Vertigo reflects upon directorial compulsion and its eventual failure. That is, Maddie goes through a series of exacting directors: Elster, the uxoricide old boy; Scottie, the fetishist lover; and Hitchcock himself. Vertigo is the classic instance of a protagonist searching for a lost love in the city, pushed to its perverse extreme--in effect leading to an encounter not with the beloved, but with death. But whether she is turned away, the counterfeit curl at the base of her head leading Scottie and the viewer (or Scottie-as-viewer) through the elaborate logic of a false story, or turning towards him, incrementally, towards a moment of truth or revelation (which comprises the asymptote of the second half of the film) there is a beyond of these relative turnings. It is a case in which the cinema goes beyond what Deleuze calls the movement image, and enters into the image of thought or time-image; in fact, Deleuze places Hitchcock at the point where the action-image culminates and begins to develop other dimensions. It is a cinema of "a camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into" (Cinema Two 23). The false recollection-images that form the story of Carlotta and the real accounts of Judy mingle and thwart the possibility of finding a true stable identity in the flow of time. The drama these actors play out is leveled by the time-image, highlighting instead the power of life itself in the face of the magnitude of death--Madeleine and Scottie wandering in the Redwood Forest, for example. In moments when the time-image (indirectly) appears, one can sense how turning towards and turning away are not opposed to each other but are both similar in their opposition to the indifferent face of death.