Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Scarlet Street
1945 · Fritz Lang · Scarlet Street on Sightlines
Kitty March signs her name in the corner of a canvas she didn't paint. The man who did paint it is standing right there, and he approves. Notice what the forgery does to the picture: nothing. Same canvas, same brushwork. It just starts being worth money.
That is the hinge Fritz Lang and Dudley Nichols built the film on, and they stage it the way Lang stages everything, in an object and a gesture rather than a speech. Christopher Cross paints on his evenings off from a cashier's window, in a rented Greenwich Village studio, in flight from a wife who despises him. Edward G. Robinson plays him stooped and blinking, apologetic before anyone has accused him of anything, the whole gangster persona folded up and put away. The film wants you to see that he is not simply the victim of a con. He signs off on it.
Deleuze sorted classical cinema by the circuit it runs. Most of it runs what he called the action-image: a character takes in a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. Continuity cutting, the reverse angle, the rescue that arrives in time — the whole grammar exists to keep that circuit closed. Lang builds the full architecture of that cinema and quietly cuts the wire. Nothing Chris does alters his situation. Not the love, not the money, not the murder.
What runs instead is what Deleuze called the impulse-image, the cinema of naturalism. Here people are moved by appetite rather than decision, and the plot is not a chain of choices but a slope. The impulse-image has a characteristic geography, two floors. The top floor is the derived milieu, the furnished and dated and socially specific world: the cashier's cage, the mean apartment where the wife rules, the dealer's gallery. Underneath, Deleuze puts the originary world, which has no furniture at all. It is pure drive, and every so often it comes up through the floorboards. The French novel Lang adapted was called La Chienne. Jean Renoir filmed it in 1931 and let street-life warmth and irony rest on top of the machinery. Lang and Nichols kept the machinery beat for beat and threw the warmth out, replacing it with geometry. Renoir's film is ironic about fate. Lang's believes in it.
Naturalism fastens onto objects, and Deleuze gives that a name: the fetish, a fragment torn out of the originary world and carried into the social one, where it accumulates a force nobody can account for. In Scarlet Street the fetish is the paintings. They migrate from private compulsion to public commodity without changing a brushstroke. They say what Chris cannot say, they are the only part of him that anyone values, and they are exactly what is taken. The film's line of descent is then just entropy, what Deleuze called the line of slope: money, then authorship, then the woman, then the last shred of self-account, each loss irreversible, the film's rhythm slow and held rather than kinetic because nothing that has been set going can be stopped.
Then Lang does something that shouldn't be available to a 1945 studio picture. Deleuze's late figure of the forger is a person who doesn't lie about the truth but manufactures it, and he drew it from Welles, from grandiose confidence men. Kitty is the petty version. She forges because Johnny, preening and feline and cowardly, tells her to, and she is too indolent to care much either way. What is terrible is that the forgery holds. Under her name the pictures become art, hung and priced and written about. Chris's authorship doesn't just get stolen. It turns out to have been decorative. The signature was doing the work all along, and that is a colder thought about art than anything in the dialogue.
Krasner's camera makes the argument visually and never raises its voice. Figures get boxed by doorframes, windows, mirrors; the field narrows as Chris's options do; the lamps pool and the rest engulfs. This is Deleuze's expressionism, imported wholesale from Lang's Weimar years, where shadow has a non-organic life of its own and light is not illumination but a force pressing on things. Dr. Mabuse taught Lang to draw a cage in light. Krasner rebuilds it in a New York apartment. And the frame is treated as a closed set, an information-dense system rather than a window: the design of every room is an argument about who has power in it, which is why the camera stays still. Lang doesn't pursue his people. He encloses them. There is no reassuring off-screen space, no sense that help is standing just outside the composition.
Lang had made this film once already. The Woman in the Window, one year earlier, the same Robinson-Bennett-Duryea triangle, the same cinematographer — and a dream-frame at the end that lets the meek man wake up. Scarlet Street is that film's correction. The escape hatch is welded shut.
Which brings you to the ending, and to what the Production Code accidentally made possible. The Code required that crime be punished. Lang gives it a punishment the law administers to the wrong man: Johnny is tried, convicted and executed for a murder Chris committed, and Chris walks out untouched. What follows is the strangest sequence in classical Hollywood, and it is not an epilogue. It is the film's real last act, elongated so you cannot skip it, in which a man who can no longer do anything at all simply continues. He cannot confess, because no one will believe him. He cannot be tried. He cannot stop hearing Kitty and Johnny, two voices that belong to no visible body, murmuring over the image of him walking. Deleuze called this a pure optical and sound situation: a character reduced to seeing and hearing, with no action available to discharge what he sees, and he dated its arrival to postwar Europe, to rubble and Rossellini. Here it is in 1945 on a Universal soundstage, produced by an independent company Lang formed with Joan Bennett so he could control exactly this. Chris becomes a seer, Deleuze's voyant, the watcher who endures because acting is no longer possible. The structure comes straight out of M: the killer sentenced by his own conscience because no court can reach him. What Lang adds is duration. In M the verdict is a scene. In Scarlet Street it's a life.
That is the film's contribution, and noir kept it. Before this, the doomed protagonist was a man who made a bad choice and paid. After, he could be a man whose consent was the crime, whose punishment outlives the plot, and whose story ends without resolving. The anti-star performance is part of the bequest — Jannings annihilated in The Blue Angel, Robinson de-glamorized here, the face we trust used against us. So is Kitty, who descends from Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box: not a schemer but someone casually indifferent, which is what makes her lethal.
Watch the last reel and try to locate the moment Chris stops being able to act. Then go back and look for the first frame where he already had no move left. It is much earlier than the murder, and it may well be the moment he watched her sign.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Chris is driven by an infatuation he cannot interrupt rather than by decisions; Lang's 'deterministic machine in which each of Chris's attempts at love, art, and finally self-assertion only tightens the noose'
- originary-world — The furnished social surfaces (cashier's office, the dominated apartment, the Village studio, the dealer's gallery) sit on top of the source novel's frank title *La Chienne* and its 'bleak arithmetic of exploitation' — appetite and predation erupting beneath respectability
- fetish — The paintings, executed for the production by John Decker, 'function as characters, expressing what Chris cannot say' and 'migrate from private compulsion to public commodity' — a part-object carrying the whole charge of the drive
- entropy / degradation — The coda is 'elongated to force the viewer to sit inside his punishment,' tracing Chris's irreversible disintegration into homeless, hallucinatory ruin
- le faussaire — 'Kitty's forged signature on Chris's canvases is staged as the story's moral hinge' — and the forgery takes: the art world accepts the pictures under her name, manufacturing an artist who does not exist
- expressionism — Krasner 'sculpts darkness rather than merely fills light'; pooled lamplight and engulfing shadow imported from Lang's Weimar grammar in *Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler* — clawing shadows and figures charged by architecture
- the closed set (cadre) — 'Figures are repeatedly boxed by doorframes, mirrors, and windows; the visual field narrows as Chris's options do,' with the camera tending 'toward stillness and precise framing rather than flamboyant movement'
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The one decisive act — the murder — resolves nothing: Johnny is executed for it, Chris is legally untouched, and no available action can alter his situation afterward
- pure optical & sound situations — The extended denouement, where Chris can neither confess credibly nor be tried nor stop hearing the accusation, and the editing holds him there because 'there is no escape from what has been set in motion'
- voyant — Chris in the final movement is a watcher and endurer rather than an agent — 'destroyed by conscience, sinking into homeless, hallucinatory ruin, haunted by the voices of the lovers he can never confess to'
- audiovisual-disjunction — Lang's use of 'sound bridges and off-screen noise' so that 'guilt and public accusation are made to intrude aurally on Chris's isolation' — the dead lovers' voices speaking over images of the living man, detached from any visible body