Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Empire of the Sun
1987 · Steven Spielberg · Empire of the Sun on Sightlines
A flight of Mustangs comes in low over the airfield, sunlight sliding off the canopies, and John Williams hands the strafing run to a boys' choir. What Jim Graham sees is not an attack. It is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to him. Allen Daviau's camera agrees with him, and nobody in the film ever arrives to tell him he is wrong.
That agreement is the whole picture. Empire of the Sun is an epic built at enormous cost — thousands of extras staged on the Shanghai Bund, a Lunghua-style camp raised in the dust outside Jerez, full-scale aircraft and live pyrotechnics — around a boy who cannot do one thing about the war he is inside. He can only watch it. What he sees is glorious, and that is the problem the film sets for you.
Consider who made it. Spielberg in 1987 was the most fluent action director alive; he went from this straight into Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Deleuze has a plain name for the system Spielberg had mastered: the movement-image. Someone perceives a situation, the situation demands something, they act, the world changes shape in response. Editing serves that chain — the cross-cut exists so the rescue can arrive on time. And the machinery is all here, at full power: Michael Kahn builds the Shanghai evacuation and the airfield raid out of escalating cross-cutting, exactly as he would build a chase. What Spielberg removes is the payoff. Jim runs, scavenges, barters, salutes, survives. He transforms nothing. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: a character who can no longer react adequately to what he perceives, whose seeing has come loose from any act it might feed.
What fills the gap is looking. Deleuze's word for Jim is the seer (voyant), a watcher and endurer rather than an agent, and his word for what a seer gets instead of a deed is the opsign — a pure optical and sound situation that has broken off from anything you could do about it. The raid is not a problem Jim can solve. It is an image and a noise: engines, the blaze off the canopies, the fireball, and over them a Welsh lullaby in a boy's voice. This lens is worth insisting on, because it explains the film's reputation. Audiences expecting Spielbergian uplift found it withholding, and the reunion at the end plays as confirmation of loss rather than catharsis. That isn't a failure of construction. It's the consequence of a form in which action was never going to fix anything.
There is a finer name for what happens to Jim during the raid. Deleuze calls it the movement of world: the figure goes still and the world does the moving, the way a dance can start absorbing the dancer. Daviau's anamorphic frame is built for it, holding Jim as a small fixed thing against runways, crowds, skies. And Kahn cuts on his gaze, on his fixations — planes, food, Basie — so that we are constantly watching a boy watch. Deleuze calls that a dicisign: not simply what the character sees, but the camera perceiving him perceiving, its own presence felt in the arrangement.
Then there is the light, which is where the film gets dangerous. Daviau organizes everything around backlight, flare, and white: shafts through camp windows, the glare off aircraft, the flash on the horizon that Jim takes for an atomic bomb. Deleuze called this register lyrical abstraction — the alternation of light and whiteness, illumination used as a spiritual quantity rather than as a description of where the sun is. Here it is revelation and menace in the same beam. It also breaks a contract. Since Bazin, realist film theory had assumed the camera owes suffering a certain restraint, that beauty applied to atrocity is a lie. Spielberg lets the boy's version stand. Because we know only what Jim knows — Tom Stoppard's script holds that line with real discipline — the film never supplies the adult who would correct him, and his misreadings become the only account on offer. That is a working case of the powers of the false: not a puzzle about what really happened, but a film that declines to adjudicate between the war and a child's rapturous misunderstanding of it.
Underneath the light, the film descends. The staging moves through three social orders: the sealed luxury of the International Settlement, the chaos of the invaded city, the camp with its scavenged goods and black-market barter. Deleuze would read the camp as a line of slope, the naturalist's irreversible downward drift in which appetite replaces motive. Jim's obsessions turn into part-objects charged with compulsive force — a fetish in the strict sense: aircraft, and food, and Basie, the American merchant sailor who teaches him survival by using him. Christian Bale, thirteen, on screen almost continuously, does something few child actors are asked to do: he lets the boy get hollow. And the camp passages breathe slower than the set pieces, holding stretches of dead time where nothing advances and captivity simply erodes the calendar.
The debts are specific and the film wears them openly. David Lean was attached to Ballard's novel before Spielberg took it; Lawrence of Arabia supplies the whole compositional method, heat-shimmered anamorphic horizons scaling landscape to one morally unreadable protagonist, and The Bridge on the River Kwai supplies the camp, with Western dignity and self-delusion studied under Japanese captivity. From Doctor Zhivago comes the Jarre trick Williams reuses, one recurring melody carrying a cataclysm through a private consciousness. The child's vantage descends from Forbidden Games, where a girl metabolizes death by ritualizing it as play, and from The 400 Blows, whose refusal of the adult overview is exactly the discipline Stoppard imposes. Kahn's fever-cutting for Jim's imagined flight and the atomic mirage comes out of Ivan's Childhood. Forward, it opens Spielberg's serious historical cycle — Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan — and it stands beside Hope and Glory from the same year in a mode that runs on to Grave of the Fireflies: the Second World War re-seen down a child's sightline.
What it did to film is simple to state and was hard to do. It put the time-image inside the American studio epic. The biggest machine in commercial cinema was turned over to a protagonist with no power to change anything, and the machine kept its scale while losing its purpose, which is why the picture felt wrong to people in 1987 and feels prophetic now.
Watch it again and watch the light. Then ask the question the film leaves open and never answers: what do you do with the fact that its most beautiful images are of a boy enjoying an atrocity, and that you enjoyed them too?
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Kahn cuts the Shanghai evacuation and the airfield raid with escalating cross-cutting — the full action machinery — around a boy who runs, scavenges and barters but transforms nothing; the ending is elliptical, a reunion that confirms loss rather than resolving the situation
- the seer (voyant) — restricted narration locked to Jim: the war reaches us only as he perceives it, fragmentary and glamorized, with no action available to him beyond survival
- pure optical & sound situations — the P-51 strafing run, the blaze off the canopies and the fireball scored to a boys'-choir 'Suo Gan', which Jim experiences as rapture rather than terror
- movement of world — Daviau's anamorphic compositions hold Jim as a small fixed figure while crowds, runways, aircraft and sky do the moving around him
- dicisign — Kahn anchors the rhythm to Jim's gaze and his fixations — planes, food, Basie — so the camera is continually perceiving a boy in the act of perceiving
- lyrical abstraction — Daviau's recurring backlight, lens flare and 'white light' of explosions and dawn; shafts through camp windows and the climactic flash on the horizon treated as revelation and menace at once
- powers of the false — Stoppard's restricted narration withholds any adult corrective, so Jim's misreadings — above all the flare he reads as an atomic flash — stand as the film's only account of the war
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — the staging descends through social orders — settlement villa, invaded city, camp — into a shadow economy of scavenged goods and barter, with Bale's Jim hollowed out over the internment years
- fetish — Jim's compulsive part-objects: aircraft, food, and Basie the opportunist sailor, the fixations Kahn cuts the film around
- dead time (temps mort) — the camp passages breathe more slowly than the set pieces, marking the erosion of time in captivity across the film's episodic two and a half hours