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I can’t find any evidence of this voice-over in the script, but in the version posted on dailyscript.com (accessed 7/22/12), there is a voice-over — Elster’s — in the Ernie’s scene. Elster’s monologue continues from the office scene to the restaurant: “I don’t know what happened that day: where she went, what she saw, what she did. But on that day, the search was ended. She had found what she was looking for, she had come home. And something in the city possessed her.”
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Elster yearns for the past and fears it.
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It always surprises me when a commentator remarks upon Judy as Elster’s mistress. I see no evidence for it in the film.
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[INT. Flower Shop (DAY)]
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Does Madeleine seem to be turned away from Scottie because she is shown in a mirror (and so reversed, as in a negative)? Or is she actually facing away from him?
…
I was either bored or I was obsessed. I don’t have enough distance from myself to be able to say. I scrolled through hundreds of pages of search results for “Gabriel Blackwell,” thinking maybe, eventually, I’d come to the end. There, buried deep in all those virtual mes, were ads for “Background Reports,” people promising to continue my search in the real world. How could I resist?
The first service that had me in its database was named “personsmart.com”; all I could see without ordering their report were the cities and states where I had lived, my age, my immediate family members, and any aliases I had used (I hadn’t used any, but the listings around mine all had several, a fact I found intriguing). Their information was accurate, but they had my age wrong — they thought I was two years older than I was — and they thought I still lived in New Orleans, even though I had moved away in 2005 and had lived in three places in Portland in the meantime. For $27.95 (discounted 30 % with “membership trail” (sic, I think — they had to mean “membership trial,” as appropriate as “trail” is)), personsmart.com would send me a report listing my: “age, possible current address, up to 20 year address history, phone numbers, bankruptcies, tax liens & judgments, property ownership, possible relatives, possible roommates, aliases / maiden names, neighbors, marriages and divorces, dea registrants, nationwide criminal check and website ownership.” Even though I was curious about the difference in age, I couldn’t justify spending thirty dollars to have someone tell me things I already knew. Half of the things they offered to tell me about myself had nothing to do with me anyway.
But when I clicked back to the Google search results page and tried the next link (there were results from “stillman.com” and “america-person-search.com,” among many others), I found the same info, the same weird age mistake, and another address, one that did not correspond to any city I had ever lived in, in San Francisco. San Francisco? Surely this was a joke.
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There are. times. when the performance of a conscious self-imitation, or anti-Method acting, comes in very handy. A person who has undergone a trauma. may experience it like a death, so that she feels as if she had become a different person and tries to keep going by pretending to be who she was, trying to behave as she knows she used to behave, until she can remember how it actually feels to be who she is.
(Doniger, The Woman)
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Does one ever resemble oneself?
(Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve)
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Ecstasy. literally means being beside oneself, which means standing slightly apart from one’s body and slightly apart from one’s mind. From which vantage point one might experience one’s body — and perhaps even one’s consciousness — as things.
(Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty)
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You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon, you’re a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
(Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly)
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In this film in which we have a man (Gavin Elster) playing himself but not himself (since not only is he innocent in his version of himself, but he is also concerned for his wife’s health and safety in that version of himself) and a woman (Judy Barton) playing another woman (Madeleine Elster) who is supposed to be playing a third woman (Carlotta Valdes), it seems notable that the only character whose identity can actually be said to have really changed during the film is the one who seems most himself throughout: Scottie Ferguson.
Scottie leaves himself behind at the beginning of the movie when he retires from the police. And he does so without regret — when Elster asks for his help, Scottie tells Elster, “I don’t want to get mixed up in that kind of stuff,” the kind of stuff that was once his profession, the kind of stuff he used to do every day. When asked by Judy/Madeleine what he does, he says, “Oh, just wander.” He has gone from a detective with the ambition to become chief of police in the first frames to a flâneur without any particular interests for most of the middle of the movie. Not only this, but he is suffering from acrophobia, an illness he did not have when the movie began, suffering from it to the degree that he has changed his life completely to accommodate it. And yet, on a surface level, Scottie would seem to be the most stable character in the film—”stable” being relative, given his mental instability and his obsession, provoked by Madeleine’s death. He is stable to the degree that that instability and obsession is present more or less throughout the movie, and stable to the degree that at least his actions are explainable. He is, paradoxically, the least frangible of the film’s main characters, the one we, the viewers, can count on to be himself and to remain himself, even though, again, he doesn’t remain himself, and may not, when we meet him, even have a (fixed) self.
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Sometimes coincidences take years to arrive and, at others, come running along in Indian file, one after the other.
(Saramago, The Double)
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I was invited to give a reading in San Francisco. It was the only such invitation I’d received since before my book had come out, and, even though the organizers couldn’t pay, I felt like I couldn’t say no. It was superstition. I told my wife that I thought if I turned this one down, I would never be invited to give a reading again. Besides, the flight to SFO was only an hour and a half, easy: I could fly down in the afternoon, read that night, and then have the following day to myself. My wife had to work and couldn’t come with me — with me unemployed, she said, she couldn’t afford to take the time off. The tickets weren’t expensive, but I was broke. I figured that since I was already going into debt for this trip, I might as well go to stillman.com and request all the information they had on the Gabriel Blackwell who supposedly lived in San Francisco, the Gabriel Blackwell who shared so much information with the Gabriel Blackwell who was me. It’s not as though I was expecting anything.