This detective, however, is unscrupulous, or rather, has been made unscrupulous through his financial woes. His wife, a model who works car shows and conventions around Las Vegas, has gambling debts in six figures; to make matters worse, he is still paying child support to his ex-wife. He wonders how much money he can get out of this woman. He can keep the writer dangling for a while longer before he, the writer, goes to another detective, he thinks, especially if he can show a little progress has been made. And while that’s going on, the detective can threaten to give up the woman’s whereabouts to the writer and get money from her.
The woman could pay the detective off if she had the writer’s money, but she doesn’t want to see the writer and can’t face being exposed, so she can’t pay what the detective wants. If the writer knew the position he had put her in, he would feel worse than he already does and would buy the detective off, but he doesn’t know anything, only that the detective is making very slow progress, which is still better than nothing. And the detective’s situation gets worse by the day — the people his wife owes money to have made threats against her before, but now they are incredibly specific threats, threats of ruining her career by first breaking her nose so that it cannot be re-set, then, by breaking her cheekbones. If the debts still aren’t paid off, they will remove her teeth, and then they will scar her face with acid. The detective feels he has no choice: he asks for even more money from the woman to keep her secret. The woman feels trapped. She thinks constantly of the crime she has committed: Is this her punishment? She feels like there is no way out.
In the last scene, we have jumped forward in time. The detective is emailing the writer a link to the obituary of the woman’s alias. He tells the writer, this is the woman you wanted me to find. She’s dead. I’m sorry. We do not learn how the writer takes the news, because we stay with the detective in his office. He initiates a public documents search for a name we recognize from the writer’s novel, the thriller, the one that made so much money.
The end.
…
Failed suicides and people who have suicidal tendencies frequently report imagining the circumstances of their (future) suicide in great detail. Whereas our daydreams about the future are typically vague and lacking in detail, these suicidal fantasies are exact: a particular bend in the road where one will fail to turn; a specific razor, where one will get it from, and just the right temperature of the water; the spot on the bridge where one will climb over the railing. These fantasies are so exact, in fact, that if the person is prevented from visiting the place described or otherwise barred from realizing the exact circumstance they have envisioned, an overwhelming majority of them will simply give up on killing themselves.
When Madeleine tells Scottie about her dream and he insists they visit the place she has described, he is, we would then say, driving her to her death. He is doing just that, in a nearly literal way, except it isn’t Madeleine whom he is driving but Judy — Madeleine is already dead. But later, perhaps, he will drive Judy to her suicide. Having witnessed Madeleine’s body being thrown out of the tower while pretending to be Madeleine, Judy is seeing her “self” die. In being later forced to recreate that day without the aid of Madeleine’s body to stand in for her, Judy must then act out Madeleine’s part. All along, Scottie has been forcing her to recall the events that led up to this death — taking her to Ernie’s, dressing her as Madeleine, taking her to have her hair done as Madeleine did hers, taking her to his apartment, and so on. If Judy’s death is a suicide, it is a suicide that has been caused by the actions of another, a kind of induced suicide.
Are all attempts to relive the past incitements to suicide?
Another way of saying this: for Judy, Madeleine’s faked death is a kind of suicidal fantasy — Judy “being” Madeleine at the time. She is able to forget it because she cannot revisit the scene of the crime. But Scottie forces Judy to think as she did at the time she pretended to be Madeleine, even going so far as to take her, costumed in the way she had been at the time, back to San Juan Bautista and the tower where she saw herself thrown from the tower by a man who was pretending that she was the woman he was throwing from the tower. Now, in the tower with another man pretending that she is not who she is, she is helpless not to act out the fantasy that is really history — she must throw herself from the tower. What else can she possibly do?
…
The only serious philosophical question is what Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back. What Eurydice saw when Orpheus looked back determines the worth of his song.
(Peter Dimock, George Anderson)
…
Casanova considered the limits of human reason. He established that, while it might be rare for a man to be driven insane, little was required to tip the balance. All that was needed was a slight shift, and nothing would be as it formerly was. Casanova likened a lucid mind to a glass, which does not break of its own accord. Yet how easily it is shattered. One wrong move is all that it takes.
(Sebald, Vertigo)
…
Scottie says, “It’s too late. There’s no bringing her [meaning Madeleine] back.” To Judy. Just before she falls.
…
It is a fundamentally insane notion, he continues, that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies.
(Sebald, Vertigo)
…
In Boileau and Narcejac’s D’Entre les Morts, Flavierès (Scottie) strangles Renée (Judy). Though Madeleine’s death earlier in the narrative has been faked in the same way — a fall from a church bell-tower — it is not repeated again in the novel as it is in Vertigo. Of course Vertigo’s ending has been changed; I cannot imagine any studio in 1950s Hollywood greenlighting a script that has the protagonist strangling the heroine at the end. Nor can I imagine an actor willing to play such a part. Jimmy Stewart was already playing wildly against type in Vertigo, as a man who cruelly transforms a woman against her will into the woman he is obsessed with, a man who then — though the ending of the film leads us to believe that Judy’s death is an accident — drives this same woman to suicide. And yet Flavierès, who is unequivocally Renée’s murderer, seems so plainly out of control that his actions seem somehow more excusable than those of Scottie, who is completely in control in taking Madeleine down to San Juan Bautista again and seems to thus be acting all the more cruelly toward her. Perhaps it is that Renée will not admit to being Madeleine, even though Flavierès is so certain that she is (and finds evidence of it in the necklace) — the reader can easily believe that she is cruel, too, taunting the obviously disturbed Flavierès — whereas Judy seems innocent, having undeceived us at the very beginning of her story by coming clean in her letter to Scottie. She seems to sincerely regret her actions in the first part of the narrative; the same cannot be said about Renée, who maintains her stonefaced denial even in the face of the evidence of the necklace, maintains it so long and so adamantly that it is possible to read the book as the story of the murder of an innocent woman by a mentally-disturbed man and nothing more. No plot against Flavierès, no perfect murder on the part of Gevigne, no echoes of the past in Madeleine, no doubling or trebling in Renée, just a man completely undone by fate and the woman he tortures and then murders.