A free replay (notes on Vertigo)

`Power and freedom'. Coupled together, these two words are repeated
three times in Vertigo. First, at the twelfth minute by Gavin Elster
('freedom' underlined by a move to close-up) who, looking at a picture
of Old San Francisco, expresses his nostalgia to Scottie ('San Francisco
has changed. The things that spelled San Francisco to me are
disappearing fast'), a nostalgia for a time when men - some men at
least - had `power and freedom'. Second, at the thirty-fifth minute,
in the bookstore, where `Pop' Liebel explains how Carlotta Valdes's
rich lover threw her out yet kept her child: `Men could do that in
those days. They had the power and the freedom ... ' And finally at the
hundred and twenty-fifth minute - and fifty-first second to be precise
- but in reverse order (which is logical, given we are now in the second
part, on the other side of the mirror) by Scottie himself when, realizing
the workings of the trap laid by the now free and powerful Elster, he
says, a few seconds before Judy's fall - which, for him, will be
Madeleine's second death -'with all his wife's money and all that
freedom and power ... '.Just try telling me these are coincidences.

Such precise signs must have a meaning. Could it be psychological, an
explanation of the criminal's motives? If so, the effort seems a little
wasted on what is, after all, a secondary character. This strategic
triad gave me the first inkling of a possible reading of Vertigo. The
vertigo the film deals with isn't to do with space and falling; it is a
clear, understandable and spectacular metaphor for yet another kind
of vertigo, much more difficult to represent - the vertigo of time.
Elster's `perfect' crime almost achieves the impossible: reinventing
a time when men and women and San Francisco were different to
what they are now. And its perfection, as with all perfection in
Hitchcock, exists in duality. Scottie will absorb the folly of time
with which Elster infuses him through Madeleine/Judy. But
where Elster reduces the fantasy to mediocre manifestations (wealth,
power, etc), Scottie transmutes it into its most utopian form: he
overcomes the most irreparable damage caused by time and resurrects
a love that is dead. The entire second part of the film, on the other
side of the mirror, is nothing but a mad, maniacal attempt to deny
time, to recreate through trivial yet necessary signs (like the signs of
a liturgy: clothes, make-up, hair) the woman whose loss he has never
been able to accept. His own feelings of responsibility and guilt for this
loss are mere Christian Band-Aids dressing a metaphysical wound of
much greater depth. Were one to quote the Scriptures, Corinthians I
(an epistle one of Bergman's characters uses to define love) would
apply: `Death, where is your victory?'

So Elster infuses Scottie with the madness of time. It's interesting
to see how this is done. As ever with Alfred, stratagems merely
serve to hold up a mirror (and there are many mirrors in this story) to
the hero and bring out his repressed desires. InStrangers on a Train,
Bruno offers Guy the crime he doesn't dare desire. InVertigo, Scottie,
although overtly reluctant, is always willing, always the one taking the
first step. Once in Gavin's office and again in front of his own house,
(the morning after the fake drowning), the manipulators pretend to
give up: Gavin sits down and apologizes for having asked the
impossible; Madeleine gets back in the car and gets ready to leave.
Everything could stop there. But, on both occasions, Scottie takes the
initiative and restarts the machine. Gavin hardly has to persuade
Scottie to undertake his search: he simply suggests that he see
Madeleine, knowing full well that a glimpse of her will be enough to
set the supreme manipulator, Destiny, in motion. After a shot of
Madeleine, glimpsed at Ernie's, there follows a shot of Scottie
beginning his stake-out of the Elster house. Acceptance
(bewitchment) needs no scene of its own; it is contained in the
fade to black between the two scenes. This is the first of three
ellipses of essential moments, all avoided, which another director
would have felt obliged to show. The second ellipse is in the first
scene of physical love between Judy and Scottie, which clearly takes
place in the hotel room after the last transformation (the hair-do
corrected in the bathroom). How is it possible, after such a
fabulous, hallucinatory moment, to sustain such intensity?

In this case, the censorship of the time saved Hitchcock from a
doubly impossible situation. Such a scene can only exist in the
imagination (or in life). But when a film has referred to fantasy
only in the highly-coded context of dreams and two lovers
embrace in the realist set of the hotel room; when one of them,
Scottie, thanks to the most magical camera movement in the
history of cinema, discovers another set around him, that of the
stable at the Dolores Mission where he last kissed a wife whose
double he has now created; isn't that scene the metaphor for the
love scene Hitchcock cannot show? And if love is truly the only
victor over time, isn't this scene per sethelove scene? The third
ellipse, which has long been the joy of connoisseurs, I'll mention
for the sheer pleasure of it. It occurs much earlier, in the first
part. We have just seen Scottie pull Madeleine unconscious out
of San Francisco bay (at Fort Point). Fade to black. Scottie is at
home, lighting a log fire. As he goes to sit down - the camera
follows - he looks straight ahead. The camera follows his look
and ends on Madeleine, seen through the open bedroom door,
asleep in bed with a sheet up to her neck. But as the camera
travels towards her, it also registers her clothes and underclothes
hanging on a drier in the kitchen. The telephone rings and wakes
her up. Scottie, who's come into the room, leaves, shutting the
door. Madeleine reappears dressed in the red dressing-gown he
happened to have draped across the bed. Neither of them alludes
to the intervening period, apart from thedouble entendre in
Scottie's line the next day: `I enjoyed, er ... talking to you ... '
Three scenes, therefore, where imagination wins over rep-
resentation; three moments, three keys which become locks, but
which no present-day director would think of leaving out. On the
contrary, he'd make them heavily explicit and, of course, banal. As
a result of saying it can show anything, cinema has abandoned its
power over the imagination. And, like cinema, this century is
perhaps starting to pay a high price for this betrayal of the
imagination - or, more precisely, those who still have an
imagination, albeit a poor one, are being made to pay that price.

Double entendre? All the gestures, looks, phrases in Vertigo
have a double meaning. Everybody knows that it is probably the
only film where a `double' vision is not only advisable but
indispensable for rereading the first part of the film in the light
of the second. Cabrera Infante called it `the first great surreal-
ist film', and if there is a theme present in the surrealist
imagination (and for that matter, in the literary one), then surely
it is that of the Double, the Doppelganger (who from Doctor Jekyll
to Kagemusha, from the Prisoner of Zenda to Persona, has trod a
royal path through the history of the medium). In Vertigo, the
theme is even reflected in the doubling-up of details: Madeleine's
look towards the tower (the first scene of San Juan Bautista, look-
ing right, while Scottie kisses her) and the line `Too late' which
accompanies it have a precise meaning for the naive spectator,
unaware of the stratagem, but another meaning, just as precise,
for a watchful spectator seeing it a second time. The look and the
line are repeated at the very end, in a shot exactly symmetrical
with the first, by Scottie, looking left, `Too late', just before Judy
falls. For as there is an Other of the Other, there is also a Double
of the Double. The right profile of the first revelation, when
Madeleine momentarily stands still behind Scottie at Ernie's, the
moment which decides everything, is repeated at the beginning
of the second part, so precisely that it's Scottie who, the second
time, is `in front' of Judy. Thus begins a play of mirrors which
can only end in their destruction. We, the audience, discover the
stratagem via the letter Judy doesn't send. Scottie discovers it at
the end via the necklace. (Note that this moment also has its double:
Scottie has just seen the necklace head-on and hasn't reacted. He
only reacts when he sees it in the mirror.) In between, Scottie's
attraction for Judy, who at first was merely a fourth case of
mistaken identity (the constant of a love touched by death; see
Proust) Scottie encountered in his search through the places of
their past, this attraction has crystallized with her profile in front
of the window ('Do I remind you of her?') in that green neon light,
for which Hitchcock, it seems, specially chose the Empire Hotel:
her left profile. This is the moment when Scottie crosses to the
other side of the mirror and his folly is born ...

... If one believes, that is, the apparent intentions of the authors
(authors in the plural because the writer, Samuel Taylor, was
largely Alfred's accomplice). The ingenious stratagem, the way
of making us understand we've been hoodwinked, the stroke of
genius of revealing the truth to us well before the hero, the w
hole thing bathed in the light of anamour fou, `fixed' by what
Cabrera ( who should know) called the `decadent habaneras' of
Bernard Herrman - all that isn't bad. But what if theywere lying
to us as well? Resnais liked to say that nothing forces us to believe
the heroine of Hiroshima. She could be making up everything she
says. The flashbacks aren't the affirmations of the writer, but stories
told by a character. All we know about Scottie at the beginning of
the second part is that he is in a state of total catatonia, that he is
`somewhere else', that it `could last a long time' (according to the
doctor), that he loved a dead woman `and still does' (according to
Midge). Is it too absurd to imagine that this agonizing, though
reasonable, and obstinate soul ('hard-hitting' says Gavin), imagined
this totally extravagant scenario, full of unbelievable coincidences
and entanglements, yet logical enough to drive one to the one
salvatory conclusion: this woman is not dead, I can find her again?

There are many arguments in favour of a dream reading of the
second part of Vertigo. The disappearance of Barbara Bel Geddes
(Midge, his friend and confidante, secretly in love with him) is
one of them. I know very well that she married a rich Texan
oilman in the meantime, and is preparing a dreadful reappearance
as a widow in the Ewing clan; but still, her disappearance from
Vertigois probably unparalleled in the serial economy of
Hollywood scripts. A character important for half the film
disappears without trace - there isn't even an allusion to her in
the subsequent dialogue - until the end of the second part. In
the dream reading of the film, this absence would only be
explained by her last line to Scottie in the hospital: `You don't
even know I'm here ... ' In this case, the entire second part would
be nothing but a fantasy, revealing at last the double of the double.
We were tricked into believing that the first part was the truth,
then told it was a lie born of a perverse mind, that the second
part contained the truth. But what if the first part really were the
truth and the second the product of a sick mind? In that case,
what one may find overcharged and outrageously expressionistic
in the nightmare images preceding the hospital room would be
nothing but a trick, yet another red herring, camouflaging the
fantasy that will occupy us for another hour in order to lead us
even further away from the appearance of realism. The only
exception to this is the moment I've already mentioned, the
change of set during the kiss. In this light, the scene acquires
a new meaning: it's a fleeting confession, a revealing detail, the
blink of a madman's eyelids as his eyes glaze over, the kind of
gaze which sometimes gives a madman away.

There used to be a special effect in old movies where a
character would detach himself from his sleeping or dead
body, and his transparent form would float up to the sky or
into the land of dreams. In the mirror play of Vertigo there
is a similar moment, if in a more subtle form: in the clothes
store when Judy, realizing that Scottie is transforming her
piece by piece into Madeleine (in other words, into the
reality he isn't deemed to know, making her repeat what she
did for Elster), makes to go, and bumps intoa mirror. Scottie
joins her in front of the mirror and, while he's dictating to an
amazed shop assistant the details of one of Madeleine's
dresses, a fabulous shot shows us `all four of them' together:
him and his double, her and her double. At that moment,
Scottie has truly escaped from his hospital chair: there are
two Scotties as well as two Judys. We can therefore add
schizophrenia to the illnesses whose symptoms others have
already judiciously identified in Scottie's behaviour.
Personally, though, I'd leave out necrophilia, so often
mentioned, which seems to me more indicative of a critic's
neurosis than the character's: Scottie continues to love a
truly living Madeleine. In his madness, he looks for proof
in her life.

It's all very well reasoning like this, but one must also
return to the appearance of the facts, obstinate as they are.
There is a crushing argument in favour of a phantasmagoric
reading of the second part. When, after the transformation
and the hallucination, Madeleine/Judy, with the blitheness
of a satisfied body, gets ready for dinner and Scottie asks
her what restaurant she'd like to go to, she immediately
suggests Ernie's. It's the place where they first met (but
Scottie isn't meant to know this yet - Judy's careless `It's
our place' is the first give-away before the necklace). So
they go therewithout making a reservation. Just try doing
this in San Francisco and you'll understand we're in a dream.
As Gavin says, San Francisco has changed. During a
screening at Berkeley in the early eighties, when everyone
had forgotten the movie (the old fox had kept the rights in
order to sell them at a premium to TV, hence the cuts for
commercials and the changed ending) and the word was
that it was just another minor thriller, I remember the
audience gasping with amazement on seeing the panoramic
view of the city which opens the second part. It's another city,
without skyscrapers (apart from Coppola's Sentinel Building),
a picture as dated as the engraving Scottie looks at when
Elster first pronounces those two fateful words. And it was
only twenty years ago ... San Francisco, of course, is nothing
but another character in the film. Samuel Taylor wrote to me
agreeing that Hitchcock liked the town but only knew `what
he saw from hotels or restaurants or out of the limo window'.
He was `what you might call a sedentary person'. But he still
decided to use the Dolores Mission and, strangely, to make
the house on Lombard Street Scottie's home `because of the
reddoor'. Taylor was in love with his city (Alex Coppel, the
first writer, was `a transplanted Englishman') and put all his
love into the script; and perhaps even more than that, if I am
to believe a rather cryptic phrase at the end of his letter: `I
rewrote the script at the same time that I explored San
Francisco and recaptured my past ... 'Words which could apply
as much to the characters as to the authors and which afford us
another interpretation, like an added flat to a key, of the
direction given by Elster to Scottie at the start of the film, when
he's describing Madeleine's wanderings; the pillars Scottie gazes
at for so long on the other side of Lloyd Lake - the Portals of the
Past. This personal note would explain many things: the amour
fou, the dream signs, all the things that make Vertigo a film
which is both typically and untypically Hitchcockian in relation
to the rest of his work, the work of a perfect cynic. Cynical to
the point of adding for television - an anxiously moral medium,
as we all know - a new ending to the film: Scottie reunited with
Midge and the radio reporting Elster's arrest. Crime doesn't pay.

Ten years later, time has continued to work its effect. What used
to mean San Francisco for me is disappearing fast. The spiral of
time, like Saul Bass's spiral in the credit sequence, the spiral of
Madeleine's hair and Carlotta's in the portrait, cannot stop
swallowing up the present and enlarging the contours of the past.
The Empire Hotel has become the York and lost its green neon
lights; theMcKittrick Hotel, the Victorian house where Madeleine
disappears like a ghost (another inexplicable detail if we ignore
the dream-reading: what of the hotel's mysterious janitress?
`A paid accomplice' was Hitchcock's reply to Truffaut. Come on,
Alfred!) has been replaced by a school built of concrete.
But Ernie's restaurant is still there, as is Podesta Baldocchi's
flower-shop with its tiled mosaics where one proudly remembers
Kim Novak choosing a bouquet. The cross-section of sequoia
is still at the entrance to Muir Woods, on the other side of the
bay. The Botanical Gardens were less fortunate: they are now
parked underground. ( Vertigo could almost be shot in the same
locations, unlike its remake in Paris.) The Veterans' Museum is
still there, as is the cemetery at the Dolores Mission and San Juan
Bautista, south of another mission, where Hitchcock added (by an
optical effect) a high tower, the real one being so low you'd hardly
sprain an ankle falling off it, complete with stable, carriages and
stuffed horse used in the film just as they are in life. And of
course, there's Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge, which he
wanted to cover with birds at the end of The Birds. The Vertigo tour
is now obligatory for lovers of San Francisco. Even the Pope,
pretending otherwise, visited two locations: the Golden Gate Bridge
and (under the pretext of kissing an AIDS patient) the Dolores
Mission. Whether one accepts the dream reading or not, the
power of this once ignored film has become a commonplace,
proving that the idea of resurrecting a lost love can touch any
human heart, whatever he or she may say. `You're my second
chance!' cries Scottie as he drags Judy up the stairs of the tower.
No one now wants to interpret these words in their superficial
sense, meaning his vertigo has been conquered. It's about
reliving a moment lost in the past, about bringing it back to
life only to lose it again.

One does not resurrect the dead, one doesn't look back at
Eurydice. Scottie experiences the greatest joy a man can
imagine, a second life, in exchange for the greatest tragedy,
a second death. What do video games, which tell us more
about our unconscious than the works of Lacan, offer us?
Neither money nor glory, but a new game. The possibility
of playing again. `A second chance.' A free replay. And
another thing: Madeleine tells Scottie she managed to find her
way back to the house `by spotting the Coit Tower' - the
tower which dominates the surrounding hills and whose name
makes visiting French tourists laugh. 'Well, it's the first time I
ever had to thank the Coit Tower,' says Scottie, the blase San
Franciscan. Madeleine would never find her way back today.
The bushes have grown on Lombard Street, hiding all
landmarks. The house itself, number goo, has changed. The
new owners have got rid of (or the old owner kept) the
cast-iron balcony with its Chinese inscription `Twin
Happiness'. The door is still red, but now blessed with a
notice which, in its way, is a tribute to Alfred: `Warning:
Crime Watch'. And, from the steps where Kim Novak and
James Stewart are first reunited, no one can see any more
the tower `in the shape of a fire-hose', offered as a
posthumous gift to the San Francisco Fire Brigade by a
millionairess called Lilli Hitchcock Coit ...

Obviously, this text is addressed to those who know Vertigo
by heart. But do those who don't deserve anything at all?

-chris. marker