Second Time Around by D. A. Miller

Second Time Around by D. A. Miller

Author:D. A. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film/History & Criticism, SOC052000, Social Science/Media Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00


Midge ignoring her classic view.

Some such memories are indefinite or even conjectural, shadowy souvenirs of the downtown wandering that I was allowed to do as a boy. But others are quite precise. In the sanatorium where Scottie is treated for “acute melancholia with a guilt complex,” I recognize St. Joseph’s Hospital where, in 1950s fashion, I had my tonsils removed, and where, after its much later condo-conversion, I lived for a while among buffed gay men who drove jeeps. At I. Magnin’s, the high-end department store where Judy is employed, I too once worked, until the day when, whether dizzy from the scent, or just confused in the Christmas rush, I dropped a sample bottle of perfume, which shattered all over the floor. And at Ernie’s, about the same time, I did my best to keep my cool while an entire meal, from the Steak Diane to the Cherries Jubilee, was flamed tableside for my prom date and me. Yet whether vague or detailed, the memories inevitably spoil Hitchcock’s rigorously curated San Francisco by mock-heroically putting me into it. In the rarefied high-romantic ethos of Vertigo, this is not funny.

Recently, then, in an attempt to retrieve Hitchcock’s San Francisco in all its unimpinged-upon purity, I treated myself to a thing called the Vertigo Tour, a private guided excursion through the locales of the film. At first it seemed to supply just what I was wanting. My guide would drive me, say, to Mission Dolores, where we inspected the church and its garden, and then, as soon as we were back in the car, we would watch the correspondent scene from the film on a portable DVD player. At the pace we worked, the location never had the time to acquire much independent density; it capitulated easily to its instant virtualization. I was reminded of the series of shots at the Legion of Honor in which Scottie looks at Madeleine while she is looking at the portrait of Carlotta; he sees the posy at Madeleine’s side, then sees it held by Carlotta in the portrait; he sees Madeleine’s cyclopic coiffure, then sees it on Carlotta, too. These shots seal Scottie into the belief that Madeleine is, or thinks she is, possessed by Carlotta’s spirit; and as my guide, following a similar procedure, reduced local sights to their Hitchcockian essence, I felt sutured into Vertigo’s San Francisco as never before. In one case, the location itself seemed to help the process along: the Empire Hotel, where Judy resides in the film, having long since become the York Hotel, was now being transformed once more, this time into the Hotel Vertigo.

But then, my guide offered to take me to a locale never seen in the film, but merely mentioned: the Portals of the Past in Golden Gate Park, a small portico by a lake where, as Elster tells Scottie, Madeleine likes to sit staring into space. I immediately recognized, though I hadn’t revisited it since childhood, the lake where my father used to take me to feed “the duckies,” who were still there, as Scottie would have said.



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