Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Invisible Man
1933 · James Whale · The Invisible Man on Sightlines
Start with the bandages. At the Lion's Head inn, a stranger in goggles and a false nose sits in his rented room while the village presses at the door. He begins to unwind the gauze from his head. Whale doesn't rush it. Turn after turn comes off, and what's left underneath is nothing. The collar of a dressing gown holds up empty air. Then the voice, cultivated and amused, goes on talking out of that emptiness.
Everything in James Whale's The Invisible Man follows from this trick. To see why it still works, and why it's funny and frightening at the same moment, it helps to borrow a few words from Gilles Deleuze.
Deleuze argued that classical cinema runs mostly on what he called the movement-image. A character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the editing carries us from one to the other. Inside that machine he picked out different kinds of shot. One he called the affection-image, and its home is the close-up of a face. In a close-up, a feeling registers on the face before it turns into action. The face, as Deleuze put it, is where the body stops moving outward and starts to feel.
Now look again at the inn. Whale stages the most famous close-up in the film and removes the face from it. Usually the horror close-up is about what a face shows, like Karloff's stitched brow in Frankenstein. Here the frame is ready for a face and none arrives. We still get the feeling, though. It just comes entirely through Claude Rains's voice: sardonic first, then swelling into talk of a "reign of terror." For nearly the whole film the affection-image is held back, and the voice has to do the face's work. That's the film's cruelest and most beautiful idea.
The voice is doing something odd too. Deleuze reserved audiovisual disjunction for modern filmmakers like Duras, who split sound from image so that each tells its own story. Whale isn't doing that. Griffin's voice always sits somewhere in the room. But this is still a 1933 sound film in which the leading man is mostly a voice talking out of furniture, and the film treats that voice as its main instrument. Laughter comes out of empty air. Footsteps cross a floor no one is walking on. Disjunction isn't really the system here, more a structural pressure the effects keep forcing. Seeing it that way shows how early sound cinema stumbled onto a problem the modernists would later make deliberate.
The film's comedy works through what Deleuze called the demark. Some objects in a film are "marks": they belong to a habit, a chain we expect. A bicycle comes with a rider. A pair of trousers has legs in it. A demark is the object that slips out of its chain and forces us to think. Whale fills the English countryside with demarks: a bicycle rolling riderless down a lane, empty clothing walking around, doors opening for nobody. Each one is a joke and a small dread at the same time, because the village's habits of seeing stop working. Una O'Connor's shrieking landlady is the right reaction to a demark. She isn't just afraid. Her sense of how the world fits together has broken, and Whale knows that's funny.
The effects are what made those demarks possible, and here the film touches an old argument in film theory. André Bazin rooted cinema's power in the photograph's bond with what was really in front of the lens. The invisible man is a photographic lie of extraordinary stability. John P. Fulton's team dressed Rains or a double in black velvet against black velvet, then matted that footage into separately shot sets so that only the clothes registered. The lineage is clear. Méliès's The Man with the Rubber Head (1901) supplied the black-background trick. The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Willis O'Brien's compositing for The Lost World (1925) supplied the discipline of building one frame out of several. Metropolis (1927) gave Universal both its mad-scientist archetype in Rotwang and an in-camera compositing tradition. Fulton's achievement was to make the seams nearly vanish. That had a cost Deleuze would recognize: Arthur Edeson's even, high-key lighting and a camera mostly locked down, because the mattes couldn't survive a freely moving frame. The trick shapes the style.
Under the comedy runs a darker shape. Deleuze described an impulse-image in which characters are driven by compulsions that pull them down a line of slope toward exhaustion and death. Monocane is that drug. Griffin arrives already transformed and already unraveling. The film never stages his discovery. It traces his descent, from confinement in the inn to open predation and the derailed train. Wells objected to the drug driving Griffin mad, but that change is what gives the film its slope. Invisibility can't cure his appetite for power. It feeds it.
That slope runs inside a sturdy action plot. What Deleuze calls the binomial, one force against another, pits a lone man against an organized community: constables, colleagues, a whole countryside on a manhunt. Ted Kent's cutting moves crisply between farce and menace, and it never holds an effects shot long enough to expose it. Here the trick and the classical movement-image are allies.
From Journey's End (1930), Whale brought R.C. Sherriff and a theatrical, chamber-bound way of staging scenes. From Frankenstein (1931) he brought the scientist's descent. Then he added the blackly comic tone he would push further in Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Fulton's methods carried into Universal's invisibility sequels and fed Hollywood's optical vocabulary for decades.
So here is what the film did. It proved a sound film could build its central character out of a voice and an absence, and that a missing face can grip us harder than a monstrous one. Watch it again and pay attention to every place a face should be. Count how long Whale makes you wait for one.
Concepts in play
- affection-image (withheld close-up / absent face) — The bandage-unwinding reveal at the Lion's Head inn builds a close-up that finds nothing beneath; Rains's face is withheld for nearly the whole film
- demark — The riderless bicycle rolling down a lane, empty clothing in motion, doors opening and objects flying by themselves break the village's habits of perception
- audiovisual-disjunction (proto-form) — Griffin is characterized almost entirely through Rains's voice, with laughter, breathing and footsteps coming out of empty air; still anchored in the diegesis, so it is a precursor rather than the modern regime
- impulse-image — Monocane drives Griffin into megalomania and murder, a drug-induced compulsion that keeps escalating his violence
- line of slope — The narrative is a descent: Griffin arrives already unravelling and moves from the inn, to open predation and the derailed train
- binomial — The lone invisible man set against the village, constable, treacherous colleague Kemp and a countryside manhunt