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Though the too-obvious parallels between Kim Novak and Judy Barton, between Elster/Scottie and Alfred Hitchcock are attested to again and again in analyses of Vertigo, the facts cannot be escaped or disguised: Hitchcock was saddled with an actress he did not want (the role was written for Vera Miles, who became pregnant just before the film went into pre-production) who was unwilling to accede to what he wanted from her (the oft-repeated anecdote about her telling Edith Head she would wear anything so long as it wasn’t gray and wasn’t a suit).
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It is as if [in the first scene between Scottie and Midge], the film is humorously suggesting that femininity in our culture is largely a male construct, a male “design,” and that this femininity is in fact a matter of external trappings, of roles and masquerade, without essence. This is an idea that the film will subsequently evoke with horror. For if woman, who is posited as she whom man must know and possess in order to guarantee his truth and his identity, does not exist, then in some important sense he does not exist either, but rather is faced with the possibility of his own nothingness. In this respect, it is possible to see the film’s great theme of romantic love as something of a ruse, a red herring. the source of the man’s fascination with the woman is her own fascination with death, with the gaping abyss, which she hallucinates as her open grave and which is imaged continually in the film in its many arch-shaped forms of church, museum, cemeteries, mission.
(Modleski, Women)
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Hitchcock’s mature films poignantly explore the nature of absence and of loss. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, it is the loss of family security abroad; in The Wrong Man, the loss of innocence and family unity at home; in the trilogy Vertigo — North by Northwest — Psycho, the loss of identity itself, for there is no living person at the center of these three great works. Madeleine Elster, George Kaplan, and Mrs. Bates are the ultimate MacGuffins.
(Donald Spoto,Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies)
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The book, now, was not something I worked on. It was, instead, an excuse, a reason not to do other things. I read. I thought about how I would write the book. I couldn’t write other things because I was writing the book, but I wasn’t writing the book, so I wasn’t writing anything. I told my wife I was working on the book. I told myself I was working on the book. I thought about the bus. I thought about the video clip. I watched the video clip again. I wondered what it meant. I wondered if I could follow my wife without her finding out about it. I thought about what that would mean.
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Why does my memory insist that the story of Anselmo, Camilla, and Lothario in Don Quixote is other than what it is? I remember it as the story of a man (Anselmo, though I didn’t know his name or any of the others until I reread the book) who convinces his friend (Lothario) to dress up as him (Anselmo) in order to seduce his wife (Anselmo’s wife, Camilla), making Anselmo a cuckold, having been cuckolded by himself. But that makes no sense. How would that work? A woman can’t cheat on her husband with a man she believes to be her husband, can she? What would that prove to the husband? Was I thinking of another story entirely? Or, as seems likely, was I conflating one or more other stories with this one?
For a very long time, I thought that Anselmo’s story was in The Decameron or maybe The Canterbury Tales but I couldn’t find it in either. I had read all three books around the same time, twelve or thirteen years before (I had also read Manuscript Found at Saragossa and a few collections of folk tales and fairy tales at the time, making the whole thing even more difficult), but I never considered that the tale I was looking for could be in Don Quixote. Where the Tales and their clear influence, The Decameron, are mostly about the stories themselves, their frames receding, the Quixote is very much about its frame, about Don Quixote, even while it is really a compendium like the other two. Somehow, Cervantes focused his readers on the man of the title despite (because of) the profusion of characters and subplots. Is it as simple as madness, a stereotyped and rudimentary but still distinct characterization? Or is there something in Cervantes’s choice of tales that focuses us?
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[Jimmy] Stewart became in a way what Hitchcock considered himself to be: a theorist of murder (Rope); a chair-bound voyeur drawn to and fearful of love (Rear Window); a protective but manipulative husband and father (The Man Who Knew Too Much); and the passionately haunted pursuer of an impossible, duplicitous ideal (Vertigo).
(Spoto, Spellbound)
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Anselmo convinces Lothario to try to seduce Camilla, his wife. Lothario refuses at first, but Anselmo is relentless. Eventually, Lothario agrees, but Camilla refuses his advances. Lothario reports back to Anselmo. Anselmo is not satisfied. He doesn’t believe Lothario. Anselmo leaves town, and arranges for Lothario to stay with his wife. Lothario can’t help but fall for Camilla, and Camilla gives in to Lothario’s advances, too. After an anticlimactic detour via a maid and her lover, Camilla and Lothario run off together and Anselmo finds out that Camilla was faithful to begin with, but, through his own actions, is not anymore. Anselmo dies out of grief. “Lothario” is now used to describe (this is according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary) “a seducer of women; rake.” This seems unfair to Cervantes’s character — Lothario resists Anselmo’s plan, and, though he does fall in love with Camilla and does seduce her, it is all unwillingly. His seduction, such as it is, isn’t his. Instead, he carries out his friend’s orders. It is really Anselmo’s seduction of Lothario that we witness; Lothario and Camilla have much smaller parts to play. Apparently, a later adaptation of this story, a play by Nicholas Rowe called The Fair Penitent, is the more likely source of the eponym, but it’s interesting to think about what it might mean if it is Cervantes’s tale behind it. Why should such a man be so reviled?
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Vertigo is or could be considered a variation on Anselmo’s story, particularly a variation in which it is not curiosity or perversity driving Anselmo, but revenge. But who, in such a version of Vertigo, would be Anselmo? Elster seems the obvious choice, but I’m not so sure it would be Elster. Couldn’t it instead be Scottie? (Or Madeleine, from beyond the grave?) Is this the source of my confusion about the tale’s storyline? If Anselmo had asked Lothario not only to attempt to seduce his wife, but to do so as himself, as Anselmo?
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[EXT. Brocklebank Apartments (DAY)]
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Many cultures tell stories about people who pretend to be other people pretending to be them, thus in effect masquerading as themselves, impersonating themselves, pretending to be precisely what they are. This. tells us that many people must put on masks to discover who they are under the covert masks they usually wear, so that the overt mask reveals rather than conceals the truth, reveals the self beneath the self; and it tells us that, although such masquerades cannot change people into other people, they may change them into others among their many selves.