Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

Even now, our technologies pretend to speak to us, to act out lives in front of us. In a strange way, it isn’t what they do but what they don’t that damns them to artificiality. They talk over us; they listen only when not in use. If you call your bank and interrupt the recorded voice, the recording will simply stop, as though the person on the other end had been struck by lightning. A recording can’t compensate for a person for the simple reason that we are trained from birth to recognize other people as people by how they respond to us. Our parents scold us or hold us when we complain; our toys lie deathly still no matter how much we scream at them.

People made famous by recordings are thus rendered unreal, people with whom we would never — could never — interact. That is, people become celebrities because they cease to be people. They become famous by being captured (the coinage is no mistake) on film or on vinyl. The people onscreen are not people even when we spot them on the street. Isn’t that the function of the entourage, the publicist, the photo op? Once a person has been transmuted by an appearance in recorded media, they can never again truly inhabit the same world their spectators do. They move in a parallel world, the world of objects, the world of things. These technologies make compensations of their subjects . They destroy them through making them absences.

And still people try to join in conversation with them. They put themselves onscreen, talk back to people who otherwise can’t be talked to. Doesn’t this help to explain the popularity of “reality television,” of “first-person” camerawork (as in The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield ), of sites like YouTube (where the bulk of the “original programming” is, not coincidentally, reviews or commentaries on already-existing work), of social media, of memoir, blogs, “selfies”? What if these trends aren’t a new kind of narcissism, but, instead, an attempt to remedy the imbalance the previous century created with its new media? The audience attempts to have its voice heard by removing itself from the audience, by making of itself a compensation. Maybe it’s doomed to failure, but when has that ever stopped anybody?

And perhaps these failures, the fact that none of these new or rediscovered modes achieve true conversation in any traditional sense of the word — the fact that they are more of the same — perhaps this only reveals that we don’t after all crave conversation or dialogue so much as we simply wish to be heard. Maybe we even prefer to be heard in a way that limits what or how others can reply to us; we like to pretend that we are absent; we don’t mind that a recording is unaware of our presence, that we can become witnesses without fear of becoming participants, that a recording’s subjects, its compensations, have, in the act of being recorded, reduced themselves in some way, devolved from people to things, that we want to become things ourselves out of some desire to reduce ourselves to ghosts. But why?

…

Morel: “When Madeleine existed for the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, Madeleine herself was actually there.”

(Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel )

…

Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel is the story of a man, a fugitive — from what crime or persecution, we are not told, though he does tell us that he was “accused of duplicity” and has been imprisoned — who finds himself marooned on an uninhabited island when his boat breaks up on the reef surrounding it. He has been told to go to this island because no one ever stops there; he will never be found. The island’s previous inhabitants were all found dead, adrift on a boat, “skinless, hairless, without nails on their fingers or toes.” There is a “museum” on the island, a chapel, and a swimming pool. As the fugitive discovers, there are also people, or what appear to be people, on what appears to be a vacation or holiday of some sort. But it turns out that these people are really recordings made by a man named Morel who has invented a device that projects not just images but (it seems) physical, tactile being — these projections are solid, can speak, smell, their sun gives off heat, their tides wash the shore. The only thing that makes them different from the reality the fugitive would be living in without the projections is that their every action is preordained, is only a repetition of a past action, has been recorded by Morel’s invention.

The fugitive becomes obsessed by one of Morel’s friends (quite possibly the woman with whom Morel was in love, the reason for the trip and the inspiration for the invention), a woman named Faustine, but, while he can see her, hear her, even touch her, he cannot do anything to alter her actions. She is implacable in playing out her days on the island in the exact sequence they have already followed — no variation, no alteration is possible. The fugitive can hide in her room but can only enter or exit when the door would have been open during the days Faustine actually spent on the island. He can reach out and touch her, knows her to have a physical dimension, but his caresses are completely ineffective — not even a hair is moved, much less an article of clothing. He could perhaps kiss her, but it would be like kissing a wall. And always, no matter what the fugitive does, she and all of the other islanders go about their unwavering routine.

The obsession is fatal: the fugitive, resigning himself to the fact that he will never be able to speak to Faustine or be heard by her, never even so much as feel her flesh give when he takes her hand; knowing also that Faustine, the Faustine who once walked where he now sees her projection walking, the Faustine who once spurned Morel’s advances, the Faustine who debarked upon this island and some days hence left it, no longer exists, has been killed by Morel’s terrible invention, records himself, ensuring his own death. He records himself walking beside Faustine’s projection. He remarks upon things when Faustine appears to have been listening at the time she was recorded. He listens when Faustine says something. He simulates an existence simultaneous to Faustine’s, and, in so doing, makes that existence real for the next person to turn on Morel’s invention, for that person will see that Faustine, previously alone on the beach or under the shade of a tree, is now accompanied by a man who seems ever so slightly out of place but who nonetheless acts as though he belongs.

…

That Bioy Casares would have written “Madeleine” in the passage quoted above — it must be a coincidence, but suppose it isn’t? After all, why should he have written “Madeleine” and not “Faustine”? There is a Dora and a Jane Gray in the narrative — why not write either of their names, instead of this Madeleine, a character who does not appear anywhere else but in that passage? Perhaps Bioy Casares, a Francophile, had derived this Madeleine from the same place that Vertigo 's writers had derived it, from Proust. “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?” being Proust’s famous reaction to the tasting of a madeleine.

…

All of Boileau and Narcejac’s characters have been renamed in the film — Flavierès is Scottie, Paul Gévigne is Gavin Elster, Renée Sourange is Judy Barton, Pauline Lagerlac is Carlotta Valdes. There is no Midge, of any name. Only Madeleine’s name has remained the same.