by Bennett Sims
The pulmonary-embolism death mask kisses the not-yet death mask
At the lectern, Bereyter is silent. He frowns down at his notes, apparently pausing for emphasis. Then he glances up and clears his throat: If you listen to this woman, he finally announces, you will hear only the surrounding drone of Ernie’s Restaurant. But this drone, he goes on, is diegetic: it is as deafening for the characters as it is for us. This man at the bar, he says, this woman’s companion, he is leaning forward to hear her, in fact must be struggling to hear her, and perhaps he is even reading her lips himself. Bereyter smiles coyly here. In forcing us to squint at her lips, he continues, the film gives us a deaf person’s viewpoint on the action depicted. As in a silent movie, this woman portrays a character whose lips must be read. Which is all the more remarkable, Bereyter concludes, when we finally discover what she is mouthing. For she is the first self-conscious author of a metafictional or metatextual white dialogue, a self-referential white dialogue. He holds up his left hand now, to indicate a direct quotation, and then—looking down at the lectern—begins to read: Read my lips, this woman says, Bereyter says. It’s Jeff.
Read my lips: it’s Jeff
There is another excited murmur in the audience. Bereyter projects his voice over the uproar: She has embraced her silence, he booms out at us from the lectern, qua white dialogue. Knowing that Hitchcock has placed her in a zone of white noise, he says, she commands her companion to read her lips. At this point Bereyter presses on with his lecture, expatiating on the implications of her utterance. But I am no longer listening. I am still watching the clip on the screen. Bereyter leaves it looping on the canvas behind him, and I cannot tear my eyes from the dead woman. Read my lips, she is saying, it’s Jeff. And when I study her lips, yes, it is obvious, that is what she has been mouthing all along. Read my lips, it is as plain as day. Read my lips, I read, pressing my body against the back of my chair. It’s Jeff, I read, pushing against the edge of my desktop with both hands. Bereyter babbles on at the lectern, oblivious. He has no clue what he has uncovered. The dead woman looms huge behind him—spectral, repetitive, looping her impossible message over and over—and Bereyter gestures left and right, lecturing to his audience. He is incapable of appreciating the significance of his own discovery. For while glancing sidelong at James Stewart—how had I not noticed?—this woman is mouthing, It’s Jeff. She is referring to Stewart, not as Scottie, but as Jeff: his repressed name, his Rear Window name. It is as if some background actor, some extra from Rear Window, has followed James Stewart into the film. As if this woman in her blue suit has herself traveled all the way from New York to San Francisco, from Rear Window to Vertigo, shadowing Scottie-Jeff to Ernie’s. Spotting him there, she identifies him. There is no other explanation. Read my lips: it’s Jeff. This message she is mouthing, directly toward the screen, is meant not for her companion, but for the audience. She is telling the audience—she is telling me—that Scottie is an impostor, that he is actually Jeff, a hybrid or chimerical Scottie-Jeff, she is confirming my theory in the most incontrovertible terms. It is undeniable now: there is no border between these films. James Stewart and this extra have both succeeded in escaping. They have left the Rear Window bottle for the Vertigo bottle. They have abandoned the Rear Window pyramid for the Vertigo pyramid. And what is to stop her, I wonder—regarding her image warily on the screen—what is to stop her from leaving the Vertigo bottle for the Wolfsegg bottle? Now that Bereyter has uncorked her? What is to keep her from escaping through the adit of the projector shaft, and from crawling (slowly but surely, in Clegg’s phrase) out of the movie and into the room? I close my eyes, unable to watch, and by the time I reopen them I have stopped breathing. But she is still sitting there of course, trapped on the flatness of the screen. The dead woman looks into my eyes, telling me again and again to read her lips, repeating over and over that it’s Jeff. I am entirely too agitated to stay. Without taking my eyes from hers, I rise from my chair in a single stealthy motion. Except I must make a noise, for the man a few rows ahead of me turns around. Seeing me standing there, he holds up an index finger, imploring me to wait a moment, then twists in his seat to grab a sheet of paper from his desk. He reaches across the aisle to give it to me. Taking it, I nod my head in thanks and sit back down. I don’t have time for this, I tell myself, even as I am placing the paper on my desktop; I have to get out of here, I think, even as I am smoothing it flat with my hand. It is a column of three photographs, screen captures from Vertigo, with italicized captions printed beneath them. The lip-reader’s transcript. I scan the extras’ faces, looking for any refugees from Rear Window. By the flickering of the projector, I squint down at the captions, straining to read their white dialogues.
Sommelier: But if you don’t stop—of course
Barman: I’ll be right there, be right there
Diner 1: We see you
I recognize the scene immediately. It occurs midway through the film, during Scottie-Jeff’s return to Ernie’s Restaurant. Again he takes his place on the barstool, peering hauntedly off-camera. Again the corpses around him mutter among themselves. I skim their captions quickly, three times in succession, looking for any clues. But none of them call out, It’s Jeff! Instead, the sommelier confers with the host. The barman attends to his bespectacled patron. But if you do not stop, says the one; I’ll be right there, says the other. As for Diner 1—who I can only presume is the wolfish man in the black bowtie—he is holding forth at his table, grinning mischievously at the woman seated opposite him. We see you, he tells her. We see you, he says. I shake my head at the transcript. Bereyter could not have written less meaningful white dialogues himself. And yet, I think, rereading the captions for the fourth time, there is something not quite right here. Something in each screen capture—something ineffable—is off: each frame before me bears some uncanny incongruity. Perhaps it is only because my eye has been trained by Hitchcock, conditioned to seek out the one stray detail that unsettles the image—the crop duster dusting a cropless field; the windmill that spins against the breeze—but it strikes me that these cannot possibly be the words that the extras are mouthing. The sommelier, flaunting a wine bottle in his hands, admonishes the host with this enigmatic ultimatum: If you do not stop, he says… But stop what? Meanwhile the barman assures his customer—even as he is walking away from him—I’ll be right there, be right there. Then there is Diner 1: he tells the woman, We see you, when no one at the table is even looking at her. He himself is glancing—grinning—at a point over her shoulder. There must be some mistake. The lip-reader must have misread their lips. The barman could very well be mouthing, Pee right there. I mouth these syllables silently to myself, testing out the alternatives. Fright there, I mouth to myself, and then, Bright air. Bright star, I mouth to myself, and then, Be right air. Be right err, Be rye tare, I mouth to myself, as a chill runs through me. Be reyt er, I mouth to myself, gripping my pen, Bereyter. Right there, I mouth to myself, Bereyter. Right there, Bereyter, I mouth to myself. Pen in hand, I scrawl a line through the italicized caption, forcefully crossing out the second be right there. Beside it I write—as best I can in the darkness, my hand trembling—Bereyter.
I’ll be right there, be right there Bereyter
Yes. Yes. It is insane, but it is obvious. In fact it is even more obvious than it is insane. That is what the barman is mouthing. He is speaking not to his customer, but to Bereyter. He is on his way—not to his customer—but to Bereyter. And the other extras as well. For instance the sommelier with his wine bottle, mouthing But if you don’t stop. Who else could he be addressing, besides Bereyter? What else could this even mean, besides, If you don’t stop disturbing our rest? If you don’t stop uncorking our deaths, the silent bottle that our death is, as vulnerable as this bottle that I hold in my hands? If you don’t stop, of course, I’ll be right there, Bereyter. We see you. I look at the transcript in horror: Diner 1’s beady eyes stare far past his companion’s shoulder, peering out of the paper to pierce my own. It is un
mistakable: he is looking straight through the camera and has been looking through that camera for fifty years, patiently, unblinkingly, waiting for the day when someone would finally meet his gaze. When someone would trespass this border and demolish this fourth wall. We see you, he says, We see you, speaking not just for his tablemates, but—it dawns on me—every single extra in Vertigo, such that now, all at once, the grin on his face takes on the most sinister dimensions. My God, I think, staring down dumbfounded at the transcript on my desk… They are coming. At just this moment, the lights flash on. I blink furiously, blinded by the sudden fluorescence, and I see that Bereyter—having stepped from behind the lectern—is now pushing up the navy sleeves of his cardigan. He is initiating the Q&A. Behind him, the canvas is blank; above me, the projector is no longer whirring. A hand shoots up in the front row, either Dzieza’s, Plunkett’s, or Guss’s, it does not matter. I cannot bear to listen. Bereyter has invited the wrath of the dead upon all of us. He has broken into the mummy’s pyramid, broken the seal on the mummy’s tomb. He has called down the mummy’s curse on all our heads, and no one else understands this. Oh, I have questions for Bereyter all right. I have been storing them up all morning. I begin to write them in my notebook, just beneath the word bottle. My hand scribbles compulsively, building up its case against Bereyter. At the critical moment, I will have to rise from this seat at the back of the room, where I have gone unnoticed in the shadows, and then I alone (evidently) will have to confront Bereyter with the monstrousness of what he’s done. Yes, yes, he will call, you there, in the back, and I will pose the questions that my colleagues are unable to, the questions that my hand—even now—is scrawling in my notebook beneath me. Have you no decency, Bereyter?, I will ask. What did you think would happen, Bereyter?, I will ask. How did you expect the dead to react, when you and your lip-reader went uncorking them? When you opened the lid, not on Pandora’s Box, Bereyter, but on Pandora’s Bottle? Not on Pandora’s Pithos, Bereyter, but on Pandora’s Pyramid? Bereyter, Bereyter, what have you done? I let the pen fall from my hand. It goes rolling over the side of the desktop, clattering to the floor. Rising to my feet, I grip the chair to steady myself, and concentrate all the energy in my being. Yes, I hear Bereyter call from the front of the room, you there. In the back.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to the following institutions for their generosity and hospitality: Bard College, especially Leon Botstein, Mary Caponegro, Wout Cornelissen, Benjamin Hale, Robert Kelly, Grayson Morley, Micaela Morrissette, Bradford Morrow, Francine Prose, Raissa St. Pierre, and Irene Zedlacher; the Copernicus Society of America; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, especially Connie Brothers, Kelly Smith, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek; the MacDowell Colony; the Truman Capote Literary Trust, especially Louise Schwartz; the University of Iowa English Department, especially Brooks Landon and Robyn Schiff; and the Corporation of Yaddo, especially Elaina Richardson and Candace Wait.
Thank you to Roni Lubliner and Peer Ebbighausen at NBCUniversal, and to Leland Faust at the Alfred J. Hitchcock Trust, for permission and assistance in reproducing images from Hitchcock’s films.
Thanks as well to the following readers for their insight and support: Jin Auh, Andrés Carlstein, Bryan Castille, Daniel Castro, Adam Eaglin, E.J. Fischer, Angela Flournoy, Jessica Friedman, Meg Gauley, Susan Hazen-Hammond, Arna Hemenway, Brigid Hughes, Evan Michael James, T. Geronimo Johnson, Cheston Knapp, Aaron Kunin, Travis Kurowski, David Leavitt, Carmen Maria Machado, Kannan Mahadevan, Halimah Marcus, Erica Martz, Ayana Mathis, Mark Mayer, Eric Obenauf, Amy Parker, Michael Ray, Marilynne Robinson, Rebecca Rukeyser, Jennifer Sahn, Pat Sims, Harry Stecopoulos, Wells Tower, Tony Tulathimutte, Madhuri Vijay, Adrian Van Young, and Eliza Jane Wood. Special thanks to Sam Chang and Ben Mauk.
‘White Dialogues’ quotes or paraphrases several works of film theory. The ‘Rear Window Vertigo’ reading is Jalal Toufic’s, from his essay ‘Rear Window Vertigo,’ included in Two or Three Things I’m Dying To Tell You. The phrase (and the concept of) ‘the mummy complex’ is André Bazin’s, from his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’ included in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. The formulation ‘she is dead, and she is going to die’ (as well as some of the surrounding language in that passage) is Roland Barthes’s, from Camera Lucida. The Michel Chion quotation is a combination of two separate passages, both from The Voice in Cinema.
The phrase (and the concept of) ‘radical closure’ is Jalal Toufic’s.