All That Heaven Allows · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The salesman wheels it in like a gift of life itself. "All you have to do is turn that dial," he says, "and you have all the company you want, right there on the screen." It is the television Cary Scott's grown children have bought her for Christmas, a machine to keep her company now that they have shamed her out of marrying the gardener she loves. The camera settles on the shot the whole film is remembered by: Cary's face caught small in the dark, blank glass, the warm reds of the room gone cold around the edge of the screen. No one speaks. The image has already said everything. She has been handed her own coffin and told it is a window.

Douglas Sirk made this in 1955 as commercial product, a Technicolor weepie shot cheap and quick to repeat the box office of Magnificent Obsession with the same two stars. What he smuggled inside it is one of the stranger things in studio cinema: a melodrama that despises the world it makes you cry for. The way he did it gives an unusually clean lesson in something Gilles Deleuze spent two books mapping, which is how a film can make its meaning in the image itself, below and against the story it is dutifully telling.

Start with the color, because Sirk does. Russell Metty floods the interiors with light that has no business being there: autumnal oranges, cold lavenders, a sickly green washing a wall. None of it is motivated by any lamp or window. Deleuze called this the colour-image, color that stops describing a place and begins absorbing the whole emotion of the scene into itself, so that a feeling becomes a thing you can see hanging in the air. When blue light pools over Cary alone at her window, the film is not lighting a room. It is showing you the temperature of her loneliness directly, with no character obliged to name it.

Then there is Jane Wyman's face. Deleuze's word for the close-up is the affection-image: a feeling that registers on a face but has nowhere to go, an emotion held at the threshold of an action that never comes. Wyman gives almost nothing. She plays a woman trained from girlhood to compose her features and manage her wants, and the restraint is the point. Hers is what Deleuze called a reflecting face, a smooth contour holding one quality steady, here a suppressed grief, rather than twitching toward a decision. We read the whole social machine in the stillness of it.

That stillness is the real argument. In the cinema Deleuze called the movement-image, a person sees a situation and acts to change it; perception flows into action, and the action resolves things. The melodrama heroine cannot. Cary perceives her situation with total clarity. She knows exactly who is imprisoning her and why, and there is nothing she can do that does not cost her everything. She gives up Ron to keep her children's approval, and the children promptly announce they are leaving anyway, and hand her the television instead. Action has come unhooked from perception. What is left is a woman who can only look and endure, in Deleuze's terms a seer rather than an agent. The grand finale, the near-fatal accident that at last lets the lovers reunite, arrives only after Ron is broken and bedridden, her freedom delivered as one more thing to nurse. Sirk lets you feel the contrivance creak. The happy ending is the cruelest joke in the film.

This is why the objects do so much of the talking. Sirk loads the frame with things that carry the argument the dialogue is too polite to make: the broken Wedgwood teapot Ron mends, the copy of Walden that names his Thoreauvian withdrawal, and above all the television, sold as "life's parade" and exposed as a tomb. These are not decoration. Each is a symbol in the precise sense, a single object condensing the film's whole organizing relation, comfort revealed as captivity.

Look at how Cary is filmed. Metty shoots her through doorways, banisters, the muntins of picture windows, the bare branches outside. The architecture of the respectable home becomes a system of bars, and the closed frame, dense and composed, is treated as a cage you can see her standing inside. The picture window is the cruelest of these. It frames nature as a thing to be looked at and not entered, an adjacent space forever just out of field and forever closed. The deer that appears at that window in the last shot completes the trick. Reconciliation arrives, but framed, glassed, held at a remove, nature delivered to a sickroom.

None of this is montage. The cutting is invisible classical continuity; the meaning lives entirely in staging and color. That is exactly Sirk's invention, to make mise-en-scene speak against the plot it serves. The film poses a problem about American conformity that it has no power, inside its own sentimental genre, to solve, and that unresolved ache is what later filmmakers heard.

Sirk did not invent the woman's picture; he perfected and poisoned it. The renouncing heroine and her glass barrier come straight from Stella Dallas, watching through a window a life she cannot enter. The lush leitmotif scoring and the performance of repression descend from Now, Voyager. The trapping of a woman inside ornate interiors, framed through staircases and windows, is the method of Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman, and the expressive rather than decorative Technicolor reaches him through Leave Her to Heaven. What Sirk added was irony as a formal principle: the swelling Skinner score pressed so hard it exposes its own machinery, the color turned cold inside the warmth. Fassbinder took the whole apparatus and stripped its gloss in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Todd Haynes rebuilt it almost shot for shot in Far from Heaven. After Sirk the melodrama became a thing that could think.

Watch it again for the reflections. Every mirror in the Scott house doubles Cary and fractures her, and the film keeps catching her inside surfaces, glass and screens and polished wood, that show her a self she is not allowed to be. Sirk's gift to anyone who looks is that second face in the glass. Once you see it, the weepie stops being one.