Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Phantom of the Paradise
1974 · Brian De Palma · Phantom of the Paradise on Sightlines
Somewhere under the Paradise, a man who used to have a face pulls a metal bird's head down over what's left of it, throws on a cape, and goes to work. From there on, Winslow Leach has exactly one expression. He still wants things — his cantata back, Phoenix singing it — but nothing that happens to him will ever again show on him.
Stay with that helmet a moment. It's the idea that got out of the theater and into the culture.
Deleuze, watching a great deal of silent film, noticed that a close-up does something no wide shot can. It lifts a feeling off the situation that produced it and leaves it hanging in the air as a pure quality. He called that the affection-image: emotion registered, not yet spent on action. His favorite version is the still, reflecting face that expresses one thing and one thing only. He named that a qualisign, an icon of quality.
De Palma does something perverse with it. He builds the still reflecting face out of metal. Winslow's helmet is a qualisign you can manufacture, the feeling cut loose from the man so completely that it becomes an object, wearable, and Swan — who owns the Paradise — grasps that long before anybody else in the movie does.
Swan's other great image is the contract. Winslow signs in blood under theatrical shadow, which is Murnau's Faust (1926) reproduced almost line for line, except De Palma keeps the expressionist lighting and fills the parchment with boilerplate. Swan doesn't lie to Winslow. He does something worse: he makes the question of who wrote the music permanently undecidable, by legal instrument.
Deleuze had a name for this as a creative principle rather than a moral failing: the powers of the false, and its hero, le faussaire, the forger. The forger isn't a liar. A liar concedes there's a truth he's dodging. The forger manufactures the true and keeps manufacturing, a fresh identity every reel. Swan is that, and the film quietly hands him the deed to the joke. Paul Williams, then soft rock's reigning tunesmith, plays the producer who steals songs, and wrote every song in the picture. The cantata Swan steals is Williams's. The doo-wop pastiche is Williams's, and it's better than most doo-wop. Phantom doesn't depict forgery. It runs it, at the level of the credits.
Then there's the reel. Dorian Gray's picture rots in the attic so the man can stay smooth; De Palma turns the picture into film stock. Swan doesn't age because a strip of celluloid ages in his place, locked away, and the finale drags it out and exposes it on a screen.
That's a crystal-image in Deleuze's sense, and an unusually literal one. A crystal forms when a present image and its own virtual double wind so tightly around each other that you can't say which is the original — think of a character and a mirror where the reflection starts doing the living. Swan and his reel are that circuit with a plot attached. Neither one is the copy. When the film burns, the man goes with it.
Which lets the ending land on the oldest promise cinema ever made: the camera was there, it recorded what stood in front of it, film doesn't lie. The Paradise runs that promise as an execution. The reel tells the truth about Swan precisely because it is film, and it screens to a packed house that takes the whole thing for part of the show. Cinema's contract honored and voided in a single gag.
The Paradise itself is what Deleuze called a crystal in decomposition: an ordered, gorgeous, faintly aristocratic world whose beauty and whose rot are the same process, running on schedule. He meant Visconti's palazzos. De Palma gets there with a rock cathedral built for a diminutive ageless king whose decay is downstairs in a can.
Now the charge people have always brought against the film: it's nothing but quotation. The 1925 Phantom of the Opera in the rafters and the unmasking. Touch of Evil in the recording studio, where De Palma walks Welles's bravura tracking shot right alongside a planted car bomb. Vertigo in the way the camera swoons and circles around Phoenix. Psycho in the bathroom.
Deleuze's answer to that charge is the relation-image, the thing he credits Hitchcock with inventing. Hitchcock stopped building images around what a character does and started building them around relations that only the audience holds. The viewer becomes a third party in the scene, the one who knows. That's the entire physics of suspense: the bomb is in the car, the people aren't aware of it, and the tension lives in the gap between those two facts, inside you. De Palma understood this better than anyone of his generation, which is also why his split screens matter. Instead of cutting between two things to build a relation, he puts both on screen at once and makes you do the montage yourself.
The bathroom is a demark. A mark, for Deleuze, is an object that means by habit: see a shower curtain, expect a knife. A demark is the break in the chain that forces you to read rather than recognize. De Palma swaps the opaque curtain for a plexiglass door and the knife for a plunger. It's funny. It's also an argument: by 1974 the grammar of Psycho sits so deep in the audience that it can be played as a bit, which means it isn't grammar anymore, it's citation. He isn't hiding the borrowing. He's pointing at it.
You could reasonably object that this is a lot of French apparatus for a movie where a man is menaced with plumbing equipment. Here's why it earns itself. Without the lens, Phantom looks like a grab bag, a brilliant young cinephile emptying the toy box. With it, the grab bag is the argument. A film about an industry that steals its own past and resells it, assembled out of stolen and resold cinema, scored by the man it satirizes, starring that man as the thief. Every layer performs the same operation, and that is a thing you have to build on purpose.
It's also crueler than its reputation. Deleuze has a phrase for a character who enters a world of raw appetite and travels in one direction only: the line of slope, an irreversible run downhill toward exhaustion. Winslow arrives as a naive composer with a cantata. Robbed, framed, disfigured, masked, sealed into the building that's monetizing him. Nothing he does bends the line. The comedy is stacked on top of the slope. It never alters it.
The film flopped nearly everywhere in 1974. In Winnipeg it ran for months and sold more soundtracks than any city on earth, and the cult it grew there still holds conventions. Two French teenagers wore the record out and became Daft Punk, two men who appear in public only as fixed metal faces.
Which is the payoff of that first image. De Palma's real invention here isn't the split screen or the long take; he'll tell you himself where he got those. It's that in 1974 he saw where pop stardom was heading — that the star would become a mask, that affect would be sold as hardware, and that the person under the helmet would be somebody who'd been robbed. Years before MTV, he built the machine's PR department and its basement in the same building.
Watch it again with the reel in mind. Every number in the Paradise is a recording of something that already happened, played to a room convinced it's happening now. Then ask who, in the whole film, ever gets to own a thing they made.
Concepts in play
- le faussaire (the forger) — Swan's blood-signed contract (Murnau's Faust restaged) makes authorship of Winslow's cantata undecidable by legal instrument; Paul Williams plays the producer who steals songs while writing every song in the film, so the forgery runs at the level of the credits.
- powers of the false — The finale exposes Swan's aging film reel on a screen: the image tells the truth because it is film, and the house reads it as part of the show — cinema's 'the camera was there' contract honored and voided at once.
- hyalosign (crystal-image) — Dorian Gray's concealed portrait reworked as celluloid: Swan stays ageless because a strip of film ages in his place, and when the reel burns the man goes with it — actual and virtual wound too tight to separate.
- crystal-decomposition — The Paradise as a rock cathedral built for a diminutive, ageless producer whose rot is stored downstairs in a can — an ordered, glittering world whose beauty and decay are the same process.
- affection-image — After his disfigurement Winslow wears the helmet-and-cape Phantom rig; feeling is registered permanently on a metal surface that can never discharge into expression.
- qualisign (icon of quality) — The birdlike helmet is an immobile reflecting face fixed at a single quality — the affection-image manufactured as hardware, which is exactly what Daft Punk's chrome masks later inherit.
- relation-image (the mental-image) — De Palma restages Welles's Touch of Evil long take shadowing a planted bomb in the recording-studio sequence, and uses split screen to put two spaces on screen at once — meaning built from relations only the viewer holds.
- demark — Psycho's shower grammar with the opaque curtain swapped for a plexiglass door and the knife for a plunger in Beef's death — the customary chain broken so the shot must be read rather than recognized.
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — Winslow's one-directional run from naive composer with a cantata to robbed, framed, disfigured, masked man sealed inside the building profiting from him; the comedy sits on top of the slope without bending it.