Though conscious I would be out of a job — was already out of a job — I was not careful with my money and could not stay at home with my notes. While my wife was at work, I took the bus to Powell’s and bought books I would not read, just for something to do. I went to the café around the corner from our apartment for coffee rather than making it myself. I went to the movies, even when there was nothing I particularly wanted to see. I took long drives out to the coast and back. I went to Pittock Mansion and the reservoir at Mount Tabor. I had no place to be and no reason to be any place.
…
Hitchcock: “We must bear in mind that, fundamentally, there’s no such thing as color; in fact, there’s no such thing as a face, because until the light hits it, it is nonexistent. After all, one of the first things I learned in the School of Art was that there is no such thing as a line; there’s only the light and the shade.”
…
Writers who worked on Vertigo:
Pierre Boileau (original story)
Thomas Narcejac (original story)
Norman Denny (Hitchcock’s English translator of D’Entre les Morts)
Alfred Hitchcock (throughout pre-production, production)
Alma Hitchcock (throughout pre-production, production)
Maxwell Anderson (first treatment, June-July, 1956)
Angus MacPhail (second treatment/”structural layout” Aug.-Sept., 1956)
Alec Coppel (continuity (“numbered paragraphs with no dialogue”), fall, 1956)
Sam Taylor (script, 1956–1957)
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Hitchcock, at the German film studio Ufa in 1924 to film The Blackguard, visited the set of F. W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann, where Murnau had a real train car set up in front of some small wooden cars, and then another real train car far off in the background, with extras getting out of it. “What you see on the set does not matter. All that matters is what you see on the screen,” Murnau is supposed to have said. Back on the set of The Blackguard, Hitchcock put dwarves in the background of a crowd scene, to give it a sense of perspective.
…
In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.
(Bhagavad-Gita)
…
Because my own life lacked structure, I looked for it in Vertigo. Being a film about doubles, one expects Vertigo to have two parts, more or less equal if not exactly identical, but, as I watched it and rewatched it, I started to think that the movie’s shape was more complex.
The double is synonymous with the uncanny: Freud’s example of his idea of the unheimlich is a man catching his reflection in a mirror and believing it to be someone else. Clearly, I thought, Vertigo has an uncanny aspect — the half of the film before Madeleine’s “death” meets the half after Madeleine’s death in Scottie’s mid-film delusion/vision/dream as the self meets its perceived double in a mirror.
But now I saw this aspect in a different light, expressed in the film’s two divisions, not in the film’s two parts. In fact, I came to believe that the film had three parts. The first: before the police officer’s death, very brief. The second: from the scene in Midge’s apartment to the inquest and Scottie’s confinement. And the last: from Scottie’s release from the hospital to Judy’s death. Three parts — the self meeting its double in the mirror, the double, and the mirror itself, an element that needed to be considered, I thought. The mirror is where the self loses its integrity — one looks into the mirror and sees one’s self, but this self is experienced as Other (for instance, one does not look out of its eyes but instead into them).
One detail in particular convinced me of this structure: the corset that Scottie complains of in the first scene in Midge’s apartment. I had always ignored it before. It’s small talk, as almost nothing else is in Vertigo — Vertigo is a relatively quiet film, and when its characters speak, they speak in double entendres. Even after I started to think about it, I couldn’t assign it any particular significance, I merely suspected it hid some greater meaning. A corset seemed like a triviality, a minor therapy for a fall that had killed another man. So went my thinking — either Scottie had been rescued from the rooftop or he hadn’t. Black or white. This or that. If he had, there was no division there, no break in the timeline; we go from the gutter to Midge’s apartment with no significant jump forward in time. If he hadn’t been rescued, Wood was right: the whole film takes place in that last moment before he falls to his death. But now I began to think that the corset seemed to argue for another possibility, a botched or difficult rescue and a lengthy rehabilitation following it.
We later learn that a year passes between Madeleine’s death and Scottie’s discovery of Judy. Might there not have been a similar period between the death of the officer and this scene in Midge’s apartment? Long days and weeks spent in traction, full-body casts and physical therapies, restricted movement and unending pain, all of it happening off-screen in the blink of an eye? Something about the dissolve between scenes had always convinced me that barely any time had passed, but now I reconsidered. Why assume a short recovery or no recovery at all? It does seem, given the dialogue between Scottie and Midge, that Scottie’s position (his lack thereof, I mean; his unemployment, his “wandering”) is a new thing, a recent thing, but one can’t be certain of that — it may only be new to Midge. One assumes that Scottie and Midge are close friends, but this need not be true — when, after Madeleine’s death and one final appearance in the sanitarium, Midge disappears entirely from the film, Scottie seems more or less unaffected by her absence. Perhaps it is that Scottie’s retirement has given him the time to reconnect with old friends he hasn’t seen since college (which, given his evident age, was quite some time ago). Perhaps Scottie and Midge ran into each other because of the corset. Midge does the illustrations for some sort of apparel company — maybe she works for the place Scottie bought his corset from. Maybe they met in the lobby or at the entrance, Midge, is that you? How have you been? Come up to my place tomorrow, Johnny-O, we’ll have a drink and talk about the gay old Bohemian days. The only clues to just how much time has passed off-screen are buried deep within the dialogue.