Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Arsenic and Old Lace
1944 · Frank Capra · Arsenic and Old Lace on Sightlines
He lifts the lid of the window seat. He shuts it. He stands very still for a second, a man who has seen nothing at all. Then he lifts it again.
Cary Grant's double-take in the Brewster parlor works because we got there first. The film tells us almost immediately what Mortimer Brewster will spend the rest of the night discovering and then frantically hiding: his gentle maiden aunts have been serving elderberry wine to lonely old bachelors and burying them in the cellar. Nothing in the shot is funny. A man opens a box. What is funny is the distance between what we know and what he is about to.
The standing verdict on this picture is that it's a filmed play with Grant mugging in it. Grant said so himself. I think the opposite is true, and Deleuze is worth bringing in here because he gives names to the parts of a comic machine that criticism usually waves at and calls timing.
Deleuze borrowed from the logician C. S. Peirce a way of sorting film images by what they ask of the viewer. The highest kind he called the relation-image, or mental-image: meaning that sits in no single shot, only in a relation we are holding across them. We're the knowing third party. Most thrillers use this sparingly. Arsenic and Old Lace is built out of almost nothing else. The laugh is never in the corpse. It's in the gap, and the gap is in us.
Inside that regime Deleuze names smaller pieces, and this film supplies textbook cases of each. A mark is an object that means by its customary chain: see this, expect that. Elderberry wine. Once we've learned the chain, hospitality itself becomes a countdown, and Abby and Martha can pour a glass while the audience flinches and they beam, serenely certain that poisoning lonely men is a form of charity. A symbol is the single object that condenses a film's organizing relation. Here it's furniture. The window seat is the whole picture in one hinge: domestic surface, and the thing inside it.
A demark is the anomaly that snaps a chain and forces you to interpret. That's Jonathan's face, and it's also the film's deepest joke about its own inheritance. Frankenstein (1931) turned Karloff's flat-headed, scarred silhouette into the most legible sign in American horror: you saw it, you knew what to feel. Kesselring's play built a running gag on it, a murderous brother who looks like Boris Karloff, and Karloff played him on Broadway. He couldn't be spared from the stage production, in which he was also an investor, so Raymond Massey took the film role in makeup designed to evoke the man he was replacing. The horror sign arrives, does its old job for a beat inside one of Sol Polito's pockets of low-key shadow, and then gets laughed at. The chain is broken on purpose and we have to rebuild the meaning ourselves. Better still: the same contract that kept Karloff onstage kept the finished film on the shelf until 1944. The original was still running live, three years after the copy was in the can.
Then there's the room. Deleuze calls the frame a closed set, a cadre: a composition treated as an information system where everything is placed and counted. Capra refuses to open the play up. Almost the entire film happens in one house on one night, and the layout of doors, staircase, cellar entrance and window seat is the comic apparatus. Bazin, writing on filmed theatre, argued that the stage is centripetal and the screen centrifugal: theatre pulls attention inward to a lit scene, cinema leaks constantly outward into the world. Capra runs a centripetal design on centrifugal equipment, and the friction is the comedy. Farce is the art of the out-of-field, the adjacent space the frame keeps pointing at without showing. A bride waiting next door. Teddy upstairs, about to charge the staircase with a bugle. Whatever is in the cellar. Every door is a promise that someone will come through it at the wrong second, and Capra's real craft, honed on You Can't Take It With You (1938), his other Broadway household, is traffic: a large eccentric ensemble routed through a fixed floorplan at rising speed, with Daniel Mandell metering each revelation and delay.
Deleuze splits the action-image into two shapes. The large form is the famous one, where a situation presses on a hero until he acts and transforms it. Capra's populist pictures are large-form to the bone. This is the other kind, the small form, where an act discloses a hidden situation and never the reverse. Mortimer doesn't act to change anything. He opens a lid, then a door, then the cellar, and each gesture uncovers more of a situation that was complete before he arrived.
The fuel in that engine is what Deleuze calls the index of equivocity: a gesture that could belong to two different situations at once, with nothing in the image to decide between them. Charity and homicide are the same act in this house. Mortimer's contortions read to the police as exactly the inherited madness he's terrified of, and to us as a sane man concealing evidence. Then Jonathan turns up with a corpse of his own and the count in the cellar stops adding up, which means the aunts' own bookkeeping becomes equivocal too. Farce's oldest rule, that everything must be capable of being misread, turns out to be a precise cinematic category.
One more concept, and it makes the film stranger than its reputation. In his account of naturalism, Deleuze describes pictures built on two floors: a derived milieu, the ordinary social surface, and beneath it an originary world of raw drives into which that surface is always sinking. Stroheim and Buñuel are his examples. The Brewster house is that diagram in set carpentry. Tea and doilies and a bay window above, a burial ground below, a cemetery outside in Warners' matte painting. The elderberry decanter is a fetish in his sense, a part-object carrying the compulsion. The aunts' kindness plays as a symptom of a drive rather than a decision, which is why nobody can argue them out of it.
What Capra does with the diagram is the invention. In naturalism the originary world always wins; everything runs downhill toward exhaustion and death. This film keeps naturalism's floorplan and throws out its physics. Nobody degrades. The aunts are beatific in the first scene and beatific in the last, Polito keeps the light high and bright and lets shadow in only when Jonathan and Dr. Einstein come through the door, and the cellar accumulates without ever exerting gravity. That's why a major-studio comedy about a domestic murder operation doesn't curdle.
The machinery came from somewhere. The Cat and the Canary (1927) codified it: one mansion, an inheritance, bodies stashed in the furniture, doors and window seats doing the work of suspense. The Old Dark House (1932) found the tonal blend, dread and deadpan inside one frame. From the comic side, Twentieth Century (1934) proved that stage-sized playing at stage-sized tempo is a screen virtue, and Bringing Up Baby (1938) fixed Grant's instrument, the flustered straight man escalated into wide-eyed physical panic. Mortimer is that instrument at its loudest setting. Grant winced at it forever after. But the performance is doing structural work: his hysteria is the only thing in the house registering the situation as horrifying, and without it the aunts' calm would have nothing to be calm against.
What the film left behind is a permission. Before it, the old dark house was a place you were frightened in. After it, the same apparatus is available as a comic instrument for a mass audience, and the horror icon becomes a sign you can quote instead of a threat. It also proved something about narrative that sounds obvious and isn't: an audience kept permanently ahead of the protagonist will laugh where it would otherwise dread. Hitchcock made the same discovery from the other end, that telling us about the bomb is what makes the scene live. Capra ran that circuit into comedy for a whole feature without it tiring.
It ends by disarming Mortimer's fear that the madness is in his blood, a reframing so deft you barely notice what it leaves untouched. The cellar is still full. Watch it again for the lid of that window seat, and for what Josephine Hull and Jean Adair are doing with their faces while everyone else screams. The joke was never that the aunts don't know what they've done. It's that they do, and they've decided it was a kindness. Deleuze's vocabulary won't make the film funnier. It will show you where the film keeps the funny.
Concepts in play
- the mental-image (relation-image) — The film's mode is farce built on dramatic irony: the audience knows almost immediately what is in the window seat while the characters remain ignorant, so the comedy lives in a relation only the viewer holds.
- action-image, small form — Mortimer never acts to transform a situation; he opens the window seat, then doors, then the cellar, each act disclosing more of a murder operation already complete before his wedding-day visit.
- index of equivocity — Charity and homicide are the same act (the aunts' serene conviction that poisoning lonely men is a kindness); Mortimer's panic reads as the inherited madness he fears, and Jonathan's arrival with a fresh corpse makes the body count itself equivocal.
- mark — The elderberry wine: once the chain is learned (a glass offered to a lonely old bachelor means a body in the cellar), every act of hospitality in the house is legible as a countdown.
- demark — Jonathan's Karloff face: the exact Frankenstein (1931) iconography, worn by Raymond Massey made up to evoke Karloff, arrives in a pocket of low-key menace and is then converted into a running gag rather than a threat.
- symbol — The window seat, the one piece of furniture that condenses the film's organizing relation between the domestic surface and what is hidden inside it.
- the closed set (cadre) — Staged openly as filmed theatre: almost the entire action inside the Brewster house on a single night, with doors, staircase, cellar entrance and window seat treated as a counted comic system rather than opened up with exteriors.
- out-of-field, relative — The farce geometry runs on implied adjacent space: the bride waiting next door, Teddy's bugle-charge up the stairs, the bodies in the cellar, with Capra choreographing entrances through doors as near-discoveries and interruptions.
- originary world (and its derived milieu) — The Brooklyn parlor of elderberry wine and beatific aunts sits directly on a burial cellar, with the matte-painted cemetery outside the house; the aunts' kindness plays as a symptom of an unarguable drive, and the elderberry decanter as its part-object.