Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

Regardless of how it was achieved, these tricks (tricks common in Hollywood, where most actors are quite short and appearance is all-important) make it seem as though the two actors occupy two different sets — the camera looks up at Helmore, but straight on at Stewart; Helmore stands on the stairs or in the raised portion of the set; Stewart sits, or stands in a cutout a foot lower than the rest of the set. Helmore is on stage, and Stewart is in the orchestra, or even in the audience. For Helmore, as for any actor playing to an audience, Stewart would be at best a ghost, a wager worthy of Pascal. In the scene, in the movie, Stewart does not rise to the level of even a prop in Helmore’s play — Scottie’s suggestions and reservations, remember, are all cast aside without consideration — but he is nonetheless the reason the performance is given. This is the position Stewart’s character will play for the remainder of the first half of the film: He exists not as an actor but as a witness.

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Was it a ghost?

(00:52:47)

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Especially note the two-shot of Helmore and Stewart just after Helmore has delivered his line, “Someone dead.” The camera cuts to Stewart and his perplexed, even angry reaction, then pans back to fit Helmore into the frame. It is obvious that Helmore, who has just descended the stairs (it looks like two risers from the way he moves), has still not come to rest flat, on the same plane as Stewart, even though he is leaning against the desk Stewart is sitting in front of. Were there two sets? or two levels to this one set?

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Helmore’s previous film was 1957’s Designing Woman .

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Robert Boyle, set designer for Vertigo , subsequently helped Hitchcock recreate Elster’s office in Hitchcock’s home. Hitchcock, of course, so famous for his profile that he made it part of his signature, was, in addition to being quite stout, also quite short. One wonders how much time Hitch spent in that raised portion, looking down on his visitors, how comfortable he was in the chair behind his desk.

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Do you believe that someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being?

(00:13:44)

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So there was no “I” anymore. It was strange to have no self — to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Pasting It Together”)

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My agent wrote that he hated my title, Vertigo Vertigo Vertigo . He made some reference to Beetlejuice . Anything else, he pleaded. Anything.

It wasn’t his style to make suggestions — he pointed out problems. I was the writer. It was my job to fix them. Sometimes, though, I didn’t fix them. A week or two earlier, I had clicked through all of his comments, deleting every one, and then sent the draft back unchanged. I wanted to pretend that he wouldn’t notice, that he would write back saying what I’d sent was great, but I knew he would notice. He did. It was ten days before he replied. He said he had been busy — something family-related. He didn’t comment on the draft I’d sent. I thought it seemed passive-aggressive of him. He must have thought I was being passive-aggressive to send it in the first place. I’m sure we were both right.

I sent him a link to the Amazon page I had found. “This is bad news,” was my subject line. He was confused; I had written another book I had never mentioned? I explained the whole thing to him. He thought it was me, playing a joke on him. I couldn’t convince him otherwise. I can hardly blame him — the coincidence of it did seem unbelievable: How had this other man come to write on the same film I had? Not that Vertigo hadn’t already had plenty written about it over the years, but at this precise moment in time ? Two books by two men with the same name, on the same subject? Had that ever happened? Just the fact that we were two men with the same name writing at the same moment seemed extraordinary; that we were writing about the same thing — that was too much. I proposed Madeleine E. as the title. This was actually a joke. He liked it. “Much better than VVV,” he wrote. “Not sure why you had to go through all that trouble just to tell me your new title.” He still thought I was joking. My girlfriend heard me cursing in the next room. I had to stop work and go for a walk.

On my walk, after I had calmed myself down, I decided that he was right: it was a joke, just not mine. I mean, it would be so easy to list a book on Amazon, to offer a used copy (already sold, naturally) of something no one would ever order anyway. (Still, though, the question lingered: why me?) How could I have been so easily fooled? Shouldn’t that book have shown up in a previous search if it had been released, as its Amazon page stated, years before? Wouldn’t one of my friends, the cashier at Safeway, my mother— my agent —have mentioned that there was another Gabriel Blackwell out there, also a writer? The whole thing had to be a hoax. It couldn’t possibly be true.

But, after two days spent working through the notes I had deleted, two days in which I did actual writing, two days in which I left my desk at eleven feeling no guilt for not being at it, two days which then concluded with the twin miracles of two full nights’ sleep, I put the book aside again. I had just typed Madeleine E. on the title page, I don’t even know why. To placate my agent, just as the other edits had been made to placate him. I imagined the other Gabriel Blackwell, doing the same thing. I had never worried about the originality of my work before but suddenly I felt as though I was trespassing in my own manuscript. And still that nagging question: Why, out of all of the obscure writers one could choose to prank, why choose me?

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When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure.

(Wilde, Dorian Gray )

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In his essay, “Family Romances,” Freud says, “There are all too many occasions when a child is slighted, or at least feels that he has been slighted, that he does not have the whole of his parents’ love, and when above all he regrets having to share it with brothers and sisters. The feeling that his affection is not fully reciprocated then finds expression in the idea, often consciously recollected from early childhood, that he is a stepchild or an adopted child.” Vertigo seems to illustrate an allied mechanism: Madeleine, split in her affections between her husband and Scottie, is revealed to have adopted her persona from a long-dead ancestor, and then subsequently revealed to have adopted that adopting persona from another already-dead woman, the real Madeleine Elster. But whose fantasy is it, really? Is it Scottie’s? He would have reason to want to believe that Madeleine isn’t Madeleine — as Madeleine, she is a married woman, unavailable to him; as Judy, she is Judy, single, “playing a role” as a wife, and thus available.

Or is it Elster’s fantasy? Had Madeleine strayed? Was that the reason for her murder? The affections he once had all to himself had been adulterated, and he found himself wishing his wife was not his wife, was anyone else, so he made her into anyone else?

Or is it Judy’s fantasy? Her employer, Elster, finished with her when her role as a woman playing the role of another woman has served its purpose, no longer her husband (he never was), no longer her employer, no longer serving any purpose to her, and she without a role, first adopted and now cast aside?