The Awful Truth · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two little Swiss figures live in the cuckoo clock that frames the film. A man and a woman, each in a separate doorway, slide out to mark the hour and then withdraw apart. At the very end, in the mountain cabin, they finally go in through the same door. Nobody on screen says a word about it. McCarey hands you a marriage repaired by a toy and trusts you to read it.

That trust is the engine of the whole picture, and it's why a comedy can be the cleanest possible lesson in what Deleuze called the relation-image — what he also names the mental-image. Following the logician Peirce, Deleuze sorts cinema by what each kind of image leans on. The action-image runs on collision: a situation provokes a deed that changes it, hero against milieu. The affection-image lives in the close-up, a feeling held before it discharges. But there's a third thing an image can call on, and it isn't on the screen at all. It's the relation a watching mind holds — yours. The relation-image makes you the knowing third party, the one who completes the meaning the characters can't or won't state. The Awful Truth is built almost entirely at this register, and the proof is that nothing important in it is ever said outright.

The historical reason is dull and decisive: the Production Code forbade the script from naming sex or jealousy. McCarey turned the prohibition into a method. Because the suspicions that break Jerry and Lucy apart are 'largely groundless,' every gesture they trade becomes an index-of-equivocity — the same act reading two ways at once, innocent or guilty, and the film refusing to settle which. A man's hat where it shouldn't be; the wrong person stepping through a door at the wrong moment. On screen it's only behavior. The jealousy, the desire, the lie all live in the gap between what the body does and what you infer it means. The comedy is that the inference is always obvious to us and never admissible to them.

Deleuze gives the relation-image its own small vocabulary, and McCarey uses every word of it. A mark is an object that means by its customary chain — when you see this, expect that. The bowler hat, the dog Mr. Smith, the cuckoo clock: each recurs until it carries a settled little grammar, so that the prop alone can advance the story without a line of dialogue. A demark is the anomaly that snaps the chain and forces you to interpret again — the door that delivers the wrong guest, the gesture that suddenly won't parse. And the symbol is the object that condenses the film's whole organizing relation into one form. That is the connecting door, and finally the cuckoo-clock figures retiring through the same little opening. The marriage is resolved as a spatial fact. Two people who could not say it walk through one door, and the relation completes itself in your head.

Look at how the staging serves this rather than the plot. Joseph Walker lights Dunne and Grant cleanly and keeps two or three actors in the frame together, so reactions play continuously instead of being chopped into close-ups; Al Clark's cutting waits a beat past the line, holding the shot so the double-take or the embarrassed pause can land. This is the discipline the relation-image needs. If you cut for rhythm, you tell the audience what to feel. If you hold and watch, you leave them to read. McCarey learned the patience on the Hal Roach lot, staging Laurel and Hardy through bodies, doors, and objects, and the threshold comedy of marital jealousy he refines here he took directly from Lubitsch — The Marriage Circle let an audience infer the indiscretion through glances and the cut that withholds; Trouble in Paradise taught a recurring prop to carry narrative the way Mr. Smith now does. From his own Duck Soup he kept the floor method of letting actors discover gags rather than execute a locked script, which is why the friction reads as live.

Two more nodes earn their names. When Dunne barges into Jerry's society engagement impersonating his vulgar fictitious sister, that's a pure gest — a posture staged to expose a social relation, performance about class rather than feeling about a person. And the film's recursive structure, each spouse intruding on the other's courtship, is the action-image small-form turned to comic ends: not a grand situation pressing toward a decisive act, but small acts that keep disclosing the one situation no one will admit — that they're still married in every way but the legal one.

What did this do to film? It proved a whole feature could be built on inference, on the audience as the third term, with the apparatus made self-effacing on purpose. Stanley Cavell would later gather it as the keystone of the 'comedy of remarriage,' and it finished assembling 'Cary Grant,' the elegant man always a half-step from collapse. Watch it again for the doors. Every time the wrong one opens, notice that the film has handed you the joke and left you to land it. That handoff is the relation-image, and once you feel it working, you stop watching a plot and start watching two people fail, beautifully, to say the one true thing.