Andes Hard: NIGHT FLIGHT

"Fog... darkness.... surrounds us like a prison," intones John Barrymore  to a row of aviation board trustee silhouettes, "but no more!" Above him glows a giant topological map of South America, like a comforting artsy lighthouse beacon. He's sending brave pilots like Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery over and through and around the Andes! Up and down the South American coast from Rio down to Buenos Aires, even with zero visibility in the dead of night without enough lift to make it above the troposphere! He's prepared for the inevitable crashes but not for a minute lateness or a single mechanical slip-up. The mail must go out on time! Or a pilot must lie dead, a plane lost. This is history! This is happening! "In spite of ya, night flying is going on!"

The trustees wince in fear -- Buenos Aires is fogged-in and the Andes are dangerous even in clear daylight due to treacherous wind currents  -- but with JB at the helm, flights leave on schedule even in ceiling zero! And the planes aren't all fancy like the poster above, they're bi-planes, and Andes' air currents hit them "like an elevator!" (there's some exhilarating aerial footage of Mongtomery's little plane bobbing up and down in the wind currents over endless white caps). Gazing contemptuously one last time in their piddling humanitarian direction, Barrymore snarls at the row:  "If it wasn't for me you'd still have one plane, a ferry service across the river to Montevideo." Yo, I took a three hour (?) hovercraft ferry across that river! And its entirety is (a natural) light coffee brown! When the water sprays up it turns the whole sky a surreal setting sun pink... I felt like I was on Venus or something. Instead, just the opposite end of the world.

Long unseen due to a rights dispute with author Antoine de Saint Exupéry's estate, Night Flight (1933) turns out to be quite the dreamy-poetic and modern meditation, full of great cool midnight moments, particularly in the Robert Montgomery sections; he seems to really grasp that elusive mix of bravery and wistfulness the movie is going for. After nearly dying in the valley between two mountains, he lands at the BA airport with a kind of calm benevolence. More than almost any other actor in any other moment he underplays the cosmic relief of being safe on firm ground after so long hovering over the maw of death, while conveying to a level approaching poetry, or at least early Hemingway. Unfolding over one long night it has curious poetic-noir fairy tale qualities-- a film spent in the pajamas, if you will, occurring in a land where most everyone else is sound asleep, recalling They Shoot Horses Don't They? and nothing else. So there's Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--a radio operator down below him passing up notes up on weather and direction--clears the fog and emerges into a clear night sky. A full moon above, he loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in a radio station of tango orchestra music on his operator's headphones, and looks up at the moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and so pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail. But that's no guarantee he or any other pilot in this film is going to survive the night. Just our luck if anyone dies it won't be dopey William Gargan. All I can do when I hear him is remember how he goes on and on about how great "Babs" is (Mary Astor) while she's off shagging Clark Gable in Red Dust! And now he's got the divine Myrna Loy, and he leaves her for a week to ten days without so much as a radio. Meanwhile Helen Hayes is talking to Clark Gable over a late supper, but he's not there, is he? Her maudlin insanity is worrying to the maid and any viewer averse to overly theatrical acting. Her endless sobs invite the same sort of passive sleepiness as the drone of the planes. "Like an elevator!"

Better moments: Robert Young's slow, careful dismounting from his plane after he nearly crashes deep in a canyon. Bumming a cigarette from the prop man and slyly kissing of the ground, Young tells him "air current... dropped me into a canyon... just missed the rocks. It's as if the mountains were crouching ready to spring at ya.... not a thing moved... almost too quiet.... as if a secret..." and he catches himself, pulling back from conjuring a silent demon incarnation of the Andes. Again the moment is leisurely, dreamy, Young makes vivid the high strangeness of what it feels like almost dying in the middle of nowhere without a creature stirring for hundreds of miles and how the landscape itself starts to seem like some giant, sentient ambivalent god (maybe if you've ever driven alone through an empty stretch of Montana or Wyoming while almost out of gas in the dead of night know too wanting to kiss the ground). "It's too good to be alive... on such a night." Young says, and his gratitude-drenched sardonic laugh feels real and beautiful. He even goes to dinner with Lionel Barrymore, an old codger who can't stop scratching his eczema and fining pilots for being even ten minutes late in the darkness, fog, and wind. But Young says he's "not half-bad" and you feel some joy because hey, life is precious when death is so daily courted and maybe that's why it makes such a dreamy, fascinating, hypnotic film. Meanwhile the wives and girlfriends pine at home, fretting every unreported hour. And Dr. Irving Pichel waits in Rio for the medicine to come by plane - which a child needs or he won't live the night!

But oh, there are some worried wives, the coolest of whom is Myrna Loy (of course) married to most uncool man (Gargan) and the most uncool (Hayes) inhabiting big ether-misted greenhouses of monologues, bugging Barrymore to bring her man home in one piece, as if he can somehow stop the weather or the night. Even if he could, Barrymore refuses to let sentiment get in his way. He doesn't even know that package of medicine waiting in a foggy Buenos Aires for the Rio-bound plane, but he does know only a ruthless iron determination can create the impossible dream, and that night flights are already going on in Europe and North America and we have to keep up! Up! UP!

Aside from the beautiful muted poeticism there's a giddily unabashed look towards death that reminds me of The Little Prince, which makes sense since that book too was written by aviator-poet Antoine de Saint Exupéry; you can tell its written by someone genuinely in love with the moon, the night, flying, the Andes and living on the lip of death. I like death too films that occur in the middle of the night--that say fuck you to normal sleep schedules--really soothe my ruffled brow, and I love that for some stretches there's no talking in Night Flight at all, just the tick-tock of clocks and metronomes, the whoosh of turbulence, and weird ethereal vocalizing in amidst the lullaby soundtrack, it's like my white noise machine in film form. Even the wives pining at home are helped by the deep dark spaces; their shadowy boudoirs are like big warm airy wombs. And as they all hover between life and death, love and loss, goodbyes and going back to sleep, a really dreamy, opiate sense of floating coheres.

While it's packed with MGM stars, ala Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight, any sense of Night Flight being an ensemble film is undone by how seldom two stars share more than one scene. The pilots are off on their own, up in the clouds, bathed in darkness, fog, and moonlight; their wives are home alone, eating dinner and crying into their champagne; over at the Buenos Aires air station, Barrymores try to hold it all together while gazing up at the big board, lecturing abstract silhouettes, and fining sleepy pilots, as if each actor only imagines the others exists but in reality they're all asleep and the empty night sky is the dream canvas. At home, the silence and dark tendrils of sleep seem to creep around whining Helen Hayes and gorgeous Myrna Loy like loving arms of night. In the air the moon is the like a big comforting mother cradling the plane like a baby, and the BA tango music picked up on the radio is perfect in its ghostly lullaby allure.

Some of the comments around IMDB encapsulate what is wrong with the film as far as conventional drama, and they are all quite right, but for me personally these same 'flaws' are why the film's so cool and beguiling. Michael Elliot writes:

I think the biggest problem is that the screenplay really isn't all that impressive and most of the drama never comes because the story never builds up any emotional connection to any of the people we meet. The Gable character is meant to be the backbone of the drama yet we never get to really meet him and we certainly never get to know him as all of his scenes are in the air and he's given very little dialogue.

But Michael, that's the point! These characters we meet in this period are all isolated, adrift in their little pocket of the world, sleeping in dark art deco rooms or crying in front of the nervous maid, waiting weeks for their husband to drift home for a few days where all he does is sleep and look wistfully out the window at that old devil moon. It's like the modern age is being born before our eyes and the sad faces of the old widows and brides as their men take off to sea in Moby Dick are here frozen at their fullest blossom in nightshade honey and spread across die dunkelbrot nacht. 

So thanks, TCM, for rescuing this film, and assisting in getting the licensing issues between Exupéry and MGM resolved, allowing it to emerge from its 75 years inside the dark cloud legal limbo like Amelia Earhart. We can almost feel the lack of eyes that have been laid on this, the way it feels is like a person comfortable with being a lonely artist, most awake and productive in the hours between midnight and dawn, when everyone else is asleep so they don't clog the airwaves with petty junk, and he can subliminally harness their dreamy calm. Many critics and fans who've wanted to see it for decades were perhaps expecting too much, I wasn't expecting anything except that it wouldn't measure up to the brilliance of another film about treacherous night flying over the Andes, Hawk's Only Angels Have Wings. And perhaps it's in the comparison, as the Fail Safe to Wings' Dr. Strangelove. In fact the two airlines could very well be connecting to each other along the South American flight plan! They might never meet, either, just a pilot once in awhile comes through Barranca, buys some drinks, waits til the storm clears, and takes off again.

And you can find much breadth of vision between the two if you compare the warm camaraderie of Hawk's film, which takes place almost entirely in the cozy bar/saloon/airfield owned by Sig Rumann, with the shadowy isolation of the command center of Night Flight, wherein the only 'fun; moment occurs when Young and Dorothy Burgess drunkenly sing "How Dry I Am" as they drive up to the runway in her convertible. It's a single moment of merriment like a daring final laugh in the face of mortality, vs., say, "The Peanut Vendor" in Angels, or the various macabre toasts, "Hurrah for the next who dies!" in The Lost Patrol (see my analysis of the WWI anti-war aviation films of the early 30s).  In this one, the song comes when the sun is just coming up, and Young puts his flight suit on over his tuxedo and gives his girl in the convertible a farewell kiss, and off he goes into the horizon, still drunk off his ass. Even in these early days of commercial cinema pilots went to work drunk! Why not? It's not like there are pedestrians or stop signs in the sky, and you're already taking your life in your hands just going up there. You need courage, by the quart if needed. And god knows you can't even be nice to Lionel Barrymore's inspector, lest brother John hear about it and break up the friendship with petty fines, so that it will be easier sending the boys into their death. What a dick.

But now that planes can fly fly fly up high enough to coast right over the Andes, thanks to pressurized cabins (and even heroes like Denzel get dragged over the coals for cockpit drunkenness) the opportunities for a man to sneer at mortality are far between. And the weird disconnect between all the stars' big scenes (like each actor was shot in a day or two on a soundstage where they didn't have to run into each other) is perfect for the subject matter. In careening through the inky blackness of the night sky instead of coasting through the inky dark dreams of sleep with their Argentine wives, these brave men of the air mail routes are, just like Exupéry's Little Prince, unbound up by the laws of gravity, sleep schedule convention, or the normal routines of human relationships. Refusing to choose life over death or home life over the air or vice versa, if they go down, they go like men, with only bobbing jellyfish parachutes for gravestones, free forever of their overbearing bourgeois wives.

Some more lines from Moby Dick maybe encapsulate the true kernel of poetic treasure within the seemingly disparate scenes of Night Flight:

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Like those birds on the plain, other MGM star-studded prestige pics like Dinner at Eight may soar critical esteem but they're in familiar ground, while Night Flight--even when it nosedives, is way up in its own gyre. Where conventional airplane dramas tend to just take a spin around the void, throw in some flares and then ride off back to safety, Night Flight plunges straight down into the black abyss, landing lights off, harpoons at the ready, all to get the postcards and insulin to Rio at the scheduled time. Call it crazy, call it suicide, but it's the kind of black art that stirs me up like Ahab's electric oratory. It's no surprise then that I'll defend the lonely black night beauty of this film, though it crushes me to the core like gravity's ticking metronome....

And, like flying itself, is often boring.

Totaled Recall: THE HANGOVER (2009) and WHO IS HARRY NILLSSON? (2010)

Full of triumph, tribulation, amusing comic turns, and a manageable portion of tiresome dick humor, THE HANGOVER is a fine way to end mid-life crisis month, i.e. November. It's all about memory and manliness and lack thereof, and if it took me awhile to see it, well, I confess I used to have problems with Bradley Cooper - the beady eyes, the cocky glassiness, the way he didn't deserve Jennifer Garner in ALIAS - but all is forgiven here. Now I love the nasal nonchalance with which he greets the next morning's calamities with a shrug and a swagger. Annoying Ed Helms (THE OFFICE), meanwhile, wakes up and starts instantly to fret about a missing tooth and that there's a tiger in the bathroom so he can't even get in there and check his gums. Cooper just chortles and rolls with it, like most people would. Dude, to me it was just like every morning/afternoon waking up on tour with my band! I was always trying to find my pants, like Zach Galifianakis does, but we'd never slip anyone Rohypinol unless they specifically requested.... which they did. My crew loved Rohypinol, we didn't waste them on girls, we didn't need to. We were men, y'all, men who loved to pop Mexican Quaaludes as they used to be known. Even if they made our parties turn into snoring Jonestowns, I'm sure we must have had fun before we crashed. Didn't we? No one had phone cameras in those days so we'll never know. But also, our crew had no Ed Helms whiner character, just various degrees of Galiafinakis, and all was bearded and chill with the worrlzzzz.

Erroneously called 'rufflin' or something in the film, by a dentist who should know better, Rohipynol is sooo much more than a date rape drug. Don't let the frat boys give it a bad name. May any man whose ever spiked a girl's drink with one drop dead instantly, by Crom!

Oh yeah, THE HANGOVER. Well written, well directed, well photographed, it solves nearly all the problems I usually have with dumb Nevada-set comedies, and in fact is better at depicting that special drug fueled blur than Terry Gilliam's much more pedigreed FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. Frankly, despite Helms' histrionics (he's worse than Alan Arkin in THE IN-LAWS) there's a real sense you'd want to hang out with these guys, whereas Depp and Del Toro in LOATHING seemed way too pretentious and violent to want to actually have more than a quick shot with before excusing yourself, going to the bathroom, and running for the hills. To bond with the HANGOVER posse one need take only a sixth shot of Jaeger, whereas Hunter would need to wave a gun in your face and scare you off, so you wouldn't see how alone and twisted he was inside.

Yeah, when it comes to drug-fueled mayhem, Zach, Brad and their dorky friend are like a good band - the alpha, Bradley Cooper on lead guitar and vocals, getting them in trouble with daring reckless drive. On bass, the rooted crazy calm of Zach G, and the clatter of nervous Helms on drums. Hunter's band would never even learn two chords before they smashed their guitars... that wouldn't fool me. I saw the Replacements in '84! Matsbra!

But, for all that, THE HANGOVER ain't perfect. First of all, these guys are pussies, because when you wake up with a super hangover like that, the thing is to just keep drinking. Nothing cures a hangover like more alcohol. There's no earthly need to sober up, dear friends, til the wedding's over. The wedding photogs can always redden up your pale, sickly countenance in Photoshop. Not that they did for me, that's show biz.

But, I totally felt that anxiety Ed Helms feels due to their  staying in a designer hotel suite, where you're surrounded by luxury items that cost ridiculous amounts, so you're dying for a drink and there's booze all around, but if you take it they charge you like $45 for an airplane bottle, or $25 for a small tin of nuts. Dude, when I go to a hotel I don't want to feel like I'm sleeping in the lobby of an expensive department store, afraid to roll over in bed lest I occur some exorbitant charge by knocking over a pillow. I mean, are they charging me for every splurb of ginger-lemon-scented hand soap? The whole thing never fails to throw me off, so even if I get a comp bottle of designer mineral water I become afraid to open it, afraid to even go down the hall for ice cubes, lest the top flight party girls see and judge me, snickering over how plebeian I am for expecting an ice machine in such a posh spot - everyone knows room service brings it... and charges.

On the other hand, when you're with 'the guys' there's often a kind of vertical displacement of responsibility, as opposed to going to one of these places with your girlfriend and being expected to show her a great time even as it's plunging you into debt and she's rolling her eyes, blaming you for the rain, and making wearying demands for 'spontaneity.' Groups of guys are more fun because there's no need to constantly prove why you're a good boyfriend, to make sure she's having a good time like some overstressed cruise director, and the HANGOVER is brilliant at showing how four guys riffing and going off in random directions at the same time in the same place, concurrent yet counter-intuitive, can bewilder the world around them into a kind of on the spot detournement societal melt down, thus enabling said guys to get away with everything short of arson. My band and I, for example, could take over and completely change the vibe of, say, a sleepy all-night diner, or an understaffed bar. Special shout out to the girls of Old City Hall in Oswego, 1992. Favorite blurry memory of that tour: Five in the morning, skinny dipping in a freezing Lake Ontario while the snow drifted down! Alcohol rules!

Aside from the not drinking more to cure the hangover aspect, my only other issue with the film was the shameful portrayal of women, which I will only excuse because of the sacredness of the "what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas" male bond. Still, why does Heather Graham always get stuck playing gorgeous, sexually available doormats? And even if that girl waiting at the altar wasn't Megan Fox, she was mighty Megan Foxy, with a dash of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Awesome, but one-dimensional. And wait, is that Cheri Oteri as the mom? Run!

But again, this is Vegas, the city of bromance and legalized prostitution...SPOILER: the final photos of the lost night smack of all the things the aforementioned stone cold bitch is right to condemn... Those implants have families damn it. They were once beautiful breasts and now just embarrassing, shocking reminders of a world gone wrong. Still it is cool to see the enemies of the day-after suddenly as the friends of the night before, preserved in the fleeting amber of digital phone memory cards. Healing, you might say.

The HANG director also made OLD SCHOOL, which I haven't seen, but I remember seeing photos of Will Ferrell at the keg, and remembering that I once partied with him, or his Syracuse equivalent, Mike "Ellis" DeAngelo. Ellis! Boys need to be boys, and what goes on under the roofie stays under the roofie, unless it doesn't, in which case, everybody's goin' to jail this moan-NIN! Some of us never left. Some of us have been here the whole time, shoveling our buckets of coins into cold, dark slots while the sheriff stands watch and we hear Tom Jones sing work songs. There is no jackpot so sweet as the one we don't remember, Lord. Just look at Harry Nilsson! What, who is Harry Nilsson? Glad ya acksed. Pull up a chair... grab a cup. Oh. No more cups? There might be one in the sink you can rinse off.

In the pantheon of rock/pop there's always those artists whose albums you see everywhere and never buy, though there's always one or two people who are into them and try to tell you how great they are and you're just not having it... Procol Harum? Molly Hatchet? Todd Rundgren? Foghat? Whaat? I used to always put Nilsson in with them, some relic of a bygone age...That won't happen again now that I saw WHO IS HARRY NILSSON (AND WHY IS EVERYBODY TALKIN' 'BOUT HIM)? a documentary with a title that instantly places him as the singer of that song in MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969, rated X).  Off to a good startbra.

Seeing the documentary helped unearth a lot of 'lost' childhood memories, such as being five and excited for the premiere of Nilsson's psychedelic 1971 TV cartoon, "The Point." Even then, at five or whatever, the cartoon made me annoyed with its YELLOW SUBMARINE psychedelic puns and Seuss-brand nonconformism. But I shouldn't blame Nilsson for being so proud of his ABC prime time slot-winning. Do we devalue Vince Guaraldi because that bridge in 'Linus and Lucy' is so overused in commercials? Nilsson was a partier, to the extreme! That is what we must struggle through the cold Las Vegas afternoon to 'remember'.

Throughout the documentary various musicians talk about losing huge stretches of time partying with Nilsson. Wives all across Laurel Canyon came to dread his husband-napping phone calls.  He'd pick up their men and they'd vanish into the 'Rufflin' haze... surfacing later drunk and belligerent, just to pick up their guitar and accidentally break a table before driving off again, with a merry laugh and tire screech.
Meanwhile Nilsson's record producers loved his incredible voice and gifts so much they seemed to just let him go too loose, recording every drunken sing-song blather that came into his head. They were all broken up still by his leaving them. (Apparently John Lennon was a negative influence). And leave them he would.

His younger Irish wife speaks as well as she can of our Harry in the documentary, and she still looks a pretty hot, and his gorgeous children remember a loving but mostly absentee dad. Though I wished there could be a Polaroid trail of his wild lost weekends, ala THE HANGOVER, it was enough of a change of heart for me that I ran to my emusic account and downloaded NILSSON SCHMILSSON and NILSSON SINGS NEWMAN. A long time Randy Newman fan (pre-TOY STORY only, playa), it's been my pleasure to hear Nilsson sing "We got to tell the people 'bout Utah / 'cuz nobody seems / to know," while walking to work down Brooklyn's scenic Vanderbilt Ave. every morn...nin'. 

But man, this country needs to remember more than Utah... we need to remember that remembering is for chumps and blackouts mean you must have had a blast, and hangover cures don't come better than a 50-50 mix of gin and grapefruit juice... chased with an overnight jail sentence, rehab, 90 AA meetings in 90 days, and... toast... it takes you an hour to eat one piece of toast you're so shaky and nauseous from alcohol withdrawal or poisoning, whichever comes first and sometimes both at once, to be so full of whiskey you can't stand up or talk, but still twitching from alcohol withdrawal.

But in the end, is having all that candle at both ends-style fun even worth it if you don't remember a damn thing? As someone who used to spend his week dreaming of Friday when I could grab a bottle like a reverse parachute and just plunge into the void, I can tell you flatly, "nobody seems / to know." Memory is not to be trusted, and the moment itself doesn't exist outside your own slicing of past and future like a dwindling cube of sopium in a room full of grubby jonesers. You're better off seeking Jesus, but churches smell like the elderly, and you can't smoke in the pews. Your best bet is this: download Nilsson's "Jump into the Fire" and listen to it walking down the street pretending to be a coked-up Henry Hill. That should answer all your questions, you black-out reincarnater. You jumped into the Lake Ontario fire a million times and don't remember... Hopefully someone, even now, is up in the ether, savoring and recording your every lost howl.

Excuse me, Miss, but Haven't We Died Somewhere Before?

Much as I love and admire VERTIGO (1954), I don't love love it the way I love THE BIRDS, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, REAR WINDOW or PSYCHO. It's not riveting, it's existential and sometimes plodding (as a kid I was bored silly by the endless shots of Stewart driving around the block and spying on Kim Novak in a flower store); It took a dozen viewings before I was able to appreciate the modernist freak-out of having Jimmy Stewart--our soft-spoken American son--acting like an obsessive misogynist dickweed. Speaking of which (SPOILER ALERT) but if you haven't seen it by now, well, you should be seeing it now. What if you die before you get a chance to see it? Or worse yet, what if you see it and realize you are already dead? Oh my god, that's what happened to me!

I've been watching BAND OF BROTHERS and in one scene a rough tough NCO tells a shaking, traumatized young private that the trick to overcoming fear in combat is to just know you are already dead. If you're afraid of losing something, life especially, you haven't got a chance of keeping it. You have to act 'as if' it's all gone, and from that comes a relaxed sense of fearlessness, like Tyler "It's only after we've lost everything that we can do anything" Durden from the FIGHT CLUB. In tripping parlance this is called 'letting go.' If you feel the reaper breathing down your neck, you don't run or cower or plead, you face it eye-to-eye and, with a loving howl, dive into his arms so hard you shatter both his reedy ulnas. Death wasn't expecting that! He's amused. He's been at this a long time, so any courageous about face wins his admiration - you've just made a friend of death. Play your cards right, you just might find yourself in the womb of fear. 

But what if you're not in the 101st Airborne, or running along the edge of Jack's personal razor, of in some decadent Paris hotel, what if you're just Jimmy Stewart, that suit-and-tie-encrusted square, adrift in late 1950s super boring San Francisco? What if, instead of having to fight Germans, you just have to climb Midge's step ladder, but you can't even do that? What if you're a woozy romantic gumshoe, playing at being a San Francisco agent ("available Ferguson" - that's you)? Then brother, watch out --it's VERTIGO.

Black and white is over, Mr. Narrator Grade-A Chump Fall Guy! It fades away in the first few frames announcing 'VistaVision' like the whole post-war noir haze has been yanked off the roof by gravity's unruly hand, plunging down 40 stories to Technicolor's lurid red-purple spectral conclusion. It's not that our Scotty (Stewart) is a coward, sir. It's just he looks too long into the face of the gorgon and turns to stone. Not even Midge's Mozart can cohere a single breadcrumb for his lost eyes' alignment.

Don't look into her false-colored eyes

Male-gazing into Medusa's face is best done--if at all--via a rear-view mirror or a quick coy glance, like one gives a pretty face while passing each other in the 5PM subway rush. If you gawk, you shall be ensnared, petrified, arrested for being a peeping tom, their passing glass-eyed gaze turned sour--an instant change in status from 'innocuous part of the urban landscape wallpaper" to 'another in the sea of horny objectifying creeps.' Or worse, if she's looking for those kind of gazes, and fins to return them - with interest. A wolf's howl freezes in his throat as his bluff is called. Scotty stares too long and he winds up a statue frozen in the funny farm flower garden, until he gradually crumbles and melts like the end of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, only instead of Fay Wray clawing his mask off, it's Kim Novak's mask returning from underneath her real one - allowing his own frozen VHS tape to finally eject.

The key element of 'unease' that prevails through VERTIGO, though, is that Dali melting-watch of the gorgon sensibility (hence the boredom). We never actually see Scotty rescued from his opening scene cliffhanger predicament. This leaves us with a queasy feeling all through the film that he's about to fall. We never see him get 'better' in the rest home and be discharged. There's a feeling he's still on the ledge during the first half and still in the home in the second. After we fade out from the roof scene, the first time, he just suspiciously now walks with a cane and strings along with Midge, his emasculatin' and desexed (bespectacled) fashion sketch artist 'pal.' But whenever he looks down from any height we get a mysterious 'uncanny' glimmer that maybe this is all happening in a 'before his eyes' kind of instant. ala Cocteau's BLOOD OF A POET, or TWO SECONDS starring Edward G. Robinson (1). And when he winds up losing the artificial persona of Novak the second time he is restored to the roof at last. Time will move normally again, even if only for the two seconds it takes to hit the pavement.

Or the end of the rope.

Now here's another thing that recovering alcoholics and addicts who were 'low bottom' (1)  and soldiers recovering from post-traumatic stress all know: the feeling that you 'almost' died so often that in many of your parallel lives (running concurrently with the reality "you" are in) you did die, and your quantum immortality options have dwindled, i.e. you are approaching your total death when all your quantum options run out (there are a hundred of you who live past 50 but only one of you who lives past 100). This is in fact a good thing as you will--finally--be able to remember your own death only when all the parallel lives are over -- which means you are completely whole only in that final moment; that's when you 'really' die, the complete and total soul death, beyond the grasp of any soul collector's fifth-dimensional clutches.

If you don't believe quantum immortality is real, here's an experiment: next time you 'almost' get hit by a bus or something random like that, close you eyes and feel, with your auric tentacles, into the dimensions to the right and left of you... are they still there? Does your soul feel lopsided? Can you 'almost' hear the distant shouts of ambulance drivers on your right or left side, the feeling of being lifted onto a stretcher, the smell of hospital disinfectant lingering even as you go on about your business in your dimension proper as if nothing happened, which of course it didn't?

Whoa, in VistaVision this might have scared me - did I ever see it that way, you know, 'before'?

Of course this all speculation, though I personally feel it to be very real. As nobody remembers dying (unless they come back into this life, in which case it's not death --just an NDE) it's obvious that we will never 'experience' it, hence it can't happen. Even people who remember past lives have a hard time nailing down what goes on between the births and deaths. If we are in a purely dead state we become, in a sense, experience itself, depersonalized intelligence, a free-floating locus of identification, i.e. very similar to the way our identification shifts when being at the movies, the free-ranging narrative focus that Hitchcock suddenly seizes control of and stabs in the middle of PSYCHO or Dali and Bunuel in the beginning of La Chien Andalou. 

The only difference between movies and real death from this angle is one of morality: Watching sex onscreen might make us hypnotized (Mecha-Medusa), like we can become when free-floating disincarnated spirits drifting in the dark void, attracted to the copulating bodies of the Sidpa Bardot (the activated womb looks like a campfire). Our spirits can wind up trapped like a fly in the amber that reflects the blazing prana, forcing us to reincarnate once again.

If you look too long at violence, on the other hand, you can make some new friends, like pulling dead characters up out of the screen/swimming pool/mirror in Cocteau's ORPHEE (1950, below) and inviting them to play cards. It's opposite land!

But as with BLOOD OF A POET, in ORPHEE Cocteau makes the mistake of assuming that mythic surrealism needs to function in cinema as it does in painting or theater, which is to say, as a shortcut in lieu of outdoor sets or tracking shots. Cinema moves far deeper far faster than a white elephant and if you want it to sell a lot of tickets your film shouldn't stop too long at the zoo, or art museum. Staring into a painting too can also be a kind of sticky amber flytrap... as in Carlotta Vance's black hole hairdo (below). Death has all sorts of dangers, presuming you want to stay dead (i.e. safe in the center of the mandala). Wherever you let your gaze and interest settle for more than that rear view glance, that's where you end (up). So look wisely, and never stare at something that has the power to stare back, unless you want to suddenly remember that you've been staring into a mirror.

ORPHEE's a good example of these BTG (Beyond The Grave) perils in its depiction of passing through the water of a mirror as entering the underworld. There is no translation of this motif on a metatextual level in Cocteau the way there is in, say, Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA (2). Instead, Cocteau displays a continental contentment with the whimsical  proscenium arch-contained magic of Méliès (3). For VERTIGO, Hitchcock's psychedelic jumping-off point is the gritty San Francisco detective film noir, whose femme fatale offers a critique of desire that subverts the structure of the carny pitchman ("Is she alive or is she dead? Trashy or Classy? All I know is hubba hubba!") into a No Exit deathtrap of rear screen projection, matte paintings, diegetic paintings, and boring flower shops. There's no noir edge to the Can-Can film cans clattering merrily up and down Cocteau's safely contained busline of a stage (4), but in Hollywood every skirt is just the red velvet curtain before a grisly death scene (or life scene, if you're dead) spills off the stage and bloodens your tux and you realize you've been the corpse all the while.

In that way, the work of Cocteau (and even sometimes Bunuel) is a little bit like the painted Greek statues in Godard's CONTEMPT, an old-school white elephant refusal to make eye contact with the terrifying black hole Medusa sun blinking back at them from the screen, even though that's what's being filmed. It's what la nouvelle vague was reacting against even as they loved Fritz Lang, one of Europe's classical formalist masters. If a Lang or Cocteau wants to make a black hole of death they make a big black hole, Hitchcock just styles your hair so that it actually is a back hole of death, it sucks your narrative locus of identification clear out through the other side of the screen and a black hole can also be a pupil's reflection in an empty drain. Lang's hole is just a hole, filmed from the side.. one that by now looks too familiar to ever be confused with our own.  May as well cue up the Mozart and get comfortable, Johnny-O. you ain't falling anywhere... Midge's got you. "There," as Marnie's mom said (and says, and will soon again say), "there, now."

NOTES
Special Thanks to 1000 Frames of Hitchock from whom I filched the above screenshots! 
Thanks to Robin Wood, who's writing on Vertigo in Hitchcock Revisited, inspired many of the jumping off points of this essay.
1a. Low bottom is an AA term for what's low enough to hit before you get sober and rise back to normal, i.e. almost dying of DTs or alcohol withdrawal, or living in that terrible space wherein you can't drink enough to stop your withdrawal symptoms because your body is so poisoned by alcohol you can't even get the bottle within a foot of your mouth without choking and vomiting from the smell, let alone keeping alcohol (or anything) down. It's a drag! 
1. Cocteau's film occurs in the space between when a small brick smokestack blows up, and when the dislodged chunk of tower falls. Robinson's is all a flashback in the two seconds before he's fried in the electric chair.
2. I admit that could be because I'm much more libidinally 'fascinated' by Bibbi Anderson than Jean Marais, it might be the opposite if I was gay, female, or French.
3. Georges Méliès is one of the French pioneers of cinema at the turn of the century, a stage magician who used film at first as a feature of his act.
4. That's of course a reference to Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) to draw the point of how Hitchcock learned the hard way that you can't show a kid getting blown up if we know about the bomb in advance; and that there's a law against bringing nitrate film cans onto public conveyances as the stock is so flammable, the cans were almost like bombs (Sabotage is also referenced in Tarantino's reference-dense Inglourious Basterds).