Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

And he is right to be worried. Madeleine attempts suicide, throwing herself into the Bay from Fort Point, at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Scottie saves her and the two begin an affair. The affair is short-lived. Scottie takes Madeleine to the Mission at San Juan Bautista to confront her with his ideas about Carlotta. Frightened by his sudden passion, she runs from him, up the bell tower above the mission chapel, where Scottie is unable to follow because of his acrophobia. He stops halfway up the stairs, and she disappears into the belfry above. He hears a scream. He sees her body plummet past the window he has reached. He sees her body on the tiles of the roof below.

The loss of Madeleine is too much. Scottie becomes unhinged. After the inquest, he is committed to an asylum for a period. When he is released, he seems to see Madeleine everywhere. He begins dating a woman he thinks looks like Madeleine, a woman named Judy Barton, who turns out to have been hired by Elster to “play” Madeleine. Scottie, though, doesn’t know this (or does he?). He forces Judy to dress like Madeleine. He forces her to dye her hair, and to wear it the way that Madeleine did. It is obvious Judy has feelings for Scottie, but Scottie is oblivious, obsessed by his memories. Judy is a kind of wax figure to him, a doll to be played with. He realizes his mistake only when he has taken this cruel treatment too far: she is the woman he wants her to be, inasmuch as she is the woman he held when he thought he was holding Madeleine, but she has never been the woman he thought he’d fallen in love with, “Madeleine Elster,” a woman he must now understand he has never even really met. He takes her back to San Juan Bautista, and, this time, he is able to climb the tower to the top. He accuses her of infidelity — to him, to herself — and she doesn’t deny it. Judy, surprised by a nun coming to check on the couple and disturbed by Scottie’s behavior, falls to her death.

The end.

…

Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.

Sam Taylor says Laurent Binet says Roland Barthes says.

…

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry they dare not realize.

(Wilde, Gray )

…

My agent worried about the books on Vertigo that had already been written, the ten or so books that were due to be published before the end of the year. I worried about one book, Madeleine E. , still unpublished and, I thought, probably unfinished. Since my agent didn’t believe in Madeleine E. he didn’t worry about it, but if it was finished and found a publisher, the news would come as a betrayal to him. It didn’t even matter if that happened before my book came out or after. It would look like lost revenue.

My worries ran deeper: What would it mean if this other book not only seemed to others but actually was the realization of what I had, as yet, only just begun, the culmination of my work, rather than merely its opposite or its complement? What if I were straining to create something not only already in existence, but something that, when finished, would be a copy of something that existed already? A copy of a copy of Vertigo , a film several decades old, having already inspired several copies?

…

Chris Marker’s La Jetée

Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct

Lloyd Kaufman’s Sugar Cookies

Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety

Brian DePalma’s Obsession

countless reused shots, homages of plot and composition and music, countless uses of the “Vertigo effect”

…

While Hitchcock maintains that he is not concerned with plausibility, the truth is that he is rarely implausible. What he does, in effect, is to hinge the plot around a striking coincidence, which provides him with the master situation. His treatment from then on consists in feeding a maximum of tension and plausibility into the drama, pulling the strings ever tighter as he builds up toward a paroxysm. Then he suddenly lets go, allowing the story to unwind swiftly.

(Truffaut, Hitchcock )

…

Hitchcock: “All that matters, all that exists for the audience, is what is on the screen. It doesn’t matter if the set extends no more than six inches beyond what the camera records — it could as well be six miles for all the effect it would have on the audience. The whole art is knowing what matters in each shot, what the point you are selling is.”

…

Though High Anxiety takes its plot from Spellbound rather than Vertigo , and is intended as a satire of Hitchockian tropes in general, rather than specifically those found in Vertigo , the poster art, the title sequence, and the protagonist’s phobia all come from Vertigo . I don’t think the pairing of these two movies is sloppy or accidental— Spellbound involves someone appearing to fall to their death who has actually been murdered prior to that fall, someone pretending to be someone else for the sake of the murderer, and a man so paralyzed by his fear that he is unable to prevent (or so he thinks) the murder in the first place. In Spellbound , however, a dream resolves things. The murderer is punished. In Vertigo , there is no resolution and Elster gets away.

…

Hitchcock’s great need (exhibited throughout his life as well as in his death) to insist on and exert authorial control may be related to the fact that his films are always in danger of being subverted by females whose power is both fascinating and seemingly limitless.

(Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory )

…

Judging by my Facebook feed — full of writers — most authors try to average between one thousand and two thousand words a day. Even if you’re hunting and pecking, typing a thousand words only takes about an hour and a half: ten words a minute for one hundred minutes, one thousand words. I did this arithmetic to make myself feel less alone. My writing time was usually spent not writing, which is not to say I spent it doing math: I Googled my name to see if anything new came up; I went for a walk; I rode my bike to the movies; I couldn’t decide on a movie, so I rode my bike home from the movies; I went to Powell’s and didn’t buy anything; I walked around next to the river; I read; I tried to watch a movie at home. Once, I had been one of those writers who could turn out two thousand words a day and then head off to my day job. Now, I wrote an email, maybe. My routine had been permanently disturbed.

To make matters worse, my wife’s routine remained the same. She left the house at nine or ten, either to go to work or to school, and was back at six or eight, depending on the day. By that time I was just starting to write — I mean actually typing into the manuscript — and I pretended to resent the intrusion. I should have been relieved.

One day, having hurriedly wasted my morning, I shut my laptop and went for a walk in a direction I didn’t usually take. Most days I walked north, through Irvington up to Alberta, or west, toward the river, but that day I went east, toward Broadway and the café where I had once worked. I crossed Broadway at 16 th, jogging across after the DON’T WALK sign had come on, even though I had no reason to be in a hurry. The driver of a bus pulling away from its stop honked, and I turned and saw my wife behind one of the bus’s windows, not where she was supposed to be. I couldn’t have been mistaken: Beneath the watery, shimmering reflection of the BROADWAY FLORAL sign was her face, her hair, her glasses, even what I was sure was the shirt she had been wearing when she left the house that morning. But she had left hours earlier, with the car, to go to work and then, after work, she was going to a friend’s birthday party. Why would she be on a bus? She was nowhere near her work. She was nowhere near her friend’s. Had she come home and left again since I left for my walk? When I got home, neither she nor the car seemed to have been there. Besides, the bus had been headed downtown, in the wrong direction for her work or the party.