Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte
1964 · Robert Aldrich · Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte on Sightlines
A harpsichord plays in a house where nobody is playing it.
The tune belongs to John Mayhew, Charlotte Hollis's married lover, hacked to death at a plantation ball in 1927. Thirty-seven years later she comes down the staircase of her rotting Louisiana house, and the room is empty, and the keys are still. Bette Davis's face does something there that almost no other face in American movies could do. It goes from regal to about five years old and most of the way back, and it does it without help from a cut.
The music is a cue. Someone upstairs is working it. Charlotte's cousin Miriam, gracious and composed, and the complicit Dr. Drew Bayliss are running a production: sound, props, a severed hand, a disembodied head, lighting supplied free by the house. They want the estate. Take the Southern Gothic off this film and what is underneath is two people making a small horror movie and screening it nightly for an audience of one.
Aldrich did not invent that mechanism. Gaslight built the template in 1944, relatives staging false phenomena until a woman stops trusting her own senses. Les Diaboliques supplied the harder architecture in 1955: conspirators faking a dead man's return to push a woman toward the grave, with the real crime withheld until the reveal can reorder everything already seen. What Aldrich invented, having proved it two years earlier in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with the same Henry Farrell material and the same decaying-house formula, was the casting. Run the machinery through a body the audience had been watching age since the 1930s, and the terror on screen acquires a second source that has nothing to do with the plot.
This is where Deleuze earns a place at the table, and he does have to earn it, because nothing about a Fox horror picture invites a French philosopher. Deleuze split cinema roughly in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts on it, and the act settles the situation; the cutting exists to carry that chain. In the time-image, action stops working. The protagonist can only look and listen, and time quits being the yardstick we measure movement by and becomes the thing we sit inside. Deleuze called the people of that second regime seers, and he found them in postwar Italy, standing in rubble no action could answer.
Charlotte is a seer for two thirds of this film. She hears music with no player and sees a hand with no arm, and there is nothing to do about either. These are what Deleuze named opsigns and sonsigns: pure optical and sound situations, images that arrive with no available response attached. What makes Aldrich's version strange, and worth the argument, is that Charlotte's paralysis is not historical. It is fabricated. Two relatives with a financial motive sat down and engineered a crisis of the action-image inside an otherwise healthy Hollywood thriller, because a woman who cannot act can be declared unfit. Deleuze's seer is a condition of the century. Aldrich's is a product, and the villains are its manufacturers.
Which makes Miriam a version of what Deleuze called the forger: not a liar in the small sense, but someone who produces a truth and gets it accepted. The severed hand is not a false statement about the world. It is an event, and once Charlotte has seen it, it is in her history. Cinema ran on a related contract, the working assumption that what the camera shows you happened. Aldrich shatters that contract inside the story and keeps it intact for us. Jewel Mayhew's confession finally arrives, 1927 is assigned to its real owner, Charlotte is neither the murderer nor mad, and the false collapses back into evidence. Deleuze's great forgeries never get straightened out. Aldrich's does. This is a powers-of-the-false film that still believes in a courthouse, which is exactly the seam where 1964 shows.
Around all of it the house is dying, and it dies in a way Deleuze had a precise name for. He used crystal for images in which a present and its own reflection can no longer be told apart. One variety he singled out is the crystal in decomposition: an ordered, aristocratic world rotting from the inside, everything arriving too late. That is Charlotte's Louisiana. The art direction fills the place with dust, heavy furniture, portraits, the residue of a vanished order, and the state's highway crews are physically at the gate. Rebecca had codified the great house poisoned by a dead person and a buried past. Sunset Boulevard had supplied the image the whole cycle would live off, a faded star sealed in a mansion with her own glory. Aldrich's addition is that the wrecking crew has a schedule.
Beneath the dust there is appetite. Deleuze's naturalism, the impulse-image, describes films in which a civil surface turns out to be skin over what he called an originary world of raw drive. The plantation supplies the manners, the cousins, the doctor, the housekeeper. The drives underneath are the tyrant father Victor Buono plays in flashback, the blade in 1927, Miriam's want. And the horror props are exactly what Deleuze meant by fetishes: part-objects, pieces torn loose and charged. Not a symbolic hand. A hand. Joseph Biroc photographs all of it in black and white at a moment when the industry had gone to color, and the choice is an argument: shadow as something the house secretes rather than something the lamps failed to reach. Psycho had just made monochrome horror respectable again and licensed sudden violence in domestic rooms, and Michael Luciano uses that license for a rhythm of long oppressive accumulation broken by jolts.
One thing the film does not do well by Deleuze's lights, and it is worth saying: the 1927 prologue, bright and formal, is a plain flashback, a recollection-image, which he thought the weakest form of time in cinema because it amounts to a title card reading before. The real time work is the melody. The song does not date the past. It reinstalls it.
And then Charlotte acts. From an upper balcony she drops a stone planter onto the people below, and the circuit she was robbed of closes in a single gesture. A situation presses and an act answers it, which is the movement-image working exactly as advertised, except that here the house itself hands her the weapon. Seven Academy Award nominations went to a picture that made a great star's obsolescence into its material, and the Grande Dame Guignol cycle it founded alongside Baby Jane spent the next decade doing the same to others.
What the ending cannot do is give the years back. Charlotte is cleared of the murder and cleared of the madness, and she is still a woman who lost thirty-seven years to a rumour and a few nights to manufactured ghosts, and the highway is still coming. Watch it again for Miriam's hands, and for the staircase. Aldrich keeps careful track of who stands above and who stands below, and by the end he has moved her.
Concepts in play
- voyant (the seer) — For most of the running time Charlotte can only watch and endure the phenomena staged around her — the harpsichord refrain in an empty room, the visions she glimpses — with no action available to her.
- pure optical & sound situations — The recurring nightmare motif of the spectral severed hand and the disembodied head, and the title song returning as a music-box or played refrain, arrive as images and sounds with no response attached.
- crisis of the action-image — Miriam and Drew 'systematically manufacture visions and terrors' precisely so that Charlotte can no longer react adequately to what she perceives, and can therefore be declared insane.
- le faussaire (the forger) — De Havilland's Miriam, 'composed, gracious, and quietly ruthless,' fabricates phenomena that become Charlotte's lived history — a truth produced rather than reported, until Jewel Mayhew's confession dismantles it.
- crystal in decomposition — The plantation filled with 'dust, heavy furniture, portraits, the residue of a vanished order,' with the state's demolition crews physically pressing on the estate for a highway.
- impulse-image (naturalism) — Beneath the gracious Southern surface, the drives that actually run the film: the 1927 hacking, Victor Buono's tyrannical father in flashback, and the conspirators' pursuit of Charlotte's fortune.
- originary world — The mildewed plantation, shot in an actual Louisiana house, is revealed as the surface of a savage world of appetite and buried violence — 'the Gothic convention of the family secret buried in the house made literal.'
- fetish (part-object) — The severed hand and the disembodied head, 'staged for maximum grotesque effect,' function as charged fragments rather than symbols.
- expressionism — Biroc's Oscar-nominated black-and-white work: interiors in pooled light and heavy shadow, the camera prowling corridors and staircases so the mansion becomes a labyrinth charged with its own non-organic life.
- icon of power (the intensive face) — Davis's face carried across 'regal defiance, childlike vulnerability, screaming terror, and near-catatonic collapse' — intensity built in micro-movements at the threshold of breaking.
- mnemosign / image-souvenir — The 1927 prologue showing John Mayhew's murder, staged bright and formal against the increasingly nocturnal present — a dated flashback representing a former present.
- action-image, large form — The climactic reversal delivered through the building itself: Charlotte drops the massive stone planter from the upper balcony onto her tormentors, a single decisive act that transforms the whole situation.