Vertigo, Borges and the deferral of death

The relationship between film and dreaming is a well documented one. In a darkened theatre, on our ipads and ipods, or in the comfort of our own living rooms our fantasies are projected on to a liminal non-space, a screen that offers up to us a surrogate existence, a life that we might desire, a story in which we might want to exist. For an hour or two we want to be trapped in this world (despite the urge to press pause and grab a beer if you’re watching in DVD); we identify with its stars (Dyer) or we fetishise the female form in voyeuristic pleasure (Mulvey). In these dreams, we can indulge our desires, our pleasures, enter an uncanny world that re-presents our own world, darkly, through its looking glass. And in absorbing the on screen world, in transferring its uncertainty and fear onto our own lives, we relinquish ourselves to masochistic abandon and the fear of death, the fear of the Other, the fear of loss,

The fear of falling.

Dreams and falling.

In Powell and Pressbuger’s A Matter of Life and Death, David Niven’s pilot falls to the ground and as he does so a new life opens up for him; in The Wizard of Oz, as the tornado hits her Uncle’s farm, Dorothy Gale’s fear of being swept into the air and dashed on to the Kansas fields elicits a dream to end all dreams. In Mulholland Drive, the fall and the dream are one, the descent into the Valley of Dolls and Death, the gunshot to the head that releases guilt and dreams, and the psychopomps that lead us to the Other world.

And then there is Vertigo.

Robin Woods and Chris Marker amongst others have made the tantalising connection between Vertigo, dreaming and the oneiric world. For Woods, everything in Vertigo that occurs after the opening sequence (which leaves Scottie Ferguson dangling from a San Francisco rooftop) is a dream; for Marker, the second half of the film is the anguished reverie of Ferguson’s diseased and guilt-ridden mind. Elsewhere, in his monograph on Vertigo Charles Barr draws comparisons with that other great ‘dream-falling’ narrative, Ambrose Bierce’s An Incident at Owl Creek in which a convicted man, at the moment of his being hanged, apparently escapes  only for the reader that the ensuing narrative adventure is merely the dying wish fulfilment of the hanged man. Recently, I read Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Secret Miracle in which the narrator, Jaromir Hladik ruminates on the idea that if reality does not coincide ‘with our anticipation of it’ then it is logical to surmise ‘that to see a circumstantial detail is to prevent it happening’. So, with his own execution imminent, Hladik begins to imagine the circumstances of his own death in the expectation that they will fail to materialise and as the report of the guns that are to kill him sound out, time stands still, long enough for Hladik to conclude a drama that he had constructed in his imagination. And when the drama is complete, Hladik dies.

Vertigo is less about Ambrose Bierce than about Borges’ Jaromir Hladik.

Cinema is masochistic; the deferred gratification of narrative pleasure, the fort/da of both image and tale contains within itself the jouissance of pain; in the masochistic longing of Hladik lie echoes (or foreshadowing, for Jaromir Hladik precedes Ferguson by two years) of Scottie’s own liebestod and our own agonies. In Borges' story, itself based on the premise of Zeno’s paradox against time in which a moving object can never reach its target because it first has to travel half its distance and so forth, the object of desire is the focal point of reflection, the point of almost zero in an always-disappearing perspective. Time, or the end of time, cannot be reached. The irony with Hladik is that once he completes the narrative that desires to be born in his imagination, the narrative that defers his death just as Scheherazade’s narratives deferred her own execution in that 1001 nights, then he dies.

And so Scottie Ferguson.

In Madeleine Elster, Scottie Ferguson finds his home, that place that all men desire. She reveals its presence to Scottie ("Remember that I love you") even at the moment that she takes it away. Home – unheimlich – the place where each man feels at home. The womb. The birth place. Good old Freud; we can always return to him can we not?

“I found myself in a district about whose character I could  not long remain in doubt. Only heavily made-up women were to be seen at the windows of the little houses and I hastily left the narrow street at the next turning. However, after wandering about for some time without asking the way I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence began to attract attention.”

Freud’s repeated return to this spot is described as ‘uncanny’ and losing one’s way, ‘in the woods’, ‘groping around in the dark ... searching for the door’ can all be seen as part of this ‘unintentional return’. But how unintentional? There is, in Freud’s anecdote, a sense that ‘there the doctor must administer to himself’ his own psychoanalysis and that Freud’s return is not unintentional at all. It too is a deferral, the impulsive compulsion to repeat of the unconscious mind, a deferral of jouissance, a masochistic desire to revisit scenes of shameful desires.

And so Scottie must relive his own shameful desires. Haunted by the memory of Madeleine he falls into the abyss of memory and become fixated on the one thing that can perhaps free him from his despair – Carlotta’s necklace, the red ruby, a blood red ovoid wound with all its Freudian symbolism.. Good old Scottie: Scottie who chased pain, who dangled over its precipices; Scottie who withdrew from his relationship with his mother, Midge. And so, in his dream fever, when we the spectator sees the necklace not once but two three times, in that moment, Scottie’s diseased brain conjures up a narrative of desire that will allow him to achieve its fulfilment.  Just as Hladik weaves a ‘lofty, invisible labyrinth’, often returning to the original version before reworking the story just as his physical universe has come to a halt, so we can read into the second half of Vertigo a re-working of the first.

All we know about Scottie at the beginning of the second part is that he is in a state of total catatonia, that he is ‘somewhere else’, that it ‘could last a long time’ (according to the doctor), that he loved a dead woman ‘and still does’ (according to Midge). Is it too absurd to imagine that this agonizing, though reasonable, and obstinate soul (‘hard-hitting’ says Gavin), imagined this totally extravagant scenario, full of unbelievable coinci­dences and entanglements, yet logical enough to drive one to the one salvatory conclusion: this woman is not dead, I can find her again? (Chris Marker, Free Replay)

And so Scottie reworks the narrative of the first part of the film into the dream-narrative of the second part, for in his deferral of Death, Scottie is toying with us all; the story he has conjured up for himself is a nightmare, ending in the uncanny repetition of the first narrative, a woman, Madeleine, falling to her death on the burnished tiles that skirt the roof of Mission San Juan Bautista. And so the film ends, just as the second part ends. In his dream state, Scottie has at least managed to climb the stairs, to overcome the acrophobia which condemned Madeline to her first death. Now he looks on at the scurrying, beetling figures below, still lost in his dream, deferring his death once more.