All right

At this point in his presentation, I actually picked up my pen, to try to scribble down—in the windowless Wolfsegg darkness—the phrase All right. But on a moment’s reflection I decided that it would not be worth the trouble. These two words—this accidental scrap of dialogue, sheer happenstance dialogue, caught on camera but otherwise unintended, the improvisatory dialogue of a background florist—were meaningless. No insight could be gained into the film via this discovery. It made no contribution to Hitchcock scholarship. I was even almost embarrassed, for Bereyter. I even almost blushed, on Bereyter’s behalf. This was what he had to show for white dialogues, after years of research? The silence in the room was killing. Even Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss—fawning there in the front row—even they must be feeling bad for Bereyter, I thought. His next example was no better. He screened for us a scene shot in a ballroom, during which he demonstrated that one dancer—a simpering man in a dark suit—could be glimpsed whispering something into the ear of his partner, an elderly woman in a ball gown of pink taffeta, outfitted with a lace tiara, perhaps the man’s mother-in-law, if not his own mother, Bereyter speculated, thereby attributing filial relations and an entire backstory to these utterly inconsequential non-characters. What the simpering man turned out to be whispering, Bereyter announced, was, If you think.

If you think

To my great shock, this second line was not greeted with abrupt and derisive laughter, but a seism of thoughtful murmurs, which spread backward through the audience from the front row. People were genuinely impressed. I alone (evidently) had to bite my tongue. I alone (evidently) saw white dialogues for what they were. This was nothing more than chitchat exegesis, a kind of crackpot cryptology, I thought, watching Bereyter smile in satisfaction, as he humbly waited out the murmur. He is a charlatan, I thought. Why not close read the billboards, or the shop-window signage? I even tried to jot down the phrase crackpot cryptology in my journal, a little something to confront him with during the Q&A. But in the darkness all I managed to scrawl were discrete stabs of ink, stark violent hieroglyphs against the paper. And what’s more, it occurred to me, setting down my pen, his methodology is not even (if I may put it this way) sound. Because by what criteria is his lip-reader arriving at her results? Lacking any semantic context, how is she supposed to distinguish between two homophones (two and too, for instance), or even resolve an ambiguous viseme? How was she able to tell that the florist is mouthing all right, rather than all ride or hall write or something else altogether? How does she distinguish one bilabial stop from another? One alveolar stop from another? One mid-front vowel from another? Could Bereyter really expect us to take this methodology seriously? No, I decided, scrawling a line back and forth in my journal: this so-called project could only be a diabolical joke, something on the order of the Sokal Hoax, cooked up by Bereyter to expose the risible state of contemporary film scholarship. I could barely believe that my colleagues—the same colleagues who have denied me tenure, referring diplomatically to my dearth of publications (in private they have not been so polite, I know, dismissing my single published article as deranged)—I could barely believe that Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss were now allowing Bereyter to pull the wool so thoroughly over their eyes. He still has not moved on from the scene in Ernie’s Restaurant: they are all no doubt still listening to the woman onscreen. My article was not deranged. Titled Rear Window Vertigo, it was the only chapter of my dissertation to be published, and its thesis is that Vertigo is in fact a second act or secret sequel to one of Hitchcock’s previous films, 1954’s Rear Window. Both movies star James Stewart, and my article’s insight was that Stewart is not playing two distinct roles: rather, he is playing the same character in each film, or, more precisely, the same character in a single film, a four-hour film titled Rear Window Vertigo. In Rear Window, the first half of the film, Stewart plays a photographer and amateur detective in New York, under the name L.B. Jefferies, who spies on his neighbors with his camera’s telephoto lens. In the second half of the film, Vertigo, he plays a professional detective in San Francisco, under the name Scottie, who is hired to shadow Kim Novak, allegedly possessed by the ghost of her great-grandmother. Jeff and Scottie, my article reasons, can only be the same person, a Scottie-Jeff hybrid, comprising two split but reciprocal identities. It is as if, at the end of Rear Window, Jeff undergoes some kind of psychogenic fugue: forgetting both his name and his existence, he travels in an amnesiac trance across the country, from New York to San Francisco, from Rear Window to Vertigo, where he takes up a second life as Scottie, who is then compelled to repeat key details of Jeff’s repressed identity, as if possessed by him. How else to explain the uncanny continuities between these characters? For instance, their mutual fear of heights. Looked at one way, Jeff’s traumatic fall from the apartment building (at the end of Rear Window) is what triggers Scottie’s symptomatic acrophobia (at the beginning of Vertigo), when he finds himself dangling from a ledge for (what he does not realize is) the second time in his life.