Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Eastern Promises
2007 · David Cronenberg · Eastern Promises on Sightlines
Steam and white tile, and a man with nothing on. Two Chechen assassins come at him with short curved knives. Nikolai has no shirt, no shoes, no grip on a wet floor, and in a Turkish bath nobody carries anything in. What he carries is what has been put into his skin: stars on the chest and the knees, the domes, the record of which prisons held him and what rank he was granted there. He goes into the worst fight of his life wearing his biography and nothing else.
The usual praise for this film stops one step short of that. People remember the bathhouse, and they remember the late revelation about who Nikolai actually answers to. Both earn their reputation. But they are one idea arriving twice, and the idea is that here a body is a document: written on, read aloud, believed, and forgeable.
Deleuze has a name for an image like that chest, and it's among the more useful things in his two cinema books. He calls it a lectosign, a readable image. Ordinarily a film image is self-evident. You see a man in a doorway and you already know the kind of thing that happens next; the picture spends itself in the action. A lectosign doesn't spend itself. It sits there and asks to be deciphered, like a page. Cronenberg builds a criminal order out of them. The vory markings aren't decoration or a research flourish. They are a working script with a grammar that older men can pronounce aloud, a language of status and biography, and Peter Suschitzky photographs them in the same cold institutional light he gives the hospital and the barber's chair. He's right to. They're paperwork.
Why reach for Deleuze at all, when this is a beautifully made gangster picture and you could just say so? Because the lens explains the strangest thing the film does, which is to put the audience through an apprenticeship. Nothing in the plot requires us to learn what a star on the kneecap means. The film teaches us anyway, patiently, and by the time we can read a chest we have been recruited into the fraternity that does the reading. Deleuze, borrowing from the logician Peirce, calls an object a mark when it means through a customary chain: see this, expect that. A badge, a wedding ring. Marks only work inside a community that agrees to honor them. That's the trap the film sets. To follow the story you have to accept the vory's own system of proof.
There is a second document, and it belongs to the other side. Tatiana's diary is in Russian, fourteen years old and dead, and Anna can't read a word of it. It only speaks when someone else agrees to translate and carry it, and what it can say is the name of the man in that family who raped her. Two documents, then. One inscribed on a living man who wants it believed, one written by a girl who is no longer here to insist. The whole moral weight of the film sits on who is permitted to read.
Which is where Nikolai becomes, in Deleuze's precise sense, a forger. Not a liar in the ordinary way. Deleuze's forger is a figure who produces truth rather than reports it, who makes a self and then makes it stick. Nikolai's ink is applied by other men as a credential and it functions: he rises, he's trusted, he's promoted into a body that was authored rather than lived. This is what Deleuze meant by the powers of the false as something creative, not merely deceitful. The forged credential does real work in the world, and the family's warmth and its threat become indistinguishable on the surface because surfaces are all this world issues. Cronenberg has been at this since Videodrome, where the abdomen opened into a slot and flesh became media. The invention in 2007 is that he moved the readable body out of hallucination and into an institution. No mutation required. A tattoo gun does it.
All of which reorganizes the plot in a way worth naming. Deleuze distinguishes a large-form action film, where a big situation presses until someone acts and changes it, from a small form, where an act discloses a situation that had been hidden. Eastern Promises is small form throughout: a corpse disposed of, a page translated, fingertips removed, and each act peels back a little more of a world we were never shown directly. His finest term for what Cronenberg does with Nikolai is the index of equivocity, an act that could belong to two different situations at once. Every single thing Nikolai does is doubled. The revelation doesn't cancel the film we watched. It sends us back to reread it, which is exactly the operation the tattoos taught us in the first place.
The faces work the same doubled way. Armin Mueller-Stahl's Semyon is what Deleuze called a reflecting face, a courtly contour that gives nothing back, grandfatherly and hospitable and the most frightening thing in the picture. Vincent Cassel's Kirill is the other kind, all twitch and intensity, a weak man whose cruelty reads as the symptom of a want he can't say out loud. Behind them Carol Spier's Trans-Siberian restaurant does its work: borscht, folk songs, Old-World icons on the wall. Deleuze would call that a derived milieu, the presentable surface of an originary world of appetite underneath it. Kitchens, cellars, baths. The hidden labor is always one floor down.
The craft debts are specific. A History of Violence, one film earlier with the same crew, set the template: a concealed man whose past is a forgery, and violence staged with anatomical exactness rather than kinetic montage. The clinical gaze on wounds goes back further, to The Fly, where damage was filmed like a medical record. Steven Knight had already run this method in Dirty Pretty Things, using a genre thriller as an X-ray of London's invisible migrant economy. Little Odessa supplies the hushed, composed register for Russian-emigre crime instead of operatic spectacle. And Semyon's restaurant is a knowing descendant of the Corleone facade, the business that launders a dynasty, except that Cronenberg strips out the opera and leaves the bookkeeping.
What it did to filmmaking is one decision, and it's the bathhouse. Ronald Sanders cuts the fight so that it stays legible and continuous, long past what genre convention would allow, and no slow motion arrives to make it beautiful. Bazin argued decades ago that cutting can spare you, and that an event shown whole leaves the looking, and the responsibility for it, with the viewer. Apply that to a knife entering an eye and you get something close to unbearable, which is the point. This is violence made readable in a period that preferred it blurred.
The question the film leaves open is not who Nikolai works for. It's whether a body can ever be told apart from the story written on it, and whether he will ever get his own skin back. Watch it again for the hands. Hands holding a page, hands turning a shoulder toward the light, hands deciding what a man is.
Concepts in play
- the readable image — The vory tattoos function in the film as a spoken and read language of status and biography — applied so they would 'read as authentic under close scrutiny and in motion' — and Suschitzky shoots them in the same cold institutional light as the hospital and barber's chair; the staging 'repeatedly frames the body as surface and text.'
- mark (the customary chain) — Tattoos mean only inside the fraternity that honors them — a distinct code, hierarchy and iconography rooted in post-Soviet criminality — and the film teaches the audience the chain so that we, too, can read a chest.
- le faussaire — Nikolai's identity is 'worn as a disguise'; his skin is a document that can be authored, forged and read (the Videodrome debt), and the forged biography actually installs him inside the family before the late revelation about his true allegiance.
- puissances du faux — The authored body produces a real rank and real trust; warmth and threat are indistinguishable on the surface, and the film's proof-system is a set of surfaces that can be manufactured.
- index of equivocity — Every act Nikolai performs for the family belongs to two situations at once; the structural twist 'recasts everything preceding it,' forcing a rereading rather than cancelling the scenes.
- small form (act discloses situation) — An architecture of concealment: motivations surface slowly, the diary is the engine, and each act — corpse disposal, translation, mutilation — discloses more of an underworld never shown directly.
- the gest — The bathhouse fight shot to emphasize vulnerability — naked body, tiled surfaces, steam — leaves Nikolai wearing only his tattooed rank, the posture exposing the social relation that governs him.
- reflexive vs intensive face — Mueller-Stahl's Semyon is a courtly, genteel contour whose warmth masks predation; Cassel's Kirill is volatile, weak and self-loathing, a face of pure intensity.
- originary world / derived milieu — Semyon's Trans-Siberian restaurant with folk songs, borscht and Old-World iconography as a respectable front for the vory; kitchens, cellars and baths carry 'concealment and hidden labor beneath a civilized veneer.'
- symptom — Kirill's cruelty is presented as the symptom of a hidden drive — insecurity and a suppressed sexuality the film treats obliquely — which drives much of the plot's violence.