Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

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Drama, Hitch has said, is life with the dull bits left out.

(Taylor, Hitch )

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My wife arranged for me to interview with a firm specializing in patent law, whose clients, she told me, were some of the biggest tech companies in Oregon. One of her oldest friends had just become a junior lawyer there, and had told her the firm was looking for a courier. If they hired me, they would pay part of my tuition to the local community college’s paralegal certificate program and allow me to work around my school schedule. I would be employed, and I would have no time to write. I saw the ploy for what it was, but I couldn’t say anything; conversations were still tense. I was too aware I had inflicted some hurt I couldn’t cancel. The interview was set for a week later.

We discovered that the blue pinstriped suit I had bought many years before no longer fit, so it went to Goodwill and my wife bought me a new suit and paid to have it tailored. I had not worked in three months; there was no question I would do this on my own, and my wife, it seemed, wanted the job more than I did. The interview turned out to be mostly pro forma. My wife’s friend’s recommendation was, apparently, enough. The HR specialist handed over a binder filled with glossy papers covered in information about health plans and retirement packages. She told me I should talk it all over with my wife before making a decision.

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Do Scottie and Judy kiss before 01:56:00, i.e., after her costuming as Madeleine? I don’t think they do.

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Sometimes when a person does something wrong, she finds it easier to continue in a wrong way; for if having done a wrong thing, she proceeds to do a right thing, the wrong thing may appear to others all the more plain.

(Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!! )

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In Vertigo , the whole emotional situation is invested with a nightmarish intensity because its true nature is unacknowledged and its natural cause diverted. The hero’s passion for the girl in the second half of the film is perverse not because he continues hopelessly to love someone he believes dead — bereavement is not such an unnatural situation — but because he is incapable of reacting to a real, living woman until he has dominated her completely and transformed her, completely against her will, into the image of his lost love. In other words, he has chosen the fantasy over reality, and tried to transform reality into fantasy by the sheer force of his obsession.

(Taylor, Hitch )

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Specular space is on-screen space; it is everything we see on the screen. Off-screen space, blind space, is everything that moves (or wriggles) outside or under the surface of things, like the shark in Jaws . If such films “work,” it is because we are more or less held in the sway of these two spaces. If the shark were always on screen it would quickly become a domesticated animal. What is frightening is that it is not there! The point of horror resides in the blind space.

(Pascal Bonitzer, “Partial Vision: Film and the Labyrinth”)

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In Vertigo , Hitchcock deftly softens the sobering abuse of his female protagonist, Kim Novak’s Judy, by focusing on the passion and torment of her lover, Scottie (and casting James Stewart in his role). Consider the scenario, though, from Judy’s perspective: She’s picked up by one significantly older man, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore’s character), who gives her a new persona (Madeleine) and then involves her in the original Madeleine’s murder. He promises her a deeper attachment, only to dump her unceremoniously after the deed is done. Then she finds the process repeated with Scottie — yet, despite his earnestness, his behavior is doubly humiliating, as it carries an implicit rejection of Judy’s own self in favor of the fantasy of Madeleine. In Vertigo , the figure of the woman pursued. found its paradoxical culmination.

(Auiler, Vertigo )

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The Marilyn Monroe explosion of the fifties had given studio heads the notion that they could take any woman with the right dimensions and create a sensation, and so [Harry] Cohn [head of Columbia Pictures] began grooming [Kim] Novak to replace Rita Hayworth as Columbia’s leading lady.

(Auiler, Vertigo )

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Novak, after all, had had plenty of experience being told how to dress and act by an older man.

(Auiler, Vertigo )

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But Judy isn’t told how to act .

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Judy’s reaction to Scottie’s “Let me take care of you”—another clue to Elster’s proposal?

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Elster’s settlement is only enough to keep Judy out of sight for a year (Scottie says, “It’s been a year since the death of Madeleine,” and we assume he’s been in the hospital for most of that year), maybe less — maybe much less — but surely he would have been concerned about Scottie finding Judy? One would think he would tell her to move away. What about the police? They’re Scottie’s friends, aren’t they? One would think, at the very least, Elster would give Judy enough money that she doesn’t have to go back to working at Magnin’s less than a year later. Why doesn’t he kill her? Why be squeamish about something like that when he’s already murdered his wife twice over? (She was already dead when he brought her up the tower.) How can he have failed to anticipate Scottie’s discovery of Judy? How can it be he hasn’t heard Scottie is out of the hospital? He can’t be bothered to check up even a year later? He isn’t worried? There is no statute of limitations on murder.

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The gentleman seems to know what he wants.

(01:47:17)

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Flesh, being never the same, exists almost exclusively in the imagination.

(Villiers, Tomorrow’s Eve )

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Kim Novak said, of her role as Judy Barton, “I related to the resentment of being made over and to the need for approval and the desire to be loved. I really identified with the story because to me it was saying, Please, see who I am. Fall in love with me, not a fantasy.” But there is an inconsistency in what she says. Judy objects to being dressed as Madeleine (by Scottie but apparently not by Elster), but she doesn’t seem to want or need Scottie to “see who [she is].” If anything, in turning him away after their first meeting, she seems to want Scottie not to see who she is, not to fall in love with her , Judy Barton. She seems — indirectly perhaps, but perhaps not — to want to leave undisturbed his fantasy of her as Madeleine.

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[INT. Elizabeth Arden Salon (DAY)]

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Novak played Madge Owens of Salina, Kansas in 1955’s Picnic , a role for which she had her hair dyed auburn. Four years later, she played Judy Barton of Salina, Kansas, hair dyed a shade browner than that earlier red. Picnic ’s director, Joshua Logan, had wanted a “mouse brown.” Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures (the studio behind Picnic ) refused and tried to get Logan to take Novak as she was, a platinum blonde. They settled on the reddish color. Judy wanted a natural color, a color her own. Scottie refused, had her dye her hair a platinum blonde, Novak’s “natural” color.

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Kim Novak: “I had to have long red hair for the role [of Madge Owens in Picnic ], so I wore a wig, and my own hair was dyed to match it. I felt very, very different as a redhead. After the picture, I kept my red hair for a while, but I didn’t feel quite the same.

not like myself.”

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When Judy comes out of the bathroom at 01:55:00 (the scene in which she is once again fully costumed as Madeleine), the fog filter/green light mimics that of the HOTEL EMPIRE sign outside the window, over Scottie’s shoulder. But this is not that light — the light in the room, as we’ve already seen, is untinted.