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This chapter identifies the isolating effects of stalkers on female figures, emphasizing the temporal isolation accomplished through the control of storage media such as tape recorders and answering machines that would otherwise connect the heroines to a vital past of female networks. Following the stalker through two pairs of films: The Terminator and Klute, then Blade Runner and Vertigo, it becomes clear that this abuse of the past constitutes criminal necrophilia. This necrophilia will nonetheless be relentlessly projected back onto the heroines, whose female networks will be figured in various ways as morbid simulation. At stake is always the cultural verdict on the modern city, a city seen as fraught with female independence and male shame.

This chapter explores how memory functions in the movement- and time-image, first explaining habit and attentive recollection, the two types of memory found in Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory (1896). Using Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), it shows that these two types of memory characterise memory in the movement-image. The chapter then turns to Gilles Deleuze's work on the three syntheses of time from Difference and Repetition (1968). The first two syntheses draw upon Bergson's two memory types. However, they are ungrounded in a third synthesis, based upon Friedrich Nietzsche's eternal return. This third type characterises memory in the time-image, and is illustrated through an examination of 81?2 (1963). The chapter concludes by relating the construction of character memory in these two films to their respective constructions of national identity.

This chapter deals with the museum scenes in Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia and Hitchcock's Vertigo. Both scenes call up associations that museums often evoke in feature films. Famous tourist attractions, the Naples Archaeological Museum and the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor become uncanny places of fatal encounters, mystery and introspection. Museums are presented as mausoleums, in which spiritual and atavist powers are confining characters in their memories. Marked by a contemplative rhythm, which matches perfectly the solemn silence of classical museum spaces, both scenes show a remarkably modernist sensibility. The contemplation of artworks and the museum experience enable Rossellini and Hitchcock to investigate the cinematic representation of the act of looking by means of emphatic close-ups of faces, highly unusual juxtapositions of action and reaction shots and bravura camera movements. The appropriate place for the contemplative gaze, the museum becomes a perfect motif of cinematic self-reflection – a theme that also is introduced by the conscientious confrontation between the medium of film and those of painting or sculpture. In so doing, the museum scenes in Viaggio in Italia and Vertigo show striking similarities with new trends that appeared in the art documentaries discussed in the first chapter.

Vertigo received mixed reviews on its initial release, but a 2012 poll of film critics rated it the best film of all time. During script preparation and filming, the Production Code Administration reported several objections to the somewhat implausible story of a man who tricks a friend with vertigo, played by James Stewart, into witnessing the ‘suicide’ of the man’s wife with the help of a double for the wife who later falls in love with the friend. Code office objections included the filming of intimate undergarments drying on a line, discussions of brassiere design, a ‘cat house’ reference, all scenes that are ‘objectively lustful’ and feature ‘open mouth kissing,’ and any hint of sexual relations between the Stewart character and the two characters played by Kim Novak. Most of all, the censors advised that ‘it is most important’ that the guilty husband be brought back for trial. The ban on unpunished crime had an adverse impact on more of Hitchcock’s American films, starting with Rebecca, than almost any other Code provision. Hitchcock made a show of accommodating the dictum in Vertigo by filming an ending in which Stewart and his ex-fianc’e listen to a news broadcast announcing that the villainous husband has been captured and is about to be extradited for trial. The ending was so out of place and obviously ‘tacked on’ that it was cut from the American release but included in foreign prints to satisfy the censorship boards of other countries.

This chapter explores the dramatic employment of music in two classic Hitchcock films, Rope (1948) and Vertigo (1958), both of which effectively sustain suspense throughout the filmic narrative. In Rope, Phillip Morgan, one of the killers, gives an on-screen performance of the first movement of Francis Poulenc's Mouvements Perpétuels (1918) during a macabre dinner party, where one of the guests lies dead in a trunk. The chapter argues that we can hear echoes of Rope’s score, based largely on Francis Poulenc’s Mouvement Perpétuel (1918) in Herrmann’s score for Vertigo. The ‘musical ambivalences’ of both scores provide counterpoints for the two film’s narrative complexities.

Of all the Herrmann-Hitchcock collaborations, Vertigo and Psycho remain not only the most famous but also the most aesthetically different. The intensely romantic, full-bodied Wagnerian score of the first would seem diametrically opposed to the chilling, strings-only score of the second. While Vertigo deals with romantic obsession, the sound of Psycho is one of ‘primordial dread’. What unites the two films, however, is the dominant role played by Herrmann’s music. This chapter will discuss sound, music and the representation of two separate car journeys. Through detailed scene analysis as well as close engagement with the writings of Jack Sullivan, Michel Chion and Elisabeth Weis amongst others, the chapter examines the importance of sound (and Herrmann’s music) in both driving the narrative but also reflecting characters’ unstable subjectivity.

This chapter argues that Herrmann’s Echoes owes much to Herrmann’s film work, and in particular has resonances with his scores for Vertigo, Psycho and Marnie. Taking a musicological approach to Herrmann’s concert and film score work, it finds in Herrmann’s music a potent ability to subtly support Vertigo’s narrative development and sonically make manifest its underlying psychological thrust without the need to resort to slavish and literal translation and therefore reduplication of the visual into the aural and musical. In addition, it sets Herrmann’s work within the context of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, examining firstly the musical relationship between Herrmann and Lyn Murray, and the stylistic agreement between them: Murray’s score for To Catch a Thief is more heterogeneous than that of his sometime friend, and a significant proportion is diegetic, drawing strongly on jazz and popular music, while at the same time looking to influences such as early Britten and Prokofiev.

Chapter discusses how James’s and Hitchcock’s respective questioning of acceleration is pertinent to a better understanding of our contemporary digital culture. This culture places a premium on actions, on doing. Acceleration has been ever increasing since the industrial revolution. Speed elevated doing: the sheer quantity of actions. James and Hitchcock in different yet related ways show how actions without the perceptive work of understanding can have deleterious consequences. Here perception is no longer removed from the world of action as has traditionally been the case in standard oppositions between the contemplative and the active life of politics. Anticipating the neuroscientific exploration of mirror neurons, the 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady makes a strong case for the discovery action within perception. In a similar way, Hitchcock’s films make us see how behind what we take to be innocent dwells a more sinister world which we perceive when the speed of our perception slows down. Hitchcock’s suspense works at an epistemological level. It uncovers knowledge which has been hidden by societal concepts of respectability, order and purity. Isabel Archer holds us in suspense in a similar way: we are aware before she and other characters in the novel are that her quest for freedom will end up entrapping her.

This chapter discusses Grant Morrison’s works for Vertigo Comics, a subsidiary group of DC Comics. In 1993, for his first writing project for Vertigo, Morrison wrote Sebastian O, which tells the story of a fugitive in an alternate version of Victorian-era England who uses advanced technology. In 1994, Morrison worked on The Invisibles, a graphic novel series that follows a ragtag group of freedom fighters who battled extradimensional foes who enslaved humanity without their knowledge.

This chapter examines Grant Morrison’s comic book projects for Vertigo Comics during and after his stint in Marvel Comics. It explains that during his stay in Marvel Comics, his projects for Vertigo abandoned the standard formula of superhero comics. It became his channel for expressing his frustration on corporate control and conservative ideology. The chapter adds that Morrison experimented with different approaches to writing a comic book narrative such as in the Justice League of America parody, The Filth. Morrison’s Seaguy parodied the narrative stasis of superhero genres with the episodic plotting that leads the story nowhere.

Theodora Patrona offers a comparative perspective by juxtaposing Vertigo to Greek American female immigrant novels. In particular, the essay is an examination of Vertigo in conjunction with works by Greek American writers Ariadne Thompson and Helen Papanikolas to present a kaleidoscopic view of the female ethnic that underscores the hurdles of first- and second-generation women of white ethnic ancestry in the United States.

The main elements of the Freudian uncanny - re-animation of the dead, doubles, repetition compulsion, omnipotence of thought - can also be seen as a catalogue of the key techniques of cinema, the magical thinking on which the affective effect of cinema is predicated. So as explore the Gothic at the heart of cinema's theorization of its own epistemological, psychological and aesthetic concerns, this chapter begins with the flashback scenes in the TV series Mad Men. Montage (and especially superimpositions) perform the spectral haunting at issue, notably how the past overshadows and encroaches upon the present and how the distinction between material and psychic reality, body and mind comes to blur. Given that, like much current cinema, Mathew Weiner's show is a genre mix, the chapter finally moves back into cinema history to explore the Gothic at the heart of film in Alfred Hitchcock's unique splice between film noir and melodrama.

Peter Covino reads DeSalvo like a poet, distilling the significance of semantic and syntactic choices to identify what he coins as DeSalvo’s “poetic of trauma.” The essay makes use of Julia Kristeva’s notions of intertextuality and poetic texts to read three chapters of Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo that center around trauma.

Jeana DelRosso’s essay addresses the subversion of memory, fact, and history in DeSalvo’s work vis-à-vis the writings of contemporary Catholic women memoirists—exemplified here by Mary McCarthy and Martha Manning. This essay argues that memoir, in the hands of a literary practitioner schooled in early and mid-twentieth-century American and British literature and second-wave feminism, becomes a rich and provocative example of literary experimentation that freely interacts with the genres of fiction, especially with regards to the Catholic elements in Vertigo.

Julija Šukys, a writer of Lithuanian origins, dialogues with DeSalvo’s “Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar,” focusing on the struggle to balance research, writing, and motherhood—and of living and falling in love with feminine literary ghosts (Woolf for DeSalvo and Ona Šimaitė for Šukys). This essay considers DeSalvo’s pedagogy and memoir more broadly and in connection with questions of creativity specifically with regard to bridging the modes of scholarly and creative writing.

Emily Bernard explores the process of bridging the modes of scholarly and creative writing through a discussion of Adultery, Conceived with Malice, and Vertigo. She views these texts as examples of the way DeSalvo both fixes and unfixes: telling the truth, we learn, sometimes happens in the gaps between words, sentences, and paragraphs.

In 1993, DC Comics launched its Vertigo imprint using six popular series from the 1980s as a conscious move away from superheroics. All six series were reworkings of older DC supernatural or horror characters: The Sandman, The Saga of the Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Animal Man, Shade: The Changing Man, and Doom Patrol. This chapter examines the technological changes and marketing innovations that helped redefine comics at the end of the twentieth century, focusing on the role of DC Vertigo and the emergence of graphic novels and trade paperbacks in the 1990s. It looks at how factors such as digital production and computerized printing, distribution via bookshops, expensive and permanent binding, pricing, and franchising have shaped the medium by bringing the graphic novel closer to the aesthetic of the literary text, while maintaining the status quo of the comics market in some respects. Finally, the chapter discusses other aspects that have affected the ways in which comics are created, produced, and received, including the redefinition of the audience and emergent intellectual property and copyright laws.

In the six masterpieces in a row that Hitchcock made from 1957 to 1964, the Master drew extraordinary work from every actor in his casts. He carefully molded the performance of Vera Miles as a wife who succumbs to depression in The Wrong Man (1957), rehearsing with her over and over again so that the scale of her work would be exactly right, and he let Henry Fonda “do nothing” in this picture in a super-controlled way that ranks with Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca for ambiguous expressiveness under a tightly unyielding surface. Kim Novak gave perhaps the ultimate tensile and contrasting Hitchcockian performance in a dual role in Vertigo, and Novak was matched in that film by James Stewart and Barbara Bel Geddes, both of whom cleanly plumbed the deep pain of their respective characters. Hitchcock worked one more time with Cary Grant for North by Northwest (1959) and brought the Grant persona to its latter-day apotheosis, especially in the love scenes with a somber and very carnal Eva Marie Saint. The Master patiently and closely directed Janet Leigh in Psycho, even sitting off camera and reading the lines her character Marion Crane was supposed to be thinking as she drove to her doom at the Bates Motel. And then Hitchcock controlled the work of Tippi Hedren in The Birds and Marnie, and they both achieved his ideal of maximum expressiveness with minimal means before he crossed a line off screen and their working relationship deteriorated.