The other week a friend told me I had to see Everybody's Woman, because Max Ophüls directed it, and Max Ophüls moves cameras, and the people in Everybody's Woman walk around a lot. Of course this friend was right, and within the first few minutes Ophüls has invented as many different ways to show people walking through doorways as there are rooms. Being so impressed with this I had forgotten what this friend had really said about the walking, which is that the characters walk after one another, pawing at them. This is true, and defines much of the action of Everybody's Woman. In the opening, walking connects disparate spaces. For the rest of the film, it marks distance. Everybody's Woman is a film about walking after someone, and what it would mean to close that distance.

To close that distance would mean death, but I will explain. The woman that everybody walks after is Gaby Doriot, an invention of the film industry, played by Isa Miranda as Gabriella Murge. We're told millions flock to her, and that they will each meet their demise, and that the allure of meeting one's demise makes her all the more desirable. We then find Gabriella, dying, as the printers continue to reproduce the image of Gaby. Everybody's Woman is framed by the coincidence of real death, which is the cessation of meaning, and death's idea, which can be signified, reproduced, and is alluring. It would be one thing to say that no one can help but desire Gaby, and that to come into contact with her is to meet death. But the film goes further, insisting that people may consciously desire Gaby, and that their unconscious desire is to fail at attaining her. To sustain, in other words, the distance that walking seeks to close. I think this makes sense, as a function of eros in fiction. Why Gabriella needs to die is another story, and involves an abdication of the very fiction that sustains her.

We never find out what makes Gaby so desirable that people will embrace ruin just to be with her. The obscurity is deliberate. To speculate on the specific contours of Leonardo or Alma's desire and subsequent demise would be as much use as speculating on that of the music teacher, who is ruined before the film even begins. There's a classical nakedness to Ophüls' approach here that means we recognise these characters as moveable pieces within a play of desire, and not people as such. This nakedness means there doesn't need to be anything specific about Gaby that makes her so fatally desirable. In fact, there couldn't be. She is everybody's, the universal object of desire, and to possess this universality, she must remain formally empty. The millions that flock to her may all believe they sense in her something that speaks to their own desire, but that quality is invariably obscure, because there is no thing to be possessed. Their desire is sustained by their failure to possess the thing that doesn't exist, and the image reproduced by the printing press ensures the beckoning of the thing never goes away. The distance between the walker and the object ensures the walker continues to walk, which, in Everybody's Woman is the currency of the living.

With distance closed comes ruin. Leonardo, Alma, and the music teacher each comes close to possessing Gaby. Why does the failure above sustain life, but possession accompany ruin? Because desire is the lifeblood of the melodrama. It's also the defining feature of the human subject. Subject to desire, life is excruciating. Without it, we are dead. Failure sustains lack, and lack sustains desire. It follows that no one desires what they think they do, writes Anne Carson:

On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case (...) As the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them connect in one triangle momentarily. The connection is eros. To feel its current pass through her is what the lover wants (62)

All three fear losing this current. "Mere space has power" (18), writes Anne Carson. "A space must be maintained or desire ends" (26). There's something important to be said for love here. When we love someone, we love what is unnamable and inscrutable about them. To be with them is to recognise our inability to possess them as we would an inanimate object. In this way, love exposes us to a lack far more intense than what can be disclosed by ordinary want. In mistaking Gabriella for Gaby, these three relinquish the excruciating infinity of love for another, and are subsequently confronted with the crushing finitude of their devotion to a commodity. Without Gabriella, and now without Gaby, they lose any trace of the sublime thing, which is why before them there is no longer even madness, only death.

The evacuation of love in Everybody's Woman precipitates the death of the film. This happens in a chilling scene where Gabriella is reunited with Roberto, whom she is sure once loved her dearly. Recognising their lives have gone their separate ways, she nevertheless feels that current of eros, and asks will she see Roberto again. He responds that of course he'll see her, in the recorded image she will leave behind in film. Initially this seems like an inversion of what the film has already explored: where Leonardo and Alma suffer the unbearable burden of thinking they've obtained the object of their desire, Gabriella cannot bear having lost hers. It would be more accurate to say that Gabriella realises that her entire relationship to the beloved was based on a misrecognition: he, too, saw her as Gaby. It is not as though the door to the infinite had closed (how melodramatic that would be!), but that it never was.

What makes her being forsaken by love's eternity so unbearable is that Gabriella is aware of the permanence of the ideal. The printing press that reproduces Gaby mimics the sequence of frames on celluloid: we see her in suspended animation as the body comes apart. In Bernard Stiegler's words, to watch oneself recorded is to stage the tragedy of one's own existence, which, preserved by the camera, captures life passing by forever. Barthes insists in much the same vein that every photograph captures the disturbing coincidence of This will be and This has been, the future anterior that means "every photograph is this catastrophe" (96). To take this back to Ophüls' play of eros, Gaby is the void in the text that draws all elements to it, the force that motivates all of the other pieces to act, that annihilates them on contact, that Gabriella must herself annihilate so that she can be free from the text.

Gabriella's tragedy is unique. Her death is an attempt to avert the catastrophe of the image. She is already the shadow of an event that has not yet occurred — the film Roberto will use to 'see her again'. It's for this reason we must see her suicide as something like eternity on her terms. To free herself from the bind of the future anterior ("I will have been in this film") she embraces its eternity, negating the passage of time. Death now to, not in, the future.

Written 24 March 2026