Inside, the room was empty except for a microphone, a music stand, and a man seated on a low cabinet, typing very quietly on a laptop. He gestured to the microphone and asked if I was ready. The woman I had met with a few days before was not there, but I decided not to mention this. The man positioned the music stand and adjusted its height, explaining that I should spread out the pages in front of me, as many as would fit, so that the microphone wouldn’t pick up the sound of me moving them around. He said that, when I was ready, I should read the first page of lines once, stop, read it all again, and then go ahead with the rest in the same way, pausing between each line for at least three seconds. “Think ‘One Mississippi, two Mississippi,’” he said. He went out of the door I had just come in through. I was now more convinced than before that this was some sort of joke. Why pick on me, I thought. As I read that first page, my throat betrayed my distrust by closing around certain words. I choked and tears came to my eyes. The line was “One shouldn’t live alone,” which sounded familiar to me, though I couldn’t place it at the time. Later, now, writing this, I realized it was a line from Vertigo, that in fact all of my lines were lines from the movie, though often paraphrased or scrambled or sometimes slightly rewritten. “I was a made-to-order witness,” I said. “I let you change me because I love you.” “What happened to you?”
At the time, I wished I had thought to bring a bottle of water with me. I traced the microphone cable up to the flocked ceiling, but I couldn’t see what it could possibly be attached to. I read through the lines I had been given, then went over to the low cabinet the man had been sitting on and sat down to wait. I wasn’t sure if this was what I was supposed to do. I guessed the man was probably right outside the door or in another office, but, I thought, if he had somehow been listening, he would know to come in, wouldn’t he? Was it all a prank? I pictured the woman, and I wondered if I would ever see her again.
…
I wonder if the male genius identifying with the female heroine is really a form of masquerade, like Marcel Duchamp in drag as his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. An exaggerated performance of feminine stereotypes as opposed to really trying to enter and understand a character.
(Zambreno, Heroines)
…
You were the copy. You were the counterfeit.
(02:04:16)
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To become so possessed by a character you begin to play the part.
(Zambreno, Heroines)
…
He made you over just like I made you over, only better.
(02:04:43)
…
The word “jealous” comes from the ML zelosus, or “zealous,” Gr zelotes, “an emulous person.” “Zealous,” in turn, is derived from zel, or zeal, “fervor, spirit of emulation,” and shares that root with zemia, “punishment,” also “to strive.”
(Partridge, Origins)
…
Was I Hitchcock? Or Elster? Or was I Scottie? Was I Judy? Or Madeleine?
…
Is the perspective from which we see Madeleine’s body on the tiles the same from which we see the policeman’s body in the alley? If so, what might that mean to us? We almost don’t notice déjà vu at first, but we feel something is off. Would we feel, perhaps without really knowing why, that the film has begun again, halfway through? Do we wonder whether we will have to go through it all again, on our way to the same conclusion? I guess what I’m asking is: does this shot put us in an empathetic position, with regard to Scottie?
It seems to me that, if the perspective is the same, the coincidence is too great. Wood’s theory about the point of suspension and Scottie’s dream, the bulk of the film, is — must be — correct. But that theory still makes more difficulties than it solves. As in a dream, the images produced would be the result of real stimuli — in this case, the body in the alley becomes the body on the roof. The guilt Scottie feels over the death of the policeman becomes the more personal and even erotically charged guilt of Madeleine’s death. Worse, following the train of thought to its end, Scottie is then ascribing the policeman’s death to a conspiracy of some kind rather than simple accident — and, given that Madeleine’s death at San Juan Bautista is the result of a conspiracy to deceive him into feeling guilty, it would be a double(d) guilt. Why? Does he feel some attraction to or more-than-professional concern for the policeman? The film seems suddenly to revolve around Scottie’s feelings for the policeman rather than Madeleine/Judy’s feelings for him.
The policeman, a uniformed patrolman as Scottie is a plainclothes detective, is an archetypal figure, placed opposite Scottie by Scottie. He represents an image — The Law — that Scottie fears he can no longer project to others. In the film, the reason given for this fear is the rooftop accident, but if the film is itself a kind of dream or projection of Scottie’s then, even before the accident, Scottie has already accused himself of failing to live up to this image: he is unable to help the policeman, and, as a result, the policeman falls to his death. Not only that, but the policeman is, by virtue of being archetypal, Scottie’s almost-double, a kind of golem for the film. For instance, he is not given a name; in the same way as the criminal he and Scottie are chasing, his face is seen but can never be stamped on the viewer’s consciousness because he is never made into a character. Is he even seen in a close-up? He is not quite human, lacking features and identity, but given life and set free on Scottie’s conscience, he is explicitly tied to the most human character in the film, Judy Barton.
…
Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.
(Wilde, Gray)
…
Someone dead.
(00:13:37)
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One final thing I have to do. And then I’ll be free of the past.
(02:00:04)
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There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.
(Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea)
…
“I heard voices.” Is it Madeleine that Judy sees at the moment she falls or jumps? What was Judy’s relationship with Madeleine before her death, if any? The nun speaks with Kim Novak’s voice (it was Kim Novak who provided the audio), with Madeleine’s voice, with Judy Barton’s voice, with the voice of the actress playing the part.
…
Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience.
(Flynn, Reenactments)
…
In one of my last classes, my students and I got into a discussion about “theme” and “symbols.” I told them that when we see something seemingly everywhere, it doesn’t mean that the thing that we think we are seeing again and again has multiplied somehow or that the world is a code or a conspiracy, but that, in finally taking notice of that thing, we are creating for ourselves a new way of seeing, one that has always been available to us, but one which we might otherwise never have put to use. For instance, I told them, say we decide to buy a particular model of car. Instantly, we would see that car parked in every other driveway we passed. But history would not have changed, and our neighbors wouldn’t suddenly decide to buy a certain car simply because we had decided to. Those cars would have been there for weeks, months, perhaps years, and if we were shown security-camera footage of our every movement for the days preceding our decision to buy that model of car, we would, with our new attention, notice them parked in those driveways (and perhaps many other places besides), even as our recorded selves would be going about their business, totally oblivious to them. We have to tell our brains to notice a thing before our brains will notice that thing. Of course I was thinking about the man, but I did not tell my students that.