Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

I remember the first time I watched Vertigo. My parents owned an MCA Home Video VHS copy of it. I was thirteen, according to my notebook of the era. I think that’s reliable. Even then, I loved movies that looked deep into obsession and pulled things out of the muck. God only knows what I thought about when the Sister who emerged unexpected from shadow rang the tower bell, and Universal’s planetary closing credit appeared. Speechless didn’t mean thoughtless, but I have no idea. I did carry away an image that has always haunted me, the sequence of Kim Novak in her long, white jacket disappearing behind a towering tree in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. The park contains over 10,000 acres of old-growth forest, developing mostly undisturbed by humans over a long period of time, and it is home to the largest continuous strand of ancient Sequoia south of San Francisco.

It is just about two minutes of film time from the dissolve that gives us the shot of the green Jaguar in the foreground of the forest to the moment Madeleine disappears from the camera’s view (the audience inhabits Scottie’s stationary POV) as she walks behind one of the redwoods. As the screenplay describes it: She seems to have disappeared. The CAMERA MOVES OVER as though it is Scottie looking. It MOVES far enough to reveal that Madeleine is no longer there. Those two minutes are like Vertigo summed up in a short. Scottie is baffled by the mystery of Madeleine and her past life, yet he cannot resist the urge to solve it, to insist there is a solution, the dizzying long view of time is dragged in with the lingering shots of the dates on the cross-section of the cut redwood, and Madeleine’s pointing to the date when she was born and the date when she died. The music sets a perfect, spooky tone, and this forest is so old. Older than the Magna Carta, this particular tree having been born in 909 AD. It is uncanny for something to have lived that long.

I thought of the scene often as I read JM Tyree’s darkly witty novella The Haunted Screen, which was published this year by A Strange Object, an imprint of Deep Vellum. Tyree is a professor and the editor of Film Quarterly. Like many works of contemporary fiction, The Haunted Screen has hybrid qualities, and Tyree’s good eye for details of film history and the local lore of Tübingen make it more than just a spooky page-turner, though it is that, too.

Tübingen is an old university town in the Southwest of Germany. The narrator of The Haunted Screen is an American who lives there with his wife, Rebecca, who, we are told on the first page, is there for a summer academic teaching job. He describes the city as the ancient university town in the forest on the river with the multicolored gingerbread medieval houses (page 2). It is the town where the poet [Hölderlin] had gone mad… wandering these hills and writing poems about the river and the trees (page 3). On the edge of the witchy Black Forest, it is a great site for a crisis or a breakdown. The narrator has no paying job of his own in Germany, and he barely speaks the language, so he has time to work on a book, a study of Vertigo, based on work he’d done for his PhD. Mostly, he walks around the nearby forest, repeating walks taken by his former teacher and lover, Amy, who is a bigger presence in the novella than his wife. Tyree deftly (and with the soul of wit) gives us enough back story to get tangled up.

What the narrator admits about his walks around town and the forest thematically rhymes with Vertigo. He says: I was also walking into my personal past, on a memory quest for an old lover.  Since this holds greater interest and emotional power for him than his marriage, it gives a shape to the novella. I love how the paranoid plot elements of the story made me sure the narrator would run headlong into a climax in a bell tower, just as Scottie in the movie does, there was no altering that path. As the narrator himself says late in the novella: And now I was being dragged toward the church by an invisible arm, not towards love, as  I had been dreaming, but towards death, I felt certain. I couldn’t help myself.

Along the way, Tyree gives us many wonderful details. There’s a cursed silent film camera from Hitchcock’s years training as a director in Germany in the 1920s. There is a collection of Ice Age miniature figurines in the little museum. There is the eerie repetition of Brando’s quote from Apocalypse Now (“You must make a friend of horror”). We get a description of the film Suspiria with its connection to the Black Forest, Hölderlin’s relationship to the oracular forest, a riff on the daring Otto Dix painting The Triumph of Death, and one of my favorite scenes, an unexpected turn to kink in a conversation with a female police detective in connection to Rebecca’s possible disappearance.

It’s a smart book you can read in a single sitting. If you like Vertigo, you better check it out.