We become unpleasant to ourselves the moment we gain / some distance / from what we were.
(Martha Ronk, Vertigo)
…
Not that I did this often, but on those occasions when I wanted to see if anyone was selling a used copy of Critique of Pure Reason, the book I had spent my early thirties writing (intending to, I guess, inflate my ego if the price had climbed from $1.59 to $1.95; or, if the price had gone down instead, to feel sorry for myself, having passed into obscurity without ever really having climbed up out of it), that book was always the only thing listed under my name and was always alone on “Amazon’s Gabriel Blackwell Page.” But now the elevator on the right side of the browser’s window had shrunk to half its usual size and there was at least one more listing below the one for Critique. I scrolled down, expecting to find a copy of a journal I had appeared in but instead found two more entries, books, complete with listing pages of their own. The first was called Shadow Man and the second was called The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men. Both were out of print and unavailable. Neither had so much as a single review on the site, but, when I searched elsewhere, I found that they had attracted a very modest amount of attention when first published — as much, it seemed, for their manner of treating their subjects as for their dubious literary qualities. Google came up with seven reviews, all in obscure magazines; one of them mentioned Critique of Pure Reason. And the bio on the listing page for The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men, with its uncanny resemblance to my own bio, raised even more questions: Who could have done this? And why “Gabriel Blackwell”? Why pick on me, I thought? Who was I? Why had this happened to me?
…
Is Midge, then, Wood’s “great abyss”?
…
There is half a woman’s head (blonde) hanging on Midge’s wall, next to the window but facing away from it, the same direction Carlotta faces in the portrait. In the crossfade at 00:38:00, Madeleine, in profile, faces the opposite direction.
…
When we see a face, it’s basically always the half of it. A subject is a partial something — a face, something we see — behind it, there is a void, a nothingness. And of course we spontaneously tend to fill in that nothingness with our fantasies, about the wealth of human personality and so on and so on. To see what is lacking in reality, to see it as that — there, you see subjectivity. To confront subjectivity means to confront femininity. Woman is the subject; masculinity is a fake. Masculinity is an escape from the most radical, nightmarish dimension of subjectivity.
(Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (film))
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This forgetting or not noticing is an authentic and integral part of watching any film — this book is an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection.
(Geoff Dyer, Zona)
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The writing of novels, I think, is so beside the point, isn’t it? One writes novels to write the author of the novel.
(Michael Martone, Four for a Quarter)
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A book is the writer’s secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can’t reconcile them.
(William Faulkner, Mosquitoes)
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Look in the mirror. That’s you and not you, after all, because the person in your mind isn’t the person in the world. And if you don’t know this already, you will.
(Ross, Mr. Peanut)
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Even when we attempt to be natural, we are often imitating what we regard as natural, which often amounts to what art has taught us to regard as nature.
(Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was)
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The only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.
(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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The view from Midge’s window is of Russian Hill; later in the film, after the scene in the Argosy Bookshop, Scottie drops Midge off at her apartment at the corner of Union and Montgomery, on Telegraph Hill. In the opening sequence, Coit Tower (which is on Telegraph Hill) can clearly be seen in the background as the three men leap from rooftop to rooftop. Later, in the scene following Madeleine’s suicide attempt at Fort Point, we see the view from Scottie’s apartment, facing Telegraph Hill, with a similar view of Coit Tower. Thus, contrary to Wood’s assertion, if at the beginning of the film Scottie is hanging from the gutter of any building that will subsequently play a part in Vertigo, it would seem that, rather than Midge’s apartment, it is his own.
…
And how is it that Scottie is a man of “independent means”? Police aren’t typically so well paid. Elster, too, in the scene in his office—“As long as I have to work at it”—is a man of independent means, though perhaps only formerly. Or is what he says true? Does he really have to work at it? Clearly, neither of these men are without a past.
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A rich man, a powerful man.
(00:34:27)
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Let me take care of you, Judy.
(01:44:05)
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Scottie is not only corseted in Midge’s apartment, he also carries a cane (though he doesn’t use it there, except to gesture with). Anyone seeing him on the street that day would have seen a man with a cane, a man with a rigid posture and a (slightly) different figure; the following day, when the corset comes off, however, his posture will change and so will his figure. He will no longer carry a cane. It is as though in this scene in Midge’s apartment — and apparently throughout his (first) recovery — he is in disguise. But he is disguised as himself. In this, he prefigures Judy’s Madeleine (and perhaps Judy’s Judy): a person with an uncanny resemblance to another person (who is, in reality, that person), but with a different carriage and bearing, and with a distinguishing feature others will be sure to notice (for Scottie, the cane; for Judy, the blonde hair). One can imagine another one of Scottie’s “college chums” running into him at Ernie’s and telling him, “You know, you look just like a man I once knew. Good old Scottie Ferguson. Wonder whatever happened to him.”
…
“Gabriel Blackwell is the author of Shadow Man. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is at work on his next book, Madeleine E., a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.”
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If one painted more forgeries than one’s own paintings, wouldn’t the forgeries become more natural, more real, more genuine to oneself, even, than one’s own painting? Wouldn’t the effort finally go out of it and the work become second nature?
(Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground)
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Succeeding the painting the plagiarist no longer bears with him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws.
(Sherrie Levine)