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CHAPTER 2 A Form of Necrophilia (The Moving Picture Gallery Revisited) To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who’s dead; he is indulging in a form of necrophilia. alfred hitchcock In this remark, made in an interview with François Truffaut and discussing the plot of his 1958 film Vertigo,1 Alfred Hitchcock casually mentions what is not only Vertigo’s rather unsettling central proposition, but also, I shall argue, an important psychosexual characteristic of the cinematic experience generally. Using Hitchcock’s observation as a starting (and perhaps ending) point, I shall examine several films, including Vertigo, that share a peculiar narrative theme: in each, men encounter—or reencounter—women who are uncannily like the dead women on whom they remain erotically and guiltily fixated—doppelgängers of their dead love objects. An analysis of similarities and differences between these films—one conscious of both diachronic and synchronic relationships—suggests a paradigm of cinema itself, or at least the classical narrative cinema. In the previous chapter, I considered the appearances and function of painted portraits in a number of Hollywood films of the 1940s and found them to be symptomatic of a propensity of the film form—in a medium occasionally sensible of its genealogical relationship to other media, photographic and mimetic —affectively to limn the fragile boundary between eroticism and morbidity. The films that are the primary objects of this chapter, too, foreground problematics of representation through, among other means, the motif of the portrait. Corridor of Mirrors (Terence Young, 1948), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Obsession (Brian De Palma, 1976), and The Last Tycoon (Elia Kazan, 1976) meet at the crossroads of representation, eroticism, death, and return. I take as some secondary objects, in a sort of postscript, three more contemporary films that complicate the theme of return by reversal of the gender pattern: Dead Again (Kenneth Branagh, 1991), The Majestic (Frank Darabont, 2001), and P.S. (Dylan Kidd, 2004). 26 Art in the Cinematic Imagination It should not be necessary to add that this short list by no means exhausts the films in which the theme is prominent. Men encounter doppelgängers of their dead love objects in a striking array of films from around the globe, including Angelo Bianco (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1955), Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1971, and its remake, Steven Soderbergh, 2002), Iruvar (Maniratnam, 1997), Suzhou River (Ye Lou, 2000), and Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003), as well as two black comedies that bring the morbid psychosexual implications of this theme to the fore in the context of generic supernaturalism and horror : Blacula (William Crain, 1972), and Dellamorte, Dellamore/Cemetery Man (Michele Soavi, 1994).2 These films share not only a basic narrative conceit but also a complex of other common preoccupations. They suggest a common syndrome; or, possibly, a myth. Discerning the symptomatologyof this myth is a multilayered endeavor. Melancholy, the most pronounced symptom, is the preeminent mood of each of the five films I discuss here, a mood one is naturally somewhat tempted to attribute to their rather pitiable, impotent male protagonists. As Elisabeth Bronfen notes in her comparative analysis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘Ligeia’’ (1838), and Gustave Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892), two literary texts that share a similar theme, the man’s initial response to the loss of his beloved is a form of melancholy—he withdraws from the world, his desire is invested in the dead. The world of the living regains his interest only when he sees that he can retrieve his ‘‘lost’’ love object by falling in love with a second woman who resembles the first. Because she is used as the object at which the lost woman is refound or resurrected, the second woman’s body also functions as the site for a dialogue with the dead, for a preservation and calling forth of the woman’s ghost, and for the articulation of a necrophiliac desire.3 This well describes the situation of the male protagonists of each of the films under discussion here. Eric Portman plays the stiff, effete, stone-faced Paul Mangin in Corridor of Mirrors: a man who suffers from a catastrophic sense of belatedness and a horror of laughter akin to a vampire’s of the cross. The lugubrious Hendrick van der Zee, Lewin’s ‘‘Flying Dutchman,’’ played by James Mason, is based on legend’s and...

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