Librari[d]an

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.

Honestly, it just isn’t that good of a horror film. Sure it has some very nice jump scares, but it also has some pretty pedestrian ones as well. And the plot! It’s about as formula they come.

Laura has a nebulous backstory involving a beautiful old house. Guess what? It’s an orphanage and she’s moving back in. Genius! Did I mention that her adoptive son has been talking to imaginary friends? Throw in a séance scenario complete with freaky medium, secret rooms, chronic illnesses, a twist ending, etc. and you’ve got a pretty good list of everything you can expect from this type of subgenre film. Come now, the only haunted house cliché they didn’t use was having the place built on an ancient Native American burial ground! And they couldn’t… because it takes place in Spain.

Truth be told, there are many redeeming aspects to the film. The art direction is interesting, and rarely appears too highly contrived. (Tomás’ sack mask and ‘little house’ are not too creepy, yet still evoke a feeling of foreboding.) Darkness/obstruction of vision isn’t used as a crutch to hide ghosts for a final, menacing appearance. (Tomás’ hallway walk was brilliant. Very well done.) The writer rarely sports with the audience’s intelligence. (Not explaining the Saint Anthony medal was a nice touch. No need to club the viewer with its significance.) Belén Rueda gave a solid performance as Laura. (Audiences never laughed at her - unintentional humor is becoming a huge problem in contemporary horror - and she never sublimated her character to the archetype of “mother”.)

My fundamental problem with the film is the wishy-washy ending. Just when you think director Juan Antonio Bayona and writer Sergio G. Sánchez are willing to destroy Laura and the audience utterly - and I do mean utterly! - with the twist, they backpedal. Instead of brining the story to a conclusion that indicts both mother/father/viewer for their neglect of children in their care - Laura’s focus on children with special needs rather than Simón, Carlos’ hands-off parenting, Benigna’s selfish revenge, our obsession with the spectral children rather than the endangered living child - The Orphanage tacks on a bunch of feel-good scenes for a speedy dénouement.

As a child, I would often have dreams about a mysterious blonde, blindfolded and all in white, silently calling out to me for help. She would appear framed in mirrors, reaching blindly towards me, or dead in a ruined coffin. When I related the dream to a friend, he assured me it was not mine at all. Rather, the girl was my misty memory of an obscure live-action Disney film, The Watcher in the Woods. The “dream” was in fact several suspenseful scenes from the science fiction/horror movie, which features a girl who was accidentally sent into another dimension - switched with an alien - during a solar eclipse. Why I came to think of it as a dream was clear: Karen’s costume design was theatrical and symbolic in nature, a softening filter made the images hazy, and little to no sound heightened the suspense of the scenes.

In “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner”, Alison Landsberg relates Herbert Blumer’s scientific finding that the mass media can implant memories into audiences via film. (LM 240) Audiences do not simply associate themselves with characters in the film, but incorporate the images and sounds fundamentally into the self. (LM 242) Landsberg views this as an extension of themes developed in contemporary science fiction films dealing with “prosthetic” (i.e. synthesized) memory.

In her essay, the author argues that post-modern film analysis privileges the time before audience’s relationships to events were not so mediated that people could not differentiate between the real and hyperreal. (LM 243, 240) Critics such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard express nostalgia for this time – the “prelapsarian moment” – when it was still possible for viewers to experience and participate in true memory rather than inauthentic memory. Landsberg argues, however, that films such as Total Recall and Blade Runner work against this idea. The protagonists of both films don’t concern themselves with their past. This is because an authentic memory is not necessarily superior to a fabricated one, and because both memories exist. (LM 243, 244) Decker and Quaid forge their own identities based on the present moment. Thus, memory is less about the past than the present. (LM 244) A foil to this argument can be seen in the film Dark City. In the course of the narrative, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) attempts to unravel his memories to escape the strange people chasing him. As it turns out, these aliens have scrambled memories into a “cocktail” and literally inject them into men and women. By repeatedly changing humans’ identities in this manner, the aliens can keep them ignorant of their captivity. Only with the help of someone with authentic memories (Kiefer Sutherland) can Murdoch learn the truth (via injection of authentic memories) and liberate the humans.

In the “Postfuturism” chapter of Vivian Sobchack’s Screening Space, she also identifies the importance of the coherence of identify. (SS 272) In the postmodern era, Sobchack feels that identity is shaped mostly by space and surface rather than the temporal. Landsberg also asserts that an emphasis on the surface typifies postmodernism. (LM 244) Thus, continuity of time is less important. Science fiction films are either nostalgic or celebratory in regard to this fact. (SS 273) In the first case, the films draw on the past in terms of plot and mise en scène (such as the antiquated fashions seen in Dune). In the second, the films glory in discontinuity editing that confuses the viewer’s sense of time. The Watcher in the Woods is of the first type, as it uses gothic horror and antiquated locales to cleverly mislead the audience into thinking the film is a ghost story (rather than science fiction).

Thus, postmodern memory and its repercussion on how films conceive of time/space can be added to a list of the elements of science fiction film. While critics readily discern the genre’s predisposition to look toward the future, they often neglect the just as conspicuous tendency for the films to look into the past.

I’ve included some screenshots from The Watcher in the Woods. I thought they might be useful in understanding why I subconsciously found the scene so gripping. If you haven’t seen the film, I would suggest it. (Annabel, at the very least, got some laughs when she revisited it.) I think it really embodies the generic tension between horror and sci-fi that Sobchack identified, even more so than Metropolis. (More on that later.)

:: Bibliography ::

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Redmond, Sean. Liquid Metal. New York: Wallflower Press, 2004.

The Watcher in the Woods. Dir. John Hough. Perf. Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards, Carroll Baker, and David McCallum. 1980/1. DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment. April 2, 2002.