Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of The 4th Man

1983 · Paul Verhoeven · The 4th Man on Sightlines

A woman threads a projector in her own living room and three dead men start moving. They wave. They mug for the lens the way husbands do on holiday. Christine keeps her marriages on reels the way other people keep them in frames, and her newest lover sits in the dark watching an anthology of endings with one reel still blank at the back.

Hold that image, because the whole film is inside it. A man looking at pictures, trying to decide whether they are evidence.

Gerard Reve — a novelist who shares his name and most of his vices with the author of the novel Verhoeven is adapting — spends this film reading. Not books. Objects. A key. A pair of scissors in a hairdresser's hand. A spider crossing its web. The letter S. Jan de Bont's camera keeps stopping on these things, lifting them out of the décor into a lacquered red-and-blue surface that looks less like the Netherlands than like an advertisement for it. Deleuze has a name for an image that has quit being something you act in and become something you have to decipher: the lectosign, the readable image. In most thrillers you look at a room and know what to do in it. Gerard looks at a room and has to interpret it, and so do we. The suspense here is a reading problem.

That is a Hitchcock inheritance and a Hitchcock betrayal at the same time. Deleuze credited Hitchcock with the relation-image: the shot that means something only because of a relation the audience is holding in its head, the viewer installed as a knowing third party in the drama. When you see scissors you expect shearing. Deleuze calls that a mark, an object dragging its customary chain behind it, and this one drags Delilah: the woman who cuts men down, here running a beauty salon. Hitchcock's contract was that the detail he slipped you was true, and the horror was that the character hadn't caught up. Verhoeven keeps the grammar and shreds the contract. Every mark in this film is also a demark, an object that refuses to stay inside its habit — because scissors on a hairdresser's table are also just scissors on a hairdresser's table. The spider is the organizing symbol, and it condenses the film's whole problem: a web, patient, with a man walking into it. Or a Catholic alcoholic who has started seeing webs everywhere.

You could stop at "unreliable narrator" and you'd be right and you'd have learned nothing. Deleuze's vocabulary earns its keep here because it stops treating the ambiguity as a withheld answer and starts treating it as the film's engine. He called it the powers of the false. Not lying — lying still assumes a truth being hidden. Falsifying narration is when two incompatible versions are presented as equally true and the film runs on the gap. Verhoeven builds the thing so that the supernatural reading (the writer really does have second sight) and the psychological reading (a guilty, desiring man is composing a murder to live inside) stay open to the final frame. And Gerard is the purest case of what Deleuze called the forger: not a con man, but an artist for whom inventing the story is the only available way of having a truth. A novelist who builds a plot and then moves in. The premonitions are crystalline descriptions in the strict sense — images that assemble their object so completely that they replace it. The death is composed before it can happen, and afterward you cannot get behind the vision to the fact.

Which is what makes those home movies more than a clue. Deleuze's crystal-image is the moment the actual and the virtual become impossible to prise apart: mirrors, screens, a present that keeps handing you its own reflection. Christine's living room is full of mirrors and full of dead men who are moving. She is a widow and they are alive. The film never gives you a stable outside from which to sort it.

There's a second Verhoeven running underneath the elegant one, and Deleuze has a name for him too. The impulse-image: a world of raw appetite erupting through the social surface, degradation on an irreversible slope. Gerard drinks, wants, prays, wants. The eye wound, the blood, the spider — these are fetishes in Deleuze's sense, part-objects carrying more charge than the scenes containing them. The salon, the crypt, the tasteful house become a derived milieu, the polite skin over an originary world of drives. Verhoeven's whole career sits on that seam, and it is never cleaner than here.

The craft debts are specific. Vertigo gave him the architecture: a camera that makes the audience share a man's erotic delusion about a blonde rather than observe it. Belle de Jour gave him the rule he follows most strictly — cut between fantasy and fact with no marker, no ripple, no dissolve. Un Chien Andalou gave him the eye and the principle that shots can be joined by an image instead of a cause: Deleuze's irrational cut, where the join itself is the meaning. Don't Look Now gave him the colour-coded premonition, the flash-forward as a red thread. 8½ gave him Catholic guilt as a continuous medium you swim through rather than a flashback you visit.

Verhoeven's own invention is the assembly. He put unmarked dream logic inside a functioning suspense machine — a real ticking clue-board, with an audience actively reading it — and then refused to pay out. The visions are staged with lighting and cutting rather than optical effects, so they arrive with the same tactile weight as the breakfast table. That is the move. Not a dream sequence, a dream that won't identify itself. Genre gets the reader's attention; art cinema keeps the answer.

It worked well enough abroad to buy him Hollywood — Flesh+Blood, then RoboCop — and de Bont's glossy, faintly sinister surface went straight into Basic Instinct, where the same woman returns and the same answer is withheld under the bed. The lineage runs on into the whole class of films built to be watched twice, where re-viewing is the point rather than the consolation.

So watch it again, with one question. Does the camera ever show you a single thing that Gerard could not have imagined? Try to find one. The film's greatness is that you will keep almost finding it.

Concepts in play

• the readable image — De Bont's camera repeatedly isolates portents — a key, scissors, a spider, the letter 'S', ecclesiastical imagery — so the visual field stops being a space for action and becomes a text Gerard (and the viewer) must decipher.
• puissances du faux — The film is built so that a literal supernatural reading (the writer really foresees death) and a psychological reading (a guilty, desiring alcoholic invents a plot) remain equally available to the end; undecidability is the engine, not a withheld answer.
• falsifying narration — Premonitory flashes are intercut with the naturalistic present with no demarcation, so incompatible versions of what is happening are presented as co-true rather than sorted.
• le faussaire — Gerard is a novelist sharing the name and persona of the book's author, 'a fantasist and alcoholic constructing a lethal story to inhabit' — a protagonist who creates his truth rather than discovering it.
• crystalline description — The prophetic visions compose the deaths so completely — staged, lit and cut with the same tactility as the present tense — that the image replaces any fact behind it.
• hyalosign — Christine's collection of home movies of her dead husbands, screened inside a décor of mirrors: the widow's present and her dead men's living images become indiscernible.
• the mental-image — The film works on 'Hitchcockian principles — showing the audience threatening details the protagonist may or may not have registered', installing the viewer as the knowing third who must hold the relations.
• mark — The hairdressing/scissors motif carries the Delilah-and-Samson chain: the seductress who shears and destroys men, an object meaningful by custom before any plot confirms it.
• demark — Verhoeven's staging 'deliberately refuses to settle the question of whether these are objective signs or subjective delusions', so each omen also breaks its own habit and forces interpretation.
• symbol — The recurring spider and its web condenses the film's organizing relation — a patient trap and a man walking in, or a paranoid's projection of one.
• onirosign — Gerard's hallucinatory religious visions — the crypt, the Virgin Mary rendered as an eerily maternal woman — are dream circuits attached to no localizable memory.
• interstice / the 'AND' — The premonitory eye/castration cutaways (the Un Chien Andalou debt) are 'linked by image rather than plot' — cuts that join across a gap instead of by continuity.
• affective colour — Strong red-and-blue coding and heavily saturated, lab-controlled tonality give the film a hyperreal sheen in which colour absorbs the scene's dread rather than describing a place.
• impulse-image — Gerard as Catholic, homosexual, alcoholic and dissolute, drawn by erotic bait toward ruin: compulsion and appetite on an irreversible downward slope beneath the film's polished surface.
• fetish — The graphic eye/wound motif, blood, keys and hair function as part-objects charged with far more force than the scenes that contain them.
• derived milieu — The beauty salon, the tasteful home and the church are presented as decorous surfaces over a world of drives — Christine's décor reads as 'the projection of Gerard's fevered, guilt-ridden Catholic imagination'.
• reflexive vs intensive face — Soutendijk's Christine holds a cool, unreadable, reflecting contour while Krabbé's Gerard works in micro-movement — charm sliding into terror — so the two faces stage the film's question between them.
• mind-game film — The structural refusal to confirm or deny the murder plot makes re-viewing the film's real mode — the same withheld-answer design de Bont and Verhoeven carried forward into Basic Instinct.

How The 4th Man was received →