Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of The Wrong Man

1956 · Alfred Hitchcock · The Wrong Man on Sightlines

A hand is held by another hand and rolled, finger by finger, across an ink pad, then across a card. The officer doing it isn't cruel; he has done it a thousand times and he is thinking about lunch. Manny Balestrero watches his own hand being used. That shot is the whole film. A bassist from Jackson Heights who plays the Stork Club, Manny does nothing in this movie. He is being done to, in stages, by people doing their jobs.

Hitchcock walks out of the dark at the start to tell us, in his own voice, that this one really happened. He had run the wrong-man premise before, in The 39 Steps and later in North by Northwest, where accusation works like a slingshot and the running is the pleasure. Here he keeps the premise and removes the running. The source was a Life account of the 1953 Balestrero case, and the picture goes to the actual rooms: the insurance office in the Victor Moore Arcade, the precinct, the courthouse, the subway. That prologue is a contract, and it is borrowed from the Fox semi-documentary noirs. The House on 92nd Street promised authenticity on camera; Boomerang! and Call Northside 777 rebuilt real miscarriages of justice on the real locations, indicting eyewitness certainty as they went; The Naked City turned New York itself into evidence. Behind all of them is Rome, Open City, and behind Fonda's helplessness is De Sica's. Bicycle Thieves gave the movies the man whose life comes apart from one trivial stroke of bad luck, and Manny is that man transposed to Queens. Bazin argued that the camera's obligation was to the ambiguity of the world, that realism meant letting things stay unresolved in front of the lens. This is a studio entertainer taking that seriously and finding out it hurts.

Almost every film you have seen runs on a circuit Deleuze called the movement-image. Someone perceives a situation, feels something, acts, and the situation changes. Perception in, action out, the cutting serving the chain. Hitchcock built the finest machines of that kind ever made. Here he cuts the circuit. Manny perceives everything with total clarity: he is innocent, he knows it, he says so, and none of it converts into action. He answers questions, he signs, he stands in a line, he goes where he is put. Deleuze's name for this is the crisis of the action-image, a character who can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. Deleuze dated that crisis to postwar Italy and to the American cinema that followed. Hitchcock gets there in 1956, at Warner Bros., in his most commercial decade, and his invention is a negative one and quite precise. Keep the plot. Take away the man's capacity to act inside it.

What is left when action goes is looking. Deleuze calls that figure the seer, the one who watches and endures instead of intervening, and calls what he lives through pure optical situations: images with nowhere to discharge. Fonda's performance is built for it. He plays terror as stillness, and the stillness accuses. The cell is the pure case. The camera locks to his eyes, the walls begin to turn and tilt, nothing happens, there is nothing to do, and the perception itself starts to spin. Herrmann, who could have rescued the scene with an orchestra, keeps the score low and mostly absent. What you hear is the door and the flat sound of a real room.

The engine underneath the plot is smaller and stranger. Manny walks into the insurance office to ask about borrowing against Rose's policy. The clerk looks up. What she sees is a man at that counter, and habit supplies the rest. Deleuze took a term from Hitchcock's own practice for this: the mark, a thing that means something because of the chain it usually belongs to. See X, expect Y. She is not lying and she is not a villain; she is reading correctly, by habit, and habit is wrong. From there, everything Manny does is what Deleuze calls an index of equivocity, an act that fits two situations equally well with nothing in the act itself to decide between them. A man asking about money at a counter. A hand filling out a form. The alibi hunt fails not because the truth has gone missing but because from the outside, the acts of an innocent man and a guilty one are the same acts. Worse than a villain, and the film knows it.

Deleuze's largest claim about Hitchcock is that he completed the movement-image by adding a term to it: us. Not as spectators but as a working part of the mechanism, the third party holding relations the characters cannot see. Suspense is the friendly version. We know about the bomb, they don't, and the gap is the fun. This film runs the identical structure with the fun removed. We are told at the start that he is innocent, so there is no puzzle, only the distance between what we know and what everyone on screen is entitled to believe. It widens for the length of the picture and buys us nothing. That is a radical use of an audience, and in Deleuze's account it is where the whole regime tips: by finishing the movement-image, Hitchcock brought it to its limit, and past a limit there is only the other side.

Burks shoots the entrapment into the geometry. Manny is boxed inside the image again and again, cut off by bars, doorways, the shoulders of officials, the frame handled as a closed set with him sealed in it. The institutional interiors are airless and interchangeable, close to what Deleuze means by any-space-whatever: space that has stopped being the setting for anyone's action. One corridor is the next corridor. In the decade when the studios answered television with colour and width, Hitchcock took the grey of the newsreel and the police photograph. He made his camera resemble the state's camera.

Which returns us to the fingerprinting. Deleuze has a word for a posture that exposes an entire social relation without anyone explaining it: the gest. Rolling Manny's fingers across the card is one. Two men, four hands, no hostility anywhere in it, and the whole relation between a citizen and an apparatus is there in the handling. Hands run all through this film, filling out forms, taking prints, gripping bars, shot tight and almost greedy. A man is being converted into parts that can be filed.

Then the one place the film lifts. At his mother's urging Manny prays before an image of the Sacred Heart, and Hitchcock dissolves: the real robber walking toward the camera, coming on until his face lies over Fonda's, and for a beat you cannot say which man you are looking at. Tomasini's cut is the film's thesis and its only miracle in a single gesture. Deleuze would call it the symbol, the object that condenses the relation the whole film is built from. Guilt and innocence are not visible properties. They were never on the face.

Then the film does the thing that makes it great and kept audiences away. The real man is caught. Manny is cleared. Rose does not get better. Vera Miles has been playing a woman going down under a weight that isn't even hers, and a verdict has no jurisdiction over her; a title tells us she recovered eventually, later, off screen. The plot resolves. The damage does not. Hitchcock told Truffaut he chafed at the fidelity to fact, that it denied him his usual licence. It denied him his ending too, and that was the find.

What did it leave? A permission, mainly: a mainstream picture could refuse to make its climax an action, and could let resolution arrive without repairing anybody. The docu-noir cycle it came out of investigated; Hitchcock just stayed with the man while the machine ran, and every later film that keeps its camera on the accused rather than on the investigator who saves him is working that seam. The crew who made this modestly received, deliberately unglamorous picture — Burks, Tomasini, Herrmann on one of his first jobs for the director — walked out of it carrying the discovery that withholding is a technique, and straight into the Paramount run everyone remembers. And it left Hitchcock a question he never quite dropped: what if the thing that destroys you is not a plot against you, only a resemblance?

Watch it again and watch the hands, and notice how seldom Fonda is allowed to finish a movement. Then take the question the film opens and declines to close. Is being cleared the same as being restored? Rose knows. Nobody in the film thinks to ask her.

Concepts in play

crisis of the action-image — Hitchcock renounces 'pleasurable suspense' for anti-dramatic realism; the blocking 'reduces Manny to passivity, a body moved through the system rather than an agent acting upon it,' so perception never converts into an act that changes the situation.
the seer (voyant) — Fonda's deliberately contained, interiorized performance — 'bewildered stillness rather than protest' — watching booking, lineup, arraignment and indictment happen to him.
pure optical and sound situations — The cell sequence: the camera locked to Manny's point of view begins to whirl and tilt as the walls seem to close and spin, 'translating claustrophobia into pure optical sensation,' with Herrmann's score withheld and only cell-clang and room tone left.
relation-image (the mental-image) — Hitchcock steps out of the shadows in the prologue to vouch that the story is true; 'there is no mystery about Manny's innocence; the audience knows from the outset,' so the film is built from a relation only the viewer holds.
mark — Manny is arrested 'after an insurance clerk identifies him as the man who robbed her office' — recognition running on customary chain (a man at this counter = the man who was at this counter) rather than on evidence.
index of equivocity — Manny's errand to borrow against Rose's policy, and the hands 'filling out forms' photographed in tight detail, are acts that belong equally to the innocent and the guilty situation; the alibi hunt cannot separate them.
the closed set (cadre) — 'Hitchcock repeatedly isolates Manny within the frame, hemmed by bars, doorways, and the shoulders of officials, so that the geometry of the image enacts his entrapment.'
any-space-whatever — 'Institutional interiors are shot to feel airless and interchangeable'; frontal, documentary booking-room compositions that echo mug shots rather than staging anyone's action.
the gest — 'The mechanical rituals of fingerprinting and lineup rendered with cold precision,' hands taking prints shot in near-fetishistic close detail — the citizen–apparatus relation visible purely as handling.
symbol — The Sacred Heart prayer: a superimposition brings the real robber walking toward the camera until his face dissolves over Manny's, 'crystallizing the film's central preoccupation with the interchangeability of the guilty and the innocent.'

How The Wrong Man was received →