THE CINEMATOGRAPH

#5. Blade Runner & Casablanca

A jaded, embittered man named Rick tries to live as best he can in an oppressive society. Eventually he finds his conscience, ceasing to cooperate with tyrants. The plots of Blade Runner and Casablanca don’t overlap much further than that, but on a deeper level they’re quite close. First of all, each ending hinges on an immortal line of dialogue, either Roy Batty’s “tears in rain” speech or Rick Blaine’s “We’ll always have Paris.” These two famous lines are equivalent, each holding onto past experience as a validation of life. Whether the character faces death or eternal separation from his beloved, those lines point to a sustaining vision that transcends the mundane idea of time that guides most of the characters, and for that matter most people in real life.

In these two endings, Blade Runner and Casablanca reach for a redeeming kernel of humanity in adverse circumstances, either in a French territory under the Nazi-friendly Vichy regime, or in a foreseeable capitalist dystopia where corporations rule the earth and decide matters of life and death. Humphrey Bogart and Harrison Ford are alike in many ways, each projecting a rough but tender masculinity, each adept at expressing the ambiguity of a faded idealist.

#6. Stalker & The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz has countless doppelgängers to choose from. It’s such an elemental movie that it’s become an almost universal template for cinematic stories across cultures and across time, but the parallels between it and Stalker are about as strong as any of its twin relationships. Like Oz, Stalker is a journey into a fantastic land where wishes are granted. The real world is shot mainly in sepia, the magical world mainly in color. The travelers are a “holy fool”, a heartless scientist, and a writer who lacks courage. The writer puts on a crown of thorns outside the gift-giving Room, just as the Cowardly Lion fashions a crown for himself outside the Wizard’s room. The scientist wears a pom-pom cap like the Tin Man’s oilcan headpiece. The characters rest on the ground halfway through, and the only thing they bring back is a dog. The fantastic place is called The Zone, inverting the two letters of “Oz”.

The apparent point of these parallels, which unites The Wizard of Oz to Andrei Tarkovsky’s vision, is the importance of home. Oz ends with Dorothy’s lesson that “There’s no place like home,” and the idea of home is central to every Tarkovsky film from Solaris on. The Stalker’s first words in the Zone are “Here we are, home at last.” The Room and its antechamber are a transformation of the Stalker’s modest home, and the film ends with an assertion of the value of family.

#7. Cléo from 5 to 7 & Run Lola Run

Cléo from 5 to 7 begins with Cléo fearing for her life. In 90 minutes she’ll get a fateful diagnosis from her doctor, and as she walks downstairs her footsteps simulate the ticking of a clock. In Run Lola Run, Lola has 20 minutes to save her boyfriend from death, and the film begins with a clock ticking as a pendulum swings back and forth. Lola runs downstairs to pulsing music and crosses Berlin, as Cléo crosses Paris in her allotted time. Each film keeps the clock ticking with frequent inserts of texts or clocks.

Although both films begin with a sense of urgency, each traces an arc from fear to a kind of faith in life. Though they end on positive notes, they both acknowledge the ups and downs of fortune, refusing to offer simplistic assurances. More important than their outcomes, Cléo and Lola both evolve from a passive outlook to a mature involvement in the world around them. There’s also a sly humor in the way both films play with time and space, charting a path through a European capital that everyone knows could not really be traversed within the time limit.

#8. Mulholland Drive & The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Like The Wizard of Oz and many other films, these two classics use a nested framing structure. The longest part of each film is a flashback told by an unreliable narrator, returning to a more objective reality when the inner tale ends. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Mulholland Drive, the inner tale is more than a fantasy… it’s an alibi told by a presumptive murderer. In Caligari, Francis shows signs of guilt for his best friend’s death, and in Mulholland Drive, Diane Selwyn pays a hit man to kill her lover.

Here again, the difference is more revealing than the similarity. The point of Francis’s alibi is to cover up his guilt, hiding the unbearable fact of betrayal and murder even from himself, thus driving him mad. His tale is distorted visually and logically, making him simultaneously a hero and a helpless victim. Diane is fully aware of her guilt, and her alibi covers up her unbearable failure. In reality she’s humiliated, but in her dying moments she imagines herself as the brilliant actress she dreamt of being, losing her opportunity only because of corrupt forces and her own kindness to “Rita”.

#9. Citizen Kane & Mildred Pierce

In Citizen Kane a dying man’s mysterious last word, “Rosebud”, sets the plot in motion. Although no one would have heard Charles Foster Kane’s utterance, it provides the premise for an inquiry into his past, unfolding his life in a series of flashbacks. Mildred Pierce also starts with a dying man’s last word, “Mildred”, which only one character (who would certainly never tell anyone) might have heard. This too leads into a long backstory told in flashbacks. Both films reveal the mysterious word’s meaning at the end. Both are triumphs of Hollywood studio production with expressionist cinematography, clever scripts, memorable acting, and imaginative sets.

Despite these similarities, Citizen Kane has always maintained the superior reputation. It came four years earlier, and its technical achievements are more showy. Mildred Pierce may owe something to the innovations of Citizen Kane, but it improves on its forebear in one all-important aspect that unites the two. Both are stories of someone who fails to grow up. Charles Kane is a tycoon and politician whose life trajectory comes down to an unresolved childhood memory, and Mildred’s daughter Veda is likewise stuck in her childhood, a stubborn case of Elektral sexuality. Veda though is not the main character. Mildred, who’s responsible for two opposite daughters, is drawn more fully than Veda, giving the film a psychological and social depth that likely exceeds the achievements of Citizen Kane.

#10. Vertigo & Psycho

Under most circumstances, two films by the same director would make a poor example of unsuspected doppelgängers. Directors often repeat patterns and rework their past films, but the overlap between Vertigo and Psycho is special.

Even the superficial similarities are not necessarily obvious. Each film starts with a similar sequence of settings, going from the rooftops of a large city in the western United States to an intimate conversation in a hotel or apartment, then to a ground floor office, followed (at least shortly) by a long scene of driving a car. In both stories the female lead is removed about halfway through in a shocking twist. Both feature a large Second Empire house, and the episode where Scottie retrieves Madeleine from the bay and changes her clothes is echoed in Norman Bates’ chaste retrieval of Marion Crane from the shower.

Marion and Madeleine both start with “Ma”, but for some reason, despite Hitchcock’s clear interest in Freud, only Psycho is widely appreciated as a story of Oedipal sexuality. The evidence in Vertigo, however, is abundant. Scottie’s fixation on his lost Madeleine is as creepy as Norman’s on his lost mother, and it has the same result, ending a young woman’s life. After the hospital Scottie seeks Madeleine in older women, and when he kisses Judy the Tristan chord on the soundtrack echoes the “mother’s kiss” in Wagner’s Parsifal. Scottie’s surname Ferguson identifies him with the Celtic prince whose mother preferred him to his father. Just as the old house looming over the modern motel in Psycho represents a psychological past, images of the past dominate Vertigo. At the end Scottie drags Judy “back into the past” as if trying to re-enter his own childhood.

Vertigo hides its subject, in part because any good movie must let the audience find its own way, but also because the idea was too disturbing to make explicit. Hitchcock evidently felt that the social ills of our world are rooted in juvenile sexuality. No one caught on though, and Vertigo was widely dismissed. Hitchcock must have made Psycho in reaction, driving in his point with uncharacteristic bluntness.