Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

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Or: Why is Scottie so insistent Madeleine has been to San Juan Bautista before? She is describing a dream; she says that it takes place in Spain. That Scottie believes the dream he has heard narrated took place at San Juan Bautista is as much Scottie’s invention as it is Elster’s.

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There’s an answer for everything.

(01:13:55)

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Two scenes intervene between Cypress Point and San Juan Bautista: one in Midge’s apartment, when Midge reveals her self-portrait-as-“Portrait of Carlotta” to Scottie, and, following it, a scene in Scottie’s apartment, “early dawn” the following day, when Madeleine tells him about her dream. One scene attempts to conceal what it in actuality reveals, the other conceals that which it is supposed to reveal; Midge’s feelings for Scottie are clearest here, where her gesture is meant to be seen as ironic, and Madeleine’s are most calculated in the scene following it, just when she is supposed to be at her most vulnerable. “Supposed to” according to her script, that is, the one written by Elster.

Something else is revealed in these scenes. Where we have been led to believe that Scottie, free, “independent,” has, to this point, been doing what he wants when he wants to do it, the true nature of his actions now becomes clear. His life is as scripted as Judy’s, except that he retains the illusion he is acting out his own will. When he suggests the two of them visit San Juan Bautista at noon that day, he believes he is doing so because he has found the solution to her problem, because he wants to help her. But he is actually doing so because Elster has fed Judy a description of San Juan Bautista, the place where he wants to dispose of his wife’s strangled corpse.

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How much of Vertigo takes place in Elster’s head before it takes place on screen? How much of it remains in Elster’s head? It isn’t Scottie’s fantasy we’re watching, is it? It’s Elster’s.

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I arrived in Portland late at night, at a gate at the end of the terminal. Because it had taken me so long to get through security in San Francisco, I was the last passenger on the plane. I had had to stow my bag above a row of seats far behind me, in the only available space in the overhead bins. Because of this, I had to wait until all of the other passengers deplaned to retrieve my bag when we landed in Portland. The crew were gone. I could hear the sound of a vacuum from somewhere. I walked down the jetway alone, into a seemingly empty terminal. The gate areas I passed were unmanned and unlit; I could see through the huge windows out onto the empty runways. A luggage tram, appearing as though its operator had vanished into thin air right in the middle of doing his job, was the only interruption in the field’s perfect, warped grid of lights. There was a couple I recognized from my flight, standing outside of the bathrooms, the husband looking at his cell phone as though in disbelief, the wife clearly ready to be wherever they were due to be. My heart quickened as I passed through the checkpoint — what if I had to go back for some reason? — but I didn’t slow down to check my bag and my pockets to see that I had everything with me. I still hoped to catch the last MAX home. I also hoped there wouldn’t be a traffic cop on the train checking tickets. I hadn’t yet canceled my credit card or my debit card, though I knew I should have. I held out some stupid hope that my wallet was in my bag somewhere, in the folds of a shirt or in the pocket of a pair of pants.

After I got home and dumped out my bag, I tried to remember if there was anything else in my wallet that needed to be canceled. I wondered if I was supposed to cancel my driver’s license. If someone who looked like me got his hands on it, couldn’t he then pass as me? What could he do, as me?

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[INT. Midge’s Apartment (NIGHT)]

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Now we can better understand how one can get emotionally involved with the inhabitants of a fictional possible world as if they were real people. It happens only partly for the same reason we can be moved by a daydream in which a loved one dies. In this latter case, at the end of our reverie we come back to everyday life and realize that we had no cause for worry. But what would happen if one lived in an uninterrupted daydream?

To be completely emotionally involved with the inhabitants of a fictional possible world, we must satisfy two requirements: (1) we must live in the fictional possible world as if in an uninterrupted daydream, and (2) we must behave as if we were one of the characters. Once we begin living in a possible world as if it were our real one, we can be disconcerted by the fact that in the possible world we are not, so to speak, formally registered. The possible world has nothing to do with us; we move within it as if we were the lost bullet of Julian Sorel.

(Eco, Confessions )

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To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

(Wilde, Gray )

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Borges, writing of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a poem written in a dream, notes that the original, historical Kubla Khan conceived of his palace in a dream. Centuries later, an English poet who didn’t know the palace he was writing about came out of a dream, dreamt a poem in which a palace is built. Borges writes, “Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object, is gradually entering the world; its first manifestation, the palace; its second, the poem.” The character of Madeleine, an invention of Gavin Elster — a daydream, at least, if not a dream proper — is the second manifestation of an archetype not yet revealed to mankind. Its first manifestation, Carlotta’s child, was conceived as though in a dream, with a man not Carlotta’s husband, a nightmare in which the child is taken away and raised as if Carlotta does not exist. Borges says that a dream leading first to a palace, and then, centuries later and continents distant, to a poem, is more incredible than all of the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions of the Scripture. But the passage of time and the great distance covered aren’t really important, are they? Isn’t it incredible enough that a dream can be shared by two men? A dream , which we still believe, because of Freud, to be a reflection of the individual, an expression of one particular brain? How can more than one person have the same dream? First Elster, then Scottie, then Judy. Now you and I.

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After my trip to San Francisco, there was an unexpected new coolness between my wife and I. Because I got home very late, and because she worked the next morning, I didn’t see her until the following evening. She didn’t ask about the trip. I tried to tell her about what I had seen, but her questions, though seeming perfectly reasonable to me later, at the time struck me as mocking. She didn’t believe me, and I had no evidence that what I said was true.

What made matters worse was that I could not leave it alone. I brought the man up several times that week, and her objections were always so rational — and my memories so immaterial — I started to share her doubts. Could I have seen what I thought I had seen? I showed her the report from stillman.com. She asked how much I had paid for it. She told me, “You get what you pay for.” This was wisdom with which I could not argue, having, after all, found the address listed on the report uninhabited and, theoretically, still under construction. But, all along and despite her infectious suspicions, I was afraid. This man had entered the world like an incursion from my nightmares. I didn’t want to see him ever again. I wanted her to see him, but I couldn’t bear to.

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The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.