Heaven Can Wait · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A door closes and Lubitsch leaves the camera where it was. There is the door, a hallway, the sound of something happening on the other side. When the door opens again the situation has changed, and nobody explains how.

Do that once and it's a gag. Do it across seventy years of one man's life and it becomes an argument about what a movie is for.

Henry Van Cleve arrives at the reception hall of Hell with the confidence of a man who has found the correct address. His Excellency, in evening dress, would like the file completed, so Henry testifies: seventy birthdays, an 1872 nursery to a sickroom in the early 1940s, a career of pleasant misbehavior submitted as evidence for the prosecution. He loses. Everything he offers as proof of a wasted life plays, in the watching, as affection and ordinary failure. Hell has standards.

The small form. Deleuze splits classical cinema's action in two. In the large form, a situation presses on a man until he acts and transforms it: the town is threatened, the sheriff draws, the town is saved. The small form runs backwards. An act comes first, a gesture or a detail or an entrance, and from it we deduce a situation the film never showed us. Lubitsch is the small form's great technician, and Heaven Can Wait is his most extended proof. Nothing here compels Henry to act. Three generations of New York money guarantee the world will never hand him a problem he must solve. What the film gives us instead is a chain of small disclosures, and out of them we assemble a marriage, an affair, a reconciliation, a death.

Deleuze's finest name for the device is the index of lack: an elliptical detail standing in for a situation withheld. The gap carries the information. An elopement is prepared and then it has simply happened. A marital rupture is repaired somewhere in the house we are not taken to. Martha's death, the emotional center of the last act, is never staged at all; the film moves from her presence to Henry's solitude, and the missing scene is truer about loss than any deathbed would have been.

This lens earns its keep because it turns a compliment into a mechanism. The "Lubitsch touch" is usually praised as delicacy or innuendo, which makes it sound like a manner, a gift of temperament. It is a transfer of labor. The scene is not deleted, it is relocated, into you. Deleuze calls an image built this way a relation-image: the meaning lives in a relation the audience holds rather than in anything on the screen, and the spectator is installed as a knowing third party. Note who helped. A comedy in which Hell is a hotel lobby, the Devil is charming, and adultery is a survivable domestic episode had the Production Code on its neck, and everything indecent had to happen behind a door. Lubitsch took the censor's requirement and made it his grammar.

The doors are also architecture. Cronjager lights every threshold so the depth past it stays legible: the next room, the hall, the stairs. That is the relative out-of-field, the frame conceding that it is a cutout from a continuous house, and Newman's score keeps clearing out so the offscreen can be heard. A door closing. A voice from another room. An argument overheard. The Van Cleve brownstone with its staircase and its serried doorways is a social diagram of who may stand where and who may come through which door, inherited entire from The Shop Around the Corner, where a single shop interior encoded a whole hierarchy in counters and back rooms.

There is a second outside, and you cannot walk to it. The title names it. Heaven never appears. His Excellency answers to someone located nowhere a camera can go, and the film's moral suspense hangs on that unreachable place: the absolute out-of-field. A comedy about damnation whose only supernatural set is a lobby with an elevator.

The birthdays. Structurally the film is a chain of dated flashbacks, recollection-images, each retrieving a former present and stamping a year on it. Deleuze is generally unimpressed by the flashback; it is a convention, and it needs a justification from outside to earn its place. Lubitsch supplies the strongest one available, testimony under judgment, which is the frame Citizen Kane had made newly usable two years earlier: a life reassembled as dissolve-linked episodes by narrators with a stake in the telling. Lubitsch compresses Kane's five witnesses into one and makes him the defendant. The tribunal he already owned, from Liliom in 1934, Molnár's celestial magistrate's court where a bureaucrat holds the complete file on a dead man, converted here from expressionist purgatory into a drawing-room interview.

And now the sharpest thing in the picture. Deleuze has a term for an act that could belong to two different situations: the index of equivocity. Henry's testimony is one long instance of it. The same seventy years, with nothing added or subtracted, constitute a brief for damnation and a brief for decency, and the images keep quietly supplying the exculpatory material he forgets to mention. The dramatic irony runs inverted. We know the verdict before he does, and the pleasure is watching a charming man fail to prosecute himself. The Code wanted sin punished. Lubitsch delivers a verdict on which sin counts, and it is not lust. It is coldness, vanity, the wounding of people who love you, and Henry was never guilty of those. In an American film in 1943 that is not a small thing to have said.

Two more, briefly. The best scene in the film has no plot in it. The Strabels at breakfast in Kansas, husband and wife behind rival funny papers, dividing a sausage with the manners of duelists, played on cutlery and newsprint with almost no dialogue. Deleuze's word for a posture that exposes an entire social relation is the gest. A decades-long marriage stated as a way of holding a newspaper. Nothing is decided at that table and everything is known.

Then the color. Fox spent three-strip Technicolor on musicals and revues; Lubitsch spent his first color film on wallpaper. Creams, wine reds, mahogany, muted period papers, the whole palette disciplined down, so that when Martha appears in scarlet at the top of the staircase the color lands as an event. That is Deleuze's absorbent colour, a hue that takes the scene into itself rather than dressing it.

What it did. The withheld scene is Lubitsch's invention, and this film is its proof at full length. It is a demonstration that an audience will build the missing scene, build it better, and that a picture's most emotional moment can be made out of an absence. The Marriage Circle had already run an adultery plot through who enters which door and what a face does after it shuts. Trouble in Paradise signed the contract, holding on the closed door and the clock while the decisive thing happened elsewhere. Design for Living refused to adjudicate anybody's arrangements. Heaven Can Wait extends all three across a marriage, a lifetime, and finally a death. Wilder kept a sign in his office reading "How would Lubitsch do it?" and carried the ellipsis into The Apartment and Avanti!. The whole American tradition of adult comedy that declines to moralize about sex runs down this line, and Wes Anderson's symmetrical, melancholy farce is a legible descendant.

Watch it once for Henry. Watch it again for the doors, and count what the film declines to show you. Then see how many of those scenes you would swear you remember.