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When [Scottie] meets [Judy], after the murder, we see her as masquerading as herself — that is, with her hair dyed brown (presumably its true color, as in the photograph with her mother), in order to become not-Madeleine; it is brown over blonde over brown. Scottie then forces her to add yet another layer: blonde over brown over blonde over brown, or Judy (in Kansas)-as Madeleine (when Gavin had made her over)-as Judy (when Scottie met her again after the murder)-as Madeleine (after Scottie had made her over). This woman is still not just like Madeleine. she has not enough of Carlotta, whose ghost further complicates the already layered roles of Judy and Madeleine.
(Doniger, The Woman)
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The best candidates for America’s sweetheart were classic neurotics out of sync with their own times. They found Hollywood and became all-American. Marilyn (Kim) Novak was the exception to this rule. She was a shy, suburban daddy’s girl who found Hollywood and became a neurotic.
(Brown, Novak)
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Kim Novak: “I hadn’t asked to become an actress, but once I was thrust into a movie career, I decided to give it my best.”
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Kim Novak: “He gave me the most important gift — faith and confidence in myself as a woman. So why am I drifting away from him and pouring more and more of myself into this career? This was all an accident in the first place.”
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Impostures succeed because, not in spite, of their fictitiousness. They take wing with congenial cultural fantasies. Impostors persevere because any fear they may have of being discovered is overshadowed by their dread of being alone. Their perpetual reincarnations of second bodies arise out of a horror vacui, terror of empty spaces within and without. Manic, they are always beside themselves.
(Schwartz, Culture)
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I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something — an inner hush maybe, maybe not — I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love — that every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations — with an editor, a tobacco-seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days.
(Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”)
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One begins writing a book about something because one is interested in that subject; one finishes writing a book in order to lose interest in that subject: the book itself is a record of this transition.
(Dyer, Rage)
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[EXT. San Juan Bautista (NIGHT)]
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Any tradition is better than any reconstruction. A tradition may be a ruin, broken unrecognizably, or shabbily built over in a jungle of accretions, yet it always retains some nucleus of antiquity; whereas a reconstruction, say a new Life of Jesus, is something fundamentally arbitrary, created by personal fancy, and modern from top to bottom. Such a substitution is no mere mistake; it is a voluntary delusion which romantic egoism positively craves: to rebuild the truth nearer heart’s desire.
(George Santayana, “Spengler”)
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Despite the rhetoric of uniqueness and once-in-a-lifetime experiences, our culture. mocks that romanticism which seeks out the irreproducible as the source of Truth. If constant repetition renders some events surreal. singularity now surrenders events to apparition, evanescence, insignificance. [E]vents must take place twice to take place at all.
(Schwartz, Culture)
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A thing that has failed can, if you change its place, be a thing that has come off.
(Bresson, Notes)
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To observe a recurrence is to divine a mechanism.
(Santayana, The Life of Reason)
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Everything which causes repetition to vary seems to us to cover or hide it at the same time.
(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition)
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Déjà vu is no mere gambit. Its intensity and sense of inevitability are consequent upon living, as all humans do, an integrally double life present and past, actual and virtual. Déjà vu is un souvenir de présent, a memory of the on-going, a slight catch in the flow of time, an intersection between our two inherently oscillating points of view.
(Schwartz, Culture)
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The two women at the center of Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct are also its most obvious parallels to Vertigo—that is, apart from a number of shots echoing or even recreating shots from Vertigo; for instance, the view down Michael Douglas’s apartment stairs, which is a near-perfect recreation of the view down the bell tower at San Juan Bautista. Sharon Stone plays Madeleine to Jeanne Trippelhorn’s Judy, blonde (Stone as Catherine Tramell/Kim Novak as Madeleine) and brunette (Trippelhorn as Beth Garner/Kim Novak as Judy Barton), illusion and truth. Tramell, like Madeleine, has at least two alter egos: one, a pseudonym — she is a writer, writing under the name “Catherine Woolf,” and the other, her double, frequently confused for her in the film, her lover, Roxy. But Trippelhorn’s Beth Garner also has an alter ego, having begun her life under a different name, Lisa Hoberman, a fact uncovered in the course of the film. She also has a past with Tramell, it turns out, back when she was known as Lisa Hoberman — both women accuse the other of imitating them in dress, hairstyle, and mannerisms. We never learn who imitated who, but the question hardly seems important to the inciting mystery of the movie: who murdered Johnny Boz? That mystery is never fully solved, though the last shot of the film strongly implies that Tramell is the murderer.
If we treat Basic Instinct, with its many allusions to Vertigo, not as an homage or an imitation but as a piece of criticism, then we can see that Verhoeven and his screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, are implicating Judy Barton in her own murder, and in the murder of Madeleine Elster. If Tramell (who not only does her hair as Judy-as-Madeleine did, but also dresses very like Judy-as-Madeleine did — white coat over turtleneck, gray suit, etc.) is guilty, then the implication is the woman she is modeled on is guilty, too. If Tramell is the murderer, she is a serial murderer, a calculating, plotting, remorseless criminal. Is Madeleine? Or, rather, is Judy? What would that mean?
The final shot of Basic Instinct implies that Tramell will murder Michael Douglas’s Nick Curran. Has Judy affected Scottie in some analogous way? Has she done more than simply change his life — has she ended it? It doesn’t seem fair to say such a thing, but the accusation does serve to focus us on Judy’s complicity in Elster’s plot, her coldness in carrying it out — to the end — long after she later leads us to believe she has fallen in love with Scottie. If she were truly in love with Scottie, if she really cared for him, could she have gone through with it, pretending to die in front of him in just such a way? The best outcome is that Scottie feels he has failed to save the woman he loves from death. The worst outcome, the actual outcome, is that Scottie feels he has caused the death of the woman he loves, by bringing her to San Juan Bautista in the first place. Isn’t Scottie’s treatment of Judy, here most of all, a kind of revenge rather than simple obsession? Revenge on Judy for her treatment of him earlier in the film, revenge on her for his psychic break and the long, possibly endless trauma of having her “die” in front of him? When he looks out at the end of the film, in a way he couldn’t have when “Madeleine” died, isn’t this a kind of triumph, as one experiences at the summit of a mountain? When he looks down, what does he see? Is he even looking at Judy’s body, or is he looking elsewhere?