All About Eve · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The first thing you remember about Eve Harrington is her face at the stage door — turned up, rain-damp, rapt, waiting in the alley for a glimpse of the woman whose life she intends to take. It is a face of pure devotion. It is also the first performance in a film made entirely of performances, and the whole machine of All About Eve runs on a single problem: watching that face, we cannot tell devotion from its forgery. Neither, fatally, can Margo Channing.

Deleuze has a name for someone like Eve. He calls her le faussaire, the forger. A liar is a small thing by comparison; a liar still concedes that the truth exists somewhere and merely hides it. The forger does something more creative and more frightening. She manufactures a truth — a self — and keeps manufacturing, shedding each identity once it has done its work. Eve arrives as a war widow nursing her grief and her small-town worship of the theatre. When that self has gotten her into the dressing room, she discards it for the selfless assistant, then the trembling understudy, then the toast of Broadway, then Addison's cold equal. There is no Eve underneath the Eves. This is what Deleuze means by the powers of the false: not falsehood as a flaw in some underlying truth, but falsehood as an engine, a way of producing the new. The reason this lens cracks the film open is that the ordinary moral reading — ambition corrupts, sincerity is good — cannot explain why the film so plainly admires her. Addison, the critic, the one intelligence in the room that misses nothing, looks at the wreckage and praises her "perfect pattern of deceit." He is paying an artist a professional compliment.

That admiration tells you something about cinema's own contract. Classical Hollywood promised a reliable image: what you see, more or less, is what happened. Mankiewicz hands the telling over to interested parties instead. The story reaches us folded inside flashbacks narrated by people with stakes in it — Karen, Margo, and above all Addison, whose acid voice presides over the awards dinner where the film begins, the statuette already in Eve's hands, the fall already certain. Citizen Kane built this in 1941: the subject established as fallen, the truth assembled from partial, self-serving witnesses. Mankiewicz had just rehearsed the trick himself in A Letter to Three Wives, where an unseen woman's voice organizes three embedded confessions. Eve scales it to the theatre and adds the crucial figure absent from Mary Orr's source story — DeWitt, the narrator who is also a character, the doomed confessor whose tone Addison borrows straight from Walter Neff in Double Indemnity.

Addison is more than a narrator, though. He is what Deleuze, following Peirce, calls the relation-image made flesh: the knowing third. Meaning in this film is built from relations the audience holds before the characters do. We see through Eve early, because Addison sees through her, and the film keeps us seated beside his intelligence, watching Margo and Karen and Lloyd walk into a trap whose shape is already plain to us. The suspense is not what will happen. It is how long the others will keep believing the performance.

And it is staged, relentlessly, in mirrors. The dressing rooms are mirror-lined; the dressing tables double every face; the backstage corridors reflect. Deleuze calls this the crystal-image, the point where a thing and its reflection become impossible to tell apart, where performed identity and identity collapse into one shining surface. Krasner's high-contrast light gives the theatrical world a noir undertow, and Bette Davis — playing magnificence shot through with the terror of a woman who knows the culture will not let her grow old — keeps pressing against her own reflection as if to check it is still there. Against her, Anne Baxter plays Eve as strategic blankness, a body all lowered eyes and grateful posture. That posture is what Deleuze calls the gest: an attitude that lays bare the social relation it performs. Eve's deference is choreography. The wide eyes are stagecraft.

What the film does to its inherited world is rot it from inside. The backstage arena of competing women comes down from Stage Door; the calculating close-up that conceals comes down from Davis's own work in The Letter. Mankiewicz takes this glittering, mannered Broadway aristocracy and shows it being eaten by its own appetite for fresh blood — what Deleuze names crystal-decomposition, an ordered world decaying from within. The final image makes the decay eternal. A girl named Phoebe, found in Eve's apartment, holds Eve's award before a triple mirror and bows to her own multiplying reflections. There is no outside to this. The crystal is perfect, sealed, infinite. The forger has already been forged.

The film's real invention is to have made the powers of the false genteel — drawn out of the noir gutter into the drawing room and carried entirely on language, on faces in rooms, on who is performing for whom. It turned "who is acting?" from a twist into a structure, and seeded a century of doubles and con artists who followed Eve up the stairs. Watch it again and study that opening face at the stage door. Try to find the seam where the real girl ends and the performance begins. You won't. That is the whole point, and the whole pleasure.