My wife explained to the two women that I had been working on a book about Vertigo. She called it “his little book.” The two women knew nothing about the movie. I’ve never seen it, they said, is it good? They pretended to be interested, but the moment I said anything about it, they ignored me and started talking to each other. We walked up towards Nob Hill, along Sutter. As we passed under the awning of the Hotel Vertigo, one of the women said, Isn’t that that movie you were just talking about? I didn’t have a chance to answer. She explained to my wife she couldn’t wear shorts like that, but she kind of wanted a pair anyway. I knew she wasn’t listening, so I didn’t tell her that the building that prompted her question had played an important role in the film. I didn’t tell her it had appeared there under a different name, its old name, the Empire. I didn’t tell her I had read that Hitchcock had begun planning the shooting of a movie in San Francisco during his first visit to the city, during that visit’s first hours, long before there was a story or a script to be shot there. He’d hardly needed a location scout during Vertigo’s pre-production, I didn’t say. I didn’t tell the woman how strange it was that Hitchcock, so in love with San Francisco, set the two most important scenes in the movie he shot there ninety miles outside of it — really, nowhere near it, at San Juan Bautista. He might as well have filmed them in Sacramento, I didn’t say. Though I guess, I didn’t go on, that seemed a little less surprising when one considered that Hitchcock had a home — far and away his favorite home — in Scotts Valley, not far from San Juan Bautista. He spent more of his time in his home in Los Angeles, of course, I didn’t say. I didn’t mention that the other two important, bookended scenes in Vertigo took place at Ernie’s, one of Hitchcock’s favorite restaurants in San Francisco. It didn’t really matter. Ernie’s was no longer there and we were many blocks away from where it had been.
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“Is this some kind of Gallup poll?” Judy, even as Judy Barton, must act a part, even after she has given up the part of Madeleine. She has, in accepting the part of Madeleine, agreed to play a part for the rest of her life, the part of Judy-who-was-never-also-Madeleine. Can there ever again be a “real” Judy?
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Scottie is in every scene of Vertigo, with just two exceptions: when we cut to Midge in her car outside of his apartment, and in Judy’s hotel room, after he has left. But, in the case of the scene of Midge in her car, we know that Scottie is there, it’s just that he’s not visible because of where the camera is set up. Move just a couple of steps down the sidewalk and suddenly there he is, in the lighted window. In the Empire Hotel scene, however, not only has he left the shot, he has left the hotel, too. (Hasn’t he? Is he standing behind the door?) We have momentarily lost track of him, the first and only time in the film. Both Wood and Modleski tell us the movie is meant to be seen as subjective, as though from Scottie’s point of view, but, if that’s so, we have to wonder whose point of view this scene in Judy’s room represents. The effect of his absence, his altogether exceptional absence, is to turn this scene into a fantasy. One has to believe it’s his fantasy since he’s not in the frame, but it doesn’t matter whose fantasy it is if it is a fantasy — the scene is ultimately more about exposition than psychology. The letter, we may conclude, cannot be real.
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A letter always arrives at its destination.
(Jacques Lacan, Seminar on The Purloined Letter)
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Hitchcock wanted the letter in the film, at this particular moment in the film, even though many people close to him advised against it. Critics said it was a clunky way of explaining what was going on and asked why the audience would keep watching if they found out what had happened forty minutes before the movie actually ended. But holding something so large over the audience’s head was not suspense: that was mystery, and Hitchcock did not deal in mystery.
There is no such letter in Boileau and Narcejac’s novel, though it would be much more natural there — although the narrator of the novel is close to Flavierès (Scottie in the film), it isn’t Flavierès, it is a third person narrator not bound to what Flavierès knows; it can tell us what Flavierès can only suspect. In fact, Flavierès’s certainty is the only thing the reader has to go on in believing that Renée (Judy in the film) is Madeleine — she will not admit it until the end of the novel, and by that point we can’t be sure her confession isn’t made out of exasperation with Flavierès’s insistence that she is Madeleine, out of a kind of fatalistic resignation or folie à deux. Indeed, because it is a book and the story is told in words only — Boileau and Narcejac do not have the luxury of having the same actress play both parts — it seems much less likely that Renée is Madeleine than that Judy is Madeleine. We cannot see to believe. We must trust in Flavierès’s words, and we know him to be unreliable. By the end, he will have strangled this woman, whoever she is, to death; how can we possibly trust him?
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In Scottie’s fantasy of Judy’s memory, Elster has to cover Judy’s mouth to keep her from screaming.
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I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.
(Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman)
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And at the base of Coit Tower, while my wife and her friends stopped in the shade to discuss their plans for the night, while I looked at my phone to try to figure out which way to go to get back to our hotel, I looked up and the man was simply standing there, looking not at me but through me, into the tower, where my wife and her friends were standing, and I reached out as though to push him away, and he brushed past me. He had been no heavier than the fog that had come in that morning and then dissipated. I felt almost as though, if I had kept my arm extended, it would have passed right through him.
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Anyone would distrust a person who said, “My companions and I are illusions; we are a new kind of photograph.”
(Bioy Casares, Morel)
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The more you disguise yourself, the more you look like you.
(Saramago, The Double)
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It seems, at first, simple: Judy writes the letter to explain everything to Scottie. This letter, then, far from being a mystery, is trying to dissolve one. But it is not as simple as it seems, because why write a letter? Judy has promised to meet Scottie again; she could just as easily explain everything at that meeting. Though it would be difficult and hurtful, still, to share this secret might well, with time, bring them closer together — how much more intimate to say it (as she does to us, the audience) than to write it. And so the letter, the fact that Judy writes these words she ought to speak, seems to indicate a distance Judy wants to maintain.