The majority of my article is devoted to tracking down and demonstrating these kinds of correspondences, which I do ruthlessly, indisputably, despite the kneejerk dismissiveness of Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss. There is no other explanation. James Stewart has exited Rear Window for Vertigo. He has escaped the Rear Window bottle for the Vertigo bottle. No sooner has he left the Rear Window frying pan than he has entered the Vertigo fire. Neither Scottie nor Jeff but Scottie-Jeff. That was—is—the major insight of my article. And yet it is as nothing next to Bereyter’s insights, according to my colleagues, for my article is contaminated at the outset by its enabling methodological error. I am found guilty of ignoring the boundary line dividing these two films. Never mind the fact that that is precisely the point of my article, or that it is James Stewart himself who has ignored this boundary line. This is what counts for a methodological error, among my colleagues, rather than lip-reading. But whereas I may not have coined a flashy term for my techniques, and whereas I may not have signed a publishing contract for my dissertation with the University of N— Press—as the irrepressible departmental gossip suggests that Bereyter has—and whereas I, in my mid-thirties, still untenured, largely unpublished, am about to be cast back into the void of the anoxic job market, at least I am on the side of Hitchcock. I at least am close-reading Hitchcock’s dialogue, dialogue that he approved in script, and not only that, but dialogue that he then directed the delivery of, and fastidiously positioned his microphones to record, and instructed his audio engineers to mix at a perceptible level, all so that it would play a definite and measurable role in the meaning of his movie. Unlike Bereyter, I am not engaged in some preposterous aleatoric hermeneutics; I am not attempting to somehow one-up the director himself, driven by scholarly hubris and an unsurpassed disregard for Hitchcock—not to say Hitchcock contempt, Hitchcock hostility, a transparently Oedipal and near-homicidal Hitchcock hatred—to ignore the dialogue of his design, rooting around instead inside his blind spots, hell-bent on hunting down any chance mouth movements that may have slipped into his film, between as it were the film’s cracks, beneath as it were Hitchcock’s watch, which—if you ask me (no one did)—is the methodological error par excellence. Yes, there are almost unthinkable levels of aggression wound up in white dialogues, aggression toward Hitchcock and aggression toward his films. Bereyter is trying to spy on Hitchcock, to expose his secrets. White dialogues are his telephoto lens, as surely as he is Hitchcock’s L.B. Jefferies. I look again at the canvas behind Bereyter. The scene at Ernie’s is still flickering against it, and the woman at the bar is still mouthing her inaudible message. Whether Bereyter has already read her white dialogue aloud, when I wasn’t paying attention, or whether he is still showboating by exhorting us to listen to her, I cannot discern. He appears to have moved ahead in his lecture, or perhaps he is on a tangent; at any rate he is now discussing the use of white noise in The Birds. Ignoring him, I continue to watch the woman at the bar. Every four seconds or so the scene jumps back to the beginning, caught in its loop. In this way she is forced to keep restarting her dialogue, forever unable to finish, like some Sisyphus of speech. It is as though this endless repetition or eternal return of the sentence is itself the sentence she is serving, the chthonic contrapasso that has been meted out to her, upon her arrival in the underworld, I think. Sitting alone in my desk chair in the darkness, at the very back of this basement seminar room, thinking of the underworld, I notice in a distracted way—and for the second time this morning—the woman’s graying hair. It is then that the thought occurs to me: yes, I realize, this woman must be dead, long dead by now, her presence on the canvas spectral.