An ad for Frances Valentine, Kate Spade’s last fashion business

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

You really nailed it in your post about Kate Spade with your observation on that “black hole above the…fireplace” suggesting a world view that life is “dark and purposeless.” Spot on! There’s even a second such image in that sequence of shots – it’s in the second photo, in a frame above Mrs. Spade’s right shoulder, as she is shown gazing at herself in a mirror – a duplication that hints that something in Mrs. Spade perhaps may have been drawn to bleak images.

I felt very uneasy as I studied these shots and couldn’t understand why. It seemed to me that I had felt the very same unsettling sensations somewhere before. I found that quite surprising because I share your view about the stylishness and good taste of the branded products bearing her name. Then I recalled where I’ve felt the same uneasy sensations: every time I watch the famous opening title sequence of Hitchcock’s atmospheric film, Vertigo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q42Jdx6T7nI

The sequence was obviously very deliberately composed around the image of a black hole to reflect the film’s bleak central themes of obsession, alienation and above all: the morbid appeal that death holds for many people who are drawn to the darker side of life. The sequence features segmented shots of the face of a woman who is never shown whole and does not appear in the world of the film at all. It dwells particularly on the image of the pupil of one of her eyes – oversized, perfectly round, black and empty. It strikes me, as I think it must strike most people, as a portal into a terrible void. Such a strange and unsettling image to find as a decoration on the walls of a family home.

Fans of Vertigo will already know that the appeal of suicide looms front and centre among the film’s themes: the central female character Madeleine, like Ms Spade a stylish and elegant woman, is obsessed by the spirit of a long-dead woman who committed suicide, attempts suicide, herself, in San Francisco Bay and describes life as a walk down a long corridor “and at the end of the corridor is nothing but darkness.” She confides in the Jimmy Stewart character early on that: “I don’t want to die, but there’s someone within me and she says I must.”

People rightly admire how effective Hitchcock was in fostering in the audience through this scene, (and through the film itself), a distinctly uneasy mood  through a combination of Bernard Herrman’s atonal, jarring musical score, jumpy graphics based on spirals and dizzying camera work but what they don’t as often speak of is how effectively he designed  in Vertigo a color scheme for his sets and wardrobe that reinforced that effect. I see that same palette in Mrs. Spade’s rooms.

Hitch’s film uses the recurring color palette of red, black and green – all colors that appear on or around the woman’s pupil in the opening sequence and also constantly on the walls, on the furnishings,  in the clothing and in the lighting of the main characters’ homes and workplaces. Hitchcock has long been rightly celebrated for his meticulous attention to detail in the composition of his scenes and his designers chose this combination of colors deliberately because they felt them  to be, when juxtaposed, jarring, unsettling and evocative of a sense of alienation.

The three colors of this palette are also considered by many film scholars to symbolise death: the black because of its association with darkness and the void, the red because its the color of blood and the green because it is the predominant color of the ancient sequoia forest where an important early scene is played out and where, with ancient life all around her, Kim Novak’s character says she yearns for death.

Can it be entirely coincidental that in just about about everyone of her rooms Mrs. Spade appears to have put the same color palette to use?

Obviously we can’t ever know the secrets of another person’s mind – not even those we know best, let alone a stranger – but those few people whom I came to know when representing them in adult guardianship hearings after they had tried to commit suicide all spoke in strikingly similar terms about “the darkness” and the “hole” they felt at their worst, where they looked inward and found nothing there. They all spoke to me about lacking a sense of identity and of how bleak and “lost” they all felt through feeling no anchoring connection to the wider world. They all spoke of the alienation they felt being so profound that it seemed to carry over into an almost physical sensation of nausea which after a while became a default setting for them, robbing them of all joy and making them feel, in the memorable phrase of one client, “like a wounded ghost who needed to die.”

Whatever the immediate cause of an individual suicide surely one thing can’t be denied: that culture plays its part. The bleakness and ugliness that is so much a part of modern life must never be embraced or allowed to push its way into the centre of our lives. We must always strive as far as possible to focus on beauty and the life-affirming values and people that are all around us but are so easily overlooked.

Laura writes:

Thank you for your interesting observations.

The media has been playing up the angle that Kate Spade had mental illness and only needed treatment. What strange speculations! She lived in a mentally ill world! Mental illness is essentially alienation from God, who is reality itself. This inability to live in reality is always the ultimate cause of suicide. In the vain and intensely competitive feminist world in which Kate Spade lived — a world in which it is normal for a woman to delay having children until after 40 — mental illness is basically the status quo.  Spade merely acted on it. Spade, by the way, was a baptized Catholic who had left the faith many years earlier.

She didn’t need a psychiatrist so much as she need grace, the lifestream of mental health.

When a lots of mentally ill people start wondering why one mentally ill person committed suicide — run. Run away as fast as you can.

There is an abyss of nothingness at the very heart of our being, and we had better counter it by the fullest possible use of our kinship with the Infinite who is also at the very heart of our being. To be ignorant of this is to live in unreality, and there can be no satisfaction for ourself or any adequate coping with anything.

 Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity 

Update

Laura writes:

We have to be careful about jumping to conclusions.

I am not buying news reports of the suicide of celebrity Anthony Bourdain. The case was closed by police within a day and before toxicology results. In the case of Spade, she reportedly was depressed. There is no indication of that with Bourdain.

[Correction: More has come out about Bourdain, and suicide does seem likely.]

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