Gabriel Blackwell - Madeleine E.

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And how is it that Scottie is a man of “independent means”? Police aren’t typically so well paid. Elster, too, in the scene in his office—“As long as I have to work at it”—is a man of independent means, though perhaps only formerly. Or is what he says true? Does he really have to work at it? Clearly, neither of these men are without a past.

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A rich man, a powerful man.

(00:34:27)

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Let me take care of you, Judy.

(01:44:05)

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Scottie is not only corseted in Midge’s apartment, he also carries a cane (though he doesn’t use it there, except to gesture with). Anyone seeing him on the street that day would have seen a man with a cane, a man with a rigid posture and a (slightly) different figure; the following day, when the corset comes off, however, his posture will change and so will his figure. He will no longer carry a cane. It is as though in this scene in Midge’s apartment — and apparently throughout his (first) recovery — he is in disguise. But he is disguised as himself. In this, he prefigures Judy’s Madeleine (and perhaps Judy’s Judy): a person with an uncanny resemblance to another person (who is, in reality, that person), but with a different carriage and bearing, and with a distinguishing feature others will be sure to notice (for Scottie, the cane; for Judy, the blonde hair). One can imagine another one of Scottie’s “college chums” running into him at Ernie’s and telling him, “You know, you look just like a man I once knew. Good old Scottie Ferguson. Wonder whatever happened to him.”

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“Gabriel Blackwell is the author of Shadow Man . He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is at work on his next book, Madeleine E. , a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo .”

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If one painted more forgeries than one’s own paintings, wouldn’t the forgeries become more natural, more real, more genuine to oneself, even, than one’s own painting? Wouldn’t the effort finally go out of it and the work become second nature?

(Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground )

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Succeeding the painting the plagiarist no longer bears with him passions, humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws.

(Sherrie Levine)

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My readers, who may at first be apt to consider Quotation as downright pedantry, will be surprised when I assure them that next to the simple imitation of sounds and gestures, Quotation is the most natural and most frequent habitude of human nature.

(James Boswell, “The Hypochondriack”)

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As Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )

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How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow — or rather, to make it impossible.

(Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition )

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There was a duplication of myself involved, perhaps even a triplication.

There was I who was writing. There was I whom I could remember. And there was I of whom I wrote, the protagonist of the story.

The difference between factual truth and imaginative truth was constantly on my mind.

Memory was still fundamental, and I had daily reminders of its fallibility. I learnt, for instance, that memory itself did not present a narrative. Important events were remembered in a sequence ordered by the subconscious, and it was a constant effort to reassemble them into my story.

(Christopher Priest, The Affirmation )

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Person , ME person and earlier personne , derives from OF persone (late MF-F personne ): L persona orig a mask (Gr prosopon ), as worn in the Ancient Classical theatre, hence the role attributed to this mask, hence a character, a personage, hence a person.

(Eric Partridge, Origins )

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[INT: Elster’s Office (DAY)]

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Tom Helmore, the English actor who plays Gavin Elster in Vertigo , had been in two previous Hitchcock movies, 1927’s The Ring and 1936’s Secret Agent. He appears in the credits for neither one.

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Rewatching the sequence in which Scottie visits Elster in his office, I am struck by Elster’s apparent unease; he seems, in his stiff-armed posture and impatient swiveling in the chair, like a child in his father’s office, placed there out of the way and told not to move, not to touch anything. What does it mean? There is already something awkward and exceptional in Helmore’s performance: his (British) accent, which stands out in this scene between a (American) man and his old college chum (also, one would have supposed, an American). The effect is to make one suspicious of Elster from his introduction — has he ever even been in this office that he says is his? Is he in fact or has he ever been a friend of Scottie’s? Is he even Gavin Elster? And on the other side of the desk and in contrast to the man across from him, in contrast also to the awkward pose that he himself has affected in Midge’s apartment at the beginning of the previous scene (which, even in the timeline of the movie, immediately precedes this scene in Elster’s office (where, then, is Scottie’s cane?)), Scottie seems perfectly at ease. It is Scottie’s milieu, it seems, if not his office. Already, even before he has begun to control the characters around him, he is in control (even while he is out of control in attempting to control them). And Elster is not in control, or wants to appear so.

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The West presented many opportunities to become what is commonly called a self-made man, a man of wealth, but it offered more profoundly an opportunity to make oneself up, as a fiction, a character, a hero, unburdened by the past. “Oh, what was your name in the States?” went one California song. “Was it Thompson, or Johnson, or Bates? Did you murder your wife and fly for your life? Say, what was your name in the States?” In those days, San Francisco was the capital not only of California but of the West, and the West was for Yankees a place without a past, both a gritty terrain of bare earth and long rivers and a fiction of masculinity and possibilities. For those who came from the East, the West was a place without a past, and amnesia felt like freedom.

(Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows )

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There is something else to note in the office scene: Helmore was apparently much shorter than Stewart, and the fact that there are no wide shots or full shots showing both actors standing up, the very careful staging of two-shots, and the frequent use of medium shots (and the camera’s avoidance of any angle or framing that would show the two actors’ feet together), are all attempts to hide the disparity in height. The low-angle medium shots of Helmore, made necessary by Helmore’s height, place the camera — and thus the viewer — in a subservient, even awed position. This gives the viewer the illusion that Helmore is in control of the scene; he looms over the much-taller, seated Stewart, and he returns to the side-area with the long table several times, presumably because its floor was raised and he could be made to look taller simply by standing on it. Stewart is quickly ushered over to the chair and remains sitting for most of the scene while Helmore walks around, leaving only the shots with Stewart and Helmore near the door to be contended with. These are made to work through imaginative framing. Or perhaps through set-dressing: I’m left wondering whether Helmore was, in those shots, standing on a block, or on a raised mark, or if Stewart was standing slightly underneath the set in a cutout.