(Doniger, The Woman)
…
Hitchcock: “I don’t want to film a ‘slice of life’ because people can get that at home, in the street, or even in front of the movie theater. They don’t have to pay money to see a slice of life. And I avoid out-and-out fantasy because people should be able to identify with the characters. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.”
…
Truffaut to Hitchcock: “Almost all of your films center on an interchangeable killing, with one character who has committed the crime and another who might just as well have been guilty of it.”
(Truffaut, Hitchcock)
…
[INT. Scottie’s Car (DAY)]
…
From Hitchcock’s December 4, 1956 letter to Maxwell Anderson, inviting him to do a second script of D’Entre les Morts:
“Before I go on to tell you what has been done, I think I should admit to you that after all this time it might have been better for me to have followed your original suggestion to have completed the structural layout even as far as a temporary script before you did the dialogue. I can only apologize for putting you to ‘double trouble.’ (Wouldn’t this be a good title for this picture?).
“First of all, I should make it clear that the structure has been organized on the basis of telling two stories. First, the ‘front’ story, which is the one that the audience is looking at and second the big story which, in other words, is the conspiracy and which is only revealed to the audience in the final scene.”
…
The movie does play like two movies, though not the interlocking or complementary ones Hitchcock describes in his letter to Anderson. Instead: as one ~eighty minute feature that ends with the faked death of Madeleine (the discovery of her real corpse) and the inquest at San Juan Bautista, and one oddly-proportioned (a little less than an hour) shorter film that follows Scottie’s confinement in the hospital. The interim between these two narratives is like that between two movies in a theater: the lights go down, flash, then come back up; there is music, but, apart from that, almost no sound; and the rest of the film more or less ignores this period in its characters’ lives — we get details of Scottie’s earlier hospital stay from Midge in the “first” film, but Midge disappears before the “second” film begins and there is no one to take her place. This second film is what most critics focus on, the story of Scottie remaking Judy into Madeleine and the discovery of Hitchcock’s “conspiracy,” but it takes up very little screen time, comparatively speaking.
…
From Hitchcock’s notes:
A. The necklace from the portrait definitely connects Judy with the past. Therefore I haven’t created another Madeleine, Judy is Madeleine!
B. If I were to confront her now, she would deny everything, because I have already seen her identification as Judy.
C. If Judy is Madeleine, who was the woman who fell from the tower, dressed the same as Madeleine, with the same color hair?
D. Judy could not have been Elster’s wife at the time because Elster’s wife’s maiden name was Valdes.
E. Elster’s wife had money therefore she must have been the dead woman — murdered for her money.
F. Why was I brought into this thing? Madeleine pretended to have suicidal tendencies. I was fooled by her throwing herself into the water. I was fooled by the Carlotta Valdes nonsense. But why me? Because I was to be a witness of the suicide — a witness who could not climb to the top of the tower.
…
It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.
(Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)
…
Again, though, there may be three parts to the movie, not two. Not just before the staged death and after, but before Scottie’s acrophobia, during it, and after his “cure”; what Scottie believes is happening (the “front” story), what is really happening (what “the audience is looking at”), and something that cannot be defined (“ ”) but which must have something to do with Scottie’s life before his accident. Or with Judy’s.
…
People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don’t want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted.
(Dyer, Rage)
…
The actress took the limitations of her costume as a source of character development: “I can use that feeling when I play Judy. Judy is trapped into portraying Madeleine, and she doesn’t want to. She wants to be loved as Judy. But she always has to go along with what someone else wants in order to get the love she wants. So I used that feeling of wearing someone else’s shoes that didn’t feel right, that made me feel out of place. The same thing with Madeleine’s gray suit, which made me stand so straight and erect the way Edith Head built it. I hated that silly suit, to tell you the truth, but it helped me to be uncomfortable as Madeleine.”
(Auiler, Vertigo)
…
It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.
(Wilde, Gray)
…
According to Hitchcock’s biographer Patrick McGilligan, the sequence of Scottie following Madeleine was originally accompanied by a voice-over. It must have been Scottie’s narration — who else could it belong to? — but, since he knows nothing about Madeleine or what she’s up to in these scenes, and since he must come across as mystified so that we, the audience, will know that we should be mystified, I can’t imagine what he would have said. “Well, now, I wonder what she’s doing here.” Having that voice-over would put the audience in Scottie’s head, making the picture that much more subjective, so the fact that it has been cut from the film as it was eventually released must mean that we are not meant to be in his head, that we should be further removed from the events we see onscreen than Scottie is. We are not meant to empathize with him, but still we feel what he feels sympathetically because he is the film’s focal point, and because while we cannot understand Madeleine — who, after all, doesn’t exist to be understood — we can understand Scottie.