Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Thin Man
1934 · W.S. Van Dyke · The Thin Man on Sightlines
Start with the scene everyone remembers. The suspects are gathered at a dinner table in their good clothes. Nick Charles presides with a drink in his hand and talks the murder out into the open, one guest at a time. Nora is at the table too. All film long she has wanted in on the case, and now she has a seat at it.
That dinner-party denouement became a convention almost as soon as audiences saw it: gather everyone, pour, and let the truth come out over dinner. It's worth asking why it works so well. The answer says a lot about what kind of film The Thin Man is, and about what it made possible.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, called the image at the heart of classical Hollywood the action-image. A situation, a person who acts on it, a changed situation. He split it into two shapes. In the large form a whole world presses on a hero until he does something decisive. Think of the western showdown. The small form runs the other way. A small act, a gesture or a remark, reveals a situation the film hasn't shown you. Detective stories live in the small form, and so, Deleuze noticed, do the sly comedies of manners of Ernst Lubitsch. The Thin Man sits right where those two traditions meet, and that's the key to it.
Take the Lubitsch side first. One of the film's ancestors is Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), which set the pre-Code template for the sexually knowing, sparring couple whose romance happens almost entirely as innuendo. By 1934 the Production Code was clamping down on nearly everything. A married couple who flirt, drink and plainly enjoy each other couldn't be shown doing much about it. So the film says it sideways. Deleuze has a name for this: the index of lack, an elliptical sign that points to a situation kept off-screen. Every double meaning in Nick and Nora's patter works as one. What you don't see is the marriage's private life, and the quips imply all of it. Under censorship, the ellipsis was no longer just a stylish choice. It was how adult life got onto the screen at all.
Now the detective side. The plot follows a missing inventor and a scattering of suspects, and each suspect's behavior could belong to two different stories, an innocent one and a guilty one. Deleuze calls this the index of equivocity: the same act fitting two situations, so you can't yet tell which world you're in. The mystery is a machine for producing those doubles. Here's the lovely part. The banter works the same way. A line between Nick and Nora is often both marriage talk and case talk at once. The equivocity runs through the whole film, through the bedroom jokes and the murder alike.
That's why the dinner scene lands. Nick doesn't settle the case by overpowering anyone. He arranges people. He seats them, sets them talking and lets each person's place in the web of relations decide which of their two stories was true. Deleuze calls this the relation-image. The meaning lives in the relations between things, and the audience, holding those relations in mind, becomes a knowing third party at the table. It's a cool, cerebral payoff for a film that nearly gets its heroes killed. The danger is real. The solution is a matter of social geometry. And the scene became what Deleuze calls a mark: an image whose meaning comes from habit. Once The Thin Man established it, a table of seated suspects told every later audience a reveal was coming.
So much for the mystery, which is handled with genuine craft. The film's real revolution was its tone, and that came from particular people working fast. W.S. Van Dyke, 'One-Take Woody', shot it in about two weeks. He'd refined his unfussy method with Myrna Loy on Red Dust: minimal rehearsal, keep the spontaneity. Weeks before, he had first paired Loy with William Powell on Manhattan Melodrama, saw how easily they played together, and carried that trust straight over. Powell brought along the debonair amateur sleuth he'd perfected as Philo Vance in The Kennel Murder Case, with deduction delivered at cocktail-hour ease. The speed of the patter goes back to The Front Page and its machine-gun newsroom talk. And It Happened One Night, released months earlier, had just codified screwball's bickering equals. The Thin Man took that comic engine and bolted it onto a murder plot.
The result is dialogue that sounds overheard rather than performed. That's the filmmakers' invention: a method of shooting built to catch performances before they go flat. You can hear the fizz still in them.
This is where the film says something about narrative. Here the plot is a trellis and the marriage is the vine. Audiences came back for five sequels, and not for the inventor. Stanley Cavell later described a Hollywood 'comedy of remarriage', in which a couple splits up and has to win each other back through talk. The Thin Man skips the split. Nick and Nora are married at the start and still married at the end, and the talk isn't repairing anything. It's the pleasure of the thing itself. That leaves a question more interesting than the whodunit: what happens to a detective story when the detectives are more interesting than the crime? Strictly, the film stays a classical action-image. The case gets solved. Still, you can feel its center of gravity drifting toward the stretches that do nothing for the plot and everything for the people.
Its significance follows from that. Just as the Code arrived, The Thin Man showed a marriage on screen as fun, flirtatious and between equals, and it set the template for every bantering couple since. Loy spent the rest of her career being called 'the perfect wife'. She liked to point out that Nora was never merely a wife. She's the one who wants in on the case.
So watch it again and keep your eye on her. Notice how each line works twice, once for the mystery and once for the marriage. And when the suspects sit down to dinner, notice that the film's real subject has been at that table the whole time.
Concepts in play
- action-image (small form) — A detective-comedy hybrid in which small acts and remarks disclose hidden situations: the missing-inventor mystery, plus the Lubitsch-descended (Trouble in Paradise) comedy of manners.
- index of lack — Innuendo-laced banter between Nick and Nora implies the marriage's private, sexual life that the newly enforced Production Code kept off-screen.
- index of equivocity — Each suspect's behavior could belong to an innocent story or a guilty one, and the couple's quip-trading serves both the marriage and the case at once.
- relation-image (mental image) — The dinner-party denouement: Nick settles the case by seating the suspects and letting their relations to one another reveal the truth, with the audience as knowing third.
- mark — The dinner-party denouement 'became an instant convention', so a table of gathered suspects came to signal by habit that a reveal is coming.