To make matters worse, my wife’s routine remained the same. She left the house at nine or ten, either to go to work or to school, and was back at six or eight, depending on the day. By that time I was just starting to write — I mean actually typing into the manuscript — and I pretended to resent the intrusion. I should have been relieved.
One day, having hurriedly wasted my morning, I shut my laptop and went for a walk in a direction I didn’t usually take. Most days I walked north, through Irvington up to Alberta, or west, toward the river, but that day I went east, toward Broadway and the café where I had once worked. I crossed Broadway at 16th, jogging across after the DON’T WALK sign had come on, even though I had no reason to be in a hurry. The driver of a bus pulling away from its stop honked, and I turned and saw my wife behind one of the bus’s windows, not where she was supposed to be. I couldn’t have been mistaken: Beneath the watery, shimmering reflection of the BROADWAY FLORAL sign was her face, her hair, her glasses, even what I was sure was the shirt she had been wearing when she left the house that morning. But she had left hours earlier, with the car, to go to work and then, after work, she was going to a friend’s birthday party. Why would she be on a bus? She was nowhere near her work. She was nowhere near her friend’s. Had she come home and left again since I left for my walk? When I got home, neither she nor the car seemed to have been there. Besides, the bus had been headed downtown, in the wrong direction for her work or the party.
Another day I saw her in the corner of the frame of a video on the Oregonian’s website, a video of a protest taking place downtown, near Pioneer Square. I watched the video again, and then I watched it again. I was sure it was her. Standing next to her was a man whose face was obscured by another person standing in front of him. This man was clearly holding onto her arm. She was supposed to be in class at the time of the protest. I didn’t know what to think. If I asked her about it, she would get defensive, whether or not anything had happened. I decided I would let her bring it up.
She came home late that night, having gone to a bar with a friend and then stayed later than she expected in order to sober up a little. That’s what she told me, anyway. I was already half asleep when she lay down beside me but I could tell she had just taken a shower. Not knowing what I was saying, I asked her why she had taken a shower, but, in my half-awake state, I must not have spoken clearly. She didn’t understand me, or she claimed not to understand me, and said so, turning to face away from me. Now I was fully awake. I repeated my question. She told me she had been around smokers at the bar and didn’t want the pillow to smell like cigarettes. She fell asleep then, but despite the fact that I had been on the verge of drifting off just moments before, I laid awake for what seemed like hours and woke up to find I had fallen asleep after all. I knew I would do no work that day. I thought about following her instead.
…
[Laura] Mulvey considers two options open to the male for warding off castration anxiety: in the course of the film the man gains control over the woman both by subjecting her to the power of the look and by investigating and demystifying her in the narrative.
(Modleski, Women)
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Men’s fascination with [the] eternal feminine is nothing but fascination with their own double, and the feeling of uncanniness, Unheimlichkeit, that men experience is the same as what one feels in the face of any double, any ghost, in the face of the abrupt reappearance of what one thought had been overcome or lost forever.
(Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman)
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Latent structure is master of obvious structure.
(Heraclitus, Fragments)
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[Scottie’s desire] is a desire to merge with a woman who in some sense doesn’t exist — a desire, then, that points to self-annihilation.
(Modleski, Women)
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Writing about Ben Hecht’s Notorious script, Bill Krohn says, “Hecht believed that what men love in women is their own ‘lost femaleness,’ and he portrayed in Dev’s behavior the same mechanism of disavowal that he analyzed in his 1944 study of anti-Semitism, A Guide for the Bedeviled. Dev fights the allure of Alicia’s femaleness like the anti-Semite who, in Hecht’s words, ‘wrestles with the jew as an ape might assault his own unlovely image in the mirror,’ and Alicia pays the price.”
(Bill Krohn, Hitchcock at Work)
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Kim Novak’s career was modeled on that of Jayne Mansfield’s, a career created out of thin air by Harry Cohn. In other words, Novak’s was a career modeled after a career invented by a man who set out to make a woman into a woman other men will find appealing.
…
When Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo begins investigating the mysterious Madeleine Elster, the first point of view shot shows him as a mirror image of the woman, and the rest of the film traces the vicissitudes of Scottie’s attempts to reassert a masculinity lost when he failed in his performance of the law.
(Modleski, Women)
…
In Sophie Fiennes’s film, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains Scottie’s motivations in the second half of the film with a maxim I have never before heard: “The only good woman is a dead one.” It is, frankly, difficult to listen to, even given Zizek’s context: explaining what he calls the “male libinal economy.” I am not much swayed by his jargon, here or elsewhere in the film, and his insistence on likening film to shit (he explains the moments before a film begins are like looking into a toilet bowl and waiting for what has been flushed down to come back up) is risible and more than a little ridiculous, but many of his insights into Vertigo and the other films he discusses are interesting.
Putting aside the rather ugly implications of (even the existence of) such a maxim, and keeping in mind Modleski’s contentions, Zizek’s comment puts me in mind of one of the earliest examples of the double in American literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” in which the titular Wilson is haunted by a man exactly like him who turns up whenever Wilson attempts to cheat, deceive, or otherwise act immorally. At the end of the story, Wilson confronts his double and stabs him repeatedly, but then thinks he perceives a mirror in front of him where he thought the other Wilson had stood. In it, his reflection is bloodied and pale as though dying.
Madeleine is a woman who doesn’t exist, a phantasm. When Scottie asks who he thinks his wife is impersonating, Elster answers, “someone dead.” Elster is not only referring to Carlotta Valdes — he is also referring to Judy’s acting out of Madeleine, his wife who he has already murdered, i.e., “someone dead.” Judy as Madeleine as Carlotta is a woman playing a ghost acting out a ghost. Anything of substance in what Scottie sees in such an apparition is thus bound to be a reflection; the woman in front of him is trying her best to appear immaterial. When we look through glass at the silver backing of a mirror, what we see is neither glass nor silver. We see ourselves. Scottie looks through Madeleine at Judy and sees neither Madeleine nor Judy. He sees his double, and, because all doubles and doppelgangers exist ultimately to reveal to us our failings, he destroys it for what it reveals in him. That, in doing so, he leaves nothing intact is the tragedy of Vertigo. He cannot recognize in Judy what is Judy’s because he is so determinedly looking for what is Scottie’s.