Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales
1960 · Rogelio A. González · The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales on Sightlines
The title tells you how the marriage ends before anyone has spoken a line. Mrs. Morales has a skeleton in this film, and her husband is a taxidermist. Arturo de Córdova, an actor Mexican audiences knew as the suave man in melodramas, plays him with the patience of someone who has spent a working life persuading dead things to hold a pose, and the film lets you watch those hands long enough to like them. That patience is the whole picture.
Deleuze, sorting out the kinds of image cinema had invented, found a category sitting between the close-up and the deed, and called it the impulse-image. In it, people do not size up a situation and act to change it. They are pulled. A drive runs underneath the behaviour, and what the character wants is not an outcome but a piece of the world to tear off and keep. He built the category out of three directors: Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey. This film was written by Luis Alcoriza, who wrote Los olvidados with Buñuel, and the machinery is unmistakable.
Naturalism, in Deleuze's sense, runs two worlds at once. There is the derived milieu, the one with furniture: the parish, the neighbours, the dining room, the doctor's visits, twenty years of a respectable address. Underneath it he puts the originary world, which is not a location. It is a condition, a zone where things are only meat, prey and remains. In most naturalist films that world has to erupt through the social one. Here it has a door off the hallway. The workshop is a licensed room, taxed and advertised, in which flesh is separated from bone as ordinary professional routine. Nothing needs to break through. It was always in the house.
The impulse works by tearing fragments loose, and Deleuze calls the fragments fetishes: part-objects lifted out of that raw world and loaded with more force than an object can carry. A taxidermy shop is a room made of them. Glass eyes, wire, pelts, a bird holding a posture it never held alive. The title names the one the film is walking toward.
The wife is built the same way, from the outside in. Naturalist characters don't get psychology in this account; they get symptoms, behaviours that are the readable surface of a drive. Her ailments are instruments. So is her devotion, and so is the word she puts around the neighbourhood. The anticlerical needling here isn't an argument about God. It is symptomatology, piety observed as a technique, sainthood and cruelty sharing a face because in this system they are the same muscle.
Naturalism has a direction, and the direction is down. Deleuze calls it the line of slope, worlds and people running out. Twenty years is the slope. The murder isn't a rupture in it; it is the last stair. And notice that the husband's trade already lives at the bottom. His profession is the aftermath of entropy, the business of making a finished thing keep its shape.
That is also what makes the crime so funny and so hard to catch. From Peirce, Deleuze takes a family of images he calls indices, where a small act discloses a situation you cannot see whole. The subtlest is the index of equivocity: a gesture that would belong equally to two different situations, with nothing in the gesture itself to tell you which. Every professional motion in that workshop is equivocal. Scraping, boiling, wiring, mounting. Trade or disposal, the same hands either way. The film barely has to hide anything, which is a much colder joke than hiding it would have been.
Then the law arrives and the register changes. When action stops being performed and starts being staged and argued, Deleuze calls the result a reflection-image: the deed transposed into figure and discourse. A courtroom is the purest case. Nobody kills anyone in a courtroom. They narrate the killing at each other, and the narration becomes the event. What the film poses there it refuses to settle, which is the discourse-image, an image that raises a problem and declines to close it. The problem is not who did it. You watched him. The problem is that you want him to get away with it.
This is where the film's oldest debt pays out. Shadow of a Doubt is in the family tree, and Hitchcock is the director Deleuze credits with completing the movement-image by adding one term to the circuit: the audience. He called it the relation-image, meaning the sense of a shot is carried by a relation only we are holding. Objects in such films work by custom, see this and expect that, and Deleuze names the customary link a mark. Then something snaps the chain, a demark, and the image loses its self-evidence and has to be read. A cabinet of mounted animals is a mark. A human articulation standing among the birds is a demark, and the reading it forces is the film.
So the skeleton is the symbol in Deleuze's narrow sense, the object that condenses the whole organizing relation. A skeleton is what is left when everything perishable has been taken off. That is also the film's account of the marriage, and of the respectability the entire street keeps polishing. Structure with the flesh off it, still upright, still correct, still receiving visitors.
The invention belongs to Alcoriza and González together, and it is a small wicked structural idea. Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux had made the wife-killer a methodical bourgeois and turned propriety into alibi and target at once. Kind Hearts and Coronets found that etiquette is a comic engine, that the better the manners the worse and the funnier the murder. Buñuel's Él had already cast de Córdova as the devout monster, spending a matinee idol against himself. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz gave Alcoriza his own Mexican model, the genteel would-be killer with his charged objects and his flat cruelty. What this film adds is the profession. Give the man a licensed trade that already performs the murder's exact operations and the Buñuelian underworld no longer has to erupt; it has a business card. Then González plays it in the house grammar of Golden Age domestic melodrama, in a commercial comedy, with a melodrama star. Buñuel's amorality with the surrealist warning label peeled off, served as an evening's entertainment.
What it did to narrative is the last turn, which I won't spoil. Popular storytelling ran on a contract: the plot does your moral accounting for you, and the ending tells you where you should have been standing. Los olvidados taught Alcoriza to watch cruelty without arranging a verdict, and this film smuggles that gaze into a picture a mass audience actually paid to laugh at. It lends you sympathy for most of its length, because the wife is genuinely unbearable, and then it collects. Mexican audiences have been quoting the moment of collection for six decades. A word-of-mouth cult item is now near the top of the polls, which is the rare case of a country canonizing the film that caught it out.
Watch it again for the hands. And ask who in that house is doing taxidermy on whom. She had twenty years of practice at keeping something dead in a lifelike pose, standing it in the parlour, and accepting compliments on the work.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Pablo Morales is not a man solving a situation but a man pulled by twenty years of accumulated appetite for release; the Alcoriza–Buñuel writing method (Los olvidados) supplies exactly the drive-driven behaviour Deleuze built the category from.
- naturalism — A world of drives running beneath the social surface: pious wife, gossiping neighbourhood, respectable husband, and underneath all of it appetite and cruelty observed without moralizing.
- derived-milieu — The bourgeois Mexican household with its parish, illnesses, doctor's visits and neighbourhood reputation — the furnished surface the film treats as a skin.
- originary-world — The taxidermy workshop inside the same house, where flesh is routinely separated from bone as licensed trade: the savage world is not hidden beneath the milieu, it is a room off the hallway.
- fetish — The taxidermist's part-objects — glass eyes, wire, pelts, mounted birds — and finally the skeleton the title names, a fragment torn from the originary world and overcharged.
- symptom — The wife's hypochondria, her devotion and her gossip are weapons rather than traits; the film's anticlerical needling reads piety as the visible surface of a drive, sainthood and cruelty sharing one face.
- entropy / degradation — Twenty years of hellish marriage as an irreversible downward run, with the murder as its last step; the husband's trade is itself the aftermath of entropy, making dead things keep a shape.
- index-of-equivocity — 'His solution involves his professional skills' — scraping, boiling, wiring and mounting belong equally to the taxidermy trade and to the disposal of a wife, with nothing in the gesture to distinguish them.
- the Figure — The courtroom strand: the killing is no longer performed but staged, narrated and argued, action transposed into discourse.
- discourse-image — The film's moral vertigo — daring you to sympathize with a murderer and then punishing you for it — poses a problem about your own judgment that it deliberately refuses to resolve.
- the mental-image — The twist works only because the audience holds a relation the characters don't; the Shadow of a Doubt debt (killer nested in respectable domesticity) is Hitchcock's circuit with the spectator built in as the knowing third term.
- demark — A cabinet of mounted animals is customary for a taxidermist; a human skeleton among them breaks the habitual chain and forces the image to be read rather than recognized.
- symbol — The skeleton of the title condenses the film's organizing relation — what remains of a marriage, and of bourgeois respectability, once everything perishable has been stripped away, still upright and still correct.