The Green Fog

 Guy Madden's The Green Fog (2017) demonstrates a quasi-theological proposition:  for cineastes, Hitchcock's Vertigo is the Holy Grail, or, perhaps, the Holy Writ of film-making, the world's greatest picture.  Madden's movie proves that Vertigo contains all films ever made in San Francisco; conversely, The Green Fog demonstrates that every movie produced in San Francisco contains,at its core, Hitchcock's Vertigo.  The name for this theorem, abolishing distinctions between Vertigo and every other film featuring San Francisco, is "the green fog" -- a poisonous-looking mist that periodically seethes over the images, blurring them into an apocalyptic viridian smudge.  The green fog is not only a name for the phenomenon that makes all Frisco films Vertigo but, also, a science fiction peril, a meteorological system that swirls over the Bay area on the West Coast, a threat that is closely monitored by a phalanx of journalists bearing notepads and observed as well by scientists and gum shoes peering at video monitors and screens on which dozens of films are projected. 

The Green Fog, a movie that is about an hour long, is comprised entirely of fragments of film and TV footage edited into a series of meditations and variations on episodes in Vertigo.  The movie is constructed chronologically -- a viewer that is familiar with Vertigo (and Madden assumes that everyone watching the picture will have this basic knowledge) can detect the narrative outline of the Hitchcock film in The Green Fog, scenes spliced into the sequence in which the story proceeds in the 1958 thriller.  For instance, Madden's prologue shows us the advance of the green fog toward San Francisco, these eerie sequences intercut with a montage of men fleeing across rooftops in that city.  (Here, Hitchcock's source material appears only as the famous shot of the hand grasping a rail that initiates Vertigo and the deadly rooftop pursuit, and, then, I think in a flash of footage a dozen cuts later that is projected in black and white -- as far as I can determine, Madden usually incorporates the technicolor imagery from Vertigo into his film in black and white format, thereby defamiliarizing imagery that would otherwise probably dominate his film.)  After the prologue, there's a section called "Weekend at Ernie's" -- this part of Madden's film shows, among other things, Joseph Cotten in a wheelchair (simulating Jimmy Stewart's convalescence in Vertigo), then, a series of shots showing cars prowling after one another on the vertical San Francisco streets (Jimmy Stewart pursuing Kim Novak in the Hitchcock movie), a series of grotesque-looking restaurant scenes, and lurid dialogue sequences, edited so that the characters seems always just about to speak or with their lips closing having finished some utterance that we don't hear.  (There's a suitably tense and jagged score played by the Kronos quartet over the footage --except for a few moments in the movie, there's no natural sound and no dialogue, although we are treated to some amplified Foley effects:  bird calls, footsteps, the hiss of wind and waves, and, sometimes, a fog horn.)   We see sequences shot in the old Mission cemetery, the picture gallery of the Legion of Honor museum with people staring fixedly at paintings, and, then, a flower shop (or a half-dozen flower shops) followed by red roses bobbing in the deadly currents off Fort Point.  This is followed by a montage of about 20 shots showing people falling into water (corresponding to Jimmy Stewart rescuing Kim Novak when she leaps off the stone pier into the Bay) -- some of this footage is weirdly beautiful, including images of bright yellow divers resting at the bottom of the sea and figures thrashing in the water.  The famous Muir Woods scene in Vertigo is refracted through images of what looks like a primitive music video shot in that forest (there's a single flash of a shot from Hitchcock), this imagery carefully scrutinized by Rock Hudson studying video monitors -- the most obvious and persistent source for Madden's found footage is the old TV show McMillan and Wife.)  A gangster dips his bread in coffee -- then, we see a dozen couples in cars that are racing along the Coast Highway.  The road ends at a lighthouse from which about ten different figures seem to fall into an abyss.  The next section in the film is called "Catatonia" and represents the interlude between the death of the woman that Jimmy Stewart loves in Vertigo and his obsessive effort to resurrect her ending in her second death, as it were, when she falls from the bell-tower at the Mission Dolores.  In this part of the movie, the green fog gradually envelopes San Francisco, sometimes, also portrayed as a huge sea beast smashing the Golden Gate Bridge into pieces.  The green fog  refers to the remarkable scene in Vertigo in which Kim Novak, remade as the hero's lost love, emerges from the bathroom of her hotel room and is bathed in a supernatural green light -- a peculiar effect in Hitchcock's film that creates a rapturous if queasy effect that is almost impossible to define. (It's hard to imagine how Hitchcock came up with this peculiar visual notion).  There is a montage of sinister weeping clowns, then, beautiful women revealed in opening doors.  A series of erotic scenes follow and, then, there is the nightmarish drive in the dark down the coastal highway again, twenty shots of men dragging women up steep steps with the apparition of the Golden Gate Bridge looming over the city in the background.  We see the lighthouse again and a nun appears suddenly on a terrace.  More bodies plunge from heights of various descriptions,, corpses landing with an unconvincing thud.  An earthquake is underway.  The fog is drowning the city.  Flames envelope collapsing buildings and green smoke billows over everything.  There's a brief epilogue of a ferry crossing the Oakland Bay and some young lovers making eyes at one another.  

"What are we looking for?" Rock Hudson says as the Tv detective McMillan.  "I don't know," he replies answering his own question.  "but at this point, I'll take anything."  The Green Fog is comprised of probably about 400 snippets of film from pictures as disparate as Mel Brooks' High Anxiety (we see Brooks falling through the famous Saul Bass graphics of whirling spirals that comprise Vertigo's opening credits) to von Stroheim's Greed.  Madden and his team seem to have carefully studied every film and TV show ever set in San Francisco.   Obviously, they couldn't secure the rights to some pictures.  For instance, John Boorman's Point Blank is represented by the famous shot of a man's feet walking as the sound track snaps with the percussion of his heels tapping against the airport tiles -- Madden doesn't use the shot from Point Blank but cuts into the montage a similar image of boots on a floor amplifying the sound of the steps on his soundtrack to simulate the Boorman movie.  Throughout the picture, the editing is stunningly inventive -- a montage of gems and necklaces, for instances, is a surrogate for the scene in the Hitchcock film in which the hero discovers jewelry that the supposedly dead heiress once wore.  Often, Madden matches eyelines to create complex narrative schemata implying plot lines between movies that were made fifty years apart.  The famous scene of Donald Sutherland screaming as one of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with alarming reaction shots) corresponds to the moment when Jimmy Stewart recognizes that he has been duped by Kim Novak's character -- the camera zooms into Sutherland's screaming mouth and, then, we are in a tunnel zooming away from San Francisco on the Coastal Highway heading toward the fatal denouement of the Hitchcock film.  The film's metaphysic is that Vertigo is somehow immanent in all movies made in San Francisco and, perhaps, in all narrative movies ever made -- there are scary towers, heights, open graves, lovers pursuing one another and erotic embraces, people try to speak but are interrupted( (they seem to stammer but no words come out). masked faces appear and vanish, the sea surges against the coast at Monterrey and under the stone steps of Fort Point, men drag unconscious women out of the foaming waves and all of this is studied abstractly by figures screening movies or watching video monitors with their ears covered under headphones as they listen to bugged conversations.  Everyone is watching everyone else, spying, eavesdropping -- it's all voyeurism while the green fog rolls in off the sea.  In Madden's account, this is the essence of narrative film:  anguished faces, an embrace, someone falling over and over again into an abyss as a camera dispassionately watches on our behalf.