Gus Cileone: Voyeurism, Fantasy, and VERTIGO

BMFI film fan and author Gus Cileone interprets Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Vertigo. Do you agree? See the film for yourself on the big screen at Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Wednesday, July 17. Vertigo is showing as part of our Hitchcock at the Height film series, which is presented in conjunction with a four-week film course about the filmmaker's best-known works.

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Voyeurism, Fantasy, and Vertigo
By Gus Cileone, BMFI Film Fan
*Spoiler Alert*

Alfred Hitchcock addresses voyeurism often, which is fitting, since his audience lives vicariously through the characters he presents on the screen. But, he goes further, making the audience, from the perspective of the camera lens, an unseen presence stepping into the stories themselves. We become a Peeping Tom, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window; we observe Janet Leigh through the hole in the wall, in Psycho; we are accused directly of causing the coming apocalypse in the diner scene in The Birds.

In Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart’s weird obsession with Kim Novak’s Madeleine takes this voyeurism to the point of obsession. The voyeur has no respect for the individual, who is only a means to satisfy the voyeur's fantasy. In the opening credits we see a woman's face and then her eye. We then look into that eye, and there is a spinning pinwheel. Right from the beginning, Hitchcock is saying that a man can lose his balance with obsession over a woman.

After Stewart's detective, Scottie, discovers that he has acrophobia, hanging from a gutter after chasing a criminal, he is traumatized by witnessing a fellow policeman fall off the roof trying to save him. Falling becomes a motif in the film. The story takes place in hilly San Francisco, which symbolizes the precariousness of Scottie's predicament. (Scottie lives right near Coit Tower.) Probably because he feels guilty about the dead police officer, he dives into the bay to save Novak's character. But the jump also shows how dangerous his obsession can become. Of course, there are the falling deaths from the tower, and Scottie has dreams of falling off the tower. After the death of his fantasy woman, he drops into a state of catatonia, unable to be in the real world. The falling theme also refers to the danger of falling in love with the wrong person, for both Scottie and Novak's Judy. One could push it and say, for Scottie, the towers are phallic symbols, and the fear of falling could symbolize the fear of impotence in real life, thus encouraging the escape into fantasy.


Jimmy Stewart stars as a traumatized detective caught in a deadly scheme.

The acrophobia is not only a plot device so that Scottie can't witness it when Gavin (Thomas Helmore) throws his wife off the tower. It also symbolizes Stewart's character's inability to see the big picture from a height. He can only see as far as his version of a dream woman. The first scene deals with beauty and sex, as we watch his ex-fiancée, Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), draw fashion pictures and discuss a newly designed bra. She is not the Hitchcock ice goddess, since she just draws beauty and clinically describes the bra's engineering. When she draws a picture of Novak as Gavin's wife Madeleine and substitutes her own face, Scottie quickly departs the room, showing how she does not fit his sexual requirements. She is real and can't compete with a dream girl. Gavin is an old friend, who knows of Scottie's disability, and wants Scottie to find out where his wife is going on her mysterious trips. At first Scottie is the voyeur spying on her beauty at the restaurant. Hitchcock places the audience in the car seat, following Novak, joining the detective in his fantasy. When he follows her through a dark walkway and opens the door, the scene lights up with the beautiful colors of flowers that the equally beautiful Novak is buying. It reminds one of Dorothy opening the door of her drab house to witness the awe of Oz, which is both a fantasy land and can be dangerous, just like Scottie's obsession.



Madeleine (Kim Novak), when Scottie follows her to the flower market.

The husband says a dead woman is possessing his wife. She goes into spells, visits her grave, and looks at the dead woman's painting on the wall of the gallery. Scottie observes that the curl in Novak's hair mirrors the curl of the dead woman in the painting. We realize that the circular curls also echo the theme of spinning wheels, leading to actual and symbolic vertigo. The story of the ghost plays into the whole unreal, fantasy theme of the film. Scottie sees Madeleine check into a hotel, but the concierge says she was not there that day, and there is no evidence of her in the hotel room. After Scottie rescues Madeleine from the bay, the camera shows her clothes hung up and drying in his home, and Novak naked under the covers in his bed. This is kind of creepy, knowing that she has been undressed by a stranger. It is as if Stewart's character presumptuously has actually taken possession of her (in contrast to her pretending to have become possessed) as an object in his fantasy world.



After rescuing Madeleine, Scottie takes her to his apartment.

When they are in the sequoia forest, Madeleine seems to disappear for a while, like an unearthly spirit. After his release from the mental institution, Scottie looks for Madeleine wherever he goes, like a morbid ghost hunter. It is ironic that he becomes haunted by the ghost of a woman who pretended to be haunted by another dead woman. Of course, when Scottie accidently sees Judy, thinking she is only a Madeleine look-alike and not part of the murder conspiracy, he wants to resurrect the dead Madeleine, forcing the now-in-love Judy to again play the same part. After Scottie finally recreates Madeleine by changing Judy’s make-up, hair color and style, and clothes, Novak materializes out of the hotel room's wall in a neon-sign-illuminated mist, like a ghost.

Scottie's obsession is a kind of madness. Gavin says there is madness in Madeleine's family, which sets the stage for the belief that she would commit suicide (her name even has the word "mad" in it). And, Scottie's madness leads to a sort of personality suicide as he realizes at the end, as Roger Ebert says in his book The Great Movies, that another man (Gavin) created the woman he wanted to forge, and thus Scottie's dream was not even his own. First he lost the person he wrongly thought was his ideal woman incarnate, and then he loses the woman he thought he created to be his perfect reproduction of his ideal. For Hitchcock, the desire to possess one's dream person is an impossible act and can only turn life into a nightmare.

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Gus Cileone is a retired government employee who worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs. He has received several writing awards and has published two novels, A Lesson in Murder and Feast or Famine. You can visit his website at www.augustuscileone.com.

Gus Cileone: Why I Love Sidney Lumet's THE VERDICT

In advance of our four-week class on filmmaker Sidney Lumet starting Tuesday, April 9 at the National Museum of American Jewish History, film fan Gus Cileone looks at the depiction of truth in one of his favorite Lumet films, The Verdict, starring Paul Newman.

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Why I Love Sidney Lumet's The Verdict
By Gus Cileone, BMFI Patron and Film Fan
*Spoiler Alert*

We lost one of our most gifted and prolific directors not too long ago. Sidney Lumet made such great films as: Long Day's Journey into Night, Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, and Network. However, a number of his films deal with crime and the legal system. These include: 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon, and Prince of the City.

My favorite movie in this area, one that deals with who stands for what is right and what is wrong, is The Verdict. You cannot find another title of a movie that has so much to do with what the film is about. The word "verdict" is derived from the Latin and means "to speak the truth." This movie shows how lies can have tragic consequences and how outward appearances are not good indicators as to who is the most reliable source of truth. It is here where the marriage of Lumet with writer David Mamet is a match made in screenwriting heaven. Mamet, too, deals with the line between justice and injustice, society's rules and the breaking of those rules, in such films as House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Glengarry Glen Ross, and The Edge.

The Verdict, a 1982 film, showcases Paul Newman—in maybe his best performance—as Frank Galvin, a promising lawyer who has fallen from legal and ethical grace in the Catholic world of Boston's jurisprudence. We first see him as an alcoholic who tries to fund visits to his favorite bar by browsing the obituaries and soliciting representation from grieving families at funerals, pretending to be a friend of the deceased. His foul-mouthed mentor, Mick (Jack Warden), throws a potentially lucrative malpractice case his way. At first, Frank is just out for the money, looking for a quick settlement. He reassures the family of the comatose victim while not revealing his dilapidated office (an expressionistic touch that mirrors his life), under the pretense that it is filled with paper for another case (a lie). He also hangs a sheet of paper on his door that says he is meeting with the judge (untrue).

Paul Newman stars as a lawyer seeking redemption in Sidney Lumet's The Verdict.

The way setting is presented in this film depicts who has power and who are the downtrodden. In his book, Making Movies, Lumet says, "In The Verdict we used a very narrow color selection and older architecture. No modern buildings were seen in the movie." St. Catherine's (the Catholic Hospital), the courtroom, the office of James Mason's defending lawyer Concannon (whose name implies he is a big shot), Frank's sleazy apartment, and even the bar Frank frequents are old fashioned in style, but are differentiated as to level of refinement by those who populate them. The heft of the dark hardwood weighs everything down, emphasizing how difficult it is to alter society's entrenched power structure. Lumet emphasizes the disparity as to the opposing sides as he cuts between the old legal library where Newman and Warden prepare for the case, and the army of litigators in the opulent conference room presided over by Mason.

Editing is essential in showing Frank gravitating back to his ethical base (and living up to his name which means "free from guile"). As Lumet writes in Making Movies, "In The Verdict, the most important transition in the movie was illuminated by the close-ups of Paul Newman examining a Polaroid photograph. He had taken the picture of the victim, and he watched it develop. As the photograph took on life, he did too. I could feel the present breaking through for a man who, up until then, had been trapped in the detritus of his past life. It was the intercutting between the developing Polaroid and the close-ups of Newman that made the transition palpable." When Frank meets the Bishop (played by Edward Binns), he cannot accept the low offer that the Bishop gives him because "no one will know the truth" that those who should have looked after his client failed her. If he takes the hush money, he will be "lost."

James Mason and Paul Newman face off in Sidney Lumet's The Verdict.

Past lies have derailed Frank before and hinder his forward movement in the present. Warden tells Frank's new girlfriend, Laura (Charlotte Rampling), that Frank was forced to lie and take the fall for his law firm's jury tampering after he threatened to expose his partners. He lost his job and his wife. In the current case, he has a doctor willing to testify against a peer, but that physician is forced out of the country by the powers-that-be, so he cannot tell the truth. Even Frank is not honest with the relatives of the patient about no longer wanting to settle out of court. Concannon is always one step ahead of Frank and we find out why: Mick finds Concannon's check made out to Laura, who is a spy, feeding information to Concannon. Ironic that on their second meeting Frank tells Laura, "Tell me the truth. You can't lie to me." But she has fallen for Frank, and does not tell Concannon about the admitting nurse (Lindsay Crouse), who Frank convinces to testify. The esteemed doctor had not read that the patient had a full meal one hour prior to the delivery of her baby, and she aspirated vomit in her mask, causing her to lose oxygen, creating the vegetative state. The doctor then coerced the nurse to lie about the time of the meal, changing the "1" to a "9." The lies of the powerful spread like a virus to infect those working for them. It is ironic to see Concannon, who has been duplicitous with Laura, lecture the nurse about perjury. Even though the photocopy of the original admitting form is tossed out, the testimony is heard by the jury. The Bishop asks an underling, after the nurse's testimony, that despite Concannon's legal prowess, did he believe her? The other's silence shows that the jury saw the truth. The irony that the supposedly trustworthy Catholic Church is behind such a distasteful cover-up is evident here. Earlier in the film, Frank tells Laura, "The jury wants to believe. I mean they want to believe." In his summation, Frank says that we hear so many lies, we doubt our institutions, we feel powerless, and we become victims. But he tells the jury the outward signs of stature and tradition don't matter because today they are the law, and he believes that there is justice in our hearts.

Ultimately, the financial settlement is not as important as is the moral victory and truth may bring redemption, but it does not erase the betrayal of lies.

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Gus Cileone is a retired government employee who worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs. He has received several writing awards and has published two novels, A Lesson in Murder and Feast or Famine. You can visit his web site at www.augustuscileone.com.

Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights: An Introduction

Last week we showed Boogie Nights in conjunction with our new film education course, Paul Thomas Anderson: Cinematic Cypher. Taught by Paul Wright, Ph.D., the class starts tonight. In case you couldn't come to one or both, you can check out an abridged version of BMFI Manager Alexis Mayer's introduction to Boogie Nights below.

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Boogie Nights: An Introduction
By Alexis Mayer, BMFI Theater Manager

Boogie Nights is Anderson's second film and he was 26 when he made it. The inspiration came from his own fascination and love of pornography, a fascination which he has made clear in countless interviews, he is neither embarrassed nor apologetic about. The film takes place over the transitional period of pornography--on film and in movie theaters, to video and at home.  It is an homage to a time when Anderson felt there was more emphasis on story and characters, and pornography was its own genre, rather than a sleazy parallel culture.

While the film is about pornography, it's not one that takes a political stance, and that was not Anderson's intention. He didn't want to tell a story about pornography's impact on society, but rather the lives of the pornographers themselves and their human qualities. As Roger Ebert puts it in his review, "They may live in a disreputable world, but they have the same ambitions and in a weird way similar values as mainstream Hollywood."

Many of the characters in Boogie Nights are influenced by real life porn figures and their real life experiences and two of the supporting actors are porn actors themselves. Mark Wahlberg's character Dirk Diggler is loosely based on porn star of the time John Holmes, and the final chapter reflects similar events in which Holmes was a murder suspect. Nina Hartley plays the wife of William H. Macy's character Little Bill. And the role of the family court judge in the custody hearing between Amber Waves, played by Julianne Moore, and her ex-husband is performed by actress Veronica Hart, who Anderson likes to call the Meryl Streep of pornography.

Anderson does gloss over some details. Most notably, it was illegal to film pornography in California in the '70s, where and when Boogie Nights takes place. But I forgive him that one. This is a great story, with great performances from a great supporting cast, including Don Cheadle, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Riley, Ricky Jay, and Alfred Molina, to name a few not already mentioned. Mark Wahlberg plays the central character of the film Dirk Diggler but the role was originally offered to Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio turned it down to play Titanic. The role of Jack Horner, porno producer, director and father figure to his gang of actors, is played by Burt Reynolds who refused the role several times before finally accepting, believing it to be an exploitation flick. And supposedly, after seeing a rough cut of the film, he was so disappointed that he fired his agents. And then of course, the film got nominated for three Oscars, including best supporting actor for Mr. Reynolds.

There's a parallel between the character of Dirk Diggler and Paul Thomas Anderson himself that I really like. Anderson says in an interview for Creative Screenwriting Magazine that following big disappointments with his debut feature Hard Eight, he wrote Boogie Nights "fueled by a desire for revenge on all the people who told me I'd ever amount to anything." I think of the scene in the beginning of Boogie Nights where Eddie, before he becomes Dirk, has a fight with his mom and says, "You don't know what I can do, what I'm gonna do, or what I'm gonna be. You don't know I'm good, I have good things you don't know about, and I'm gonna be something! I am!" Dirk goes on to win an Adult Film Award for Best Penis, and Anderson gets his Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

For Further Reading:
Mottram, James, The Sundance Kids - How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood, New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2006

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Theater Manager Alexis Mayer is a film handler and projectionist with a B.F.A. in Visual and Media Arts from Emerson College and a professional certificate in the Preservation and Restoration of Motion Picture Films from the L. Jefferey Selznick School of Film Preservation.

Exclusive Interview with Paul Wright, Ph.D., Instructor for “Trafficking in the Absurd: The Coen Brothers’ Films”

By Meredith Slifkin

Where will you be Wednesdays this January? Sign up for the new BMFI course, “Trafficking in the Absurd: The Coen Brothers’ Films,” which meets on Wednesdays (Jan 5.-Jan 26) from 6:30pm-9:30-pm in the Multimedia Room. This exciting course will examine the “comic absurdity” and “flawed humanity” prevalent in the works of the notoriously quirky (and brilliant) Coen brothers. There will be a special focus on Miller’s Crossing, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, and A Serious Man.

The instructor for “Trafficking in the Absurd” is Paul Wright, Ph.D., who was good enough to give me an exclusive interview about the course, and about his personal interest in the Coen Brothers. Wright is an Assistant Professor of English and the Co-Director of the Honors Program at Cabrini College. Previous courses he has taught at BMFI include Scorcese’s Cinema of Loneliness, Kurosawa: East Meets West, and Icon in the Director’s Chair: Clint Eastwood. Posted below is our enlightening interview:

Q: Why the Coen Brothers? What attracts you to their body of work, both personally and academically?

A: The Coen Brothers first got under my skin with their unique sensibility sometime around 1986, when I saw their first feature, Blood Simple, on television late one Saturday night. Aside from being unable to sleep for the suspense of that film, I was struck by their knack for exposing the self-delusion of their characters--the characters' inability to see the world except through their own prism of misbegotten assumptions. This is a theme the Coens have returned to many times over the years. Academically, what has continued to enchant me is their unabashed love of film genre. They have tackled nearly every cinematic genre imaginable--suspense, slapstick, the gangster film, art-house, film noir, spy-thriller, western, spiritual morality tale, and more. They approach each film genre with a genuine passion for the material and the form, but always with an eye toward ironic re-imaginings of those forms.

Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski (1998). "Trafficking in the Absurd: The Coen Brothers' Films" begins Wednesday, January 5 and continues on Wednesdays through January 26.

Q: “Trafficking in the Absurd” is a striking name for the course, can you explain your choice of this title?

A: I think it was a viewing of The Big Lebowski that inspired me here. When the Dude (Jeff Bridges) is told another character is a nihilist, he responds, "Ah, that must be exhausting." I think this perfectly captures the Coen Brothers' playful (and to my mind, very healthy) sense of the absurd in so many of their films. For them, life's absurdities are not merely existential or coldly philosophical in nature--they embody the self-involved comedy that each of us makes of our daily lives, so often without intending it. It's not just the Coens who "traffic in the absurd"; we all do.

Q: What can students hope to get out of this course?

A: To build more on the previous response, I'm hoping that people come away from the course understanding that blunt honesty need not equal contempt. Aside from the course's focus on the great artistry of the Coens as writer-directors, I stress that for all the Coens' revelry in human beings' penchant for self-importance and self-deception, the Coens' brutal candor and irony never amount to outright contempt for the human condition. I have read some dismissive assessments of the Coens that argue they are misanthropes. This seems as off the mark to me as criticisms of the great Japanese director Ozu, who was said to have treated actors only as props and "colors" for his palette. I think these criticisms of the Coens miss their fundamental appreciation for the downright charms of flawed human beings trying to break out of the orbits of our own delusions. There is something profoundly engaging and affecting about Coen characters; even a villain in Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men has a perverse charm. While most of us (thankfully) are less like Anton and more like the bumbling characters of Burn After Reading, what's essential here is the quirky charisma of Coen characters. It might be unsettling just how much of ourselves we recognize in these characters, but that recognition is also a great pleasure in its own right. There is a reason so many gifted actors gravitate toward the Coen Brothers, and I think it's bound up with the celebration of flawed humanity in their writing.

“It’s not just the Coens who ‘traffic in the absurd’; we all do.”

Q: Your academic interests also include the European Renaissance, does this influence your work in film studies at all? I imagine Machiavelli is actually pretty relevant to the films of the Coen brothers…

A: Yes, when I wear my other academic hat, I teach the European literary traditions of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. I did my doctorate in comparative literature under the direction of an historian; I suppose "cultural historian" is the best way to describe my scholarship. This isn't as far-fetched a connection to cinema as one might think. If there is a defining feature of Renaissance culture, it is its increasingly anxious sense of the theatricality and performative aspects of our world. Long before becoming a best-selling Shakespeare biographer, Stephen Greenblatt famously wrote about Renaissance courtiers and writers engaged in "self-fashioning"--i.e., the drive to mold and in essence create the "self" as a fiction indispensable to our social lives. If you think about the Coen Brothers' ironic sense of their characters trying to fashion their own lives and meaning in the world, you realize that many of the themes we ascribe to modern theater and cinema (or even "post-modern" society at large) have deep roots in the historical past. I actually find a powerful resonance between my two areas of study. As for Machiavelli, one can certainly find in The Prince a kind of handbook for would-be "players" and manipulators. What I love about your question is that, like the Coens, Machiavelli also has a real knack for exposing those princes who fail precisely because they assume the world looks at things as they do. This is the cardinal sin of the Coen Brothers' moral universe.

Michael Stulhbarg in the Coens' 2009 Oscar-Nominated,  A Serious Man

Q: Do you have a favorite film by the Coens? Or any on the syllabus that you’re especially excited to be teaching?

A: It's so tough to pick a favorite obviously, so I can only throw out the powerful associations of certain of their films that get me every time. As I said above, Blood Simple had the most formative impact when I saw it in high school. Miller's Crossing also comes to mind as it bridges the venerable gangster genre with the primal loneliness that comes with living among others; I often think of this film as the existentialist's Godfather. O Brother Where Art Thou, that loose and wonderful adaptation of Homer, speaks to the literature professor in me. Fargo channels my inner mid-Westerner, and as an adoptive father, I can't watch Raising Arizona without laughter and tears. If I had to pick two films that are favorites in my current stage of life (whatever that is exactly), I'd have to go with The Big Lebowski and A Serious Man. Lebowski has the virtue of being endlessly re-watchable and charming; A Serious Man is its more somber and philosophical cousin, I suppose. Both are films I find myself sharing and quoting obsessively with a like-minded soul in my life. At any rate, I guess you could say I love the Coens all round.

Special thanks to Paul Wright for graciously agreeing to this interview. Sign up now for “Trafficking in the Absurd: The Coen Brothers’ Films.” The cost is $100 for BMFI members and $125 for non-members. Click here to register online, or call 610-527-4008 x107.