Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Casualties of War
1989 · Brian De Palma · Casualties of War on Sightlines
A woman is killed on a railway trestle, and the camera is nowhere near her. De Palma puts it high and far back. The men are small, the trestle is small, and the murder takes up about as much of the widescreen frame as a bird would. He could have gone close. This is the director whose reputation rests on the camera that looks when it shouldn't, the great anatomist of voyeurism, and at the exact moment his film exists in order to show, he stands off and lets the rifles crack flatly across open ground the way sound carries over water. You watch it from roughly where Pfc. Eriksson watches it. Too far to stop it. Close enough to see everything.
That distance is the film's argument, and it is where Deleuze earns a seat next to it.
Deleuze cut cinema in two. In the movement-image, somebody perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation; editing serves that chain. The war film is one of the last places the chain reliably holds, because combat is a genre where seeing and doing are built to fit. The other regime opens when the chain snaps: a character sees something he has no adequate answer to, and the film has to find a way to keep him there. Deleuze's word for that person is voyant, the seer. Not a passive man. A man whose looking has become his whole situation because the doing has been amputated. The shots that hold him Deleuze called pure optical situations — opsigns, an ugly word for a plain thing: an image that has stopped being a cue for action and become something you simply have to take in.
The standard objection to Casualties of War is that a stylist of the guilty gaze had no business near a real atrocity. The objection is backwards. Coerced looking is the subject. Eriksson is made to watch, made to keep watching, and then told that having watched makes him one of them.
De Palma builds that with two tools. The first is the anamorphic frame. Burum's 2.39:1 lets him park Eriksson at one edge while the squad's mass fills the rest, so refusal and complicity are legible in a single image. No cut is needed to make the moral point, and no cut is available to relieve you of it. Deleuze called the frame a closed set: a composition treated as a system, information-dense, holding you inside its terms. The second tool is depth. The camera keeps the whole squad in focus and keeps Eriksson looking at them, so we are perceiving a man perceiving. Deleuze's name for that doubling is the dicisign, and it's the reason you can feel the camera's presence in this film as a second, appalled consciousness in the clearing. Watch, too, where Eriksson's body is put: outside the group's geometry, at the margin of the hooch, on the far side of the river crossing. Deleuze's gest is a posture that exposes a social relation without anyone naming it. Here the relation is lateral pressure inside a small unit, where standing three feet apart is treason.
And Meserve? He is the film's other engine, and he belongs to a different Deleuzian family: the impulse-image, Deleuze's naturalism, where a recognizable social world turns out to be crust over an originary world of pure appetite. The recon patrol is the derived milieu: orders, radios, the mission's flat vocabulary. The jungle Burum shoots is the originary world underneath it, humid, desaturated, misted, a landscape that swallows the men walking through it. The abduction gets spoken in the language of requisition and belongs entirely to the other place. Deleuze says the impulse-image runs on a line of slope, an entropy that only goes down, and Penn plays exactly that: a competent, funny, protective sergeant whose care for his men makes the descent worse rather than better.
So the film sets a naturalist slope loose inside a genre built for action, and then removes Eriksson's capacity to act. That is Deleuze's crisis of the action-image staged with unusual cruelty, because De Palma gives his witness one moment of genuine agency and makes it happen to him. In the tunnel sequence Eriksson nearly drops into a VC hole and Meserve hauls him out. Vertiginous, physical, over in seconds — and it installs a life-debt that will disable his dissent later. The one thing Eriksson does is get saved.
Then there's the way the whole thing reaches us. The subway prologue and coda mean the atrocity arrives as memory. Deleuze called the dated flashback a recollection-image, and thought it the weakest way a film can touch time, because it seals the past into a former present and files it. De Palma uses it and then breaks it. The coda is not a memory. A young Vietnamese-American woman returns a scarf Eriksson has dropped, and that gesture attaches to no rememberable event. It is a dream-image, a circuit with no localizable origin. Viewers split over whether it's consoling or too neat because they're grading it as memory or as realism, and it is neither. It's the wish the memory keeps manufacturing on its own.
The debts are exact. Rear Window invented the paralyzed watcher whose looking becomes his guilt; Vertigo gave the guilty camera its grammar. De Palma strips both out of genre and points them at an atrocity, which is the boldest thing he ever did with Hitchcock. Paths of Glory supplied the institution that scapegoats the just man, tracked in deep focus through the ranks, and Rabe rebuilds it as the film's procedural back half. The Deer Hunter founded the squad-level ordeal watched helplessly by a friend. Apocalypse Now set the anamorphic jungle against moral descent, and Burum answers it in mourning rather than delirium, with Morricone's woodwinds grieving over the images instead of driving them. Platoon split the platoon into good and evil with a recruit as conscience; Casualties keeps the poles and takes the battle away.
What it seeded is harder to name than what it owes, partly because it failed commercially into a market that had absorbed all the Vietnam it wanted. But the technique survived the film. De Palma proved that a suspense apparatus tuned for criminal stakes works just as well on moral ones: the held duration, the audience made to wait, the tightening — all of it aimed at will anyone refuse rather than will he get caught. And he made the strongest case in American cinema that distance can be an ethical position rather than an evasion. Refusing the close-up on Oanh's death is a formal decision with a moral content, and once you've seen it you can't unsee how often other films use closeness to buy feeling cheaply.
Watch it again and watch the edges of the frame. Then sit with what the coda actually asks: the film hands Eriksson absolution in a dream because there is nowhere in waking life it could come from. Is that a consolation or an indictment? Deleuze would say the dream-image is where a film admits the past isn't finished with it.
Concepts in play
- voyant / the seer — Eriksson is present at the abduction and the trestle killing with no available action; the dossier's 'powerless Eriksson' whom the audience is made to wait and watch alongside
- pure optical & sound situations — The trestle murder staged in high, distancing wide shots, with the flat report of gunfire across open ground — an image offered to be taken in rather than acted on
- dicisign — Deep-focus compositions that keep the whole squad legible while Eriksson watches them, so the camera perceives a man perceiving
- the closed set (cadre) — Panavision anamorphic 2.39:1 used to hold Eriksson at one edge while the squad's collective menace fills the rest, staging moral separation as spatial fact
- the gest — The squad repeatedly arranged so Eriksson stands physically at the margin of the group — the hooch, the trestle, the river crossing each composed to isolate him within the group's geometry
- impulse-image — Meserve's authority curdling into brutality; Penn's magnetic, funny, then monstrous leader whose competence makes the descent more disturbing
- derived-milieu — The reconnaissance patrol's orders and procedure — the social surface in whose language the abduction is issued
- originary world — Burum's humid, desaturated greens and enveloping mist, 'a landscape that seems to swallow the patrol'
- line of slope / entropy — The film's irreversible descent from patrol to abduction to the killing on the trestle, with Meserve disintegrating along it
- crisis of the action-image — A war film whose engine is not whether the crime occurs but whether anyone refuses; Eriksson's sole moment of agency is the tunnel, where Meserve hauls him out and creates the life-debt that disables his dissent
- mnemosign / recollection-image — The subway-car prologue and coda set years later in the US, so the entire atrocity is delivered as memory returning unbidden
- onirosign / dream-image — The coda in which a young Vietnamese-American woman returns Eriksson's dropped scarf — described in the dossier as an oneiric gesture of forgiveness, attached to no localizable memory