Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

…

I decided I would say no more on the subject of my doppelganger. I would not be coerced into seeing a doctor. Though I’d always suspected there was something the matter with me, I believed in what I’d seen, and I didn’t want it trivialized or turned into a symptom of an illness. My wife was convinced that I was somehow criticizing her by refusing to see someone (she had always seen a therapist). She stopped speaking to me. If I tried to talk about anything, even what we would do for dinner, she would ignore me, and if I persisted, she would bring up the doctor and my unwillingness to get better. I slept on the couch. She stayed away as often as possible. Though we lived together, were still married, I might as well have been watching her on a security camera.

…

As any Freudian dreambook would have told Hitchcock, dreaming that you can’t go up a flight of stairs is a symbol of impotence.

(Krohn, Hitchcock at Work )

…

How does Elster get down from the tower? We know that he does, but it seems impossible. Maybe even more mysterious, how can this have been part of his plan? Scottie, paralyzed with fear, is on the staircase. He cannot move, but, for Elster, there is no other way down. For the plan to work, Scottie must be stuck on the stairs. But the plan will fail if Scottie is stuck on the stairs. The body is on the roof below, dead, obviously from a fall from the tower. Does no one think to go up to the top, to find out what happened, whether she was pushed? They’ve just seen Scottie go up after this woman who is now dead. They don’t suspect Elster — they haven’t seen him so they can’t suspect him — but they aren’t interested in finding out what the man they have seen is doing? He hasn’t come down. The police arrive. They investigate the body on the roof and the circumstances of its death. There are people all over the grounds, watching, looking. How long does Elster stay in the tower, waiting for a chance to sneak away without anyone seeing him? All the while, down below, the police are trying to get in touch with him, to let him know that his wife has died, apparently a suicide, in a mission many miles south of the city. Mr. Elster, we regret to inform you. While they phone his home in the city, he waits in the tower, watching the priests and laypeople, the policemen, Scottie. They wait for word from him, wait for the picture of what has happened to come clear. Once he has checked his tie and cleaned under his fingernails for the twentieth time, after he has straightened his shirt and his hair yet again, what else is there left to do? How many times would he have gone to the edge, just to see? How many times would he have thought about jumping?

…

The act of creation implies a separation. Something that remains attached to the creator is only half-created. To create is to let take over something which did not exist before, and is therefore new. And the new is inseparable from pain, for it is alone.

(John Berger, “Ape Theatre”)

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The movie is doubled. The chase on the rooftops is the chase up the tower.

…

And not only Elster. Scottie, too, would be trapped in the tower. With his acrophobia and his vertigo, how can he possibly get down? In the novel, it’s explained: he sits on each riser, going down step by step on his butt. I remember doing almost the same at Teotihuacan, on a trip to Mexico City with my wife, a year or two before we were married. She watched from the ground as I went up the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Going up was easy enough, steep and awkward but manageable, but coming back down, the steps were so shallow you couldn’t see the next step past the end of the one you were on — each step seemed to drop off into nothing. I had not been the only one taking those steps half sitting down. It hadn’t even seemed undignified, as though I and the others were paying tribute to the gods the Nahuatls had worshipped there. One crawls in the presence of gods. Hitchcock, though, reveals a lack of humility. He cuts from the tower to the inquest. No crawling. No genuflecting. As at the beginning, we leave Scottie metaphorically suspended or trapped, unable to get down. Can we be sure he does? Is he trapped in a tower in the fantasy he’s invented, trapped on the gutter?

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Would it then make more sense to say that the first part ends before the inquest, with Scottie still in the tower?

…

[INT. Inquest (DAY)]

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Scottie exits the tower and the chapel moments after Madeleine’s fall. No one sees him. (Unless Elster does.) But Scottie is at the inquest, under suspicion. Did he come forward, tell someone, “I was there; I saw”? Why would he, after sneaking away?

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We are not here to pass judgment on Mr. Ferguson’s lack of initiative. He did nothing. The Law has little to say on the subject of things left undone.

(01:20:00)

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Things left undone.

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Madeleine: I’m obliged to believe that nothing finishes when we think it does. that’s what’s so terrible.

(Boileau Narcejac, D’Entre les Morts )

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At 01:22:00, Scottie and Elster look down out of the window.

The view can’t be less troubling for Scottie than the one from Midge’s window at the beginning of the film — even though we don’t get a perspective shot here (or the famous “vertigo effect”), it is an echo of that view, a loose end now tied up. Scottie seems at peace, calm. Elster tells him his future plans and Scottie looks out the window, unanswering but also untroubled. He is cured. How else can we interpret this? Though he is surprised at the end of the film when he comes to and then passes the spot where he had to stop before, he has been cured much earlier, by the shock of Madeleine’s fall, a shock made reference to by Midge in the very scene this shot refers back to. Scottie has conquered his acrophobia before his breakdown, and the breakdown has nothing to do with his acrophobia except incidentally, because it was brought on by Madeleine’s fall, which Scottie sees as having been partly caused by his acrophobia, or rather by the limitations brought on by that condition.

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At some point, I realized that the book I had really been writing was not the book under contract. I would never finish that book. The book I was writing I was writing without putting ink on paper. It was a calcification of my thoughts into the crevices left behind by the authors of the books I was reading at the time. I had begun to think of myself, the self I was creating, as a geological formation, a spire ascending not because I willed it but because something had begun — me — and then persisted through time.

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Increasingly, the process of novelization goes hand in hand with a straitjacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary watching authors’ sensations and thoughts get novelized, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression.

(Dyer, Rage )

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The judge at the inquest says that Mr. Elster could not have anticipated Mr. Ferguson’s weakness. During their first meeting, in his office, Elster asked Scottie, “Shouldn’t you be sitting down?” There’s no way the judge could know that of course, but shouldn’t Scottie be suspicious that this is the story Elster is going with?

…

How could the two hours of Vertigo fit between the rain gutter and the pavement? Although our experiences can’t alter time — time is useful as a dimension precisely because, like spatial dimensions, it isn’t subjective — scientists believe our circumstances can and do change the way our memories work. Or, more exactly, our circumstances change the speed at which our memories recall, and therefore the amount of things they are able to recall in a given moment. Although time doesn’t actually slow down, the amount of things a person is able to think at once increases when he or she has the feeling that time has slowed down. Maybe we use thoughts as a kind of internal clock: One thought takes one second, two thoughts take two seconds, and so on. We think two things and think two seconds have passed, but, because our memories are working faster, only one second has elapsed, and so it seems that time has slowed.