Dishonored · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A young lieutenant stands at attention while the woman he is about to help kill uses the polished blade of his drawn sword as a mirror. She fixes her lipstick. She straightens the veil of her stocking. Then the firing squad fires. That last image of Dishonored holds almost everything Josef von Sternberg knew about cinema: an instrument of death pressed into service as a vanity glass, a face composing itself one final time, a woman who chooses to die performing rather than confessing.

Start at the surface, because Sternberg always did. Deleuze gives us a precise name for what Sternberg is doing to Marlene Dietrich's face throughout this film: the affection-image. It is his term for the close-up — a feeling that gathers on a face but is held there, not yet (or never) discharged into an act. Most directors use the close-up as a relay: she sees, she feels, she does. Sternberg jams that circuit. X-27 perceives everything and acts almost never; what we get instead is the held quality of her composure. Deleuze actually treats Sternberg as the master of one specific variety he calls lyrical abstraction — light struggling against white, the face loosened from its setting until it becomes pure luminous quality. Read the dossier's account of Lee Garmes's photography and you are reading a description of lyrical abstraction by another route: smoke, netting, lace, foliage and falling snow placed between lens and subject so the frame is never a clean window but a textured screen. The veil is not decoration. It is the method by which the face is abstracted from the world and offered as a quality for its own sake.

Which quality? Here Deleuze's distinction between two kinds of face earns its keep. The intensive face is all features straining toward a threshold — desire, fear, the verge of action. The reflexive face is a smooth contour that reflects a single state: wonder, irony, thought. Dietrich's X-27 is the reflexive face in its purest form. The dossier calls her 'ironic and unreadable,' her erotic confidence one 'that never tips into sentiment.' That unreadability is not a gap the film will fill. It is the content. Her face gives back light the way the sword gives back her reflection, and neither tells you what is behind it.

This is why the film, an espionage melodrama in outline, keeps slipping its own genre. Sternberg builds the closed set with obsessive density — the cat, the piano, the masquerade masks, cipher and regalia — yet the action-image machinery these objects should drive never quite closes. Why does X-27 let Kranau escape? Love, contempt for her masters, sheer self-determination? The film refuses to say. Deleuze would recognize the figure she has become: the forger, the one who creates rather than discovers truth, whose identity is serial. X-27 is prostitute, then peasant, then society woman, then prisoner, 'while the woman beneath remains ironic and unreadable.' These are not disguises hiding a true self; the masquerade goes all the way down. The reading of coded music at the piano makes the point structurally — espionage as performance, truth itself a thing composed and played. This is the powers of the false glimpsed thirty years before Deleuze named them in the modern cinema: a film that quietly declines the contract by which images are supposed to deliver the truth of a person.

The firing squad is where surface and fatalism fuse into a single gest — Deleuze's word for a posture that lays bare a relation rather than advancing a plot. Refusing chaplain and blindfold, repairing her makeup in a soldier's sword, X-27 stages the whole film's argument in one attitude: feminine self-presentation set against the rigid masculine surface of the institution, a woman's sovereignty over her own death asserted as a matter of grooming. And the sword-mirror itself is a small crystal-image — the instrument of execution handing back her reflection, present and image folded together so you cannot say which is the real one.

None of this came from nowhere. The Blue Angel taught Sternberg to sculpt Dietrich's face with directional key light behind veiling gauze; Morocco codified the loaded long take and objects-as-masquerade, the costume cross-dressing that here becomes the spy's serial selves and that final lipstick. Behind them stand The Last Command's layered planes of snow and scrim, Louise Brooks's self-possessed fallen woman in Pandora's Box, and the Weimar chiaroscuro of Metropolis and Sunrise that Garmes folds into Dietrich's glow inside dark frames. Downstream, the veiled, fatalistic woman lit from within shadow becomes a permanent fixture of film noir, and Sternberg refines the same grammar one film later in Shanghai Express.

What Dishonored did to the art is quieter than a revolution and more durable. It took the spy thriller's working engine and spent its whole budget of attention on surface, light, and the unreadable face — insisting that meaning be read off the image rather than handed over by the plot. That instinct, that an image can withhold its truth and be richer for it, is exactly the demand the time-image would later make of everyone. Watch it again for the face. Everything is already there, and nothing is explained.