Librari[d]an

I really, really enjoy checking out how people find my blog and should start keeping track of the funny, bizarre, and repellent search strings they employ. So far, most people who get to my blog are connecting with my more image and recipe based posts.

Current event posts also seem to have staying power, as well as anything that has some sexual wording in it (no matter how distant). For example, using the word “sexual” has just ensured that this post will be viewed repeatedly. Note at the right how some depraved sexual deviant got to my blog just today by searching for “via veloso rape scenes”. (Poor Via!) I hope my post that discussed the rape scene in Hitchcock’s Marnie didn’t titillate the social deviant! ;-)

It’s also interesting to see how users punctuate their searches, as if adding symbols and operators [all over] the -place +will (return better) “results” ‘for and some and strange and reason’. Hahaha! Information literacy be damned, let’s just make things look tech-ish and Boolean for no discernible reason at all!

In conclusion, I would like to tell the person who plugged “dsytopic pittsburgh” into a search engine that I share your interest, and would like you to watch George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead for this very reason. (There is one particularly excellent, if computer-generated, shot of the Point all dystopia’d out.) Or, if you’d like to see some real dystopia, I’d suggest South Oakland (south of the boulevard) on a Saturday morning. A wasteland, that!

Others have tried - and failed - to recreate Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: In 1976 Brian de Palma created the interesting, if poorly executed, Obsession–a thinly veiled Vertigo knock-off. Sixteen years later, Paul Verhoeven would emulate the film’s visuals to a surprising degree in Basic Instinct. (A visual comparison of Basic Instinct and Vertigo can be found here.) Attempts to recreate key scenes from the film have occurred as recently as 2005. Now, it’s time to add another to the list; Vanity Fair’s March 2008 issue will feature a photographic homage to Hitchcock’s films, including Renée Zellweger as Judy / Madeleine in the final tower scene from Vertigo! (Roy)

I never would have expected Vanity Fair to pick Renée Zellweger to fill Kim Novak’s shoes. Although I admit that she’s a talented actress, Zellweger has never been in a role that required the vulnerability, complexity, and emotional scope that Novak had to bring to her character. And of all the scenes to choose! You’d think they’d pick an easy “grey suit” episode, but instead they chose the climactic dénouement in the tower. It is perhaps the movie’s most emotionally charged scene. However, as you can see in the video of the shoot (also below), Zellweger has pretty much nailed it.

Zellweger’s performance at the shoot - described by Vanity Fair itself as “especially notable” - was both intense and impressive. (Windolf) This praise is pretty amazing, considering that there were five other Oscar winners and a huge amount of A-listers being photographed for Hitchcock’s other films. (Check out the article, cited below, for the full list and scans.) As you can see in the photo and video, everything in terms of the mise en scène was perfect: the coiffure, cosmetics, dress, earrings, tower interior… even Carlotta’s pendant.

At the shoot, Zellweger “was watching the scene over and over while getting her hair and makeup done, and when she came on set she started breathing really hard, almost hyperventilating. [...] She just absolutely exploded on the set and truly became that character like I’ve never seen before. We were in awe.” (Windolf) This method acting may explain why Zellweger’s performance lacked the subtle artistry that Novak brought to Judy’s character in both this and other scenes. (And in all fairness, it was just a photo shoot.) In addition to amplifying the emotions for a traditional camera, Zellweger herself may have been having an emotional reaction to Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak’s performances.

Revisiting Vertigo is something of an obsession for fans of the film. (Unfortunately, this Vertigo fanatic will not be close enough to visit San Fransisco when he goes to Anaheim, California this summer for the annual ALA conference.) Watch a YouTube video of the locations featured in the film here. Check out a stunning visual comparison of scenes from the film and contemporary photographs at Vertigo… Then and Now.

Special thanks to Joel Gunz, Hitchcock Geek for bringing Vanity Fair’s photo shoot to my attention and Deeda Blair for scanning and posting the article.

:: Bibliography ::

Roy, Norman J., photographer. “The 2008 Hollywood Portfolio.” Vanity Fair (March 2008): 370-71. Accessed 8 February 2008. http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/20148385.html.

Windolf, Jim. It’s the Hitch in Hitchcock. March 2008. CondéNet. Accessed 6 February 2008. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/03/behindthescenes200803.

Shut up! No, really. Shut up. In all likelihood you haven’t even seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), let alone viewed it recently with a critical eye. I was like you once. I thought the film was a joke, the beginning of Hitchcock’s cinematic decline. I have come to realize, over time, that this is far from the truth; Marnie was Hitchcock’s last truly great film.

Marnie falls easy prey to critics for an obvious reason: Like Hitchcock’s Spellbound, the emphasis on psychoanalysis dates the film. (For a bizarre look at the not-so-hidden sexual imagery/dialog embedded in the film, check out this video. I think the creep who made it has to be a total freak, a “sex maniac” if you will.) Marnie lacks the clout that a dream sequence created by Salvador Dalí and star power (Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck) provide. Don’t get me wrong, Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren are stars… However they’ve both developed an air of camp.

So what makes Marnie so good, despite the flaws? (It certainly isn’t the sloppy stunt work with the horse!) And let’s not rely on silly auteur prattle about motifs in Hitchcock’s canon of work. (She’s blonde? Amazing. She adopts a variety of identities? You don’t say!) But let’s begin with that blonde. The blonde with the pinched features and shrill voice. The perfectly imperfect Hitchcock blonde, Tippi Hedren. Hedren became the Galatea to Hitchcock’s Pygmalion because she was a natural in front of the camera. Now, the title role in Marnie isn’t exactly an easy part to play: Sexually frigid. Kleptomaniac safe-cracker. Compulsive and convincing liar. Phobic of the color red and thunder/lightning. (No wonder why the French title is Pas de printemps pour Marnie, “No Spring for Marnie”. This woman’s got problems!) Yet somehow Hedren is able to pull it off. Just look at the film’s infamous rape scene, in which Hedren is equal parts desperate, defenseless child and resistant woman (resistant in terms of her passivity, her utter disconnect from the physical violation she suffers). And what about the scene at the racetrack, where Hedren has to convey the schism between her false persona (socially adept businesswoman) and true one (nervous, saturnine anomic). Of course, there are many scenes in which Hedren simply can’t hold her character together. (”The colors! Stop the colors!”) But who could?

The second redeeming quality of the film is Bernard Herrmann’s lavish, misunderstood score. (Listen to the Prelude in this theatrical trailer for the film. Also, note Hitchock’s hilarious one-liners: “She does seem a rather excitable type” reduced me to tears!) It is mostly considered a melodramatic, Romantic mess of a composition. This may or may not be true. What his music does reflect, however, is an externalization of the emotional, child-like tumult Hedren’s character experiences thrroughout the film. Of course, I would be remiss in not crediting the director, Hitch, for making a contribution or two. Remember the scene in which Marnie robs an employer after hours? The audience is on tenterhooks as she cracks and empties the safe, removes her shoes, and soberly attempts her escape without being noticed by a cleaning woman–only to drop one of her high-heels! This suspenseful sequence alone is worth forgiving Hitchcock the sillier fare in the final reel.

I plan on posting more about the formal achievments of Marnie in the future. Keep an eye peeled.

L’amour de l’étymologie is a feature exploring the etymology of English words. Today’s entry: the noun vertigo! You may rarely find this word spelled (vertego, verteego, virtigo) and pronounced (although this is the standard pronunciation) in any number of ways. If you’re feeling adventuresome, branch out and use related words such as the adjective “vertiginous”!

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Vertigo should not be confused with acrophobia, the fear of heights.

I have been consistently fascinated by the word vertigo since childhood, having seen Hitchcock’s classic of the same name at a tender age. Hypnotized by the film’s salient imagery, captivating score, and general pathos, I found myself returning to the term time and again. Only about a year ago I discovered that the title - Hitchcock’s personal favorite for the film - barely survived the journey to the marquee. (There were around fifty suggested titles ready and waiting to oust Vertigo.) In late October of 1957 the studio asserted that “No execs like Vertigo and believe it handicap to selling and advertising picture whether potential customers know what word vertigo means or not”. (Auiler 113)

This quote most likely explains why the original trailer for Vertigo opens with a shot of a dictionary. The book opens and the camera zooms in on a page as a quick dissolve takes viewers to a detail shot of the entry for “vertigo”. A voice-over informs the audience that the word means “a feeling of dizziness … a swimming in the head … figuratively a state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror.” As the book spins and dissolves into one of Saul Bass and John Whitney’s iconic spiral motifs - known properly by the name “Lissajous spirals” - it seems reasonable to ask just how much of this definition is fact and how much is hyperbole.

In truth, the clever mind that thought up this educational prelude got the meaning pretty much right.

In the original Latin, vertigo meant “a turning around, giddiness”. The Romantic languages inherited this term, and it can be assumed that Anglophones adopted the word from either French or Spanish. The first known use of vertigo in English has been dated to 1528 in Paynell’s Salerne’s Regim, which describes “The heed ache called vertigo: whiche maketh a man to wene that the world turneth”. The main gist of vertigo has followed this pathological assessment. The Oxford English Dictionary’s primary entry: “A disordered condition in which the person affected has a sensation of whirling, either of external objects or of himself, and tends to lose equilibrium and consciousness; swimming in the head; giddiness, dizziness”. The term can also be applied to animals such as horses, sheep, and hawks–although any link between dizziness and these animals’ diseases seems tenuous.

All that jazz is without adding an article. You can slap an “a” or “the” before vertigo if you don’t mind sounding a bit backward. Similarly, using plural forms (vertigos, vertigoes, verteegoes, vertigines) may sound awkward to contemporary ears.

Figurative uses of the word came along later, with the first recorded use in 1634. Vertigo in this case means “A disordered state of mind, or of things, comparable to giddiness.” The OED quotes people who wrote that art, power, and intellectualism may induce this state.

The final use of vertigo is as a noun which encapsulates the “act of whirling round and round.” Although loaded with poetic potential, this usage seems relatively rare; the only historical quote the OED cites is 19th Century writer Thomas de Quincey’s use of the word to describe a top in his Autobiographical Sketches.

That’s all she wrote. Stay tuned for more etymologies and musings on Hitchcock’s Vertigo!

:: Bibliography ::

Auiler, Dan. Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. ISBN: 0312169159.

“Vertigo.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2008. 2 Jan. 2008 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=vertigo&find.x=0&find.y=0&find=Find+word>.