Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Purple Rose of Cairo
1985 · Woody Allen · The Purple Rose of Cairo on Sightlines
The brightest thing in this movie is a rectangle of light in a half-empty matinee.
Gordon Willis shot Cecilia's New Jersey in cold, muted color: diners, rooming houses, a brutish husband. He shot the picture she keeps buying tickets for in crisp high-key black and white, all Art Deco sheen and white dinner jackets. That contrast isn't decoration. It's the argument, made in exposure values before a word is spoken. The fake world is better lit than the real one. Willis puts Cecilia's longing inside the image, so you feel it a beat before you could explain it.
Then a man up on the screen stops mid-scene, notices the woman who keeps coming back, and climbs down into the room.
Buster Keaton had done the reverse six decades earlier. In Sherlock Jr., the projectionist walks INTO the projected movie, which is what wishing feels like. Allen's invention is to run the traffic the other way, and that one reversal changes everything downstream. If the fiction can come out, the fiction has wants. It can be inconvenienced. It can be left behind. Escape stops being something we do to a film and becomes a transaction with two parties, and one of them is going to get hurt.
Deleuze called the smallest unit of time in cinema a crystal-image: a spot where an actual thing and its virtual double keep trading places until you can't say which is the original. His usual example is a mirror. Allen builds one at the scale of a movie house. Audience and screen sit facing each other across a few yards of darkness, each the other's reflection — Cecilia dreaming the glamour, the glamour played by people who need to be looked at. You don't have to grant the concept as doctrine. You only have to notice that Allen stages the theater so that patrons, screen, and the space between them stay legible in a single composition. That is a picture of a circuit, not a picture of a girl at the movies.
Inside that circuit is a second, harder one. The film-within-the-film is what Deleuze called a perfect crystal: a sealed world with no outside. Penthouses, nightclubs, endless elegance, no door. Watch what happens to the characters stranded in it once Tom leaves. They can't advance, because the plot needs him. So they sit in their evening clothes and philosophize and eventually start bickering with the paying customers. It's funny, and it's accurate. A world with no outside and no plot is just a set with people standing on it.
And every crystal has a flaw — a crack, in Deleuze's vocabulary, along which something escapes the totality. Tom Baxter is the crack. Note the direction of his flight: out of the luminous world into the drab one. He goes because a face in the dark moved him, and he has no concept of a world that does not obey a script.
The joke Allen gets out of this may be the most ontologically precise gag in American comedy. Film theory distinguishes what is merely offscreen — the next room, the street outside — from something beyond the frame that can't be located in space at all. For any movie, the audience is the second kind. We are the absolute elsewhere; the image cannot reach us, which is the whole basis of the old idea of the screen as a window. Allen converts the absolute into the merely adjacent. The beyond becomes a room you can argue into.
What keeps this from being clever and cold is Jeff Daniels doing two jobs with one face. Tom is fictional and incapable of dishonesty. Gil Shepherd, the actor who played him, shows up to reclaim his runaway property and is capable of little else. Deleuze's term for what Gil does is the powers of the false: falsity not as a fault to be corrected but as a productive force, dissolving the question of which version is the true one. The forger is his name for the figure who makes truth instead of reporting it, and Gil is a lovely specimen, forging a feeling in order to retrieve one. Set that against the contract we inherited from documentary realism, where the camera records what was actually in front of it and therefore doesn't lie. Here the honest man is made of projected light and the liar is made of flesh. Cecilia has to choose between them. The symmetry is cruel, and Allen doesn't soften it.
Which brings us to the last shot.
She has lost the job, the husband, the fictional man and the real one. She goes back to the theater. Astaire and Rogers are dancing "Cheek to Cheek." Deleuze has a name for exactly this: the movement of world, where the character goes still and the world moves on her behalf, the dance absorbing the dancer. Cecilia doesn't dance. Fred does, and it lifts her anyway. There is nothing left for her to do but look, which is what Deleuze means by a pure optical situation — the moment the action machinery of the movies stops delivering and a character becomes a watcher rather than an agent. Allen holds on Farrow's face while it travels from wrecked to lit. One quality, sustained, discharged into no action whatsoever. The refusal to cut is the thesis.
Sullivan's Travels argued in 1941 that escapist comedy is a genuine lifeline for the downtrodden. Allen's ending stages that argument and declines to celebrate it. Fellini's The White Sheik deflated a fan's idol against ordinary life; Allen's twist is that the idol turns out to be the only decent man in the picture. From 8½ he took the habit of making artifice the subject, and moved it off the making of a film and onto the finished thing. From Persona he took a screen that can break and the nerve to end in unresolved sorrow. From Hellzapoppin' he took characters who argue with the projection booth, a vaudeville reflex that Susan E. Morse's timing converts into a load-bearing dramatic device — two levels of reality reacting to each other on the beat.
That is the contribution. Before this, breaking the frame was a gag, and gags are free. Allen made reflexivity cost the heroine her life. Eighty-two minutes, no fat, and it has sat in film-theory syllabi ever since as the standard case for anyone arguing about spectatorship and what a moving image actually is.
Watch it again, and watch the light. Willis tells you the whole time where the film's sympathies lie. Then ask the question the last shot leaves open: is the screen keeping her alive, or keeping her still?
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Allen's staging 'frames the theater so that the audience, the screen, and the space between them are legible in a single geography' — patrons and screen facing each other as mutual reflections, the actual and the virtual swapping places.
- the perfect/saturated crystal — The film-within-the-film's sealed world of nightclubs and penthouses 'overflowing with elegance,' where the remaining characters, unable to advance without Tom, 'stall, complain, and negotiate with the audience' — an enclosed totality with no outside.
- the cracked crystal / line of flight — Tom Baxter 'walks out of the black-and-white world of the film-within-the-film into Cecilia's grubby color reality,' the fissure through which something escapes the closed fiction — running toward the poorer world, not away from it.
- out-of-field-absolute (made relative) — 'When the stranded characters within the film-within-the-film turn to bicker with the paying customers, the composition must hold both planes at once' — the audience, cinema's unlocatable beyond, becomes an adjacent space the image can address.
- dicisign — The recurring framing of Cecilia in the theater, the camera perceiving a spectator in the act of perceiving; Willis makes 'the fantasy literally more luminous than the life, so that Cecilia's longing is embedded in the image itself.'
- the forger (le faussaire) — Gil Shepherd, 'the vain, anxious real-life actor who played Tom,' arrives to reclaim his runaway creation and courts Cecilia to do it — a man 'capable of little else' than dishonesty, manufacturing a feeling to serve a purpose.
- powers of the false — Jeff Daniels plays 'two versions of the same face' as opposite kinds of men, and the film's cruel symmetry forces a choice between 'a man who is ideal but fictional and a man who is real but false' — real and true pulled apart from each other.
- movement of world — The final image: Cecilia sits motionless in the theater while Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance 'Cheek to Cheek' in Top Hat — the dance moves, she is carried by it.
- pure optical & sound situation — 'Abandoned by both,' Cecilia has no action left to take; the ending gives her only a screen to watch and a song to hear, and 'refuses consolation.'
- the seer (voyant) — Cecilia's whole role is watching — she returns to see the same picture again and again, 'her only escape,' and the film ends by confirming her as a watcher rather than an agent.
- qualisign (icon of quality) — Farrow's face held in the closing shot, 'open, unguarded vulnerability — no irony, no self-protection,' registering a single quality that never discharges into action.