(McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock)
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Thus even the critics would seem to have trapped Novak/Madeleine/Judy.
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Throughout postproduction, Hitchcock [refined] his vision of a film as he never had before, reediting, stripping away the elements that made the story explicit, allowing for longer stretches for Herrmann’s music, and in the process completing the transformation of Vertigo from an everyday murder mystery into a haunting emotional allegory.
(McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock)
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Hitchcock: “I leave holes in my films deliberately.”
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It’s easy to agree with Hitchcock; his films are not mysteries. There are mysteries in them, but those mysteries are not the point. A Hitchcockian mystery is solved and then tossed aside. It is frequently outlandish, even sometimes improbable, but, because it is not why the film exists, we are not disappointed by it. Judy’s letter doesn’t ruin the film; it makes us anxious about what comes after. When will the axe fall? But Vertigo is profoundly a mystery, as are all tales of murder. We may learn who committed the murder, we may even learn their ideas about why they committed the murder, but we will never understand why someone has been killed, just like we will never understand why we exist. Murder is such an abomination to us we simply have no understanding of it. Why did Elster murder Madeleine? Perhaps there were motives, but do they really explain why one day she was alive and the next she wasn’t? And why did Elster involve Scottie and Judy? Why did Judy go along with Elster? Why did Scottie spurn Judy in favor of Madeleine, even after he knew there was no Madeleine? How can one claim that Vertigo isn’t a mystery when there are so many things we will never understand in it?
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The things we bring off by chance — what power they have!
(Bresson, Notes)
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In all of my time on the street, going in and out of buildings and up and down blocks or driving to and from offices and circling until I found a space, I never once saw my wife. When she went to work now she went to work and she stayed at work. And if I ever saw the man, I did not later remember that I had seen him, just as I did not later remember seeing any of the other people I saw on the street but whom I did not know. The city was no longer strange to me.
I sometimes missed the long mornings at home, writing, but as time went on, I found I missed them less and less. My friends from work took me out. We watched basketball and football (I quickly found I still did not enjoy soccer, or baseball) and sometimes went to Blazers games when the partners weren’t using their box. We met my wife’s friends for brunch on weekends, and I started a garden. I started cooking again. My wife and I talked about having a baby; when I had found a job as a paralegal, of course, but this was not so far off, as things go. In less than nine months, if all went as planned, I would have my certificate and a promotion at work, or, if the promotion didn’t come through, I could begin looking for jobs elsewhere. What really had all of that writing been for, I wondered? I had not been paid so much as a cent for my book. Few people had bought it and even fewer had read it. I had long ago deleted my social media accounts, and I found I had stopped feeling the petty jealousies that had made this writing thing seem so crucial, so pressing. I felt, for the first time in a very long time, that I was doing absolutely as much as I needed to do, and that it was enough. I could no longer remember why I would ever have put myself through what I had put myself through. I worked out. I lost weight. I went to the doctor. I slept well.
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I had sought to understand Gracia through Seri, whereas in reality she was my own complement. She fulfilled what I lacked, became the embodiment of that. I thought she explained Gracia, but in reality she only defined me to myself. A creation of my manuscript, she was intended to explain Gracia to me. But the events and the places described in the manuscript were imaginative expressions of myself, and so were the characters. I had thought they stood for other people, but now I realized they were all different manifestations of myself.
(Priest, The Affirmation)
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Where remarriage to a wrongly cast-off wife is a rebirth after an apparent death, remarriage to another woman is a second death for the first wife. And indeed, remarriage to the first wife after such a long time, long enough for her to have become another woman, is also a kind of death for the woman she used to be.
(Doniger, The Woman)
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Judy clings to Judy’s purple dress because it is Judy’s, not Madeleine’s. We see her smothering it just after she’s ripped her letter to Scottie in half, and she wears it at least twice in the montage of scenes after their affair has begun.
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I wish you’d leave me alone. I want to go away.
(01:49:27)
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Scottie, no matter how obsessed with transforming Judy into Madeleine he gets, never forgets Judy’s name, never once calls her Madeleine by accident.
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To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.
(Bresson, Notes)
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There might actually occur a case where we should say “This man believes he is pretending.”
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)
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[Stories of reincarnation] suggest that each of us, in our present lives, may at any moment be awakened to the memory of another, lost life, that we all constantly reinvent ourselves out of the scraps of the past, so that, in a sense, we are always imitating our past selves. All of us, too, helplessly spin out of our desires the lives we have inherited from our former selves. And so in each new life, we pretend, once again, to be who we are, repeating lines from an earlier script even when we think that we are improvising or that we are not performing at all.
(Doniger, The Woman)
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In movies, in fictions, the woman always falls for the man. Though his behavior may seem frightening or violent or disturbing to us, still, she cannot help herself: The intensity of the man’s attraction to her is attractive. In Brian DePalma’s Obsession, at the end of their first date, after almost a full day of listening to Michael Courtland talk about his dead wife, about how much she looks like this dead wife, Sandra Portinari allows herself to be led in an imitation of the dead wife’s walk. “Don’t sashay,” he tells her, his hand on her hip. It is a stolen intimacy, an invasion. We would not believe the attraction was mutual if she didn’t believe it was, if she didn’t believe that love guides Michael, not obsession. That Judy goes along with Scottie is equally unbelievable to us. In both cases, we find there is some history between the two people — Sandra is Michael’s daughter, seeking revenge for her mother’s death, and Judy feels some guilt about her part in Scottie’s incapacitation — we can understand each woman feigning an attraction (Sandra’s ulterior motive, Judy’s real attraction). But both films really only serve to illustrate the truth of the matter: The man, the seducer, fails to realize that his behavior shouldn’t be attractive to the woman, that the only possibility is that he is being fooled by the seduced. I don’t mean that “love is blind”—to say that would be to lead us back to where we started: The woman cannot see the horrible things the man is doing because she is in love with him. No, that gets us nowhere. I mean that in order for the seducer to convince himself that he is seducing the seduced, he must first seduce himself.