terrified of falling, dreaming of Judy on the street, Judy in her room, Judy in his arms, Judy in the tower.