Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Shop Around the Corner
1940 · Ernst Lubitsch · The Shop Around the Corner on Sightlines
The first thing Lubitsch shows you is a door somebody else has the key to. Clerks gather on the pavement outside Matuschek and Company, greeting each other by name, waiting to be let in to the place where they spend their lives. Almost everything that follows happens on one side of that door or the other, and the film makes you feel every crossing of it.
Deleuze has a useful name for what that door is doing. A film frame, he argues, is a closed set: a system where everything visible has been placed and weighed. But the closed set is never actually closed. It opens onto an out-of-field, the part the image implies and withholds. Usually this is the relative kind, the next room, the street, the person who just walked out and is somehow still in the scene. Lubitsch builds a whole feature on it. One set, with a selling floor, a back office and a stockroom, and a door. The stockroom is where you can say the true thing. The office is where you can be destroyed. The floor is where you perform. The shop is the entire world and it has exits, and the drama is nearly always a question of which room a person is standing in and who can hear them.
Which brings us to the thing everyone calls the Lubitsch touch, and to what Deleuze lets you say about it that is more precise than "elegance."
In Cinema 1 he splits the action film into two shapes. The large form descends from a situation that presses on everybody down to the act that changes it: the town, the gunfight. The small form runs the other way. A small act, a gesture, a detail, and from it a whole situation you had not seen is disclosed. Deleuze calls such a detail an index, and its purest version is the index of lack, an elliptical gesture pointing at a situation the film never shows. Lubitsch had been refining this since One Hour with You, where feeling arrives by way of a cutaway to a closed door. Shop is built of these. A bouquet of carnations. A letter in a coat pocket. A door that shuts. You are constantly handed a small thing and asked to deduce a life from it.
The film's finest index is a different one, though, and it is why the picture still works on a fourth viewing when nothing can surprise you. Deleuze calls it the index of equivocity: one act legible in two different situations at once. Every exchange across that counter belongs simultaneously to a workplace quarrel and to a courtship. Kralik needling Klara about her taste is a head clerk defending the stock and a man flirting with the woman he writes to at night, and nothing in the playing settles which. Raphaelson's dialogue is built so that no line has to be false for the double meaning to hold. That is rarer than it sounds. Most mistaken-identity comedy works by making people lie. Lubitsch's people say exactly what they mean, and it means two things.
So where does that leave us, sitting in the dark? Deleuze's final category of the movement-image is the relation-image, the point at which a film stops handing you perceptions and actions and starts handing you relations, which only the audience can hold. He builds the idea almost entirely out of Hitchcock: you know about the bomb, and your knowledge is not a spoiler, it is the motor. Shop Around the Corner is that same instrument tuned to a warmer note. You are told the truth early. From then on you sit inside every scene as a third party doing arithmetic the characters cannot do, and the whole rhythm of the picture, Ruggiero's cutting, the beat held just long enough before a reaction, is calibrated to your knowledge rather than theirs.
Hitchcock's version of this makes you complicit and anxious. Lubitsch's invention is that the identical structure can produce tenderness. Knowing more than the characters normally makes an audience feel superior. Here it makes you feel protective. That is the discovery, and nobody has quite matched it since.
Daniels lights all of it softly and evenly, and the camera declines to editorialise. It holds, and lets a face work. Margaret Sullavan's does more than anyone's. Deleuze separates two kinds of close-up feeling: the face as a still reflecting surface expressing one quality, and the face as micro-movements climbing toward a threshold. Sullavan's is the second kind. Hauteur tipping over into longing by degrees, while she is still talking about something else entirely.
The shop is a warehouse of what Deleuze calls marks, objects whose meaning is just their customary chain. A wallet means a gift, means an occasion, means a person. Against them Lubitsch sets a demark, an object that refuses to stay in its chain. Matuschek insists on stocking a cigarette box that plays a tune when opened; Kralik says it will not sell. It stops being merchandise and becomes the instrument by which loyalty is tested, an argument is had, and a decent man is fired. Watch how much narrative weight one novelty item carries. That is the Trouble in Paradise method, comedy deduced from behaviour and props rather than gags, brought indoors and put on a wage.
The wage is the point. What keeps this from being a charming trifle is that everyone in it is frightened: of dismissal, of loneliness, of being unlovable, which the film treats as one fear in three registers. Frank Morgan's Matuschek learns of his wife's infidelity and the picture goes near enough to death that the floor moves under you. Lubitsch had tested that the year before in Ninotchka, letting real exposure cut through banter without a change of key, and Design for Living had already taught him how much a single confined set could hold. The letters matter because they are the one room in these people's lives that their employer does not own.
There is a temptation worth naming. The letter-self is an ideal double of the actual clerk, and in the postwar cinema Deleuze would chase exactly this, the crystal-image, where a person and their virtual double become impossible to tell apart. Lubitsch declines the offer. He folds the double back into the body, on Christmas Eve, on the shop floor. The classical resolution costs him nothing, because he has already let the dark thing in through the back office.
What it seeded is visible from a long way off: the musical She Loves Me, then Ephron's You've Got Mail, which changed only the medium of anonymous writing. The premise it fixed, antagonists who are secretly ideal partners, is now so standard that the machinery has gone invisible. Go back and the machinery is all there, and you can see what it was for. Grand Hotel gave MGM the template of a full ensemble's private lives inside one institution; Lubitsch shrank the Berlin hotel to a Budapest shop and found the smaller box held more.
One thing the film never settles. Kralik knows for days and says nothing. Tenderness, cowardice, or a man enjoying an advantage? Stewart plays it with a starch that refuses to resolve the question. Next time, watch the door, watch the objects, and count the number of moments when you know something the person on screen does not. That count is the real plot.
Concepts in play
- index-of-equivocity — Raphaelson's exchanges across the sales counter belong at once to the clerks' quarrel and to their concealed courtship; the audience knows the letter-writers' identities, so every needling line is legible in two situations without anyone lying.
- the mental-image / relation-image — The film tells the audience the truth early and runs on sustained dramatic irony; Ruggiero's cutting withholds and delivers information so that editing itself becomes the instrument of a relation only the viewer can hold.
- index-of-lack — The 'Lubitsch touch' of implying through objects, gestures and offscreen action what dialogue never states — the grammar of cutaways to closed doors carried over from One Hour with You.
- action-image: the small form — A doorway, a letter, a bouquet of carnations do the narrative work: a small detail discloses a whole hidden situation rather than a global situation pressing toward a decisive act.
- demark — The musical cigarette box Matuschek insists on stocking and Kralik says will not sell — an object that leaves its commercial chain and becomes the test of loyalty behind Kralik's dismissal.
- mark — The shop's stock of wallets, cigarette cases and leather goods, objects whose meaning is their customary chain of gift and occasion, out of which Lubitsch and Raphaelson build behaviour-driven comedy.
- the closed set (cadre) — The single principal set — selling floor, back office, stockroom — staged as a complete social world whose spatial relationships (the counter as barrier, the storeroom for confidences) carry the meaning.
- out-of-field-relative — The recurring motif of the shop door, with the film's construction built from entrances, exits and arrivals, so that the adjacent rooms and street remain continuously active in every scene.
- icon of power (potisign) — Margaret Sullavan's quicksilver shifts between hauteur and longing, held by Daniels's unobtrusive camera and by an edit that knows when to stay on a reaction.
- symbol — The anonymous letters themselves, which condense the film's organizing relation: the same two people loving in writing and clashing in the flesh, and the only space in their lives their employer does not own.