He also told me I was being naïve. The only reason he had taken the book on was that it was sold already. It was a variable that was not a variable at all, a thing that could be counted upon. There would be people like me who would buy it, and there would be many people like me — just think of everyone who had seen Vertigo. I had only to “tell my part of the story,” like varnishing a chair from Ikea and telling people I had made it. As a result of the poll, though, other writers — more enterprising than I was and less bothered by the idea of “value”—were now picking up the subject. There would be ten new books on the film by the end of the year. The moment, he told me, would very soon pass, and every day I delayed, the book was less and less likely to garner any serious attention — by which he meant “sell well.” It would not make it to the shelves; it would begin and end in a bargain bin somewhere. This did not boost my confidence in what I was doing. I had already been wondering what I had to contribute to the study of Vertigo, and now I felt sure the answer was nothing.
…
Madeleine E.
This is a book about a man and his girlfriend, who live together. She has taken a week off work, but doesn’t tell anyone why. She is going to have an abortion. She will need the rest of the week to recover. She would have taken more time off work, but she needs to work because the man is unemployed, and she supports them both, and she doesn’t make much to begin with. The man sits in the waiting room of the clinic with the girlfriend’s mother. The man feels as though something has caught up with him. He can’t imagine how things can get any worse, but he also can’t imagine that things will get better. He will always feel this wretched, he thinks. Nothing good will ever happen again. We do not learn what the mother or the girlfriend are thinking or feeling, but, really, what could be more difficult for either one than to find themselves in this situation?
As soon as the nurses have left her alone to rest, the girlfriend gets up from the operating table. She leaves the room she has had the procedure in and goes across the hall to where she left her clothes. She dresses and walks out into the waiting room. Alright, she says, let’s go. It has all been so quick, the nurses haven’t even noticed she’s not in the operating room anymore. The man and the mother don’t know the girlfriend isn’t supposed to be up and moving. The girlfriend faints on her way to the elevators, even while being held up by the man and her mother, and she sits on the floor next to the elevator for half an hour before she can finally make it downstairs and into the car. The man feels guilty about the whole thing. Not what happened after, but what happened before. Even though it was a decision they both made, he feels responsible. He even feels guilty about feeling responsible; it’s self-centered, he thinks. The last thing he would ever do is address the subject head-on. He avoids talking about it and tries to avoid even thinking about it. Forever after, the man can’t imagine the child that might have been, but he never forgets that it doesn’t exist. They never speak about it.
The man and his girlfriend had arguments before the abortion. After, they never argue. Not that they never disagree, but they don’t argue. Instead, both of them go silent. In part, this is because each feels like they have inflicted some injury on the other, something irreparable. They are careful not to make things worse. Not only was there the procedure and all the guilt surrounding it, but also there is the man’s accident, or what they call his accident. Two months after the abortion, things got so bad between them, the girlfriend left. She was gone for almost a month. Though he told no one, the man attempted suicide while she was gone. One day, he was supposed to meet up with an old friend, but he didn’t show up. The old friend called the girlfriend to see if she knew where he was. The girlfriend was the one who discovered him. He suffered permanent brain damage as a result of not getting enough blood to his brain for several hours. Now, he is a step slower than he used to be. He gets frustrated much more easily than he did before, but he doesn’t forget what he has done, and he tries not to take it out on the girlfriend. The girlfriend feels so bad she moves back in with him.
There are a few blank pages. We come back to these characters, but we can’t be sure where in time we are. Something has changed. The man and his girlfriend are walking in the park with a little girl. We learn that the girl is not theirs. It is the little girl’s fourth birthday, and she’s having a party in the park next to their apartment, so, when she has to go to the bathroom, they take her back to their apartment. She is the girlfriend’s friend’s daughter. The girlfriend and the girl’s mother are not as close as they used to be — jobs and motherhood got in the way. They don’t dislike each other, there was no big fight, they just never see each other anymore. When they were younger, still in high school, people said they looked alike. They were often asked if they were sisters — not twins, but sisters. While they are in the apartment, the little girl noticed a picture of the girlfriend, age five, stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet in the shape of a horse. The girlfriend took it down. See, she says to the little girl, See how much we look alike? The little girl nods: she looks more like the girlfriend than her own mother. Later, when they leave the party, the girlfriend starts crying. The man is confused, but he holds her, and then, in silence, they both get ready for bed. Later, much, much later, when he has no reason to remember this, he does remember it, and he figures it out.
…
I watched the film until the film itself became a kind of blindness.
(G.C. Waldrep, “D.W. Griffith at Gettsyburg”)
…
As reported by Michael Wilding, Hitchcock said, “The secret of suspense. is never to begin a scene at the beginning and never let it go on to the end.”
…
The first version of the script, written by Maxwell Anderson, was called Darkling, I Listen. In it, Scottie’s acrophobia first manifests itself during a sequence on the Golden Gate Bridge. At the end, Judy jumps from the Bridge. If, once retitled and rewritten, she had fallen from the gutter?
PART ONE
…
Madeleine E.
…
[INT: Midge’s Apartment (DAY)]
…
Coming out of the forest onto a slope of scree during a hike with my wife, the trailhead — and our car in the gravel turnoff next to it — was directly in front of us, but far, far below. The trail had gone steadily uphill, looping past a lake and winding through trees so thick there were no plants growing under the canopy, just pine needles, dirt, and a few rocks. Because the lake was in a valley on the other side of the mountain we had been climbing, it seemed like we had not climbed up the mountain at all, only pivoted around it. But then the terrain grew steeper a mile and a half in and started to switchback, finally opening out onto this slope, cutting back through the forest, and then alternating between the forest and the rocky slope on the way up to the summit. Each time we came back to the rocks we were higher up, but, to have traveled so far along the trail — each switchback perhaps a quarter of a mile — we still did not seem to have gone very far up the mountain. Looking out and down, I felt that strange sensation of having to guard myself from something I knew I would never do: not to jump, not with any thought of falling, just a strange pull to go to the edge and then pass beyond it, into the air, to run forward into space. My fear of heights, I thought, was a recognition of this impulse in myself, my curious fascination with edges. When I looked out from the edge, I felt as though my feet were being pulled into what I was looking at, as though the ground were falling away beneath me, as though the edge was getting closer and closer even though I was not moving towards it. Something in me was drawn to the horizon.