The Yellow Spot: Ocular Pathology and Empirical Method in Gaston Leroux’s Le Mystere de la chambre jaune

The 2003 release in France of Bruno Podalydès’s film adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s Mystery of the Yellow Room [Le Mystère de la chambre jaune] (1907) brings renewed attention to this classic detective story and to its visual potentiality.1 Podalydès plays up its scenes of surveillance, blindness, and insight by overlaying tropes of photography with the visual universe of Tintin comic books; in his film, the book’s narrator Sainclair becomes a bespectacled photographer whose optical prosthetics identify him as “he who sees” (Podalydès, 352). But while the story’s cinematic rebirth may tempt us to read its “optics” in a vague post-Lacanian sense (metaphors of mastery, sins of the filmic gaze), such a reading would elide a scientism specific to Leroux’s age.