Vertigo
Doctors say the cause of my vertigo is a disorder of the inner ear. But I know perfectly well that the real culprits are Hitchcock, Parviz Davayi(1), Sepid o Siah magazine(2), and Kim Novak’s beautiful shoulders.
They are the reasons I have watched Vertigo two hundred and sixty-five times.
Hitchcock, with the magic of his images;
Parviz Davayi, with that enchanted, romantic series of essays he wrote about the film;
Sepid o Siah, the weekly everyone read from back to front, whose final word always belonged to Davayi;
and Kim Novak, whose shoulders were signs of a kind of heavenly bliss.
Distraught and depressed in a hospital emergency room, I think back to my vertiginous years.
The first time, I watched Vertigo five times in a row—from the morning screening to the last show at night—then wandered the streets until dawn, dazed and possessed, just so I could watch it five more times.
Exactly like Scottie, searching the world for Madeleine, I searched for my own Madeleine among the schoolgirls I passed on the street.
I looked nothing like James Stewart, but I was searching for a Kim Novak—or at least hoping to find shoulders as tempting as hers.
I always carried an issue of Sepid o Siah in my pocket and had memorized every line Davayi had written about Vertigo. I repeated them to myself while walking, especially when I went on pilgrimage to visit the Vertigo poster.
That year, I spent most of my final exams sitting in movie theaters and failed five subjects.
Indifferent to the future, I dreamed of Hitchcock’s circular camera movements—Scottie’s gaze endlessly chasing Madeleine.
My dreams were vividly colored, always dominated by green: the green of Madeleine’s velvet dress when she first appears.
I tried to have vertigo. I tried to be afraid of heights. I climbed the ladders, hoping to feel sick like Scottie. I wanted my eyes, like Hitchcock’s camera, to plunge into the depth of our courtyard—where my mother stood anxiously and my father angrily threw his slipper at me, shouting, “Boy! What are you doing up there?!”
He didn’t know Scottie had possessed me. He didn’t know what pleasure there was in having vertigo—falling, like Scottie, from a stool into the arms of a bespectacled secretary.
I hated myself because no matter how much I spun around, I never got dizzy. No matter how much I hypnotized myself, I was never afraid of heights.
From our neighborhood on Deh-Metri Street in a poor part of Tehran to Darband, a beautiful high class suburb of the city, there was a long way—but only the streets from Tajrish squire to Darband had the steep rises and drops of San Francisco, the true streets of Vertigo.
I spent three summer months wandering those streets under the pretext of studying for my make-up exams.
Every evening at dusk, I went to the old Zahir-od-Dowleh Cemetery—a place eerily similar to the world of Vertigo: green, misty, perpetually suspended in twilight.
If Forough Farrokhzad(3) had been buried there then, I would surely have visited her—but she would arrive ten years later. Instead, remembering Madeleine’s grandmother’s grave, I went to the tomb of Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri (4), a magical, mysterious woman whom Scottie would unquestionably have fallen in love with. I always imagined Qamar in a long green velvet dress.
Now Hitchcock has been dead for years.
Davayi lives on the other side of the world, in Prague, near Kafka.
Sepid o Siah no longer exists.
Kim Novak and her shoulders are ninety two years old.
And I—on this side of time—waited eighty years to reach my dream: finally, I got vertigo.
Two weeks after watching Vertigo for the two hundred and sixty-five times, for the first time in my life I felt my head spin. I lost my balance. I fell. I became terrified of heights.
My young daughter rushed me to the emergency room. On the way, she was frightened by my loud laughter and thought I had gone mad.
In the ER waiting room, I staggered joyfully. My peak happiness came when the doctor said, in his diagnosis, “Vertigo. Severe vertigo.”
I kissed my doctor’s face. I wanted to call Davayi in Prague and tell him—but it was the middle of the night there.
Still dizzy, I went to the ocean where Hitchcock’s ashes had been scattered, to tell him I had finally joined the vertiginous. And when I got home, I sat down to watch Vertigo for the two-hundred-and-sixty-sixth time.
(1) Parviz Davayi is a pioneering Iranian film critic whose writing is deeply influenced by Alfred Hitchcock. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern film criticism in Iran. (2) – Sepid o Siah (White & Black) was a popular Iranian weekly magazine published from the 1930s through the 1970s, known for its wide readership and cultural influence. (3) Forough Farrokhzad was a major Iranian poet and one of the most influential female cultural figures of modern Iran; she was also an important filmmaker. (4) Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri was a celebrated Iranian singer active from the 1920s to the 1950s. She was the first woman of her time to sing publicly in Iran without wearing a veil and is widely known as “The Queen of Persian Music.”
Midnight Cowboy
Karim Kontrol worked in his hometown of Malayer (1) at Haj Ahmad Malayeri’s kebab shop—shaping Lula Kebab, tending the grill, sweeping and washing floors, delivering food to people’s homes—until one night he watched Midnight Cowboy at Zagros Cinema and decided to go to Florida.
Instead, he came to Tehran.
He said he had no choice: first, Malayer didn’t have an airport; second, he couldn’t afford a ticket to Florida.
Karim was a mixture of Midnight Cowboy’s two main characters: Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman).
He tried to be tall like Jon Voight and claimed his hair had always been blond—saying he dyed it black in old photos. Because one of his legs was shorter than the other, he limped like Dustin Hoffman.
And since in Midnight Cowboy it is Dustin Hoffman who always tricks Jon Voight, Karim—being both at once—ended up tricking himself and constantly getting himself into trouble.
In Tehran, Karim became an usher at Royal Cinema, which earned him the nickname “Karim Kontrol.”(2) His eyes worked well in the dark; he seated audiences without a flashlight and, for a tip, whispered summaries of missed scenes to latecomers.
To impress the Royal’s manager, whenever he was free he crossed the street to Taj Cinema and loudly spoiled the ending of whatever film was playing there—shouting things like, “The killer is the girl herself!”
This got him hired by Taj Cinema for a higher salary, and now the unlucky victims were the audiences at Royal.
Karim bounced between Taj and Royal, adding to his savings for a Florida ticket—until the managers of both cinemas held a joint meeting and fired him permanently. Dustin Hoffman’s side of Karim finally got Joe Buck into serious trouble.
Now dressed like Joe Buck, Karim wore jeans and a red-and-white checkered shirt bought from behind Park-e Shahr (3)—where clothes of the dead were sold. He topped it with a Gheisar (4)-style hat over his heavily oiled hair and limped up and down Pahlavi Street, in front of the elegant Chattanooga and Sorrento restaurants, hoping to seduce a wealthy, older woman with his cowboy charm.
The one who helped him wasn’t a rich widow—but a small, fluffy male dog named Buck, who had fallen into a gutter late at night after leaving Chattanooga with his owner. Using his night vision, Karim rescued the dog and returned him to a very mature woman in a fur coat, whom Buck adored.
She hired Karim as Buck’s bodyguard—and after that, I never heard from him again.
A month ago, purely by chance, I saw an obituary in a local Miami newspaper. The photo bore an uncanny resemblance to Karim Kontrol—older now, but still wearing those Park-e-Shahr clothes and the Caesar hat.
It said: Rescuer of lost dogs. A man who made his living saving dogs in danger has passed away.
I am certain the Karim I knew made dogs disappear first—then rescued them.
But the important thing was this:
Karim Kontrol finally made it to Florida.
(1) Malayer is a significant city in Iran’s Hamadan Province, known as the capital of its county, famous for its traditional rug-making (2) Karim Control, in Iran movie theater ushes ere called Contorlchi (3) Park Shahr with its 26 hectares (64 acres), is an urban park located in central Tehran, Iran
