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In his book Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes the city of Zobeide: “the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein.” Zobeide, he tells us, was founded by men who had shared a dream of a woman, naked, running through the moonlight in the streets of an inscrutable city. When these men came together, it was decided that the city of the dream should be built. It is unclear to me whether they believed that building the city would draw this mysterious woman from their dreams like baking soda draws the poison from an insect’s sting or if they believed that they were simply creating a situation in which the possibility of their dream coming true was somewhat less improbable (or, for that matter, whether they felt they were carrying out some dream directive or if they were all similarly mad). Whatever their reasons for building it, each arranged for this city’s streets to dead-end where they had lost sight of this woman in their dream. When new men arrived, having also suffered this dream, they changed the city’s plan to accord more closely with their own dreams’ endings, where each had lost sight of the woman. What Calvino doesn’t tell us is that, in doing so, numerous pockets of the city, inaccessible to anyone but those who found themselves there while the new citizens were executing their own dream engineering, were then closed off, creating tiny pockets of city in which one might find that the only passage out had suddenly been blocked, creating, at a stroke, completely private courtyards, so private as to not allow entrance or exit — prison cells, in other words. Inevitably, awaiting the dream-woman’s arrival, the founders of Zobeide laid in wait in these pockets of city, ahead of their dream-selves, waiting for the woman to be driven toward them. When other seekers came along, the founders found only themselves trapped, stuck behind walls too high and too smooth to scale, in front of doors opening into buildings now without egress, their lives even more circumscribed than the ones they had planned for their dream-woman.
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A single woman contains, for the man who loves her, the souls of all other women.
(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve)
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She first saw him on our way to lunch. I thought she would say something, but she just looked surprised, surprised and angry. She stopped in the middle of crossing the street, still in the crosswalk. This was how I knew she had seen him — in that instant she turned to face me, slowly, cautiously, as though the man were a poisonous snake and the moment she took her eyes off him he would strike. When the light changed and the cab in front of us honked, we had no choice but to continue crossing the street to where he was still standing. But when we reached the sidewalk, my wife slowed until she was well behind me and gave me a look meant to pierce my obliviousness, a look of displeasure that would have taken real effort to ignore. Why did we have to keep going around in circles, looking for this place where I had said we should get lunch? Why couldn’t we stop wandering and just eat somewhere? She didn’t care where we ate, she didn’t care about the historical significance or the restaurant’s Yelp scores or what it served or how well it served it, she just wanted to stop. She just wanted to sit down and to eat. She was going to go into this place (it was an Indian place with a huge buffet) and I could come with her or I could go on without her.
I was worried she would spring onto the curb and attack him. Instead, she glared at me and then went into the restaurant without saying anything. Inside, we picked at food we didn’t really want and made a point of not speaking to each other. She had chosen a table far away from the window. I really can’t remember what I ate or whether it was good.
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Thinking back now, my memory puts her where she hadn’t been. She was asleep, in the hotel room, blocks away, but I can also see her there, with me, on the street. Which memory was the unreliable one?
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[INT. Judy’s Hotel Room (NIGHT)]
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Judy lives in the Empire Hotel, next to a restaurant (?) named — what else? — ”Twelfth Knight,” Twelfth Night being Shakespeare’s farce of identity, in which men fall in love with men who are not men and women fall in love with women who are not women.
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In many countries, the traditional Twelfth Night celebration ends the winter festival that begins with Halloween. There is drinking and feasting. Children run through the streets knocking on doors and ringing bells to drive out evil spirits. The order of things is reversed: the king is treated as a peasant, and, from among the peasants the Lord of Misrule, who presides over the festivities, is chosen. In other countries, Twelfth Night begins Carnival, which involves the same reversal and many of the same traditions.
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Judy: “I’ve been on blind dates before. Matter of fact, I’ve been picked up before.” By Elster? An allusion to (before) the beginning?
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Better well hanged than ill wed.
(Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, via Shakespeare, Twelfth Night)
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I’ve been understanding since I was seventeen.
(01:44:15)
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Judy writes her note to Scottie left-handed, as though (for nine out of ten people) seen in a mirror.
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While we are, I think, meant to assume that Judy is taking down all that she says in her voiceover, when she holds her letter up to tear it in half, we can see that she has only written two lines. It’s possible, I suppose, that there is more writing on the other side of the paper, but it isn’t visible to us, and it really doesn’t seem likely, given the wide margin of blank space we can see. What did she really write?
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Scottie sees the same woman, a woman who is not Madeleine or Judy, at Ernie’s at 01:43:00 (gray suit) as at 01:31:00 (blue dress/brooch).
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Green (as Edith Head, who designed two green outfits for Kim Novak, flatly observed) is the colour of death.
(Krohn, Hitchcock at Work)
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Green is also the color of rebirth.
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We met up with my wife’s friends on Market Street, barely two hours after we’d touched down. This trip was supposed to be a reconciliation, an apology — she held it all against me. I held it all against me, too. She chose San Francisco as a poke in my eye, I thought, but I felt I deserved a poke in the eye. I couldn’t be sure it was my fault, of course, but I thought it was probably my fault. And I was still afraid of this other man. I wanted to order in, stay in our hotel room, make up or at least talk. She made plans on the plane, before we’d even touched down, without telling me what they were. We’ll be late, she said. I didn’t know we were going out, I said. I was not in a position to refuse.
The two women who screamed when they saw my wife and I coming down the sidewalk were less friends than they were former co-workers. My wife’s happiness at seeing them was clearly forced. When she went in to give them a hug she looked directly at me, into my eyes. It was clear that the two women were there to help my wife make me feel worse about myself. I tried to make myself as invisible as I could for the rest of the afternoon, but then I was worried about this other man. It was awkward to be out clothes shopping with these three women who did not want to have anything to do with me, but I couldn’t risk just standing outside of the shops on the street. I had to stay close.