All About Eve · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

At the Sarah Siddons Award ceremony that opens the film in medias res, we already know Eve Harrington has won — and what follows is less reconstruction than fabrication. Addison DeWitt's voiceover performs the powers of the false with every sentence: morally compromised, self-serving, competing against Karen Richards's embedded counter-narration, his account constructs a version of events that forecloses the real Eve even as it claims to expose her. This is the narrative architecture inherited directly from Citizen Kane — Mankiewicz scales Welles's in-medias-res opening and partial eyewitness flashbacks to the Broadway milieu, but where Kane mourned unknowability, Addison revels in it, wielding narration as an instrument of power. Milton Krasner's cinematography enforces this moral darkness through the visual grammar of film noir: the chiaroscuro pools of light against deep shadow that bathe Margo's dressing room and theatre backstage give the social comedy a fatalistic undertow, and the close-ups of Bette Davis's face — never more precisely lit than in the 'fasten your seatbelts' scene — transform theatrical performance into something unnerving, a mask becoming transparent under pressure. But the film's most sophisticated move is its deployment of the relation-image: Addison's direct address to the audience folds the spectator into his cynical gaze, making us complicit in admiring Eve's audacity before we've fully registered that we're being manipulated too. Mankiewicz stages spectatorship itself as the film's true subject — every character is watching someone perform, and so, pleasurably, are we.