“Je sui,” fet il, “uns chevaliers
qui quier ce que trover ne puis;
assez ai quis, et rien ne truis.”
[“I am,” he said, “a knight
seeking what I cannot find;
long have I sought and nothing I
have found.”]
Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain
Note to the reader:
Those who have not seen Vertigo should proceed no further.
*
There is a remarkable moment—one among legion—in Vertigo (1958), stunning for at once its simplicity and its complex depths. It is surely a gateway, although to know into what it leads is a challenge not fully to be met by even the most appreciative in the film’s large audience. Judy Barton has been “entertaining” Scottie Ferguson in her room at the Empire Hotel. As far as he can tell, instant by instant, it is difficult to be sure whether she is intimidated to have him there, or pleased. She is perhaps both, in alternation. But she is far from very comfortable, and he is by the second more and more curious to know her, to take her to dinner, to come close. Notable in their little conversation is that Hitchcock actually brings us physically closer to Judy than he brings us to Scottie; one could joke that Scottie is envious of our proximity to her, envious of some proximity, to be sure, and wishes to be like us or at least not to be the man he is forced by circumstance to be at this instant. When the film is done, we will surely recognize in retrospect how our poor Scottie would have done well to be more like us than like himself, to have been able, as were and are, to escape from this film.
Scottie leaves the Empire, at any rate, promising to pick Judy up in half an hour—-but no, she needs more time to get ready so, all right, one hour. The door shuts behind him. For half a second we linger upon that shut door.
And now the infamous passage that so many critics of the film insist is misplaced, where Judy slowly turns to the camera, rabid trepidation in her eyes; then goes to her closet and brings out a suitcase and some clothes; and sits at a little table to write, “Dear Scottie, . . . And so you found me . . ..” (1) As she speaks what she is writing, essentially a deconstruction of the theatrical plot arranged and produced by Gavin Elster for murdering his wife—as she goes through it, as it were scene by scene, the film takes us on her memory voyage and we see what she is claiming at this moment to remember. Swiftly, then, we are back in the hotel room with her, and she has stood up with her letter, is considering it, is weighing its value, and then, just as Lina Aysgarth does with another letter in Suspicion, she tears it up. So it is that what she has just recounted to us goes no further now; that we are burdened with a knowledge that supercedes that of the film’s principal character, placed higher than he is on Thomas Scheff’s “ladder of awareness.” (2)
I want to give some attention to Judy’s recollection, or her dream, certainly her narrative. What we see as she voices it, is this:
• 1, Judy racing to the doors of the Mission San Juan Bautista tower and entering;
• 2, Scottie following;
• 3, Judy climbing but Scottie unable to climb;
• 4, Judy in the bell chamber where Gavin is holding the lifeless body of the real Madeleine Elster;
• 5, Judy looking his way—some kind of signal—and Gavin hurling the body out, then instantaneously—
• 6, —clamping his hand around Judy’s mouth, pressing hard, and drawing her away from the opening. As they move into shadow we move out of this passage and back to the Empire Hotel.
A few passages earlier in the film, at the finale moment of what could be called The Happy Escapade of Love, we are watching Madeleine pulling away from Scottie on the grass outside the Mission, running to the door; Scottie following, seeing the door to the staircase, heading up the staircase, pausing on his journey twice (for a “vertigo” shot depicting his feeling and view as he looks down), then flagging short of the top. But quickly, just as he flags, a piercing scream (what in my childhood was called a ”blood-curdling scream”) and the body falling past a window beside him; Scottie peering out and down to see the splayed woman on the Spanish-tiled roof and the approaching priest and nuns on the garden path; and then a high Dutch angle looking down on him from outside and near the top of the tower, as he cowers near the Mission door and then sneaks away (a shot that will be reprised, of course, in North by Northwest).
And then—here—comes the remarkable moment (as I have billed it):
Gavin with his hand clamped over Judy’s mouth. (3)
[IMAGE 2 HERE PLEASE]
Judy, it seems, is not making the scream we hear from Madeleine” as she falls off the tower: to be precise, the scream we heard earlier, along with Scottie, at the “precipice.” Madeleine herself, the real Madeleine, is now, we are learning, a corpse—in Judy’s memory flashback, now already—so that the scream in Scottie’s ears cannot be coming from her. But, as we see in the memory, there is no one else nearby to make a scream that loud. It can be only Judy screaming. Judy faking a scream from Madeleine. Except that here in the hotel room, in Judy’s replay, there is no scream. I will shortly come to the fact that there is nothing but music in this replay, nothing vocal, but it is enough at this moment to notice. And Judy, apparently, certainly does not remember herself screaming or even remember any scream—-this instant with the absence of the scream is her avowed memory and in that avowed memory there is no scream. But we know, or like to believe we know, that the event she is replaying indeed did have a scream: our “knowledge” comes from our trust in Scottie on the staircase. Further, we must see, the screaming original was Hitchcock’s vision, even, if we might like to say it, Hitchcock’s avowed memory—-no one else’s—since it is Hitchcock who has given it to Scottie to hear. Let us walk slowly through this riddle.
• [1] We (of course) take Hitchcock’s reading and demonstration of the scene as correct and as full and complete as he wishes it to be. With Scottie, we look out a window and see the body falling past; we hear that scream. It would have to be this way for our original view beside Scottie: we must have no tickle of suspicion that this plummeting body is already dead, dead before the fall, and therefore no suspicion that it could not have been the origin of that scream—any such suspicions would point to a plot in effect, above Scottie’s head. To share Scottie’s innocent viewpoint and have our experience come to the rounding point, we must have that scream. And in order to experience Hitchcock’s Vertigo, we must perforce share Scottie’s innocent viewpoint.
• [2] As Judy goes about her recollection, she recollects with insider knowledge—we all do that when we recollect. The little episode we are watching as she talks out her letter is a way of giving us to share her knowledge, to be in her: not so much to see it as she remembers it, but to see her memory. I say that she has “insider” knowledge meaning, not merely in the obvious way that she is a figure thinking aloud and we are out here seeing what, in the closet of her mind, she is thinking (thinking/remembering) but in a more intriguing way, too, a way woven into the diegesis: she was part of a drama configured by Elster and she knew the script, her lines, and the action that would be forthcoming action: it was all planned. (All actors with scripts know more than the audience does about where things are headed). As to this drama, this arrangement, Judy was one of the few insiders. Also, as she is remembering in the hotel room she is activating her deep knowledge not only of the plan but also that there was a plan, that it was all planned, rendered into a script that, indeed, has faded some in time because it was played out some notable while ago (time for Scottie to have that dulled and dulling view of the inquest; then his mental breakdown; this his journey in search of ghosts). She murmurs in her narration (she pens in her letter) that Elster knew “you” wouldn’t get up the stairs—-she’s writing to Scottie, but also means us, because somehow Elster knew about Hitchcock: that Hitchcock would see to it that if Scottie couldn’t get up the stairs we wouldn’t either; or if he did not know about Hitchcock, as he planned, surely he knew about any peeping outsiders (such as we are and were), the sorts who would try to watch the feeble man climb. Elster’s foreknowledge that he would be hidden from Scottie’s view is now visible to us, as he stands regally and tense in preparation with the dead body a prop to be tossed. (4) Now,
• [3] As Judy recollects it—-Judy is still in the process of recollecting—Elster prevented a scream. You can think repressed or edited or stage managed—it doesn’t matter which, because what’s simply true is that with his hand on her mouth he has made it so that she cannot scream. Either as dramatist and director he doesn’t want any scream at all, or he doesn’t want her scream. So Judy must calculate, looking back, sharing a confidence with us—because after all, what we are seeing (Elster, his hand, her mouth) is what Judy is saying (penning), surely what Hitchcock is having Judy say, not, perhaps, what Hitchcock himself would have said were we to have asked him. It may be that Judy is surmising now that Elster would have been concerned that outwardly (for Scottie? for the world?) any such scream as she might have emitted would have been a telltale marker of . . . Judy. Judy herself, Judy’s scream—that is, Judy in the role of Madeleine, Madeleine screaming, except that Madeleine, as we are to think, as Scottie is to think, is already tumbling past us as we hear. Scottie will know that “Madeleine” voice: he has been conversing with her: “Only one is a wanderer.” It may be that now, thinking back, Judy sees the two voices—her voice; her “Madeleine” voice—as separate, distinct, just as separate as the two being always (secretly, offstage) were. We certainly don’t think Judy’s voice is Madeleine’s voice. Judy is either imagining an Elster who has made a division between his character Madeleine and his performer Judy, who has come to believe their voices are different and telltale and that Judy’s scream would be a giveaway that she, not Madeleine, has reached the top of the tower; or else she is remembering and trying to reimagine her own inability to make expression at that critical moment, Elster’s big hand clamping her mouth shut. For all we can know, at the crucial instant beside the bell she was in fact mute but in order to recollect this muteness—a strange thing to recollect—she must invent a Gavin with a hand over her mouth, a prophylaxis when the voice would surely have erupted. She is at any rate working to grasp how in her spirit she could be screaming at the explosion of this moment yet not screaming; thus, how Elster could have been imprisoning that scream for some tactical reason. Once again, so we don’t lose the thread: we are not seeing Elster repressing a scream, we are seeing Judy in a hotel room, having met Scottie again, recalling the repression of a scream that could conceivably have come out of the mouth of that girl she dream-remembers at the top of the tower, dream-remembers as herself.
• [4] In fact, one would argue, narratively speaking, Madeleine Elster must have screamed as she fell, because we heard a female voice, and there was a scream and instantly then a fall. If we do take this as fact (and I am not arguing that we should), Judy, who was in the tower, thus very close by, also heard that scream. More. As, up there, she would have seen Madeleine as a corpse, she herself must have made that scream “as Madeleine.” And then abruptly the scream was cut off by the clamping hand. A clamping hand because Gavin was afraid Judy, wholly out of control, would scream too long—-past the point when the body thumps down. But lay aside our factuality and go with Hitchcock. Dream-remembering at the Empire, Judy brings in that protective, that prophylactic hand before and not during a scream, to prevent it not to cut it off. As she is now staging it (re-staging it)—and Hitchcock is now giving Judy to stage/re-stage it; this is Hitchcock’s staging of Judy’s staging/re-staging—Gavin caught her before she could vocalize, pulled her into himself, found her mouth with his hand.
• [5] For Judy, then, as she knows it (again) in her hotel room, she was not able to vocalize in the tower; and the engagement having come to a close at its theater there were no further possibilities of vocalizing; and so this narrative silence and narrative clamping make up Judy’s final exercise in letting herself go as the character Madeleine. But:
• [6] As she writes to Scottie, as she tells us what she is writing to Scottie, she neglects to mention the scream altogether. I should put this more bluntly. We see onscreen Gavin’s hand clamping Judy’s mouth prophylactically. But as we listen to Judy narrating this vision we see, we do not hear her mention the word “scream.” When we hear—but also see—what she is thinking as she writes, the scream, even a stifled scream, is gone. The ultimate stifling. Judy may now be screaming out her memory but she is both “showing” and forgetting or blocking that there was a scream. Judy’s version of the event is screamless. In place of the scream is—actually demonstrated graphically through gesture—repression.
• [7] We must not do what Hitchcock makes it so deliciously easy to do: let ourselves become so absorbed with this little narration that we forget that Judy is making it. It is easy to take the point of view that she is merely seeing again what was actually there for her, but the closest Hitchcock allows us to come to what was actually there for her is this recollection. In Hitchcock all actuality is narrated actuality. What we can know for certain is that Judy is shown as authoring this account, and as not placing a telltale scream as she authors it. If the authoring itself is not a replacement for the scream (if she is not screaming this little story), then she is denying some original agency. I say some because I do not know how to put a label on this agency: one might hope to think it was Judy/Madeleine’s agency, but we didn’t see/hear that onscreen. Surely original agency would be not the dead Madeleine’s but Judy’s own, as an actor in role, coming to a culminating moment but being held back. If we don’t see this we can conclude by elimination of improbabilities the curtain falling on this actor’s performance. Call her an actor upon whom the producer has suddenly exercised a constraint. For her to accept that she screamed—even to accept that she wanted to scream—she would have to identify thoroughly—even up to the ultimate moment—with the dead woman she is playing (up to that point); she would have to believe in the role, even to the death scream. Call it “method acting” if you would like to. But to fail now at the Empire Hotel to accept that in the tower at San Juan Bautista she screamed, that there was a scream or even a desire for a scream, is to have Judy drop out of role half a beat too early. The scream happened without her; and without her the body of her character fell into space.
Dramaturgical Illogic
A number of contradictory observations could be offered:
• [a] There is no scream in Judy’s memory sequence, true; but in that sequence there is altogether no sound, and so the absence of a scream is no special absence. I will return to this, just below.
• [b] In the earlier killing sequence, where we do not arrive at the top of the tower but linger in hesitation with Scottie, we see by her disappearance from view that Madeleine, our current Madeleine, does arrive. We note, too, that the death scream comes almost immediately upon that arrival, with the body falling after it. This is as though the scream in “Madeleine’s leap” came at the cusp of the leap, not during it. However, the implication here is that if, as Judy remembers it, Gavin had the dead body (the unscreaming dead body) and tossed it, then clamped his hand over her mouth, this clamping could have happened only after “Madeleine’s scream,” scripted to be given on his cue (that we don’t see) yet given—if given—in a way we cannot comprehend. The prophylaxis was aimed against not Madeleine’s death scream but against a second scream of alarm, Judy’s alarm, a now successfully prevented second scream. Yet, to be clear: we see Judy at the top, watching Gavin and the body at the window, and Gavin hurling the body, and this Judy who is watching not moving her mouth.
• [c] This potential hypothetical second scream of alarm, had Judy been on point of giving it, could only have been an evocation from a “someone else,” we can now say the actor (Judy Barton) not the character (Madeleine Elster) but at the moment as she remembers this “someone else” would have been herself. It would have been an unscripted “real” scream as against the scripted characteristic scream we did hear in the earlier scene. In conversation Willliam Rothman has suggested for Judy, a cri de coeur. When in the finale Scottie asks Judy, “Why did you scream?”—Hitchcock is covering his bets, knowing we will be willing to gather that Judy did scream, although he never shows us Judy screaming—he is perhaps trying to come to terms fully with the theatrical set-up that is being revealed to him, the you being not the character Judy was playing but Judy as one who played, who was engaged in playing a character. Perhaps Scottie is putting the jigsaw of the past together piece by piece, and here now is the ultimate piece, the realization on his part that the “you” who screamed (in a scream for which we are to take him at his word) wasn’t the person he thought screamed before her death but the person he is talking to now. Then > now > then > now > then > now . . . ..
• [d] In the reveal sequence in the hotel room, Hitchcock is perhaps present as target of Judy’s letter, at least ostensibly, since having puppeted the Elster puppetry beginning to end he is ultimately the audience before whom the characters are revealed and now he is revealing a principal character revealing herself to him as much as to us: a star just going over the performance in the dressing room. Or else, if he is not her target, he is present affording us a show of what she remembers, therefore present in effect “confessing” the crime to us. One could argue, I think, that in every moment of his work Hitchcock is present somehow, but I think I will have a more moving suggestion, below.
As to the general (musically enhanced) silence of Judy’s memory. First, the filmmaker needs a stylistic division between the reprise climb of the tower and the earlier one, the echo and its origin, and he achieves this division by making Judy’s memory in the reprise a silent film. There is more, however. Not being one of the world’s composers, as Bernard Herrmann was, I cannot be sure of composers’ powers, but surely those of us who are not composers do not as a rule remember the sounds of our past experiences; sound is too diffuse, to multidirectional, too equivocal as to centrality and focus—a composer knows how to make an acoustic organization that will reduce these problems. But for me, certainly, and I think for others, the timbre of a voice, the pauses, the gasps—all these disappear under the pictorial memory. For this memory reprise, silence is the best sound. Or: Judy’s narrating voice is the music.
But further, Hitchcock confronts a serious dramaturgical problem, that is, a challenge in revealing his explanatory story to an attentive viewer, In this memory sequence, he needs, all at once, to: get Madeleine into the staircase and heading up the tower; show Scottie helplessly following her until she arrives at the top and finds a little scene we cannot have anticipated; show Elster holding the dead real Madeleine at the opening, Madeleine and Judy dressed identically, and throwing Madeleine out as Judy rushes up; show Elster clamping Judy’s mouth shut and pulling Judy away into the shadows, still holding her mouth. But also, in accomplishing all this, Hitchcock must take care to:
•• [I] arrange for every one of these narrative points to be made with equal soundness or “truth”;
•• [II] have Judy’s recounting managed for the screen with excellent clarity, that is, visually no ambiguity whatsoever, because he must also
•• [III] make it all happen very quickly—as it were, in one single fluid phrase of motion that is racing forward, because he deeply knows that
•• [IV] the viewer’s mounting thrill and breathless anticipation must be satisfied with ongoing and instantaneous happening, happening that is full of implication yet without décor, without development, without delay of any kind: any accretion, decoration, needless addition will take up attention, and viewer attention in a sequence like this is like water in the desert. Hitchcock knows here, as always, that
•• [V] of supreme importance is neither Madeleine nor Judy nor Gavin nor Scottie nor the tower, but: the viewer with an urge to rush forward that cannot be quelled. The viewer rushing forward . . ..
Logically, it could have been fulsome to have Judy rush up, arrive, issue a blood-curdling scream as she rushed to Elster’s side, see the body fly out, and then find the hand clamping her mouth. We can tell ourselves, indeed, that this is what happened. But if we did that we would be misperceiving and miscalculating. The invocation of a double scream, achievable through Judy emitting and then being blocked from a second emission, is a logical feature of the moment, but it adds a stymying complexity to our view of the speeding Judy as she reaches Elster, a complexity in which we would have seen her scream out of nowhere and before we could see why, and this would be one more thing for us to compute: Judy’s nerves, Judy’s condition as a person, which are not Hitchcock’s focus. Afterward, thinking back, we might be in a position to compute, but at the moment, as the scene rushed on, any such instigation to wonder about a scream, about Judy, about what is happening would block the rush, would for a quarter of a breath put us on hold, would clamp us, and in this horrible caesura would also contradict the already noted speed of Judy rushing up the stairs (that sets the speed of our anticipations). So, while there might have been logic to the arrangement of actions, had they occurred this way,. . . nevertheless, as far as Judy’s memory sequence goes, the look of her screaming before being prevented from screaming again, giving some facial expression, would have confounded our ability to follow what was essential—the focus on Elster. It would have slowed the pace and, ultimately, would have marred the structure Hitchcock gives us.
Because: we are not, thanks to Judy, watching what happened. We are watching what she can remember having happened. We are in her memory. And my point here is that the clamping hand is part of her memory, not part of the event. When we watch Scottie helplessly watching the demise of Madeleine we are not seeing or thinking of Elster. But we are also not seeing or thinking of Elster’s prophylactic hand. Judy cannot get that prophylactic hand out of her visualizing mind, she sees it (again) powerfully. But does she remove it from the narrating mind?, since although we see the hand played out (in our vision of her memory) it doesn’t come into the written confession, that she is speaking as we watch.
That she is speaking as we watch . . . that we are watching as she speaks . . . that in watching, because the showing is so articulate and so vibrant, we are forgetting that she is speaking all this, and that she is speaking all this because she is writing all this . . . in a letter that will not be given over, because as recipient of a story, this story, this story of death, Scottie is so much less important than we are.
Not only doesn’t she say “scream”; she also doesn’t say “hand.” We see the hand, we hear the scream, and only because although she does not say “scream” or “hand” she is, of course, saying both words, writing both words.
We might reasonably think that since the prophylactic hand was not part of the rendition of the killing offered initially to us (as a suicide); and since in a puzzling, vital way it was not in Judy’s recollected (guilty?) version, albeit source of so powerful an action; and since Judy remembers it this way but only Judy sees it this way, the hand belonged to a force outside fact, outside history: Hitchcock. The hand belonged to the Hitchcock who needed his Judy to survive this atrocity, move onward, walk down a sidewalk with some friends, have dinner with Scottie, and so on. To the Hitchcock who needed Judy the survivor in order to set up Scottie as a fall guy (in both primary senses of the epithet). It is, after all, only Hitchcock who wants Scottie to be duped (who wants us and Scottie to see that he has been duped). Hitchcock’s clamping hand, puppeted through Elster, prevents what could have given away the play altogether, a scream after the body is falling.
But I think there is one more turn to the screw.
If we watch the action of Judy while she is with Scottie, from the sidewalk outside Podesta Baldocchi all through the Empire Hotel and elsewhere, we continually have the sense with her, just in her pauses and her silences and her gazes and her turn of the head, that she is holding back a scream. Some kind of a scream. A scream of horror, or the memory of horror? Holding back a scream is of course, for her own moral benefit now, holding back the fact that she screamed, thus that she participated in the murder, by playing out a script. But how easy it is to forget, swept away as we are by emotion, that this sensitive Judy was, in her story which is, finally, Hitchcock’s story, little other than an actor, the player of a staged role. The first scream, had she made it, we might have interpreted as scripted, cued, prepared for in advance—a required sound effect. (5) The ostensible second scream, the one she is forced to hold in—no: the one she believes she remembers being forced to hold in—this is an actor’s scream of supreme terror, a scream of understanding the script for the first time while engaged in playing it, outered at the instant when the character has suddenly fallen away and the actor is naked as herself on the stage, whoever or whatever herself actually is, wherever we may find the stage.
Murray Pomerance
- On the idea of a misplaced scene, see in particular Herbert Coleman, The Hollywood I Knew: A Memoire: 1916-1988, Lanham Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003, 262-5.
- Thomas J. Scheff, “Audience Awareness and Catharsis in Drama,” The Psychonalytic Review 63:4 (1976), 529-54.
- The delicious symmetry between his hand on her and hers on his shoulder is a recapitulation of a similar delicious symmetry, in the matched backward gazes of Doris Day and Brenda De Banzie outside the Mamounia in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
- Watch the tossing of the prop body in The Great Train Robbery (1903).
- For a telling preface to this see the elaborately scored (scripted) intended murder in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), where the score (the script) is actually shown to the viewing audience with the killing point clearly marked.