Trouble in Paradise · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A gondola slides across the Venice night and a man is singing — the postcard arranges itself, the tenor swells, romance is imminent. Then the camera notices what he's actually doing. He's hauling garbage. He heaves a can of refuse into the boat and paddles off, still singing. In about ten seconds Lubitsch has taught you how to watch his film: he builds an expectation, then lets the next thing in the frame quietly demolish it. The song was real. The romance was trash collection.

That little detonation is the key to everything, and Deleuze has a precise name for the kind of image it is. He calls this the relation-image — the mental-image, the highest and most cerebral rung of the movement-image, where meaning no longer sits inside a single shot but in the relation a viewer holds between things. The image stops handing you sensations and starts posing relations: you, the audience, become a knowing third party who completes the circuit. Most films work on your eyes and your nerves. Lubitsch works on the part of you that infers. It's worth saying that Deleuze made Lubitsch the very emblem of this image — the comedian as a thinker in pictures — and Trouble in Paradise is the cleanest proof of why.

The machinery has two parts, and Deleuze names them too. A mark is an object that means something by its customary chain — when you see X, you've been trained to expect Y. The film is stuffed with marks treated as little engines: a clock, a handbag, a comb, a garter, a returned wallet. Watch how the clock works. Lubitsch can't show you Gaston and Mariette in bed — and even pre-Code, he wouldn't want to. So he gives you a clock, a doorway, a fall of shadow, a bed glimpsed and withheld, the door closing the camera out. Nothing happens onscreen. Everything happens in you. The clock is a mark: it carries the meaning time is passing, and so is their resistance, and you supply the night the film declines to film. This is the famous ellipsis, the editing that 'scenes end a beat before their payoff' — but Deleuze lets us see it isn't coyness. It's a whole theory of where meaning lives. It lives in the gap. The door, here, is practically a co-author.

Against the mark Deleuze sets the demark — the anomaly that breaks the habitual chain and forces you to think. The singing garbageman is a demark. So is the gentleman thief himself: Gaston is a man whose every gracious gesture is also a theft, so that suavity and larceny stop being opposites and become the same motion. When Gaston returns the stolen wallet, the object flips its customary meaning inside out — a theft performed as a courtesy — and you have to re-read the man in front of you. The whole love triangle runs on demarks: 'Monsieur Laval' is a sign that points two ways at once, and the comedy is the friction of you knowing what the marks on screen don't.

Notice what this does to narrative. Lubitsch hands the plot — caper, boudoir farce, romance — almost contemptuously to the spectator and keeps the staging for himself. The pleasure isn't suspense; we're in on the con from the first reel. The pleasure is watching meaning get assembled out of objects and thresholds and cuts, with the actors playing innuendo as wit rather than leer, and Milner's camera gliding past the very things the characters pretend not to see. Sound joins the same game: fresh off his operettas, Lubitsch scores speech like music and lets the Italianate song curdle against the garbage, so even the soundtrack sets a mark and then demarks it.

The lineage is a craftsman handing himself the same tools, sharper each time. The Marriage Circle (1924) is where Lubitsch first told a story through glances and doors instead of intertitles — silent cinema forced him to make objects speak, and he never gave up the habit once sound arrived. The Oyster Princess taught him to choreograph moneyed absurdity to a beat. The Smiling Lieutenant rehearsed the elegant adultery-by-suggestion that this film distills; the same-year One Hour with You, with Raphaelson again, makes the audience-as-accomplice explicit. And the line runs forward: the screwball comedies of the later thirties inherit Lubitsch's faith that the smartest thing in the room is the audience — though they'd talk faster and trust the gap less.

Here is what the film did to film. It proved that comedy's deepest engine is omission — that you can make an audience do the indecent, delighted work themselves, and that this is more flattering and more erotic than showing them anything. Lubitsch's specific invention is the punchline built into a cut, the seduction conveyed by a clock, the moral judgment refused so that larceny and loyalty are simply allowed to coexist. He didn't film what happened. He filmed the shape of the gap where it happened, and trusted you to fall in. Watch it again and keep your eyes on the objects. They're doing the talking. So are you.