by Adam Gopnik
Actually, though, she is the Kim Novak character. She had been hired by the bad guy to play the part of the first Kim Novak character—another woman was thrown off that tower, as part of an insurance scam—and to make it even odder, the fact that this is so is given away by the second Kim Novak character (in a flashback) right in the middle of the movie, so that the viewer, unlike poor Jimmy Stewart, is never in doubt about the reason the new Kim Novak looks like the old Kim Novak. The meaning of Hitchcock's choice to give away the key plot point in the middle of the movie, against the advice of everyone around him, is, I have discovered, a subject as much argued about among the cineasts as the nature of consciousness is among the philosophers.
Martha went to wake Olivia and get her dressed for school.
“Bluie 's in the fish hospital, darling,” I heard her say. Boys and men don't believe in the fish hospital; mothers know that it is where all problems should be sent, while we wait to solve them.
She'll just walk in, like Jimmy Stewart, and will be strangely reminded of Bluie—then he'll become Bluie for her,” Martha said a few hours later as we watched the new fish swim around in Olivia's tank, though I could tell that she was trying to reassure herself that this would work. I had gone to PETCO and bought a Bluie look-alike. It was easy—the bettas all looked like Bluie.
But I was beginning to doubt that this was such a good idea. I remembered that in the movie Jimmy Stewart goes nuts, and Kim Novak ends up throwing herself off that bell tower for real.
“Are we doing the wrong thing?” I asked. “I mean, won't she figure out at ten or so that Bluie died?”
All this while, Martha, as a New York mother in crisis, had her cell phone cradled under her jaw. Everybody had had a dead-pet problem. Goldfish had floated to the tops of bowls; hamsters had been found dead in their cages, their furry feet upward; and more gruesome pet-on-pet homicides had taken place, too. Each family had a different tack and a different theory. There were those who had gone the full Vertigo route and regretted it; those who had gone the tell-it-to-'em-straight route and regretted that. In fact, about all one could say, and not for the first time as a parent, is that whatever one did, one regretted it afterward.
I made only one call, and that was to my sister the developmental psychologist. She explained to me instantly that it was normal for children to develop intense attachments to pets, even “zombic” ones that did not reciprocate affection, and that a pair of Japanese psychologists, Hatano and Inagaki, had done studies of how children develop intuitive theories of biology by having pets.
“They claim that all kids, Western and Eastern, go from having primarily just psychology and physics to having a ‘vitalist’ biology right around age six,” she told me. “That is, they start to think there is some vital spirit—you know, kind of like Chinese Chi—that keeps animals and humans alive, gets replenished by food, damaged by illness, and so on. And here's the cool thing. Hatano and Inagaki show, experimentally, that giving kids pet fish accelerates the development of this kind of vitalism. We give them fish as a learning device, though we don't know that when we do it. Olivia is probably in transition from a psychological conception of life to a biological one, which may be why she's so bewildered.”
It seemed that the mere presence of a fish in a bowl, despite the barriers of glass and water and the fact of the fish's mindlessness, acted as a kind of empathy pump for five-year-olds, getting into the corners of their minds. Olivia was a vitalist, and Bluie was no longer vital. According to my sister, children's education proceeds in stages. At three, they're mostly psychologists, searching for a theory of mind; at six, they're biologists, searching for a theory of life. At ten, they're philosophers, searching to understand why our minds cannot make our lives go on forever.
“My sister doesn't think we're going to screw up Olivia's mind,” I said to Martha a few moments later. “She does think that we're going to screw up her theories of biology.” Martha was still watching the tank and trying to see if new Bluie would pass. “Olivia is going to think that dying things go away to PETCO and come back as good as new.”
Luke was the first one home. He studied the new fish, too. “Does new Bluie know that he's not Bluie?” he asked. Reddie was looking at new Bluie, but we couldn't even guess what he was thinking.
In the end, when Olivia came home from school, we did neither the ingenious Hitchcockian thing nor the honest thing; New York liberals, we did the in-between, wishy-washy, split-the-difference thing. Martha told her that Bluie had been successfully extracted from his castle window by the fish specialists, but he had been so stressed by the experience that he was resting, and it might take a long time for him to recover. Meanwhile, they had given us Bluie's brother.
Olivia took one long, baleful look at the new Bluie.
“I hate this fish,” she said. “I hate him. I want Bluie.”
We tried to console her, but it was no use.
“But look, he's just like Bluie!” we protested weakly.
“He looks like Bluie,” she admitted. “He looks like Bluie. But he's not Bluie. He's a stranger. He doesn't know me. He's not my friend, who I could talk to.”
That evening we took turns staying up with her, sitting in the rocking chair in her room and rocking until she slept. The room, I realized, was full of Bluies: things that she had ascribed feelings and thoughts and intentions to, all the while knowing that they didn't really have them. There were Buzzes and Woodies, American Girl dolls, and stuffed animals from her infancy. Children, small children particularly, don't just have more consciousness than the rest of us. They believe in consciousness more than the rest of us; their default conviction is that everything might be able to think, feel, and talk. This conviction is one that entertainment companies both recognize and exploit, with talking toys and lovable sharks, though at some other level, the children are entertained by them because they know it's all made up—no child believes that her own toys in her own bedroom talk like Woody and Buzz in the movie. Ascribing feelings to things is a way of protecting your own right to have feelings. Expanding the circle of consciousness extends the rule of feelings.
Olivia loved Bluie because it is in a child's nature to ascribe intentions and emotions to things that don't have them, rather as Hitchcock did with actresses. She knows that she is Olivia because one of the things that she is capable of doing is imagining that Bluie is Bluie. Though you read about the condition “mind-blindness” in autistic children, the alternative, I saw, was not to be mind-sighted. The essential condition of youth is to be mind-visionary: to see everything as though it might have a mind. We begin as small children imagining that everything could have consciousness—fish, dolls, toy soldiers, even parents—and spend the rest of our lives paring the list down until we are left alone in bed, the only mind left.
And yet, though I had been instructed by my reading that we imagine minds as much as know them, I also realized, looking at the little girl who had cried herself to sleep, that the difference didn't quite matter. A pet is an act of empathy, a theory of love the child makes, but it is also a living thing, and when it dies, it moves briefly but decisively outside the realm of thought, where everything can be given the shape of our own mind, and into the cold climate of physical existence, where things are off or things are on. Science might be dissolving life and mind into smaller parts, but among the higher animals, at least, with eyes and skeletons and hungers, the line between life and non-life is pretty much fixed and hard; from the other side of that window, no traveler, or goldfish, has yet come home to his bowl.
The real proof of consciousness is the pain of loss. Reddie, swimming in his studio, did not know that Bluie had gone; Bluie himself may in some sense not have known that he had gone. But Olivia did. The pain we feel is not the same as the hum we know, and it is the pain, not the hum, that is the price of being conscious, and the point of being human. I looked at the sleeping child, hoping that she would be over her grief in the morning.
Mom,” Luk
e said the next morning, “you shouldn't have done that big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing. It just stretched it out.” The three of us were sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Olivia to wake up.
“I didn't do a big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing,” Martha objected querulously. She was pretty tired. “I did a big Bluie's-in-the-rehab-clinic-right-next-to-the-fish-hospital thing.”
“Well, that makes it worse,” Luke said.
“Let's try this,” Martha said. “Let's tell her that, though Bluie did die, this Bluie is kind of Bluie reborn.”
I thought she might have something, and in the next fifteen minutes, we did a quick, instinctive tour of the world's religions. We made up a risen-from-the-grave Christian story: the Passion of the Bluie. We considered a Buddhist story: Bluie goes round and round. We even played with a Jewish story: Bluie couldn't be kept alive by the doctors, but what a lovely bowl he left for his family!
Then we heard the door of Olivia's room open, and she came to the table, theatrically calm, and sat down. “I'm going to call the new fish Lucky,” she announced. “And can I please have the Honey Nut Cheerios?” She knew that the Honey Nut Cheerios were, strictly speaking, off limits, but that no one was going to call her on it this morning.
It was, I thought, an inventive stroke. Did the name refer to new Bluie 's unearned good fortune in finding a home thanks to the death of the original Bluie? (He had, after all, fulfilled the oldest New York fantasy: He had found and moved into someone else's vacated and rent-controlled apartment.) Or did it refer to his good fortune in being alive at all to swim around in the world a little longer? Certainly luck seemed like a wiser thing to celebrate in a fish than reincarnation.
But then an odd thing happened. After a couple of days of everyone calling him Lucky, we noticed that Olivia, on her own, began to call the new fish Bluie. It was as if, having made a grand and instructive emotional tour, she had ended up right where she started. We begin with the problem of mind, pass through the experience of pain—and end up loving the same old fish.
I understood suddenly why Hitchcock had given away the secret in the middle of Vertigo. The surprise is revealed because Hitchcock could not see what was surprising. He didn't think that there was anything bizarre in the idea of someone constantly being remade in the image of someone else's schemes or desires or weird plot points, because he thought that this is what life and love consist of. Suspense, not surprise, was the element Hitchcock swam in—not What next? but How will we get to the inevitable place again? Hitchcock himself, after all, did not adapt to circumstances. He made circumstances adapt to him. When Grace Kelly married a prince, there was Kim Novak, and when Kim Novak rebelled, there was Tippi Hedren. Every five-year-old has one fish, as every great director has a single Blonde. What Hitchcock's films of the fifties have in common with all the world's religions is the faith that death can be overcome, or at least made tolerable, by repetitive obsession. First the mind, then the pain, and then the echo: That is the order of life. James Stewart learned this, and now Olivia had, too.
Luke had a much more sinister view about what had happened to Bluie—less Vertigo and more Psycho.
“What I think is,” he said, “Reddie put Bluie up to swimming into that window and then laughed inside when he saw what happened. It was, like, the Revenge of Reddie. He hated Bluie all this time for having a bigger house than he did, and finally tricked him to his death. Reddie is the bad guy, with all these plots and schemes. Look at him! He's the villain.”
And for a moment or two, watching poor Reddie swimming in his low-rent bowl, I did think I could see an evil gleam in his small fishy eye, a startling resemblance to Anthony Perkins in his drawn, nervous excitability and long-simmering rage. I watched him in slightly panicky wonder. He looked like a fish who knows his own mind.
Last of the Metrozoids
In the spring of 2003, the American art historian Kirk Varnedoe accepted the title of head coach of a football team called the Giant Metrozoids, which practiced then every week in Central Park. It was a busy time for him. He had just become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, after thirteen years as the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he was preparing the Mellon Lectures for the National Gallery of Art in Washington—a series of six lectures on abstract art that he was supposed to deliver that spring. He was also dying, with a metastasis in his lung of a colon cancer that had been discovered in 1996, and, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he was running through all the possible varieties of chemotherapy, none of which did much good, at least not for very long.
The Giant Metrozoids were not, on the face of it, much of a challenge for him. They began with a group of eight-year-olds in my son Luke's second-grade class. Football had replaced Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and the sinister water yo-yo (poisonous) as a preoccupation and a craze. The boys had become wrapped up in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ march to victory in the Super Bowl that winter, and they had made up their minds to be football players. They wanted a team—“a real team that practices and has T-shirts and knows plays and everything”—that could play flag football, against an as yet unknown opponent, and I set about trying to organize it. (The name was a compromise: Some of the boys had wanted to be called the Giants, while cool opinion had landed on the Freakazoids; Metrozoids was arrived at by some diplomatic back formation with “Metropolitan.”)
Once I had the T-shirts, white and blue, we needed a coach, and Kirk, Luke's godfather, was the only choice; during one of his chemotherapy sessions, I suggested a little tentatively that he might try it. He had been a defensive-backfield coach at Williams College for a year after graduation, before he went to Stanford to do art history, and I knew that he had thought of taking up coaching as a full-time profession, only to decide, as he said once, “If you're going to spend your life coaching football, you have to be smart enough to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.” But he said yes eagerly. He gave me instructions on what he would need, and made a date with the boys.
On the first Friday afternoon, I took the red cones he had asked for and arranged them carefully on our chosen field, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street, just a couple of blocks from the Children's Gate. I looked over my shoulder at the pseudo-Renaissance mansion that houses NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, right across the street. We had met there, twenty-three years earlier, his first year at the Institute of Fine Arts, and mine, too. He had arrived from Stanford and Paris and Columbia, a young scholar, just thirty-four, who had made his reputation by cleaning up one of the messier stalls in the art-historical stable, the question of the authentic Rodin drawings. Then he had helped revive some unfairly forgotten reputations, particularly that of the misunderstood “academic” Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte.
But, as with Lawrence Taylor's first season with the Giants, though we knew he was supposed to be good, nobody was this good. He would come into the lecture room in turtleneck and sports jacket, professor-wear, and, staring at his shoes and without any preliminaries, wait for the lights to dim, demand, “First slide, please,” and, pacing back and forth, look up at the image, no text in his hand but a list of slides. “Last time we left off looking at Cézanne in the eighties, when the conversation between his code, registered in the deliberately crippled, dot-dot-dash, telegraphic repetition of brushstrokes, and his construction, built up in the blocky, stage-set recessional spaces, set out like flats on a theater,” he would begin, improvising, spitballing, seeing meaning in everything. A Judd box was as alive for him as a Rodin bronze, and his natural mode was to talk in terms of tension rather than harmony. What was weird about the pictures was exactly what there was to prize about them, and, his style implied, all the nettled and querulous critics who tried to homogenize the pictures into a single story undervalued them, because, in a sense, they undervalued life, which was never going to be harmonized, either.
It was football that made us friends.
In that first fall, he had me typed as a clever guy, and his attitude was that in the professions of the mind, clever guys finish nowhere at all. That spring we organized a touch-football game at the institute, and although I am the most flat-footed, least-gifted touch-football player in the whole history of the world, I somehow managed to play in it. A bunch of us persuaded our young professor to come out and join in one Sunday. The game was meant to be a gentle co-ed touch game. But Kirk altered it by his presence. He was slamming so many bodies and dominating so much that a wary, alarmed circle of caution formed around him.
Finally, I insisted to John Wilson, the Texan Renaissance scholar in the huddle, that if he faked a short pass and everybody made a lot of noise—“I got it!,” “There it is!,” and so on—Kirk would react instantly and run toward the sound, and I could sneak behind him for the touchdown.
Well, the play worked, and, perhaps recognizing that it was an entirely verbal construction, Kirk spotted its author and came right over, narrow-eyed and almost angry. “Smart play,” he said shortly, with the unspoken words “Smart-ass play” resonating in the leaves above our heads. But then he shook his fist happily, a sign meaning okay, nice one. He turned away. He sees right through me, I thought; he knows exactly what I'm up to. I began working harder, and we became friends.
A quarter century later, he was coming to the same field from the hospital. He was a handsome man, in a big-screen way, with the deepset eyes and boyish smile and even the lumpy, interesting complexion of a Harrison Ford or a Robert Redford. The bull-like constitution that had kept him alive for seven years, as the doctors poured drugs into him like Drano into a clogged sink, might have explained why the chemo, which thinned and balded almost everyone else, had somehow made him gain weight and grow hair, so, though he was a little stocky now, and a little gray, his step was solid and his eyes were rimmed with oddly long Egyptian lashes.