On the whiteboard beside the screen, Bereyter has not yet erased his works-cited entry. 1958. That is right: over five decades have passed since the filming of this scene, half a century, and even then she was already middle-aged. This woman on the screen before me, this woman smiling to her companion—mouthing something, rolling her eyes—this evident coquette, lush, and flirt, this actor, this extra, this filler, this specimen of white dialogues and therefore this woman whom Bereyter is exhorting us to listen to today, she is a dead woman. There is no getting around it. Bereyter has employed his German professor to read the lips of the dead. Whoever that actor was (her name will undoubtedly go unlisted in the credits), she could never have expected this outcome. When she agreed to occupy a barstool in the background of the new Hitchcock film, and when that esteemed Englishman directed her to speak freely, to simply improvise—no one would ever hear her, he must have told her, she enjoyed the privacy of silence—she could never have predicted that one day, half a century later, who knows how many years after her own death, some presumptuous scholar in a prep-school cardigan would be reading her lips. Whatever she said that day, she had surely assumed that it would remain a secret, whispered in confidence to her companion at the bar, her costar in quietness. After leaving the set, she probably forgot the line of dialogue herself. And when she brought her family to see Vertigo on opening night, and pointed out her image on the silver screen—her son leaning toward her in the darkness, asking, What are you saying there, Mother? What were you mouthing that day?—it is likely, then, that her words were as much a mystery to her as to everyone else in the theater. That she was powerless to remember. That she had stuffed this message deep into the background bottle of the scene, then promptly forgotten about it. Having consigned it to her unconscious, she must have ended up taking it—as they say—to her grave. It was to be the great secret of her life, this great silence, the private message that she had immortalized in four seconds of Vertigo: inviolably bottled until the end of time. Well, for half a century at least. She had not counted on Bereyter. She had failed to anticipate this eavesdropper, this grave robber, this bottle-opener and corkscrew artist, who decades after her death would break into Vertigo and extract her message himself. She had not foreseen that he would go so far as to hire a lip-reader to wrench this message from her dead lips. Messages of the dead. Of course—why hadn’t I thought of it before? That is surely how Bereyter intends to pitch his white dialogues to us this morning: as transmissions from beyond, coded messages from the underworld. His sheaf of white dialogues, there on the lectern before him, is as ridiculous as a Ouija-board transcript. When he reads from it next, in his best campfire quaver—in his horripilating Vincent Price whisper—that, surely, will be the climax and acme of his mountebankery this morning. Listen to her, he will intone to us in a hushed voice, and hear the messages of the dead. Listen to her!, he will then boom out at us from the lectern, and behold this signal from beyond, which we have recovered from the white noise of death. There is to be no limit to his presumptuousness: not only a savant, but a visionary; not only a pedant, but a necromancer. That is the raison d’être of his white dialogues, necromancy pure and simple. This woman at the bar cannot be the only corpse in Vertigo, after all. After half a century, most of its cast must be dead. James Stewart, I know, died of a pulmonary embolism in 1997. The florist is obviously dead, and the simpering dancer too (to say nothing of his elderly mother-in-law, or mother, who probably perished in the parking lot mere seconds after stepping off set). Kim Novak alone (evidently) is not yet dead. But as for everyone else, almost every other extra, they are all cadavers now, if not completely decomposed. Skeletons in their coffins, I think, in an utterly morbid tone of mind-voice, and this thought seems to penetrate the image onscreen like an X-ray, transforming the very extras at the bar into a band of skeletons, such that the restaurant strikes me for a moment as the most grotesque apotheosis of death, a horde of corpses.