Boundary Language

the vertigo project

Anahita Shadkam and Don Kunze are co-writing an essay for publication sponsored by the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland’s book project following The Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival. This project began with a presentation, summarized in a paper, expanded in an essay, revised for the publication, and revised further to incorporate advice from the editors.

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the new evidence

With the final paper due March 15, the plan is to (1) DK starts writing, (2) post each version for review by AS, and (3) DK revises the text to be checked over. The new sources, not all of which will be mentioned in the new essay, are explained below.

Freud’s Signorelli Parapraxis suppresses “Signor” and carries “Signorelli” down with it, as a boat pulled down by a heavier anchor thrown overboard. The downward motion creates a simultaneous boyancy of signifiers that suddenly appear as a “cloud” of connections made with rules that change as the game advances (cf. chess, with gambits).

  • Freud’s story about forgetting the name “Signorelli” (the famous Signorelli Parapraxis).
  • Lacan’s review of Freud’s parapraxis and explanation of it as a metaphor logic.
  • Lacan’s claim that metaphor is the “gateway to the unconscious.”
  • The feature in Vertigo, of Elster as the latent signifier.
  • Judy as co-latent with Elster (as his agency), Madeleine as her “role.”
  • The roll of the role = the thaumatropic haunting of Madeleine by Carlotta (and, therefore, the foreshadowing or key to the con)
  • The theme of “traveling around together” — really (in Lacan’s terms) the signifying chain linking metaphoric concealment with metonymic reconstruction.
  • Metaphor = Part 1; Metonymy = Part 2. Part 1 is a series of lists: (1) from Elster to Scottie, a set of instructions; (2) Scottie’s list to protect Madeleine, played out as an ITINERARY of places they travel. The travel list ends with the • that is the tower, the place Scottie and Judy will return to at the end of Part 2. List 3 is Scottie’s instructions to dressmakers, beauticians, etc. on how to make Judy into Madeleine.
  • Just as the first two lists divide into (1) instructions designed to conceal the con from the mark and (2) instructions unknowingly constructed in accordance to the scam, list 3 confronts the “cloud” of clues linking Carlotta with Madeleine, the cloud with the latent element of the • as the jewel. This could only have been given by Elster to Judy to play Madeleine as someone “played” by Carlotta, a play to “play” (seduce) Scottie.
  • In Part 2, Scottie addresses “the cloud issue.” This is the complex of signifiers that make Madeleine an anamorphic Other of Judy. Scottie anticipates the thaumatropic device of the con, in its two versions (Judy/Madeleine; Madeleine/Carlotta). Scottie’s list to remake Judy seems to be directed locally, but it is in effect the costume project duplicating Elster’s first act of charade. Scottie is unconscious of the list that must have logically preceded the list Elster gave him. This list, encountered first in experience, reveals a list that was logically first.
  • When Madeleine emerges from the green cloud, it is the anamorphotic emergence of the woman from the clues-complex. [This is not yet developed].
  • The Signorelli Parapraxis becomes the Vertigo Parapraxis, and might have made a better title for the paper. Because parapraxis (Lacan claimed) follows the logic of metaphor and extends to the notion of fantasy (the “cloud” of the Imaginary obscures the Symbolic which is the challenge of Scottie’s “second death”), it turns the film into another Seminar.
  • New thesis (for general research purposes). Reading Lacan is difficult. You need a “key” that is based on your experience with the arts — literature, film, architecture, folklore, etc. — to have some set of expectations charging your curiosity and forming your questions. The reader of Lacan needs to structure their demand, all the more important because demand addressed to a dead Other makes understanding a question of apophrades (“voice of the dead”) and also a kind of prophecy — think of Hamlet, but with a less awful ending.
  • The jewel is the • in the metaphor formula that relates the two aspects of the latent signifier (Elster), which have structured Part 1 and Part 2 of the film. The • is also the hole in the middle of the thaumatrope (ancient version), which has connected the wish related to the lack (the animal of pray, who has yet to be hunted down) to the actual moment of the kill. This is not a “merger” of two opposite states but rather a dynamic action. The • is also the top of the tower where Scottie will create the final list of items in the “cloud” that were components of the scam.

aims of the new version

The list idea is to make the essay understandable to the general reader. They are things clearly present in the film as such, and something that Hitchcock had to craft to make the story intelligible. The latent signifier idea is also literally present as the scam that traps Scottie into being the ideal witness at Madeleine’s suicide inquest. The thaumatrope idea is that, at the inquest, Scottie is testifying about one woman but it is another woman who has actually died. The thaumatrope as an ancient device has been appropriated by the con, to “kill Scottie,” a death that is played out by his nervous breakdown. Scottie’s “first death” (Lacan’s theme of the two deaths) opens to Part 2, leading to his second, or “symbolic” death. This is also Judy’s second death, although in reverse. Her first death was symbolic, this second is literal/actual. The two directions of travel in Scottie’s and Judy’s “between the two deaths” is the concluding and Master Thaumatrope, connecting the metaphoric and metonymic functions of Vertigo.

In the standard method of using theory to “explain” a work of art, the story is regarded as simple and straightforward, the explanation becomes complex and often tedious. Here, we aim for a reverse logic. The story is, like the “cloud of signifiers” that we encounter in the story which provides the (essential) puzzle that the audience experiences as anxiety is converted by theory into an “economic model” that reveals, beneath the mystery, a smooth flow of energy along several circuits. Our argument leads to the discovery of Vertigo‘s single circuit, albeit a circuit that could be characterized as simultaneously: (1) a simple 360º return of logic from an “outward” movement back to its origin; (2) a 720º double circuit, formed by the duplicity of the scam that concealed the con from the mark; and (3) a 180º circuit that limits the view of the audience to the presentation on a screen, requiring the figure-ground reversal where images move and the observer sits still. This 180º “presentational circuit” is the duration of the film as a dream, creating the mandate by which the end (a terminus we see only in the 180º “presentation mode”) must answer to the beginning (the récit fort of Roland Barthes). Without the material facts of beginning and end, the issue of spectation would not exist, but thanks to “cutting off the ends” of a signifying chain, the other circuits would not exist. Hitchcock knows this very well and plans all of his films to have “the Hitchcock twist,” a “gotcha” element. This is, as Tom Cohen has argued, the key to the director’s success, embodied even in his name: the “hitch” is the trick or secondary requirement that is “cocked” at the beginning of the film so that the ending will release the tension of this spring action.

Seuss parapraxis, showing how the agency/instance of the letter can produce a cloud of associations, to be sorted out with sorites’ “already-always” logic of retroaction. Suppress a signifier to see how this works!

Update: The circle analogy, plus arguments about idempotency (homeostasis), proved too cumbersome for the reader. Annahita’s advice was “stick to the story.” This has the double benefit of reviewing the evidence for those who have not seen the film or did not watch it critically plus allowing the structure of the story to serve as the outline. Vertigo does this well, with it’s two-part first part (1a, 1b, divided at the point where Scottie rescues Madeleine from drowining) and dramatically contrasting part 2, where Madeleine and Midge have disappeared after Scottie’s nervous breakdown. The list idea of Part 1 is that Elster assigns Scottie to follow Madeleine and Madeleine has a list of places to visit from her dead great-grandmother Carlotta. These two lists suppress the third, Elster’s actual list, which is the list of the scam. In Part 2, Scottie imposes a list of transformations on Judy to make her look like Madeleine. The lists were to be compared to their mathematical equivalant (bijection, surjection, injection) to bridge to the thaumatrope, the ancient device used as a charm for good luck hunting. But, the lure of this comparison was the Ø-phenomenon suggested by the archaeologist Marc Azéma, who claims that thaumatropes are “the first instance of cinema.” But, the Ø-function is not a blur or merger. The illusion happens in the head of the spectator, looping the viewer in as a component of the circuit film creates as its Imaginary, which (like Scottie’s death-dream Imaginary, terminates in a Symbolic test), finished with a Symbolic challenge, which is the jewel forcing recognition that Judy had been “Madeleine all along.” This recognition moment comes from the logic of sorites. When grains of sand are falling one by one, at some point the spectator realizes that there is a pile of sand. But, when? Subtracting grains of sand one by one from the recognition point backwards, the critical spectator gets to a single grain without identifying the point where the falling grains became a pile. The “pile” was present as an idea only at the moment the spectator realized that he/she was “too late.” This is Scottie’s reaction when he sees the jewel necklace in the mirror as Judy prepares for dinner at Ernie’s. The scam was “already and always” present; the sorites is/was the scam that was the FANTASY covering over the REAL, that was made available only at the SYMBOLIC point, when it was “too late.” Retroaction (après coup) is essential to all of Lacan’s theory. It is the terminus that refers to the origins, and the origins are the moment of suppression that simultaneously create the “cloud” of associative meanings as symptoms. As with the Signorelli Parapraxis, it the signifier’s letters make the bid difference, but not only can changes happen along the metaphoric axis (changing the entire meaning of the word based on homophony or an alternative, such as “cat” to “mat”) or metonymic/diachronic axis (going places, meeting people, seeing new things — i. e. an itinerary and cartography).

There is another virtue of the latest edition, namely that Midge’s role is clarified. Midge does not appear in Part 2, but she plays a key role in shifting the audience’s affections away from his domestic status quo with Midge, where Midge’s apartment has been symbolic of the audience’s desire for a “normal story.” Midge tries to paint a joke portrait, replacing Carlotta’s face with hers. Scottie’s abrupt negative response creates an emotional hinge in the film, where the audience is able to enter into his fantasy sympathetically and read it as a love story. Madeleine’s psychosis becomes a part of the tragedy of their romance, with Scottie playing the role of the lover who can save her. This shift has to happen quickly, however, so the sorites logic must be employed. The audience must experience the new plot basis by thinking it has “already and always” been there. Hitchcock’s trick is the double negation of Midge, a “quick-quick-slow” or foxtrot — two no’s to prepare the audience for the slow play-out of Part 1b, Scottie and Madeleine’s “wandering around together.” The painting mistake is key to the understanding of parapraxis, and strangely reminds us of how Signorelli had “painted over” Fra Angelico’s project in the same chapel at the Orvieto Cathedral (he painted himself standing in the corner of The Deeds of the Antichrist, standing in front of Fra Angelico).

This anachronism forces us to conclude that the “truth of Vertigo” lies not just in the discovery of Judy’s role as Madeleine but the structure of metaphor that simultaneously expresses a cloud of associations along the paired axes of metaphor and metonymy at the same time it suppresses a “master signifier,” which is the scam, with its Con, Mark, and Shill. The resemblance of metaphor to the scam has encouraged several cranky academics to condemn Lacan as sheer nonsense, but this is an occupational hazard in psychoanalysis, just as the psychoanalytical session — especially Lacan’s, with its variable time-duration — relies not on the Analyst producing “answers” for the puzzled Analysand, but on the Analyst patiently attending to the Analysand’s slips of the tongue and bungled explanations, coaxing the Analysand her/himself to “involuntarily” blurt out the Truth, the Truth of truth. This is the “desire of the Analyst” in relation to the “demand” (the blah blah blah) of the Analysand.

Generally, it is essential do do what Lacan himself does in collecting evidence from art, culture, philosophy, etc. in his seminars, which he does not order to form explanations but rather allows to float within a “Signorelli Cloud” of parapractic elasticity. This annoys those who demand a (Boolean) logical account, but Lacan steadfastly holds to an “Eulerian” principle, where two overlapping circles create a void out of their symmetrical difference. This means that his discourse will continually — like architecture — require itself to circle the void, but the circle will always be a double constructed on the absence of a third element, just as the Borromeo rings are held together, two by two, thanks to the presence of an absent third. This missing third will always play the role of apophrades, the “voice of the dead.” This has been the theme of Vertigo, that in any transaction, opposition, rivalry, or polarity, there is “something missing,” whether a scam, a wife, or a dead ancestor.

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