J. M. Tyree

WAYS OF LOOKING AT VERTIGO

My Madeleines 

The old stories continue on in the present, binding the future with the past. I’m in this story. You’re in this story. We’re all in the story, piecing it together. Chronology won’t help, or, rather, time might talk backwards, impossible.

One story is about following a thread through a maze (of streets or memories), looking for an escape route from monstrous things. This is an ancient story that repeats itself from time to time. The setting is the famously problematic filmmaker’s adopted home of California, USA, the place where Hitchcock emigrated. More specifically, its locations encompass the most haunted precincts of its most uncanny city, honing in on the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, where more people end their lives deliberately than anywhere else in America, it is said. Death by water.

So this is a different old story, about a quest into the underworld. Another kind of story. But this one happens every day. You wish to rescue someone or something beloved from the ashes or the waves. It might be an actual flesh-and-blood lover or a ghost. Or else it involves the recovery of a sense of self, or lost time, the past writ large, or the nightmare of history. We’ve all been there.

Maybe it’s just an errant attempt to understand how all stories are connected. Have a madeleine. Bite into the Proustian cake that is also a sponge and a shell as well as a time-traveling device in another book and the name of a lover in the movie, and also, the icon of pilgrimages across Europe towards holy places, a nest of linked trails, each marked by a shell, all pointing west, in the direction of an unquiet burial ground which might be fake. Some inner journey to a private Compostela? Further west, towards another Spanish church, the Mission Dolores in San Francisco. Time zones collapse. Eras meld. Was it a ghost? Was it fun? asks Midge.

Because the film is about modern America and how it is built on yawning graves, the protagonist will drive a car. In the movie, there’s a painting of a dead woman who has come back to life in order to haunt and possess the woman the man loves (or so he thinks). To drag her down into the ocean, the source of all life on this planet, which is also fatal to the suicide, calling with its sirens down into the depths.

Orpheus and Eurydice. Theseus and Ariadne. Tristan and Isolde. Dante and Beatrice. Proust and Albertine. Scottie and Madeleine. Chris Marker and Hitchcock. Veronika and Veronique. Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer. I’m messing this up. The descent into hell, which is also a maze and a spiral and a city. The fall and the recovery that is always partial and fragile. Survive and be torn to pieces. Time lost along with love and desperately regained in facing the impossible. Bringing the dead back to life. You and me, my lover, walking among the graves of the Mission Dolores. How have we managed to stick together all these years, without ever having met?

What’s the nature of this remote entanglement between us and these parallel lives, centuries, stories, myths, paintings, books, and films? How many times and dimensions are we allowed to inhabit simultaneously? Where are we, and, equally important to understand, when are we? What’s this invisible thread connecting us? Is it love or obsession? A baseless fabric of vision or a desperate illusion? Happiness or self-destruction? Might we catch a glimpse of one another, or touch hands, somewhere in the space between worlds and selves? Is the water safe or deadly? Is the fire warm or burning?

This process began as a form of remote viewing, tele-vision or telepathy, being somewhere you’re not, in two places at once. Bilocation. Parallel universes submitted for your consideration, Twilight Zone style. Start anywhere. Like me, you might disappear in Washington, DC, in 2022 and—cue Bernard Herrmann’s circular film score—reappear in San Francisco in the 1950s or London or Germany decades earlier still. You might see Kafka at the movies at the turn of the last century or Hitchcock directing a lost film in Munich in the 1920s.

You roam across nine time zones and a hundred years or so, in space and time from California to Europe, trying to remember all of your encounters along the way. This evil movie was deeply inside you and you were lost inside of it, without having traveled a mile. Cinematic anti-travel might seem like a pale substitute for the real thing, but these works of art are far from safe spaces. They were more like black holes towards which the light of days gravitated, never to return, if black holes provided passage between universes, wormholes or something. You could be crushed or liberated by the odyssey and you might never be at home again. Going nowhere, without a clue, without a ring of invisibility, without any Mount Doom into which you might drop your baggage and simultaneously save the world and yourself.

The problematic Hitchcock’s problematic masterpiece had been named the Greatest Film of All Time by Sight & Sound magazine's international survey of critics in 2012. I had been given a ballot that year but remorselessly spent it on The Lady Vanishes (1938), trying to resist the gaslighting of decades of critical opinion. I strongly preferred the razor wit of this international spy tale cowritten by Hitchcock’s wife and coauthor, Alma Reville, to Vertigo’s clumsy misogyny and cod-Freudian death drives, its buy-in to the bogus mythology of the femme fatale. I wanted to live within the splendor of the earlier film's confident Margaret Lockwood, especially her triumph over male presumption during the prelude to the disastrous war everyone knew was looming. I wanted to watch her win. I was much more interested in the supposedly minor or transitional work, even though it was one that helped Hitchcock get to Hollywood. I wanted to know why Hitchcock had been much more optimistic in his wry outlook when the world was far worse off in the late 1930s than it was in the late 1950s, amidst Vertigo’s suicidal despair. The answer of some scholars was that in between these two points in time Hitchcock had seen the camps, during his brief stint back home making the Holocaust documentary Night Will Fall. Hitchcock supervised the editing in 1945 as his wartime effort on behalf of the British government, but the film was shelved and remained unreleased until 2014.

Vertigo meant something to me personally. I had lived in San Francisco a block away from the Mission Dolores when I was studying and teaching creative writing at Stanford. The bells of the church were part of my routine, and I spent my fair share of time haunting the graveyard where the fictional revenant Carlotta Valdes was buried before she supposedly returned to possess the soul of Madeleine Elster.

Sorry, I forgot to recount the basic plot—but it is incomprehensible, and in any event the plot is not the point of Vertigo. Madeleine is in fact Judy Barton (Kim Novak), an accomplice to the killing of the real Madeleine by her husband Gavin Elster, who convinces Barton to pretend to be Madeleine, and to pretend to be possessed by “the mad Carlotta.” Retired detective Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) is hired by Gavin to follow the woman he believes to be Madeleine, in the process falling in love with her and fishing her out of the drink at Fort Point. If you love movies you know the story. The point of it all, I have come to feel, is seeing an animated version of Jimmy Stewart’s severed head falling through a grave forever, absolutely surreal dreamspace invading mainstream Hollywood. Everybody knows the story, but we also know that Vertigo is a mobius strip that is impossible to summarize. Once you start talking about it, you cannot stop.

And, yes, Novak’s choice of pretend suicide is the actual spot in San Francisco Bay where, in real life, more people choose to die than any other in the United States, by jumping from the Golden Gate bridge into the waves below. Death by falling or by drowning, accounts of attempted suicide, journeys into the underworld and the fatal shimmer of the depths of the water—vertigo. I knew the spot and these feelings well from walks with my wife and friends over the years, many of them troubled writers who shared my tendencies towards abyss-gazing, some of them people I wasn't sure would make it. The accidentally revealed Google search for “too sad to go on.”

A Movie Inside a Book Inside a Movie

We’re going further backwards, in the wrong direction entirely, before the beginning of the story. The trailer is for an upcoming film called Vertigo. It opens on… a book. A book? The book is a dictionary. We know it’s a dictionary because it has the word “Dictionary” embossed on the cover in gold lettering set into a hideous blood-red crocodile skin pattern. The book flips open and we’re on a page of definitions that also features an illustration of vertebrae. The page number is 1621. In the Catholic catechism this is the number denoting the Latin rite of the celebration of marriage during Mass. This ensures “the connection of all the sacraments with the Paschal mystery of Christ.” (Easter means that the beloved rises from the grave and is witnessed after death, like Carlotta Valdes. The Church is the “beloved bride” for whom Jesus “gave up himself.”)

Already an abyss opens and the film has not even begun to be advertised. Later, Scottie will dream of decapitation and falling endlessly into a grave. But that number is a coincidence, meaningless, surely, or happenstance, at best. The dictionary page features words from “vert” to “vespers” (sunset begins the Orthodox liturgical day, as Catholic Hitchcock might know, and thus time is reversed, down is up and up is down). As for “vert,” it’s green. Green and red will be the primary colors of Vert-igo. Life and death. Combined in one glorious image: Novak’s green dress against the stunning red backdrop of Ernie’s restaurant during the scene when Stewart first sees her as Madeleine and falls for her. The red is the red of the crocodile-skin dictionary, the fake book. The green is the green of the ghostly neon light that suffuses the room when Novak, now as Judy, completes her final transformation back into Madeleine in their hotel room. The Hollywood Code forbade hinting at what might have happened next in that room, adultery piled on adultery, murder on murder, haunting and possession, sex and death and Technicolor. In the restaurant, Novak almost seems to disappear into a mirror as she exits. In the hotel room, she floats into the fog of deadly love.

Vert is not just green, the real dictionaries want us to know. It’s heraldic green, the green of a coat of arms, resplendent with symbolism. And, for what it’s worth, vert also has another, archaic meaning specific to the use of land, the legal right to harvest the green stuff. Now Novak/Madeleine/Carlotta points at the rings of the ancient tree and says, “There I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you.” Then, if I recall correctly, they’re out near the ocean, frantic with illicit touches. And, of course—not to bury the lede—“vert” simply means “vertical,” as in heights, as in acrophobia, as in vertigo.

“I look up, I look down, I look up, I look down,” Scottie says in Midge’s apartment, trying to prove his competency and manhood before getting dizzy and fainting away like the ingénue in a Gothic corridor when confronted with the first ghost.

We’re not going to get anywhere fast going at this speed. We’re two seconds into the trailer and haven’t even reached the film. Zoom in on this highly suspect definition while a fifties-style television-announcer type of voice declaims the words we’re reading:

VERTIGO:  ver’-ti-go—
a feeling of dizziness…
a swimming in the head…
figuratively a state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror.

The page spins and is devoured by the surreal galaxy of abstract spirals designed by John Whitney for Saul Bass’s astonishing opening credits sequence. That’s it, we’re in. This was never a movie after all. Vertigo was always a book. A fake dictionary or dream dictionary in which the entire imaginative journey of the film is embedded. The film is pitched as one that “gives new meaning to the word suspense.”

Then we see the film’s title, presented movie-style in those inverted commas whose purpose is never clear to me. Typographically, these quotation marks stand in for italics, I suppose, but they create an unnerving feeling, as if to say, this is “Vertigo,” but, like, not really. It’s quote-unquote vertigo—a fiction about vertigo. James Stewart awakens from a nightmare. Is he dreaming the dictionary, or is he trapped inside of it? Novak inches along the staircase of the Mission where she’ll meet her end, almost a spoiler for the film. They’re both utterly terrified. Cut to their embraces near the ocean. Novak says, “I don’t want to die,” but the sea beckons. The absurdly confident pitchman’s voice returns: “A beautiful girl, haunted by the desperate, unexplainable urge to destroy herself… What was the strange attraction that brought these two together?” Novak, without her clothes, looks up at Stewart, all eyes, from bed, a false advertisement for the shattering of the Hollywood Code. The voice drones on about “the specter from the past” and “the compulsion that drove her to the point of no return.” Image of the Golden Gate, image of a woman edging toward her plunge into the sea. Eurydice rescued by Orpheus.

That boundlessly confident salesman’s voice again, offscreen, like before, now descending into a particularly poetic kind of pulp gibberish allowed only in the greatest hack detective stories: “It broke down all barriers between past and present, between life and death, between the golden girl in the dark tower and the tawdry redhead he tried to remake in her image.” (A little bit nasty and unnecessary, that comment—Judy could have easily just left town and didn’t have to get involved again with Scottie. It would require writing a whole novel, told from Judy’s perspective, to explain her actions in the film, and even then we might not understand why she returns to the flower shop where he first stalked her.) And then the depravity of 1950s misogyny, a misunderstanding of love so deep and foul that it cannot wash out with any number of Equal Rights Amendments. Judy: “If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?” Scottie: “Yes.” Hey, that’s not love! Neither one of these people understands love. They only know about self-destruction, the repetition compulsion, and the hopeless confusion of Thanatos and Eros. “Then I’ll do it,” she says, heartbreakingly. “I don’t care anymore about me.” Title cards hold out the enticement of “KIM NOVAK playing two amazing roles.”

Then Jimmy Stewart leaps on to a rooftop, scrambles, and begins to fall. Catching himself by a rain gutter, he’s suspended over a city at a fatal height in a position from which no rescue is possible. This is the end of the trailer but the beginning of the film. Many have tried and all have failed to explain how Scottie is saved from falling to his death in the first minutes of the film. Vertigo starts off with a blatant impossibility, leading many obsessives of this film to conclude that the entire story takes place inside Scottie’s head. By these lights, this is an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge movie in which the entire picture happens in the instant before the protagonist’s death. Or maybe the whole thing, soup to nuts, is a dream or nightmare about falling, with dream lovers and dream logic and dreamy, dreamy San Francisco swimming in one’s head.

A book is a stationary object that moves. Its illusion of movement is fundamental—ink on a page is as still as the frames of a moving picture that jumps into life when the brain is fooled and confused by persistence of vision. Yet we’re transported. Something comes after vertigo—more vertigo. Vertigo upon vertigo, or vertigo after vertigo, or Vertigo on Vertigo.

J. M. TYREE is the coauthor, with Michael McGriff, of Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object/Deep Vellum), a National Public Radio Best Books selection. He teaches at VCUarts and serves as an editor at New England Review.