In contrast to the first part of the book, which, by the end, was taking place almost entirely at home, this second part doesn’t even mention where the screenwriter lives. It takes place on the set. We move ahead a few months, into production. The screenwriter is talking to the costume designer about the actress’s wardrobe. We learn there have already been many fights on set, between the screenwriter and the actress, the screenwriter and the crew, the actress and the crew. He wants her dressed and made up one way; she wants things another way. She is implacable, but he won’t get rid of her. The producer is working to get them both thrown off the movie, but, for whatever reason, this isn’t happening, or is happening too slowly. The screenwriter wants her hair done a certain way, dyed a certain color; she hates that color, doesn’t want to cut her hair because — she says — the woman she’s playing wouldn’t cut her hair that way, wouldn’t dye it. Really, she thinks it will make it harder to find other work, later, but she knows she doesn’t have the clout to make that argument. Already, several crewmembers have quit.
The screenwriter has an idea. If the actress’s argument is that her character wouldn’t dress the way he wants her to dress, he will change the script so that she has to dress that way. as part of the story. Before, it was a simple story about a girl and a boy — they fall in love, the girl gets pregnant, the boy leaves because he is frightened and cowardly. They both have jobs, at least at the start of the movie (later in the script, he quits his job, a source of tension between them), but the jobs aren’t particularly important and the movie doesn’t really pay much attention to them. Now, however, the screenwriter writes the girl’s character as an amateur actress. She acts in commercials. More of the movie takes place at her work. He, the screenwriter, will play the part of a tyrannical commercial director who insists that the girl change her appearance to suit the commercial she’s in. This happens after she has discovered she is pregnant but before she’s told the boy she’s pregnant. She knows she won’t be able to get work once she starts showing, so she can’t turn it down, but the director is playing out some sick fantasy of a girl he’s obsessed with, and she’s afraid he could turn on her. This anxiety in part explains the frustration she has with her boyfriend’s lack of a job — she feels trapped in this situation. The director begins to call the actress by her character’s name, and, because it’s a commercial for laundry soap, the name and even the character is completely made up. She suspects the “character” the director has made up is really a former girlfriend. He writes lines for her that make no sense in the context of a commercial for laundry detergent. He explains her motivation: she’s pregnant; she’s thinking about leaving her boyfriend for another man who she thinks may be the father of the child she’s carrying; her boyfriend is acting possessive and weird towards her, but she feels like she can’t say anything because she is, after all, cheating on him; she hides the evidence of her assignations by taking a shower as soon as she comes in; she throws her clothes in the washer, too, so he won’t smell the other man on them. That’s how good this laundry detergent is, the director tells her. It’s so good, no one will suspect your infidelity. The actress is scared.
The actress — not the one in the movie, but the one who plays the one in the movie — is increasingly afraid of the screenwriter. She wants to leave the production, but she’s worried she might not get another break like this again. She thinks, surely the editor, the producer, the studio won’t leave these scenes in, these scenes of the commercial. Surely, she thinks, they’ll see the screenwriter has gone off the deep end and will pull him off the picture. I might as well play along with it, she thinks. She gets her hair dyed. She puts on the clothes he’s picked out for her. She even acts out the scenes with the screenwriter. He’s a terrible actor. She feels even more confident that the scenes won’t make the cut, that someone will step in.
She can tell something else isn’t right, though — something more than she’d suspected. Though the screenwriter hasn’t come on to her, at least not directly, the producer has (this is part of the reason things have deteriorated between the screenwriter and the producer — they are both jealous of each other), so she’s not comfortable going to him with her concerns, but she doesn’t think she has a choice anymore, the screenwriter’s so unbalanced, so she sets up a meeting with him, the producer. The producer figures nothing will be as damaging as the truth, so he tells the actress the screenwriter hasn’t changed the script or the movie at all, not really. The footage they’ve been shooting was never intended to be used. It was all a sham. The screenwriter put in lines that would work in other parts of the film, filmed a few of the key scenes with the boyfriend between those new, fake scenes, all so that, even if the actress leaves the production or refuses to go on in costume, he, the screenwriter, can edit her back into the film the way he wants her to appear. There is just enough coverage to make her unnecessary. He took you, babe, the producer says.
…
Robin Wood writes: “The pretense was that Carlotta was taking possession of Madeleine; in reality, Madeleine has taken possession of Judy. Judy, we feel (the Judy of the last third of the film), is not a girl who would ever allow herself to become explicit about, perhaps even conscious of, such fears: she hasn’t the intelligence, the self-awareness, or (despite her evident capacity for suffering) the depth. The fears can only be released in her through her being Madeleine: in a sense, it is Madeleine who is the more ‘real’ of the two, since in Madeleine all kinds of potentialities completely hidden in Judy find expression.” But this is Scottie’s theory of Judy, perhaps Hitchcock’s (perhaps not); it should not be the critic’s. Wood seems to be making/remaking Judy into Madeleine. Judy doesn’t have the “depth” to be frustrated to find herself in love with a man in love with a “pretense”? Or to despair at it? On the contrary — she shows all the grace and depth Wood could want merely by not grabbing Scottie by the shoulders and shaking him violently back to consciousness.
…
Hitchcock to Novak: “You have got a lot of expression in your face. Don’t want any of it. I only want on your face what you want to tell to the audience — what you are thinking. Let me explain to you. If you put in a lot of redundant expressions on your face, it’s like taking a sheet of paper and scribbling all over it — full of scribble, the whole piece of paper. You want to write a sentence for somebody to read. If they can’t read it — too much scribble. Much easier to read if the piece of paper is blank. That’s what your face ought to be when we need the expression.”
…
Novak wasn’t liberated. She felt imprisoned. Her character even had to walk in a certain way, trapped and clinched into clothing she had disdained. Hitchcock molded the look and behavior of Novak, the way Scottie molds Judy — he trapped her with his attitude. Madeleine/Judy also feels trapped, and most critics believe that the director drew out Novak’s greatest performance for Vertigo, helping her transcend her limitations.