Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

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[The first shot of Madeleine, at Ernie’s] is not (cannot possibly be) a point-of-view shot, yet it has the effect of linking us intimately to the movement of Scottie’s consciousness. The camera movement is unlike anything in the film up to that point, introducing a completely new tone, the grace and tenderness underlined by Bernard Herrmann’s music. Madeleine is presented in terms of the ‘work of art’ (which is precisely what she is): her movement through the doorway suggests a portrait coming to life, or a gliding statue; when she pauses, turns her head into profile, the suggestion is of a ‘cameo’ or silhouette, an image that will recur throughout the film. As ‘work of art’ Madeleine is at once totally accessible (a painting is completely passive, offering itself to the gaze) and totally in accessible (you can’t make love to a picture).

(Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited )

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How does a writer go so far inside her character that she comes face to face with her mirrored self?

(Judith Kitchen, Distance & Direction )

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My girlfriend and I had once worked at the same non-profit. I was a grant writer there, but I hated the job and couldn’t wait to leave. A month before I quit, one of our coworkers told me someone in the office had a crush on me. It was common for people there to sleep together — something about the stress and the subsistence wages — but I had never been that type of person. Because I had been overweight most of my life, I found it difficult to believe anyone could find me attractive and so, to avoid embarrassment, I rarely asked anyone out. But the coworker’s comments gave me courage. I thought for sure it was one of the four administrative assistants, the only people there who had taken an interest in my writing. Two of them were married, so I guessed it must be one of the other two. I asked her out. The whole thing was so long ago I can’t remember what we did on the date, but I do remember that when we’d gone back to her place and were sitting on her couch, she asked me why I’d asked her out. I remembered she’d looked genuinely curious. I gave her an answer that seemed appropriate — it was complimentary but vague, since I didn’t really know her that well — but I remember thinking I had guessed wrong. There was no second date.

A week later, I put in my notice. Things weren’t awkward between the woman and I, if anything, she was friendlier than ever, but it was clear that she felt no attraction to me, and vice versa. When I told her I was leaving, she congratulated me — no one wanted to work there; everyone was biding their time — and said, “Oh, she’s going to be so sad.” She told me who it was who had the crush on me. She didn’t know that I’d asked her out because I’d thought it was she. It was a surprise, then, for both of us.

It was a relatively small office, so I thought it would be better to wait until after my last day to approach this woman, the one who actually had the crush on me — to tell the truth, I was probably just scared — but if I wasn’t working there anymore, it would be that much more difficult to approach her. I was going out of town, and, being a coward, I figured the best way to do it would be to send her an email asking her out, using as my excuse for not doing it in person the fact that I was out of town and didn’t have her phone number. Later, on our second date, she told me it was lucky I’d emailed her at work and not at her private email address, because, just before I’d written that email, someone had hacked her account and she’d been locked out ever since. I didn’t know her private email address at the time, so there was never any question I would use it, but I didn’t say anything. I let her tell the story.

Whoever had hacked her account had sent emails to people in her address book — she found out when her brother forwarded one to her at work — telling them she wanted to meet them at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time. The email said only that it was very important they be on time. The addresses were all far away, so no one she knew had actually gone to one of these meetings (she hoped no one had, and worried it was some kidnapping thing, even though she told me it was probably really a scam and this was just the first step), but one of her bosses had asked her if she was OK, and another person in the office had given her funny looks, and she had wondered why she couldn’t log in to her email. Then her brother forwarded her the email and she found out what had happened. In the end, she abandoned the hacked email address and set up a new one, and never really thought about it unless someone mentioned sending an email to her there.

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Though the too-obvious parallels between Kim Novak and Judy Barton, between Elster/Scottie and Alfred Hitchcock are attested to again and again in analyses of Vertigo , the facts cannot be escaped or disguised: Hitchcock was saddled with an actress he did not want (the role was written for Vera Miles, who became pregnant just before the film went into pre-production) who was unwilling to accede to what he wanted from her (the oft-repeated anecdote about her telling Edith Head she would wear anything so long as it wasn’t gray and wasn’t a suit).

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It is as if [in the first scene between Scottie and Midge], the film is humorously suggesting that femininity in our culture is largely a male construct, a male “design,” and that this femininity is in fact a matter of external trappings, of roles and masquerade, without essence. This is an idea that the film will subsequently evoke with horror. For if woman, who is posited as she whom man must know and possess in order to guarantee his truth and his identity, does not exist, then in some important sense he does not exist either, but rather is faced with the possibility of his own nothingness. In this respect, it is possible to see the film’s great theme of romantic love as something of a ruse, a red herring. the source of the man’s fascination with the woman is her own fascination with death, with the gaping abyss, which she hallucinates as her open grave and which is imaged continually in the film in its many arch-shaped forms of church, museum, cemeteries, mission.

(Modleski, Women )

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Hitchcock’s mature films poignantly explore the nature of absence and of loss. In The Man Who Knew Too Much , it is the loss of family security abroad; in The Wrong Man , the loss of innocence and family unity at home; in the trilogy Vertigo — North by Northwest — Psycho , the loss of identity itself, for there is no living person at the center of these three great works. Madeleine Elster, George Kaplan, and Mrs. Bates are the ultimate MacGuffins.

(Donald Spoto, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies )

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The book, now, was not something I worked on. It was, instead, an excuse, a reason not to do other things. I read. I thought about how I would write the book. I couldn’t write other things because I was writing the book, but I wasn’t writing the book, so I wasn’t writing anything. I told my wife I was working on the book. I told myself I was working on the book. I thought about the bus. I thought about the video clip. I watched the video clip again. I wondered what it meant. I wondered if I could follow my wife without her finding out about it. I thought about what that would mean.

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Why does my memory insist that the story of Anselmo, Camilla, and Lothario in Don Quixote is other than what it is? I remember it as the story of a man (Anselmo, though I didn’t know his name or any of the others until I reread the book) who convinces his friend (Lothario) to dress up as him (Anselmo) in order to seduce his wife (Anselmo’s wife, Camilla), making Anselmo a cuckold, having been cuckolded by himself. But that makes no sense. How would that work? A woman can’t cheat on her husband with a man she believes to be her husband, can she? What would that prove to the husband? Was I thinking of another story entirely? Or, as seems likely, was I conflating one or more other stories with this one?