Sightlines · a concept

inversion image

*2nd reflection* — `sublime-figure` + `enfeebled-figure`, with `the-quotidian` (the everyday as at once trivial and unfathomable) as its genetic limit.

On screen: the sublime hero or his feeble inversion; the uncanny everyday

Freaks (1932) — The 'who is the monster?' reversal — practiced operatic villainy in the beautiful antagonists against the matter-of-fact presence of the performers — inherited from Caligari's fairground frame.
The Great Dictator (1940) — Hynkel built as the feeble inversion of the sublime fascist hero — the palace rallies copy Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will shot-for-shot, then puncture the grandeur with slapstick
Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) — The sublime hero exists only offscreen, in the dead father's real record and the fabricated wound, while the lead is his feeble double; Freddie Steele's shell-shocked Marine, fixated on his own dead…
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) — Eddie Bracken's Norval — 4-F, stammering, physically undone — stands in the exact position the departing soldier-hero vacates, in a film satirizing 'the hunger for a hero'; Bracken deepens the type…
Monsieur Verdoux (1947) — The Tramp is retired entirely and replaced by his dapper, soft-spoken opposite, staged in the even high-key light and theatrical depth of the domestic murder farce inherited from Arsenic and Old Lace.
Night and the City (1950) — Fabian as the 'feeble inversion' of the action-hero — 'the appearance of energy but nothing to apply it to,' a con artist with no art; perpetual motion that never becomes a transforming act
Sanjuro (1962) — The disreputable, slouching ronin is the genuine article while the decorated, formally poised antagonists are empty — the sublime hero rewritten as his shabby inversion; the film as genre critique.
The Pink Panther (1963) — The climactic irony in which Clouseau is framed and convicted as the Phantom — the would-be master hero curdled into his feeble inverse, the fool claiming the story; doubled by the film's accidental…
The Firemen's Ball (1967) — The film takes the culture's emblem of rescue — the fire brigade — and stages it in feeble reverse, helplessly watching a house burn; the real firemen cast as extras felt their profession and dignity…
The Producers (1968) — Dick Shawn's L.S.D. plays Hitler as a preening physical clown whose body betrays him, inheriting the burlesque-impersonation grammar of Chaplin's The Great Dictator, where the dictator's oratory…
Blazing Saddles (1974) — Gene Wilder's Waco Kid, the legendary gunslinger reduced to an alcoholic; Brooks's Governor William J. Le Petomane; Mongo punching a horse.
Jabberwocky (1977) — 'Knights are vain, useless, and dangerous. Heroism is a performance the ruling class maintains for its own benefit' — set against Palin's straight, earnest, rational Dennis as the feeble double of…
The Wiz (1978) — Richard Pryor's Wiz played small and frightened: a failed Atlantic City politician stranded by a balloon, the feeble inversion of the sublime magus
The Kingdom of Diamonds (1980) — Utpal Dutt's Hirak Raja: grandiloquent, vain, rhyming nearly every line, at once menacing and gloriously absurd — the sovereign played back as comic grotesque, on the template of Chaplin's dictator.
Fitzcarraldo (1982) — Kinski's hero of grandeur played 'without irony,' the sublime being who wills the impossible, staged at the edge of frame between cabin and jungle — Deleuze's own reading of Herzog's hyperbolic hero
Shallow Grave (1987) — Authority inverted into menace — institutional protection and physical threat collapsed into the single body of Sheriff Dean.
Army of Darkness (1992) — A department-store clerk taken for a prophesied deliverer, and the S-Mart coda that restores him to his job, his braggadocio and one more Deadite in the housewares aisle: the sublime hero replaced by…
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) — The franchise's spatial logic inverted: the monster dropped into the most domesticated possible environment for deliberately uncanny, incongruous effect.
Shrek (2001) — Lord Farquaad as the feeble double of the sublime ruler: a diminutive villain presiding over a kingdom of gleaming theme-park perfection, with Katzenberg's post-Disney grudges animated into him.
Spider-Man 2 (2004) — Raimi's 'genuine slapstick sympathy for a hero whose life is falling apart': the sublime hero continually flipped into his feeble everyday double, which is where every joke in the film lives.
Hot Fuzz (2007) — The sublime action hero placed in the uncanny English everyday — a London supercop exiled for competence, his paperwork and pub rounds given the coverage of a gunfight.
Skyfall (2012) — Silva as the feeble, degraded double of the heroic agent — the operative MI6 made, used, and abandoned, returned as Bond's reflection in ruin, his capture built into the plan.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) — Sweeping crane-like moves and heroic low angles briefly borrow the grammar of the action blockbuster before puncturing it, and the mock-epic vistas set enormous natural scale against two bickering…
Black Widow (2021) — David Harbour's Alexei / Red Guardian, a run-to-seed Soviet super-soldier mining pathos and buffoonery in equal measure — the sublime state hero returned as his feeble inversion.
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) — Mussolini appears as a small, ridiculous caricature during the carnival sequence, a deliberate deflation of tyranny that gives the sublime leader his feeble inversion in puppet form.
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) — Thor introduced through a comic self-improvement/recovery montage and jealous of Stormbreaker; Russell Crowe's vain, broadly comic golden Zeus
Napoleon (2023) — Phoenix plays Napoleon as petulant, insecure, mumbling — a deliberate deflation of the Great Man, the sublime hero turned into his feeble, uncanny inversion