Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Harvey
1950 · Henry Koster · Harvey on Sightlines
Somewhere in the Dowd house hangs a portrait of Elwood P. Dowd, seated, with a very tall rabbit standing at his side. Everyone who enters the room has to deal with it. For Elwood's sister Veta it is a social catastrophe in oil paint. For us it is close to the only time the film lets us see Harvey at all, and it is a painting, which proves nothing. Hold onto that picture, because the whole film works the same way. Harvey is always about to be shown, and he never is.
Henry Koster and his cinematographer, William H. Daniels, had the tools to put a giant rabbit on screen. They chose not to. What they made instead is a film about the edge of the frame. Daniels keeps setting up compositions with a gap in them: a chair angled toward nothing, a doorway left clear, a two-shot that only has one person in it. James Stewart fills the gap with his eyes. He looks up at a fixed height, always the same height, and the camera respects that sightline from scene to scene, so that we learn where Harvey is standing without ever seeing him.
Deleuze has a useful way to describe what is going on. Every shot, he says, is a closed set, a frame that selects and holds certain things. But each frame also implies an out-of-field: what is there but not seen. The simplest kind is the relative out-of-field, the room next door, the person just past the edge, the space a glance or a cut could reach. Harvey lives in that space. He is a neighbor of the frame. When a door swings open on its own, or when Elwood steps aside at a threshold to let someone through, the film is extending the room into the space beside it. The joke works because the film keeps that geography consistent.
Deleuze also describes a second out-of-field, and it explains why Harvey moves people instead of just amusing them. The absolute out-of-field is not next door. You can't find it in space at all. It is the sense that the scene opens onto something larger and still changing, something no cut will ever bring into view. Harvey is a pooka, a spirit out of Celtic folklore, and the film declines to settle whether he is a delusion, a real visitor, or something it half believes in itself. So the empty part of the frame does two jobs. In one scene it is a place where a rabbit stands. In the next it is an opening onto everything this anxious, status-hungry household has shut out. Watch Stewart and you can see the film move between the two.
The tool that does this is his face. Ralph Dawson's editing keeps holding on Stewart and on the reactions of people around him. Elwood's face is what Deleuze calls a reflecting face: calm, turned toward something, expressing one quality, here a loving attention to empty air. Josephine Hull's Veta has the opposite kind of face, an intensive one, all flutter and escalating alarm. Her Oscar-winning turn gives the farce its speed. The comedy depends on how far apart those two faces are.
The farce has a structure of its own too. Deleuze's small form of the action-image is a world where acts point to situations we can't fully see. One kind of clue he calls an index of equivocity: one gesture that could belong to two quite different situations. Every courtesy Elwood pays Harvey is a gesture like that. Holding a door is either good manners toward a friend or a symptom, depending on who is watching. The staff at Chumley's Rest read his manners as symptoms. The plot is a long run of misreadings, and one of them nearly commits the wrong person. The film's quiet argument sits in that mix-up. Sanity here is a way of interpreting gestures, and the people who are certain they know how to interpret them turn out to be the most confused.
It matters what kind of film this is. Harvey belongs to the classical regime Deleuze calls the movement-image. The cutting is restrained and unhurried, scenes play as stage-length units, and the plot is a comedy-of-errors machine that runs to a resolution. Chase co-wrote the screenplay, Stewart had already played Elwood on Broadway, and Hull brought her stage Veta with her. Bazin argued that filmed theatre can become cinema if it respects the stage instead of hiding it, and this is a clear case. The film's most cinematic idea, the occupied empty frame, came out of a stage problem. Still, there is one odd thing inside this classical machine. Elwood barely acts. Everyone around him schemes and rushes, and he stays still, polite and watchful. Is he an early cousin of the seer that modern cinema would later build whole films around? The film doesn't say. It is worth asking anyway.
The film's ancestry is easy to trace. Topper set up the template of spirits sharing the frame with the living, with moving objects and lines answered by figures others can't see. Blithe Spirit, five years earlier, had exactly Harvey's staging problem: a presence only some people perceive, sold through blocking and reaction shots. Here Comes Mr. Jordan supplied the tone, the supernatural as warm whimsy instead of horror. Arsenic and Old Lace passed on Hull herself and a model of faithful, single-set adaptation. You Can't Take It With You had already argued for tolerated eccentricity against a money-minded world. And It's a Wonderful Life gave Stewart the warm, halting method he brought over from his scenes with Clarence the angel. Koster had worked this vein himself with The Bishop's Wife. Harvey takes all of these and leaves out the one thing they shared, the spirit you can see.
That omission is what the film gives to the art. It shows that a character can be built entirely from the out-of-field, from eyelines, empty chairs and a door that opens by itself, and that the result can be more persuasive and more moving than any effect. Restraint here is the method, not a budget limit. The next time you watch it, don't look at Stewart. Look at the space next to him that Daniels keeps leaving open, and notice how full it starts to seem.
Concepts in play
- relative out-of-field — Daniels frames empty space as if occupied (a chair angled toward nothing, a doorway kept clear, a two-shot with an invisible partner), and Harvey's position stays consistent through Elwood's eyelines
- absolute out-of-field — Harvey is a pooka from Celtic folklore, and the film never settles whether he is real, a delusion, or something it half believes in; the empty frame opens onto something that can't be located in space
- the frame (closed set) — Compositions built around a deliberate gap, staged so the audience reads an absent body inside the set
- reflecting vs intensive face — Stewart's calm, unwavering attention to empty air against Josephine Hull's flustered, escalating Veta
- icon of quality — Editing holds on Stewart's beatific face, which expresses a single quality of loving attention toward the unseen
- index of equivocity — Elwood's courtesies to Harvey (making way at doorways, gesturing to empty chairs) read either as friendship or as symptoms; the comedy of errors that nearly commits the wrong person runs on this double reading
- index of lack — Practical cues such as a door that swings open on its own and a hat with holes cut for ears imply an unseen situation
- action-image, small form — A farce of misreadings in which acts point to a partly hidden situation (is Harvey there?) that is never fully disclosed
- the movement-image — Classical, restrained cutting in scene-length units and a comedy-of-errors plot that resolves; a stage-to-screen studio picture within the classical regime