It occurred to me then that the care we normally exercise in space necessarily involves the curvature of another dimension: time. The default way down is also the fastest. Gravity obeys parsimony. My wife and I could arrive at our car in an instant, accelerating to terminal velocity at 9.81 meters per second per second, but it would take us hours to reach the car by trail. In looking down from a great height, I was in fact looking into the future, undergoing a kind of time travel. Is the fear of heights also a fear of the future, of knowing what is to come before it has come? A fear of inevitability? In order to stave things off, I crawled through space like someone on his way to an execution.
We generally experience travel along the horizon as a reprieve from aging. “Go West, young man!” Horace Greeley had said, as if to move out along the sun’s path was to slow or even stop what that transit signifies. Such travel, in my experience, always seems interminable, like a day that never ends. One looks out of the car window or the train window and sees the landscape and the landscape never changes or else seems to be continually refreshed, replicated like a cheaply-made cartoon’s background, the bush one has just passed seeming like the bush one passed the minute before, the ranks of telephone poles maddeningly regular, the fields, even the hills no more than ghosts of those one has already seen. But vertical travel — a fall — takes place so quickly and so definitively we can hardly remember the experience. Once, we were there. Now, we are here. There is only a feeling in the pit of our stomach to mark the stretch between; there is almost no sense of time passing. We travel through space but we fall through time.
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Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
(Pablo Neruda, “Tonight I can write”)
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The famous “vertigo effect” of Vertigo was accomplished by simultaneously tracking back (moving the camera away from the subject) and zooming in. “When Joan Fontaine fainted at the inquest in Rebecca,” Hitchcock recalled, “I wanted to show how she felt that everything was moving far away from her before she toppled over. I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me. I tried to get that into Rebecca, but they couldn’t do it. The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and zoom simultaneously.” François Truffaut writes, “The reason why so many brilliant or very talented men have failed in their attempts at directing is that only a mind in which the analytic and the synthetic are simultaneously at work can make its way out of the maze of snares inherent in the fragmentation of the shooting, the cutting, and the montage of a film. To a director, the greatest danger of all is that in the course of making his film he may lose control of it.” Viewpoint and perspective; dolly and zoom; the analytic and the synthetic; the detail and the whole. Truffaut limited his claim to directors and film, but it seems to me that one could easily say the same thing about writers, artists, and craftsmen and their labors. Or about husbands and marriages.
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Robin Wood says (and then reaffirms in his “Endnotes for Earlier Editions”) that when Scottie looks down from the stepstool in Midge’s apartment, he sees the same alleyway into which the policeman has fallen to his death. Does Scottie hang from Midge’s gutter in the prologue, then, or perhaps from across the way? Does he, in fact, hang just outside Midge’s window? (Does this give us a clue as to how he might have gotten down?) Spatially, this seems impossible. And watching it myself, I really can’t see the similarity Wood must have seen, unless perhaps we are now meant to be on the opposite side of that alley in Midge’s apartment. It isn’t merely that the light has changed (it has, from late dusk — almost evening but not quite, the light tinted blue, indicating that the sun has not yet completely set (or that the filmmaker is shooting day for night) — to the bright light of noon or shortly before, as though the movie was told in real time rather than the accelerated time it seems to be occupying), but also that there are several fire escapes in Midge’s alleyway that I don’t see at the beginning of the film. There, the buildings fall straight downward without interruption — as does the policeman. The angle at which the camera is set, too, is different, though this might go towards proving Wood’s point rather than refuting it, if the camera’s angle is meant to cover up the similarity. And look at Midge’s near-panoramic view; for Scottie’s leap (the policeman’s leap, the pursued man’s leap) from one building to another to have been at all feasible, this window ought to be facing a wall. What can Wood possibly mean, then? That Scottie believes this to be the same alley? That he perceives it as the same alley?
For all of the difficulties presented in taking such a statement literally, Wood’s reader is never given any reason to doubt that it is meant to be taken literally. And, if only as a thought experiment, it is more interesting to take Wood at his word: This is the same alley. The policeman has fallen from the roof of Midge’s building. Scottie has hung from its gutter. The tragedy (perhaps also the rescue) takes place right outside, and, when Scottie looks down from the stepstool, he sees what he sees when looking down from the gutter. He is revisiting the scene of a crime. Because doesn’t that then retroactively put Midge in Scottie’s (future) position (at Mission San Juan Bautista) with regards to the policeman/Madeleine? Unaware of what is happening above, she hears a cry and looks out her window just in time to see a body falling past. Was that.? Can that possibly have been.? We can imagine her then rushing to the window, looking down to the alley just as Scottie will later (that is, now, in this scene) look down from the very place she is standing, from the slightly-higher vantage of her stepstool, just as Scottie will (later still) look down from the tower window to the tiles of the roof of the Mission San Juan Bautista. Below, in place of Madeleine Elster’s body, the policeman’s. In place of Judy Barton running up the stairs to the top of the tower, the pursued man crossing the rooftops. In place of Gavin Elster tossing his wife’s body from the tower, Scottie reaching out to the policeman and watching him go over. The policeman become Madeleine. Midge become Scottie. Scottie become Elster. Has Midge tried to make someone over, too, or fallen in love with the wrong person? Undoubtedly, she has. Is the policeman, like Judy’s Madeleine, a fake? Who has actually fallen? What would be Scottie’s motive in getting rid of the policeman, or in seeming to get rid of him? Who or what is actually being sacrificed?
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