A horde of corpses

James Stewart with his haunted expression is dead, and the balding man at the bar behind him (his blonde hair brushed back from his calvity) dead, and the romantic trio in the background (the woman in the dovegray pea coat, her date in his charcoal suit, the tall gentleman chaperoning the two of them) every one of them dead, struck down by the last half century. Chatting convivially on set, they too are likely victims of Bereyter’s grave robbery. For that is what his white dialogues project amounts to, in the final analysis: already hermeneutically useless, already methodologically unsound, it is also, after all that, sheer vandalism; it is also, on top of everything else, the most depraved and tasteless tomb raiding. I watch the dead woman at the bar. I imagine her son watching this movie, now that she is dead. He must replay this scene on repeat as well, from time to time. If nothing else about his mother is certain, these four seconds present an irrefutable truth: one day in 1957, on set in Ernie’s Restaurant in San Francisco, she was there. Her klieg-lit body reflected luminous rays, which were captured in the canisters of Hitchcock’s camera, and with the breath of her lungs she uttered various words, which no microphones recorded. That is the paradox of film: on the one hand, she is dead; but on the other hand she is still—inside these four seconds—alive. Sitting at the bar, flickering on this screen, she is not yet dead. It is 1957, her death lies beyond the horizon of the film, she has forever yet to die. She is dead, and she is going to die, her son must mutter softly to himself, while rewinding this scene on the DVD, I think. This movie, for him, must be no different from any other family album or home video. It is a photographic document of his living mother: the treasury of her rays, a last surviving locket of her light. The one thing it did not preserve—the one thing this footage cannot tell him—is what she said that day. And so thank God for Bereyter: thank God Bereyter has finally arrived at Vertigo, crowbar in hand, to pry the lid off this poor woman’s sepulcher. Thank God he has crawled deep inside—accompanied by his ghoulish lip-reading Igor—to plunder her message once and for all. And he won’t stop there: next he will publish his results with the University of N—, ensuring that this bereaved man can one day flip through the pages of Bereyter’s book and find his dead mother’s image printed in a screen capture, with an italicized caption floating beneath her face. At long last, at this late date, he will be able to see—laid bare in all their banality, their bathos—the words his dead mother spoke that day: Yes, I’ll have another; No thank you; All right. If I could see my notebook in this darkness, I think, gripping my pen pointlessly, if only I could see, I would sketch a quick caricature of Bereyter now.