White Dialogues

by Bennett Sims

  Bereyter confessed that he had watched this scene countless times beforehand, without ever registering the florist. He saw Novak mutter something to the woman, and he saw the woman nod in return. That is all. But for some reason, that night, he finally noticed what he had always failed to: the florist is speaking. Far from simply nodding at Novak, the extra is saying something to Novak. He rewound the scene repeatedly, he told us, squinting at the florist. What was she mouthing? What had she said? And would it be possible, Bereyter asked himself that night, he informed us this morning, to read her lips? After making various inquiries on campus, he eventually managed to meet the lip-reader from the German department. She agreed to review the footage, and, within a week, she had delivered her results: the florist was mouthing All right.

  All right

  At this point in his presentation, I actually picked up my pen, to try to scribble down—in the windowless Wolfsegg darkness—the phrase All right. But on a moment’s reflection I decided that it would not be worth the trouble. These two words—this accidental scrap of dialogue, sheer happenstance dialogue, caught on camera but otherwise unintended, the improvisatory dialogue of a background florist—were meaningless. No insight could be gained into the film via this discovery. It made no contribution to Hitchcock scholarship. I was even almost embarrassed, for Bereyter. I even almost blushed, on Bereyter’s behalf. This was what he had to show for white dialogues, after years of research? The silence in the room was killing. Even Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss—fawning there in the front row—even they must be feeling bad for Bereyter, I thought. His next example was no better. He screened for us a scene shot in a ballroom, during which he demonstrated that one dancer—a simpering man in a dark suit—could be glimpsed whispering something into the ear of his partner, an elderly woman in a ball gown of pink taffeta, outfitted with a lace tiara, perhaps the man’s mother-in-law, if not his own mother, Bereyter speculated, thereby attributing filial relations and an entire backstory to these utterly inconsequential non-characters. What the simpering man turned out to be whispering, Bereyter announced, was, If you think.

  If you think

  To my great shock, this second line was not greeted with abrupt and derisive laughter, but a seism of thoughtful murmurs, which spread backward through the audience from the front row. People were genuinely impressed. I alone (evidently) had to bite my tongue. I alone (evidently) saw white dialogues for what they were. This was nothing more than chitchat exegesis, a kind of crackpot cryptology, I thought, watching Bereyter smile in satisfaction, as he humbly waited out the murmur. He is a charlatan, I thought. Why not close read the billboards, or the shop-window signage? I even tried to jot down the phrase crackpot cryptology in my journal, a little something to confront him with during the Q&A. But in the darkness all I managed to scrawl were discrete stabs of ink, stark violent hieroglyphs against the paper. And what’s more, it occurred to me, setting down my pen, his methodology is not even (if I may put it this way) sound. Because by what criteria is his lip-reader arriving at her results? Lacking any semantic context, how is she supposed to distinguish between two homophones (two and too, for instance), or even resolve an ambiguous viseme? How was she able to tell that the florist is mouthing all right, rather than all ride or hall write or something else altogether? How does she distinguish one bilabial stop from another? One alveolar stop from another? One mid-front vowel from another? Could Bereyter really expect us to take this methodology seriously? No, I decided, scrawling a line back and forth in my journal: this so-called project could only be a diabolical joke, something on the order of the Sokal Hoax, cooked up by Bereyter to expose the risible state of contemporary film scholarship. I could barely believe that my colleagues—the same colleagues who have denied me tenure, referring diplomatically to my dearth of publications (in private they have not been so polite, I know, dismissing my single published article as deranged)—I could barely believe that Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss were now allowing Bereyter to pull the wool so thoroughly over their eyes. He still has not moved on from the scene in Ernie’s Restaurant: they are all no doubt still listening to the woman onscreen. My article was not deranged. Titled Rear Window Vertigo, it was the only chapter of my dissertation to be published, and its thesis is that Vertigo is in fact a second act or secret sequel to one of Hitchcock’s previous films, 1954’s Rear Window. Both movies star James Stewart, and my article’s insight was that Stewart is not playing two distinct roles: rather, he is playing the same character in each film, or, more precisely, the same character in a single film, a four-hour film titled Rear Window Vertigo. In Rear Window, the first half of the film, Stewart plays a photographer and amateur detective in New York, under the name L.B. Jefferies, who spies on his neighbors with his camera’s telephoto lens. In the second half of the film, Vertigo, he plays a professional detective in San Francisco, under the name Scottie, who is hired to shadow Kim Novak, allegedly possessed by the ghost of her great-grandmother. Jeff and Scottie, my article reasons, can only be the same person, a Scottie-Jeff hybrid, comprising two split but reciprocal identities. It is as if, at the end of Rear Window, Jeff undergoes some kind of psychogenic fugue: forgetting both his name and his existence, he travels in an amnesiac trance across the country, from New York to San Francisco, from Rear Window to Vertigo, where he takes up a second life as Scottie, who is then compelled to repeat key details of Jeff’s repressed identity, as if possessed by him. How else to explain the uncanny continuities between these characters? For instance, their mutual fear of heights. Looked at one way, Jeff’s traumatic fall from the apartment building (at the end of Rear Window) is what triggers Scottie’s symptomatic acrophobia (at the beginning of Vertigo), when he finds himself dangling from a ledge for (what he does not realize is) the second time in his life.

  The majority of my article is devoted to tracking down and demonstrating these kinds of correspondences, which I do ruthlessly, indisputably, despite the kneejerk dismissiveness of Dzieza, Plunkett, and Guss. There is no other explanation. James Stewart has exited Rear Window for Vertigo. He has escaped the Rear Window bottle for the Vertigo bottle. No sooner has he left the Rear Window frying pan than he has entered the Vertigo fire. Neither Scottie nor Jeff but Scottie-Jeff. That was—is—the major insight of my article. And yet it is as nothing next to Bereyter’s insights, according to my colleagues, for my article is contaminated at the outset by its enabling methodological error. I am found guilty of ignoring the boundary line dividing these two films. Never mind the fact that that is precisely the point of my article, or that it is James Stewart himself who has ignored this boundary line. This is what counts for a methodological error, among my colleagues, rather than lip-reading. But whereas I may not have coined a flashy term for my techniques, and whereas I may not have signed a publishing contract for my dissertation with the University of N— Press—as the irrepressible departmental gossip suggests that Bereyter has—and whereas I, in my mid-thirties, still untenured, largely unpublished, am about to be cast back into the void of the anoxic job market, at least I am on the side of Hitchcock. I at least am close-reading Hitchcock’s dialogue, dialogue that he approved in script, and not only that, but dialogue that he then directed the delivery of, and fastidiously positioned his microphones to record, and instructed his audio engineers to mix at a perceptible level, all so that it would play a definite and measurable role in the meaning of his movie. Unlike Bereyter, I am not engaged in some preposterous aleatoric hermeneutics; I am not attempting to somehow one-up the director himself, driven by scholarly hubris and an unsurpassed disregard for Hitchcock—not to say Hitchcock contempt, Hitchcock hostility, a transparently Oedipal and near-homicidal Hitchcock hatred—to ignore the dialogue of his design, rooting around instead inside his blind spots, hell-bent on hunting down any chance mouth movements that may have slipped into his film, between as it were the film’s cracks, beneath as it were Hitchcock’s watch, which—if you ask me (no one did)—is the methodological error par excellence. Yes, t
here are almost unthinkable levels of aggression wound up in white dialogues, aggression toward Hitchcock and aggression toward his films. Bereyter is trying to spy on Hitchcock, to expose his secrets. White dialogues are his telephoto lens, as surely as he is Hitchcock’s L.B. Jefferies. I look again at the canvas behind Bereyter. The scene at Ernie’s is still flickering against it, and the woman at the bar is still mouthing her inaudible message. Whether Bereyter has already read her white dialogue aloud, when I wasn’t paying attention, or whether he is still showboating by exhorting us to listen to her, I cannot discern. He appears to have moved ahead in his lecture, or perhaps he is on a tangent; at any rate he is now discussing the use of white noise in The Birds. Ignoring him, I continue to watch the woman at the bar. Every four seconds or so the scene jumps back to the beginning, caught in its loop. In this way she is forced to keep restarting her dialogue, forever unable to finish, like some Sisyphus of speech. It is as though this endless repetition or eternal return of the sentence is itself the sentence she is serving, the chthonic contrapasso that has been meted out to her, upon her arrival in the underworld, I think. Sitting alone in my desk chair in the darkness, at the very back of this basement seminar room, thinking of the underworld, I notice in a distracted way—and for the second time this morning—the woman’s graying hair. It is then that the thought occurs to me: yes, I realize, this woman must be dead, long dead by now, her presence on the canvas spectral.

  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.

  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. Yes, that would give me ultimate pleasure. To portray Bereyter as he truly is: not in his prep-school cardigan, but in his khaki bush jacket and pith helmet; not with his sheaf of lecture notes, but wielding his pickaxe, his loot sack, as he tears open this poor woman’s sarcophagus. For Vertigo is her pyramid, as surely as Bereyter is her Howard Carter. Of course all films—but especially old films—are pyramids, I realize. Of course all films—but especially old films—serve a preservative function: they exist first and foremost to freeze-dry their actors’ bodies, safeguarding them from destruction. I know this as well as anyone. Actors’ heads are shrunken in the formaldehyde jars of close-ups. They are embalmed within the film, mummified by the film. That is why it is possible to view all films—but especially old films—as mummy films. Photography began, after all, as a mummifying technology, a 19th-century advance in mankind’s age-old mummy complex. With each passing era, I know, mankind has perfected the perverse art of preserving corpses. First the mummy, then the death mask, then the photograph. After the photograph, there remained only one logical step: the moving image. From Egypt down to the Egyptian Theater, there has been a direct and unbroken lineage. Every movie is a pyramid, stuffed tight with mummies. Every movie is a mobile gallery of death masks. I have always felt this way. Whereas most viewers see actors’ faces, all I see are death masks. Whereas my colleagues are liable to say, That actor did a fine job, I always have to stop myself from saying, That death mask did a fine job. Frankly, my dear, I hear one death mask say to the other death mask, I don’t give a damn, and I watch in horror as tears stream down the second death mask’s face. With Vertigo it is no different. I see the James Stewart death mask kiss the Kim Novak death mask. I see the pulmonary-embolism death mask kiss the not-yet death mask. Even though Kim Novak is still alive, her face in this movie is no less grotesque a death mask: it is a twenty-five-year-old’s death mask, a simulacral death mask, waiting patiently for its living counterpart to die. Meanwhile, in the backgrounds of these scenes, there are whole crowds of death masks, every shot a charnel house of death masks, the unmummified or half-mummified faces of extras. It is as in any pyramid: here too there are hierarchies of preservation. At the pharaonic apex, there are Stewart and Novak, painstakingly embalmed. Not only their images, but their voices as well, have been extended into eternity. Below them are the extras, their servants and courtiers, who have been permitted to disintegrate. Sometimes the camera does not bother to preserve these extras’ faces, only a passing shoulder, a half-turned back. Sometimes their voices have been excluded from the audio track. Everywhere the movie echoes like a mausoleum with the sounds of Stewart’s voice, which drowns out all the extras’ voices, such that we cannot hear what these people are saying. For over half a century, their speech has remained invisible: un-listened-to, and perhaps unlistenable, buried beneath the phenomenal threshold of the film. Their names are not even listed in the film’s credits. In these so-called credits—in fact they are necrologies—in these crawling columns of the dead, the extras do not merit registry. They are the plebeian dead, anonymous corpses. Faceless, mute, they have been lost to nameless oblivion. Now, half a century later, Bereyter has arrived to disturb their rest.