Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

The man and his girlfriend had arguments before the abortion. After, they never argue. Not that they never disagree, but they don’t argue. Instead, both of them go silent. In part, this is because each feels like they have inflicted some injury on the other, something irreparable. They are careful not to make things worse. Not only was there the procedure and all the guilt surrounding it, but also there is the man’s accident, or what they call his accident. Two months after the abortion, things got so bad between them, the girlfriend left. She was gone for almost a month. Though he told no one, the man attempted suicide while she was gone. One day, he was supposed to meet up with an old friend, but he didn’t show up. The old friend called the girlfriend to see if she knew where he was. The girlfriend was the one who discovered him. He suffered permanent brain damage as a result of not getting enough blood to his brain for several hours. Now, he is a step slower than he used to be. He gets frustrated much more easily than he did before, but he doesn’t forget what he has done, and he tries not to take it out on the girlfriend. The girlfriend feels so bad she moves back in with him.

There are a few blank pages. We come back to these characters, but we can’t be sure where in time we are. Something has changed. The man and his girlfriend are walking in the park with a little girl. We learn that the girl is not theirs. It is the little girl’s fourth birthday, and she’s having a party in the park next to their apartment, so, when she has to go to the bathroom, they take her back to their apartment. She is the girlfriend’s friend’s daughter. The girlfriend and the girl’s mother are not as close as they used to be — jobs and motherhood got in the way. They don’t dislike each other, there was no big fight, they just never see each other anymore. When they were younger, still in high school, people said they looked alike. They were often asked if they were sisters — not twins, but sisters. While they are in the apartment, the little girl noticed a picture of the girlfriend, age five, stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet in the shape of a horse. The girlfriend took it down. See, she says to the little girl, See how much we look alike? The little girl nods: she looks more like the girlfriend than her own mother. Later, when they leave the party, the girlfriend starts crying. The man is confused, but he holds her, and then, in silence, they both get ready for bed. Later, much, much later, when he has no reason to remember this, he does remember it, and he figures it out.

…

I watched the film until the film itself became a kind of blindness.

(G.C. Waldrep, “D.W. Griffith at Gettsyburg”)

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As reported by Michael Wilding, Hitchcock said, “The secret of suspense. is never to begin a scene at the beginning and never let it go on to the end.”

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The first version of the script, written by Maxwell Anderson, was called Darkling, I Listen . In it, Scottie’s acrophobia first manifests itself during a sequence on the Golden Gate Bridge. At the end, Judy jumps from the Bridge. If, once retitled and rewritten, she had fallen from the gutter?

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Madeleine E.

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[INT: Midge’s Apartment (DAY)]

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Coming out of the forest onto a slope of scree during a hike with my wife, the trailhead — and our car in the gravel turnoff next to it — was directly in front of us, but far, far below. The trail had gone steadily uphill, looping past a lake and winding through trees so thick there were no plants growing under the canopy, just pine needles, dirt, and a few rocks. Because the lake was in a valley on the other side of the mountain we had been climbing, it seemed like we had not climbed up the mountain at all, only pivoted around it. But then the terrain grew steeper a mile and a half in and started to switchback, finally opening out onto this slope, cutting back through the forest, and then alternating between the forest and the rocky slope on the way up to the summit. Each time we came back to the rocks we were higher up, but, to have traveled so far along the trail — each switchback perhaps a quarter of a mile — we still did not seem to have gone very far up the mountain. Looking out and down, I felt that strange sensation of having to guard myself from something I knew I would never do: not to jump, not with any thought of falling, just a strange pull to go to the edge and then pass beyond it, into the air, to run forward into space. My fear of heights, I thought, was a recognition of this impulse in myself, my curious fascination with edges. When I looked out from the edge, I felt as though my feet were being pulled into what I was looking at, as though the ground were falling away beneath me, as though the edge was getting closer and closer even though I was not moving towards it. Something in me was drawn to the horizon.

It occurred to me then that the care we normally exercise in space necessarily involves the curvature of another dimension: time. The default way down is also the fastest. Gravity obeys parsimony. My wife and I could arrive at our car in an instant, accelerating to terminal velocity at 9.81 meters per second per second, but it would take us hours to reach the car by trail. In looking down from a great height, I was in fact looking into the future, undergoing a kind of time travel. Is the fear of heights also a fear of the future, of knowing what is to come before it has come? A fear of inevitability? In order to stave things off, I crawled through space like someone on his way to an execution.

We generally experience travel along the horizon as a reprieve from aging. “Go West, young man!” Horace Greeley had said, as if to move out along the sun’s path was to slow or even stop what that transit signifies. Such travel, in my experience, always seems interminable, like a day that never ends. One looks out of the car window or the train window and sees the landscape and the landscape never changes or else seems to be continually refreshed, replicated like a cheaply-made cartoon’s background, the bush one has just passed seeming like the bush one passed the minute before, the ranks of telephone poles maddeningly regular, the fields, even the hills no more than ghosts of those one has already seen. But vertical travel — a fall — takes place so quickly and so definitively we can hardly remember the experience. Once, we were there. Now, we are here. There is only a feeling in the pit of our stomach to mark the stretch between; there is almost no sense of time passing. We travel through space but we fall through time.

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Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

(Pablo Neruda, “Tonight I can write”)

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The famous “vertigo effect” of Vertigo was accomplished by simultaneously tracking back (moving the camera away from the subject) and zooming in. “When Joan Fontaine fainted at the inquest in Rebecca ,” Hitchcock recalled, “I wanted to show how she felt that everything was moving far away from her before she toppled over. I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me. I tried to get that into Rebecca , but they couldn’t do it. The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we got to Vertigo , we solved it by using the dolly and zoom simultaneously.” François Truffaut writes, “The reason why so many brilliant or very talented men have failed in their attempts at directing is that only a mind in which the analytic and the synthetic are simultaneously at work can make its way out of the maze of snares inherent in the fragmentation of the shooting, the cutting, and the montage of a film. To a director, the greatest danger of all is that in the course of making his film he may lose control of it.” Viewpoint and perspective; dolly and zoom; the analytic and the synthetic; the detail and the whole. Truffaut limited his claim to directors and film, but it seems to me that one could easily say the same thing about writers, artists, and craftsmen and their labors. Or about husbands and marriages.