In this way, Bereyter said, he excavates a parallel script, an underscript, hidden between the lines of Hitchcock’s original: it is as though all this dialogue has been secretly printed there in invisible ink. Or better, he said, as if this dialogue were a message in a bottle. That is how he came to explicate the Clegg epigraph on the whiteboard: it is as though these extras, he said, have stuffed their messages into the bottles of various backgrounds, and it is only by reading their lips that we can uncork them. Since the lights were still on at that point, I was able to jot down the word bottle in my notebook. Only five minutes into the presentation, and already I had caught him in his first mistake. For although the movie can be said to form a kind of ontological bottle, encapsulating its characters, it is the deaf person (in Clegg’s epigraph) who is bottled: by reading the extras’ lips, it is not so much—or not only—that we rescue messages from their bottle; but rather, we invite them (slowly but surely, in Clegg’s phrase) to enter the bottle that we ourselves (the deaf moviegoers, in Chion’s phrase) are trapped inside. If the back-ground bottle is nestled inside the Vertigo bottle, then both are wedged within the Wolfsegg bottle, I thought to myself, sitting silently in my desk chair. It is a mise en abyme of bottles, I thought, circling the word bottle in my notebook. Not long after this, Bereyter dimmed the lights. He began his lecture by boasting about his felicitous invention of white dialogues. It may come as a surprise to some of you, he said, but I discovered them quite by accident. Late one night, while rewatching Vertigo for my dissertation, I spotted an extra I had never noticed before. The scene (which he proceeded to screen for us) occurs twenty minutes into the film (not long after the scene at Ernie’s, in fact): in it, Kim Novak visits a florist, a somehow stern-looking woman in a blue dress.

Bereyter confessed that he had watched this scene countless times beforehand, without ever registering the florist. He saw Novak mutter something to the woman, and he saw the woman nod in return. That is all. But for some reason, that night, he finally noticed what he had always failed to: the florist is speaking. Far from simply nodding at Novak, the extra is saying something to Novak. He rewound the scene repeatedly, he told us, squinting at the florist. What was she mouthing? What had she said? And would it be possible, Bereyter asked himself that night, he informed us this morning, to read her lips? After making various inquiries on campus, he eventually managed to meet the lip-reader from the German department. She agreed to review the footage, and, within a week, she had delivered her results: the florist was mouthing All right.