Madeleine E.

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We open already in pursuit of something ineffable: the outline of a man Jimmy Stewart is chasing. We briefly see this man’s face in soft focus and shadowed, but, because we are not ready for it (how could we be? we have no context; we could ask “Will this be a main character?” but our next question would then be “In what?”) and because we never see it again, it might as well never have been shown. Can you remember what he looked like? Even after watching Vertigo fifty-plus times, I have no mental picture of him. Why is Stewart chasing this man? We will never know.

…

In Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly, “Fred” (a pseudonym), an undercover police officer whose identity is kept disguised by something called a “scramble suit,” investigates himself, the person inside the “scramble suit,” Bob Arctor, a drug addict living with two other users, one of whom has informed on Arctor, precipitating Arctor’s investigation of himself. To make matters worse, Arctor has been given an adulterated form of the drug Substance D, “Slow Death,” which is causing his brain’s hemispheres to operate independently of each other, so that, as his investigation of himself progresses, he begins to see himself as someone else: “Bob Arctor,” suspect, as opposed to Bob Arctor, self. It is at this point in the book that the informant’s identity is revealed, to Arctor and to us, but, though things appear to be coming to a head, Dick chooses to then turn Arctor into a vegetable, incapable of even the most rudimentary investigation, and has the book follow him into this new passive state. The ensuing chapters are pastoral, as placid as the preceding fantasy was paranoid. It is an unusual choice, to say the least.

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