Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

…

I wonder if the male genius identifying with the female heroine is really a form of masquerade, like Marcel Duchamp in drag as his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. An exaggerated performance of feminine stereotypes as opposed to really trying to enter and understand a character.

(Zambreno, Heroines )

…

You were the copy. You were the counterfeit.

(02:04:16)

…

To become so possessed by a character you begin to play the part.

(Zambreno, Heroines )

…

He made you over just like I made you over, only better.

(02:04:43)

…

The word “jealous” comes from the ML zelosus , or “zealous,” Gr zelotes , “an emulous person.” “Zealous,” in turn, is derived from zel , or zeal, “fervor, spirit of emulation,” and shares that root with zemia , “punishment,” also “to strive.”

(Partridge, Origins )

…

Was I Hitchcock? Or Elster? Or was I Scottie? Was I Judy? Or Madeleine?

…

Is the perspective from which we see Madeleine’s body on the tiles the same from which we see the policeman’s body in the alley? If so, what might that mean to us? We almost don’t notice déjà vu at first, but we feel something is off. Would we feel, perhaps without really knowing why, that the film has begun again, halfway through? Do we wonder whether we will have to go through it all again, on our way to the same conclusion? I guess what I’m asking is: does this shot put us in an empathetic position, with regard to Scottie?

It seems to me that, if the perspective is the same, the coincidence is too great. Wood’s theory about the point of suspension and Scottie’s dream, the bulk of the film, is — must be — correct. But that theory still makes more difficulties than it solves. As in a dream, the images produced would be the result of real stimuli — in this case, the body in the alley becomes the body on the roof. The guilt Scottie feels over the death of the policeman becomes the more personal and even erotically charged guilt of Madeleine’s death. Worse, following the train of thought to its end, Scottie is then ascribing the policeman’s death to a conspiracy of some kind rather than simple accident — and, given that Madeleine’s death at San Juan Bautista is the result of a conspiracy to deceive him into feeling guilty, it would be a double(d) guilt. Why? Does he feel some attraction to or more-than-professional concern for the policeman? The film seems suddenly to revolve around Scottie’s feelings for the policeman rather than Madeleine/Judy’s feelings for him.

The policeman, a uniformed patrolman as Scottie is a plainclothes detective, is an archetypal figure, placed opposite Scottie by Scottie. He represents an image — The Law — that Scottie fears he can no longer project to others. In the film, the reason given for this fear is the rooftop accident, but if the film is itself a kind of dream or projection of Scottie’s then, even before the accident, Scottie has already accused himself of failing to live up to this image: he is unable to help the policeman, and, as a result, the policeman falls to his death. Not only that, but the policeman is, by virtue of being archetypal, Scottie’s almost-double, a kind of golem for the film. For instance, he is not given a name; in the same way as the criminal he and Scottie are chasing, his face is seen but can never be stamped on the viewer’s consciousness because he is never made into a character. Is he even seen in a close-up? He is not quite human, lacking features and identity, but given life and set free on Scottie’s conscience, he is explicitly tied to the most human character in the film, Judy Barton.

…

Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.

(Wilde, Gray )

…

Someone dead.

(00:13:37)

…

One final thing I have to do. And then I’ll be free of the past.

(02:00:04)

…

There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

(Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea )

…

“I heard voices.” Is it Madeleine that Judy sees at the moment she falls or jumps? What was Judy’s relationship with Madeleine before her death, if any? The nun speaks with Kim Novak’s voice (it was Kim Novak who provided the audio), with Madeleine’s voice, with Judy Barton’s voice, with the voice of the actress playing the part.

…

Aristotle, in his Poetics , never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience.

(Flynn, Reenactments )

…

In one of my last classes, my students and I got into a discussion about “theme” and “symbols.” I told them that when we see something seemingly everywhere, it doesn’t mean that the thing that we think we are seeing again and again has multiplied somehow or that the world is a code or a conspiracy, but that, in finally taking notice of that thing, we are creating for ourselves a new way of seeing, one that has always been available to us, but one which we might otherwise never have put to use. For instance, I told them, say we decide to buy a particular model of car. Instantly, we would see that car parked in every other driveway we passed. But history would not have changed, and our neighbors wouldn’t suddenly decide to buy a certain car simply because we had decided to. Those cars would have been there for weeks, months, perhaps years, and if we were shown security-camera footage of our every movement for the days preceding our decision to buy that model of car, we would, with our new attention, notice them parked in those driveways (and perhaps many other places besides), even as our recorded selves would be going about their business, totally oblivious to them. We have to tell our brains to notice a thing before our brains will notice that thing. Of course I was thinking about the man, but I did not tell my students that.

I also did not tell my students that what is most disturbing about this is that it makes the thinness of our perception clear to us. We really and truly notice almost nothing of the world. We live only a small fraction of our lives. All around us are systems and connections of which we are completely ignorant. We go around thinking these things we don’t notice don’t exist, but of course they do. The overwhelming majority of people and things in the world are, to us, not even ghosts or phantoms but absolutely nonexistent. But ghosts exist, and they are not waiting for our attention.

…

In a short section on Vertigo in Nick Flynn’s The Reenactments , a memoir about the process of turning his earlier memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City , into a movie, Being Flynn , Flynn writes: “The real appearing unreal, the unreal appearing real — this is the definition of the uncanny.” His definition is not definitive, though: the uncanny comes to us from Freud’s unheimlich , “unhomely,” meaning, “that which ought to have stayed at home, but hasn’t,” and this meaning, ultimately, is the more complete, the more complex, the more accurate definition. Freud’s “homely,” heimlich , the German homely, doesn’t mean “plain or banal”; it refers instead to family secrets and the memories we leave behind when we leave home (i.e., “grow up”). The uncanny, then, the unhomely, is that which dredges up these old secrets, secrets that are sometimes not even known to us — the uncanny is not a species of déja vu, in other words, not something we recognize as something we’ve seen before, but something which we haven’t seen but is yet familiar to us or else something we have seen before but which seems unfamiliar to us. The classic example is that of a traveler in a strange house, waking in the middle of the night and catching his reflection in a mirror, believing it to be someone else. Flynn, perhaps without realizing it, describes the reverse example elsewhere in The Reenactments , sitting on a couch on the set that is to stand in for the house he grew up in: “After all, whose childhood home doesn’t feel like a prop, until you leave it, then it is the dream you enter, night after night.”