Ignorance

The greater the period of time left behind us, the more irresistible the voice inviting us to return. This phrase has the look and feel of evidence, but all the same it is untrue. As one gets older and the end nears, each moment becomes more and more precious, and one no longer has time to waste on memories. One has to understand the mathematical paradox of nostalgia: it is more powerful in the throes of youth when the volume of life lived is completely insignificant.

                                                                                                                  Milan Kundera, L'ignorance

Watching this pretentious quilt of a film a while back, I was reminded of an old (and incorrect) saying: judge not the act for the place in which it occurs. Paris, a place I have never been able to get over, makes the most trivial of acts and banal of conversations seem more profound and life-changing. It colors the shades of my twilights, the reflections upon a citied river, the dappled incongruity of the houses and brasseries that have no comparison in any other city, the weather that always seems to enhance our rising emotions. Yes, readers of these pages know my weaknesses, and one of them is surely for the metropolises of Northern Europe. Strange that, as my ancestors hail from all corners of the Mediterranean; perhaps it is my conscious effort to overcome my bloodlines; perhaps, and more likely, it is among these northern lights – Paris, London, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Moscow, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Helsinki – that my soul has found the balance of culture, language, art and humanism that will forever nourish its dreams. And should memory serve me well – and it is usually a docile hound – I first flipped through this book on the ground floor of this bookstore several years ago. 

Only the German translation was available, and a few pages of random reading (my usual method of selection) suggested that waiting to acquire the original would probably be a better idea. Memory has yet to yield any data regarding that brief dalliance apart from the plot blurb on the back, which I seem to remember verbatim, and a few scattered thoughts about one woman's rather melodramatic and tragic return home (home, in this case, being this breathtaking city). The result is an odd novel, more a pastiche of the author's memories than anything else, and proof positive that where something takes place undoubtedly influences how we view what takes place. Our protagonist – well, our initial protagonist – is a Czech émigré called Irena, now living in Paris with her adult daughter. Like many of her compatriots Irena fled her homeland when the Red Army decided to practice tank manoeuvres in downtown Prague. Twenty-one years later, when the wall of ignorance between East and West was finally torn down, she was faced with a choice: return to a country she no longer knows or remain in another country where she will never truly be at home. It is a choice that every émigré and political refugee faces once another tyrant has been destroyed (we have, thank Heavens, only a few left), and there are no advantages to making a decision that has already been made by history. As our omniscient narrator comments: "But what can a man who has come to see the country of his past think of, if not of his past?" And here is where Irena wades through the waters of oblivion and finds some shells and artefacts she did not expect.

She goes back in time to her ex-husband Martin, now held against the light of the most typical filters of the past: her current lover, a Swede by the name of Gustaf, and "the one who got away," a Czech émigré and veterinarian called Josef. Martin dies after several years in France and with him dies her last opportunity to speak her native language on a daily basis, her daughter predictably preferring the new to the old. Gustaf is the very opposite of Martin: loud, almost rambunctious, unbeset by sadness and nostalgia (like many Scandinavians, he felt "limited" by the smallness of his country), and callow in the ways of the Iron Curtain. When the Berlin Wall does tumble, it is Gustaf who immediately suggests that Irena go back and take a look around – with him, of course, as a willing accomplice. Since he has never lost his country or the occasion to return to it, he could not possibly understand what leaving the ones you love for good might signify. His blithe, almost troglodyte manner is belied by the heaviness in Irena's eyes. Irena, we are told early on, is very much like the most famous wanderer in literary history. Indeed, given the twenty-year hiatus and the irretrievability of so much of the past (Odysseus and Irena both leave around the age of thirty-five), Ignorance provides a true account of Ulysses, because unlike Joyce's masterpiece, we witness a departure, period of absence, and return. The return is more important than the wanderings because the wanderings mean nothing if they cannot end; this is not to find fault with the metaphor Joyce borrowed but rather to underscore Kundera's closer approximation. And like Odysseus, who returns to his beloved Penelope after two decades away, Irena feels little of what she thought she might feel upon her touching Czech soil anew. So much so that Kundera offers an analysis: "If I were a doctor, I would issue the following prognosis in his case: 'The patient suffers from an insufficiency of nostalgia.'" This prognosis is quickly amended to: "'The patient suffers from a masochistic deformation of his memory.'" What is amusing about such a remark is that it no longer refers to Irena, but to the man she re-encounters twenty years later, Josef.

About a third of the way through the novel, Josef hijacks the narrator's attention and we are thrown headlong into his world. Josef also left his family behind, although he was unmarried and began a family in his new homeland, Denmark. Unlike Irena, however, Josef selected another small country as his destination; he would not melt into the ethnic stew that France was becoming in the 1960s, but stick out rather prominently in still-homogenous Copenhagen. Here we find a wonderful passage on the much-maligned "small country complex":

To be ready to give your life for your country: all nations of the world have known the temptation of such a sacrifice. The enemies of the Czechs, as it were, have also known it: the Germans, the Russians. But these are great nations. Their patriotism is different: they are exalted by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was rife with glory but because it was unknown; not because it was great and elevated, but because it was small and constantly imperiled. Thus their patriotism signifies immense compassion for their country. The Danes are the same. It was not by chance that Josef chose to emigrate to a small country.

The details of Josef's youth after he discovers his old high school diary and is astonished that he didn't bother to take it along with him might remind the Kundera connoisseur of the author himself. After all, we are regaled on the usual tales of skirt-chasing, music, and Romanticism that is kept alive by Kundera's own digressions on figures such as this poet and this composer. Amidst these digressions is a tapestry of beautiful images, failed dreams, and tainted memories that can only come from a long life of reflection, art, and moral intuition. In one great passage, Josef spots his watch on the wrist of his brother, and then compares his return to that of a dead man returning from the grave twenty years later and finding his possessions divvied up among his survivors; another passage features the bittersweetness of nostalgia as "the captive, conquered present overcome by the past." That is not to say that the world of Kundera – who turns eighty-five today – is not tinged with hope: he remains, in fact, incorrigibly optimistic about the future of art while rightly attacking the trendy nonsense with which the twentieth century was saturated. Long-time Kundera readers have realized that each successive work seems to be a summary of his previous output, at once more precisely tied to his experiences and more abstractly philosophical, and we read and are transported to all the right points of the past. Even if most of them aren't really there anymore.

Akhmatova, "Вечером"

A poem ("In the evening") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Music graced the garden lea,
Woe and pain in furtive play;
Oysters iced upon a tray,
Fresh and piquant smells of sea.

“Your eternal friend" – his words,
As my dress he came to touch;
What embraces, that should mean much,
Could his hands disguise as birds? 

Or as cats? So one beholds
Female riders, circus folk.
As faint golden lashes cloak
Tranquil eyes, a laugh unfolds.

Near the stretching fumes amassed
Came harsh voices like sad strings:
“Thank the heavens for all things,
With your love alone at last.”

The Bridesmaid

It is said that you can cull the basic structure of a family's relationship from how parents compliment their children. Anyone can criticize you in a moment of weakness with or without justification; but flattery and other such niceties, especially when performed sincerely and in full belief of their declarations, take more of an effort. Complimenting a child too much, it is also thought, may retard the child's emotional growth insofar as he expects only good things to be said about him by everyone else, which as our world has shown us is not usually the case. Yet no praise whatsoever is equally pernicious for, I should hope, quite obvious reasons. What then is the middle road? For better or worse, I am fully convinced that children – at ten, twenty, or fifty – should be given an element of choice and praised when their decisions cost them more than a few blinks of contemplation. Opting not to bully a classmate should be, for a properly raised child, a rather simple affair; cheating when you know you can get away with it, however, is an entirely separate lesson. A child has an inherent moral structure that he senses he should follow (whether this structure was formally inculcated by a parent, teacher, or other older relative is not that important), and despite his squawks of innocence and efforts to recuse himself from decision-making, he understands much more than he would ever let on. When children become young men and women, they are faced with much more serious quandaries – where to work, who to call friends, who to call lovers, and what to think of their parents now that their opinions carry significantly more tonnage. Some people never leave this realm of childhood. They wallow instead in irresponsibility and innocence so stupendous it can only be labeled "below morality," although some of us prefer the term prelapsarian. They expect the hard things in life to be regulated by their progenitors, merely leaving them with the task of selecting their toys and food. And for the family Tardieu, the protagonists of this film, responsibility has long since given way to moral indolence.

The film opens as so many modern films do, with a newsreel about a terrible event: a twenty-one-year-old girl has gone missing from her home in Nantes. The reporter on the scene rattles off a few details before a young man sidles up to the set and promptly switches it off. That man is construction salesman Philippe Tardieu (Benoît Magimel), and turning a blind eye to the impurities of reality has come to be a habit. His younger sisters Sophie (the lovely Solène Bouton) and Patricia (Anna Mihalcea) gape and stare in dismay, first at the horror of losing someone who dated a former schoolmate of theirs, then at Philippe's insistence that they prepare themselves for the arrival of their mother Christine (Aurore Clément). Christine is a widow, a soft touch and a doormat. Watching a game show where pure luck allows a woman to win "money for life," she whispers to Sophie that she couldn't be on that show because she wasn't raised to earn money that way. As a hairdresser, she has to listen to her obnoxious clients rave about better, cheaper salon stylists as well as provide house calls to some of the lazier among them. We are then hardly shocked that she is now attached to a despicable louse named Gérard Courtois (Bernard Le Coq) whom she plans on introducing to her children, age twenty-six, twenty-three, and seventeen, that very night. 

As a symbolic gesture of her break with her past, she also intends on giving Gérard the bust of Flora (who Flora is supposed to be is never clarified, although it is said to resemble Christine), a gift from the children's late father to his beloved wife. The bust has sat in their garden for years on end, and the camera does not shy away from capturing Philippe's alarm at this loss. Soon, it will be the children assuming the role of the parent, asking the age, profession, and status of Gérard, as well as displaying overt skepticism towards the whole enterprise. But before this inevitability comes to pass, Christine parks her scooter, enters their house, and immediately all her attention falls to Philippe. "You are as beautiful as a star," she says, in a quote repeated at a much later point in the film. And her daughters? "You are as beautiful as angels," she coos. And it is clear: a radiant star, alone, as opposed to a heaven full of interchangeable angels, that is how Christine perceives her offspring. In no small coincidence, that is also precisely how they perceive themselves. The titular wedding is Sophie's, her betrothed Jacques being a "simple clerk at city hall" who also happens to volunteer for the fire department. Jacques is an homely fellow, especially considering his fiancée, but he cannot be faulted for being a bad Nantais. In a lesser film, the first scene would feature the bride either trying on her dress or actually minutes away from the ceremony, and her brother among the pews lost in some chain of neurotic thoughts until his eyes came upon one of the bridesmaids – the stock method of plot advancement. Yet Chabrol takes his time, placing all the pieces where they need to be and adjusting them more than once if necessary. By the time the wedding finally takes place we already have an excellent idea of Philippe's obsessive, brooding personality – exactly the type of person who would fall for the wrong woman. And there is, without a doubt, a wrong woman. 

As the wedding proceeds without incident, one bridesmaid catches Philippe's eye, although he might have instinctively been looking in that direction since his girlfriend of sorts was supposed to have been included. One gets the slippery feeling that Philippe's destiny can be solely imputed to his single-minded pursuit of order, lockstep regimen, and bourgeois financial success. He is not a bad person in the criminal sense; yet his ethics have atrophied enough that he cannot distinguish a good girl, one that might make him very happy and rid him of that silly bust he keeps gazing at then hiding like a dirty magazine, from a bad girl. Alas, he finds something far worse than that in Jacques's wayward cousin Senta (Laura Smet, the daughter of this actress and this famous singer). Her real name is Stephanie, although she changes it, Sophie informs us, every six months and cannot be bothered with the banal details of daily life like sewing on a blue flower to that prime example of conformity, her bridesmaid gown. She derives her exotic looks from an Icelandic mother who died at childbirth, a story straight-shooter Jacques readily confirms and one that puts Philippe's mind, so prone to conflict avoidance and blocking out any form of improbity, at ease. The wrong woman, however, has other plans. After eyeing him up throughout the brief and dull reception, she sits alone at the table of her cousins waiting for something to happen. The desired event occurs when she inexplicably turns up at his doorstep soaking wet and ready for any type of action his limbs might be able to handle. To justify her impetuousness, she confesses to being an actress (preferring acteur to the allegedly sexist actrice and comédienne, with the former referring to movie stars), and reminds him that Senta is the heroine's name in this famous opera. This and whatever else slips out of her mouth in the throes of passion or at any other time cannot be verified. 

Nor, for that matter, does Philippe have any immediate interest in discovering the truth. He doesn't really want to disbelieve anything she says; he wants, in fact, the most preposterous batch of lies possible because what he lacks in his life is imagination. She strings him along so shamelessly that he actually seems enthralled by her mountain of distortions, that everything she could be saying is probably rubbish, and by trying, quite passively, to detect what if any of the details of her life are genuine. We all know men like Philippe, men who lack imagination and always tell the truth, embarrassed about their few personal details that they don't want to make public, and anxious to believe others because it is through others that they experience the lies and fantasy that they do not dare to expound themselves. A nice twist intervenes when Philippe at long last calls Senta a bare-faced liar (he does it in the gentlest possible way: he suggests she write screenplays) to which she predictably writhes in indignation. From this point on, the twists are superseded by far less subtle plot devices that border on the ludicrous stuff we find in more commercial cinema. But Magimel is wonderful throughout, ever mumbling underneath his breath about some repressed emotion, seconds from bursting although he never really gives full vent to his feelings (after reluctantly handing over the bust, for example, he almost walks into Gérard as if he were sniffing him and about to bite him). There are far too many bright spots to be distracted by Senta's asinine existentialist theories and the incestuous fact that her last name, Bellange, is a homophone of "beautiful angel." Is that why, when Philippe is about to leave to a fateful dinner with Senta, he appears before his mother dressed to the nines and is offered the same compliment as before? This time he agrees, although he should be thinking of star-crossed lovers instead.

Some Recollections of Mortality

We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custodians pull off their coats and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the procession came along. It looked so interestingly like business.

                                                                                              Charles Dickens

One spring day and evening in New York twenty years ago I happened to watch, at intermittent points, the television news (what this author claims "tells no more than the survival of greed and fear and pain and hate"). Three white men, bearded and stout, were leaning against a vehicle surrounded by reporters, cameramen and, as it turned out, forces unsympathetic to their cause. Their cause, as it were, appeared to be nothing more than mere survival. They had been riddled with lead, not in any critical areas yet enough to stymie flight, and they pleaded with the camera and anyone to whom the camera dispensed its images to have pity on them. Should they be pitied because their cause is just or simply because without medical attention they will not live more than twenty-four hours? One of the three men, the broadest of chest, spoke loudly and with a Germanic accent, and the casual observer could not help but ask where all this was taking place. He spoke and the camera decided to listen for a minute or two, and then other events of the days required other cameras and other pleas. When, hours later, we returned to the three wounded soldiers – they were mercenaries in a pro-Apartheid South African militia – there was nothing more to hear or sense. They leaned motionlessly on the tires of their jeep, ambushed on the outskirts of this desert and the camera found them all quiet and cooperative. I asked myself and my uncle sitting next to me whether they were still alive and he responded with three words: "They look dead." There was no other confirmation, no voiceover from the camera which surveyed their bodies, no statement of anguish or regret; these were contract killers who had known that they would probably die pursuing their odious profession. We were not expected to pity but to observe them, gaze upon them, and, as it stated in this essay, "look at something that could not return a look."

Perhaps not surprisingly, our narrator is British and the field of his investigation French; death, after all, is a foreign affair. In the first paragraph, he saunters out at four o'clock in the morning – when nothing but birds and the most debauched of Paris's nightcrawlers are out and about – only to end up, a few hours later, at the far end of the plaza before Notre Dame. It is here that he beholds "an airy procession coming round," which he mistakes for "a marriage in Blouse-life, or a Christening, or some other domestic festivity," yet which happens to be the funeral march of an old man. He ponders how we can insouciantly look upon the lot of a stranger and speculate as to the reasons for his demise. The ideas that surface are not among the most pleasant:

An old man was not much: moreover, we could have wished he had been killed by human agency – his own, or somebody else's: the latter, preferable – but our comfort was, that he had nothing about him to lend to his identification, and that his people must seek him here. Perhaps they were waiting dinner for him right now? We liked that. Such of us as had pocket-handkerchiefs took a slow intense protracted wipe at our noses, and then crammed our handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses.

His death may not be tragic; it may in fact be just as commonplace as his life. A wonderful passage follows between a pair of creaking hinges in which the custodian to the funeral,  a "tall and sallow Mason," reminds the crowd of onlookers about the procedures necessary so that this man, unknown to most if not all of them, may enjoy full burial rites in accordance with the lay tradition. 

The scene is the first of three glimpses at death: an old man who passed after a long life; an unknown thirty-year-old woman found dead on the street; and then the narrator's participation as a juror in the inquest of the death of a child. All three stations in life – thirty being roughly halfway through our existence according to life expectancy of the mid-nineteenth-century – are accounted for, as are three very different ways to look at what may happen to us when our biological systems fail and end. In the case of the young child who may or may not have been done away with by his mother, the courtroom's suspicious faces and baleful implications are not kind to the accused:

The miserable young creature who had given birth to this child within a very few days, and who had cleaned the cold wet door-steps immediately afterwards, was brought before us when we resumed our horse-hair chairs, and was present during the proceedings. She had a horse-hair chair herself, being very weak and ill; and I remember how she turned to the unsympathetic nurse who attended her, and who might have been the figurehead of a pauper-ship, and how she hid her face and sobs and tears upon that wooden shoulder.  

Despite her posturings and testimony, the woman was convicted although "her sentence was lenient, and her history and conduct proved that it was right." Her child had barely tasted life, and her responsibility for its well-being was never quite bereft of doubts about her ability and desire to be a good mother. Thus the one who is to bestow life upon her child cannot bring herself to accept the commitment she has entered into, leaving her child from her inception already in the dark and thorned arms of death.

For those unaware of Dickens's contributions as an essayist – he is one of the finest in the English language – look no further than this succulent collection. The pieces range from odd piles of observations on life's minutia to short and modest tracts on more profound matters, and they are unequivocally a rousing success. Dickens has a love for Paris betrayed only by his greater endearment to certain facets of his homeland, and his feelings are evident in the detail which he proffers on death in its various guises. He wonders aloud "whether it is positively in the essence and nature of things, as a certain school of Britons would seem to think it, that a Capital must be ensnared and enslaved before it can be made beautiful" (we would do well to apply this credo to our own daily routines). He is also puzzled by the inquest, considering that the truth might never be fully revealed, attributing all of this to his own ingenuousness:

The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a modest young uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. Many suns and winds have browned me in the line, but those were my pale days.

And his brown skin will one day become pale and sallow like that of the pallbearer and custodian, as we too become greyer and night gains in its darkness.

Vertigo

It is said that routine in the intelligent man is the mark of ambition. But it also serves another purpose: it wards off the melancholy of time. To live without fear may befit those who have nothing or no one to lose; but the rest of us must persist in our optimism, in our patience, in our diligence, all the while cognizant that death approaches with steadier step. Thus the bravest among us are not the fearless but those who acknowledge that they must conquer their fears every so often – every so very often – in order to achieve their goals. Yet what if our fears were so brutal and devastating as to rob us of any chance at life? What if our fears alone stood between us and monumental and eternal love? Such is the quandary of the protagonist of this exceptional film.

Our protagonist's Christian name may be John Ferguson (James Stewart), but as we are still in the era of ethnic shorthand, he will be known to us and everyone in 1950s San Francisco as Scottie. In our opening scene Scottie and a fellow policeman pursue a rooftop-scaling criminal only to allow him to escape, leaving Scottie suspended from the gables. The other officer approaches to help but instead falls to his death, his screams forever to line the nightmares of John Ferguson, who discovers from this horrific episode that he suffers from acute acrophobia, what is colloquially and incorrectly termed vertigo. Now retired months later a convalescent Scottie admits to his old college flame Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) that, although on the eve of disposing of his corset and walking stick, he still cannot stomach the downward view of a city window, much less that of a stairwell. He also mentions another college chum, one that Midge does not recall, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore). Elster has taken a very different path than his college friend. A lawyer by education and a bachelor by practice, Scottie sought with no little enthusiasm to "become chief of police someday"; Elster, on the other hand, chose a very rich wife and the very dull job of her forefathers. This job, in the grand trade of shipbuilding, has occupied Elster to such a degree that he has not had the time or energy to tend to Madeleine (Kim Novak), with whom he claims to be "very happily married." Scottie smiles coldly at this man he once knew, and never knew well: Elster is a mercenary, the type of human being who does not want to regret sentimental decisions because far fewer among us come to regret decisions that make us wealthy and carefree. Despite his affluence and beautiful (and much younger) wife, Elster does harbor a few concerns, specifically about that untended spouse of his. Which is why, after little ado, he proposes that Scottie follow her.

Now there are two kinds of men who would ask you to surveil their wives: those who absolutely trust you and those who absolutely do not, with very different ends in mind. In how many melodramas do fearful husbands hire investigators only later to learn that these same gumshoes have become their wives' first and sole misadventures? Yet Elster does not so much trust Scottie, who barely remembers him, as believe that Scottie has a conscience, which is another assessment altogether. Madeleine is beautiful and, if Elster's insinuations are to be believed, a distinctly mysterious and secretive soul. More importantly, her soul may not be entirely her own:

I'm not making it up. I wouldn't know how. She'll be talking to me about something, nothing at all, and suddenly the words fade into silence and a cloud comes into her eyes and they go blank, and she is somewhere else, away from me – someone I don't know. I call to her and she doesn't hear. And then with a long sigh she is back, and looks at me brightly, and doesn't know she's been away, can't tell me where, or why.

It spoils nothing to reveal that the person allegedly in possession of Madeleine Elster is none other than her great-grandmother, a suicide by the name of Carlotta Valdes. Spurned by her married lover, Carlotta's life was short and, in its final stage, bereft of any hope or human kindness; but such a tragic fate did not detract from her beauty, captured for posterity in a museum-housed portrait Madeleine regularly admires ("admire" may not be the right verb; she sits before it as if it were a shrine or holy object). Madeleine also visits Carlotta's grave, wears her jewelry she received as heirlooms, and drives off to such unusual locations as the Mission San Juan Batista and Golden Gate Park, unusual because there seems to be nothing for her there except the memories of others. Or, perhaps, of one other. "Do you believe," asks Elster, trying not to sound ridiculous, "that someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being?" Scottie strongly opposes such ideas, which does not make him an ideal candidate to find out why Madeleine logged ninety-four miles on her odometer one lonely afternoon spent, she claims, by a lake. As he soon finds no viable explanation for his quarry's actions, however, Scottie, too, begins to wonder about the otherworldly influence of Carlotta Valdes. All the more so when Madeleine, with little forewarning, propels herself fully dressed into the San Francisco Bay, forcing Scottie to end his shadowy game and involve himself directly in the very curious case of Madeleine Elster.

My strict non-disclosure policy prevents me from saying much more, even if Vertigo's fame is such that few of its secrets remain hidden to the first-time viewer. But its diabolical beauty resides equally in its details. Scottie is apprised of some San Francisco lore by a local bookseller (Konstantin Shayne) in a wonderful scene which contemporary film would likely task to the Internet and its mighty search engines. Midge, who exists primarily so that Scottie doesn't need to talk to himself, provides comic relief where, it should be said, none is needed (including the film's only misstep, a vulgar joke straddling Midge's easel). An inquest, read aloud by a coroner to a tepid audience, is perfect in its pacing, tone, and implications ("Mr. Ferguson, being an ex-detective, would have seemed the proper choice for the role of watchdog and protector"). And the ex-detective's turns and twists through the streets of San Francisco have been often mimicked, perhaps most prominently in a thriller about another enigmatic blonde. A few differences between the film adaptation and the original novel are to be expected: Boileau-Narcejac's story takes place in Paris, during the first months of the greatest of European catastrophes; Gévigne (clearly the inspiration for "Gavin Elster") is much more of a known quantity to Flavières, the Ferguson prototype, having roomed with him at school; and Madeleine is a petite, "almost maudlin" brunette, not the voluptuous blonde who long haunted Hitchcock's fantasies. More importantly, the novel also does not hesitate to villify Flavières, a failed artist who unabashedly envies Gévigne's wealth, wife, and success, while the only suggestion of Scottie's caddishness comes in his casual neglect of torch-carrying Midge. Indeed, Scottie could have so easily settled down with Midge long ago and led as peaceful and secure a life as can be expected of a mild-mannered police detective suffering from acrophobia. Maybe, in fact, marriage and stability might have encouraged John Ferguson to reassume his work as an attorney, protecting in a different manner the world from those who wish to ravage it. And maybe then will he discover that Elster is German for magpie.