Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Blazing Saddles
1974 · Mel Brooks · Blazing Saddles on Sightlines
Bart rides out across the desert and a big-band chart comes up under him. Brass, swing, "April in Paris." Then the film shows you the band. The Count Basie Orchestra, in tuxedos, set up in the sand.
Notice what the frame is doing during that joke: nothing. Joseph Biroc photographed Blazing Saddles the way he photographed Aldrich pictures. The desert has real depth and real heat. The low angles on Taggart carry actual menace. The saloon is lit with the amber pooling and shadowed corners the genre had been using on saloons for forty years. Biroc shoots it like Vera Cruz. Nothing in the image winks. So where is the comedy?
In you. Deleuze, sorting the kinds of film image, ends with what he calls the relation-image: an image whose sense comes neither from what it shows nor from what someone does in it, but from a relation the viewer brings and holds. He splits it in two. A mark is an object that means by its customary chain. Black hat, tin star, the stranger riding in at the head of act one. When you see it, you know what follows. A demark is the object that breaks the chain and makes you interpret instead of anticipate. The Western is one of the densest systems of marks ever assembled. Basie in the sand is a demark. So is Gucci trim on a sheriff's outfit riding into Rock Ridge. The image stays innocent, the habit snaps, and the snap happens in the audience.
The vocabulary earns its keep because it explains the film's strangest production decision. Hiring a veteran scope cinematographer for a comedy looks like a joke about budgets. It is the entire method. Satirizing a visual style requires reproducing that style with fidelity, because a demark needs an intact chain to break. Shoot it like a television sketch and there is nothing left to snap. That is Brooks's invention, and the parodies that followed him in the 1980s mostly mislaid it. They kept the bits and dropped Biroc.
Underneath, the plot is a working Western. Deleuze's movement-image in its large form goes: a milieu presses on a character until a decisive act transforms it. The encompassing situation, what he calls the synsign, is the land itself and what the railroad wants from it. The binomial is force against force, Hedley Lamarr's hired men against a town. Brooks leaves every beam of that structure standing. What he poisons is the assumption holding it up, which is that the milieu is a real place and that the people shown in it are all the people who were there.
So the action keeps converting into show. Deleuze has a name for that hinge too: action transposed into Figure rather than performed. Lili Von Shtupp's number is an attraction-image, staging that figures instead of acts, and it is also a direct citation. Madeline Kahn is reading Dietrich's Destry Rides Again turn back to the genre, accent and chair-draped posture and the chorus of cowboys behind her. Alongside it runs the inversion-image, a concept Deleuze took from burlesque: the sublime hero and his feeble inverse. The fastest gun in the West turns up drunk. The Governor is a buffoon. The strong man punches a horse.
At the crisis of the action-image, Deleuze lists five symptoms, and one is consciousness of clichés — characters and films that know they are moving among worn images. He was uneasy about it, because he suspected it could collapse into parody and stop there. Blazing Saddles is the counter-case. Brooks makes the cliché say its own name out loud. The townspeople use the word, repeatedly, in the flat unembarrassed register of people who have never once been asked to justify themselves. That flatness is doing something precise. It is what Deleuze calls a gest: a posture that exposes a social relation rather than expressing a private feeling. Cleavon Little plays straight into it with tactical composure, and he is the only person in the picture who is never confused. The cutting supports this rather than the story. Howard and Greene protect the timing of the bit above continuity or momentum, letting a sequence run to its limit and then stop hard. The causal links go slack because causality is not what holds the film together. Recognition is.
And there is a reason the recognition cuts. The frontier was built by Black cowboys, by Chinese railroad labor, and by Indigenous people whose land it was, and the Western as Hollywood practiced it had erased all three. Deleuze, writing about political cinema, says the decisive condition is that the people are missing — the political has to pass through an absence, and film has to help invent what was deleted. Brooks puts the deletion onscreen and runs the film on it. He also casts himself as a Yiddish-speaking Indigenous chief, one missing people spoken by a member of another. The production rhymes with the joke: Richard Pryor wrote Bart and did not get to play him.
Then the ending, which is the best piece of film theory in the picture. Every frame implies a space next door, the relative out-of-field. It also implies something it can never show, a larger changing whole it belongs to, and Deleuze calls that the absolute out-of-field, the Open. The Western's version has a name everyone knows. The horizon. The frontier. Brooks sends the brawl through the wall of the backlot into the musical soundstage next door, then the commissary, then Hollywood Boulevard, where Bart and Jim buy tickets to the end of their own film. The gag converts the absolute out-of-field into a relative one. The Open turns out to have a street address in Burbank. It is the same instinct that put Basie in the sand: keep taking cinematic technique and making it a physical object you can walk into.
He had help. Keaton's projectionist walks into the screen he is watching in Sherlock Jr.; Brooks runs that backwards, sending his characters out of the picture to buy seats for it. Hellzapoppin' opens on its own soundstage and keeps cutting to the projection booth, which Brooks rebuilds as a set beside a set. Duck Amuck strips the frame to blank paper and pans off to the animator's hand, Warner cartoon logic scaled up to a Warner backlot torn open by its own cast. Duck Soup gave him permission to let the plot simply stop and the escalation continue. And Hope and Crosby had already worked out the aside that doesn't collapse the picture, which is what Bart and Jim do for ninety minutes before the picture finally does collapse.
What it changed: a genre's plot could now be executed correctly and be the joke at the same time. The money it made bought Young Frankenstein, in black and white, at another studio, within the year. It could only have been made when it was, while the standing sets and wranglers and lifelong Western performers were still, barely, in working order. A parody built with the original tooling.
Watch the light next time. Watch how seriously the desert is photographed while the film dismantles the reason anyone ever photographed it that way. And sit with the last minute: the only exit from a myth was out of the frame, and out of the frame was Hollywood Boulevard, and then a chauffeured car heading into a sunset. Escape, or just a larger set? Brooks declines to say.
Concepts in play
- the mental-image (Thirdness) — Biroc shoots Rock Ridge with full genre fidelity and "nothing in the image is winking" — when Bart rides in wearing Gucci trim, "the incongruity has to be carried entirely by the audience's own genre literacy."
- mark — The film leaves the Western's furniture "structurally intact": the black-hatted land grabber, the drunk gunfighter, the saloon chanteuse, the arriving lawman — each an object that means by its customary chain.
- demark — The Count Basie Orchestra physically produced in the sand, playing "April in Paris" mid-desert, inside an otherwise straight Western frame.
- action-image, large form — Hedley Lamarr wants the land for the railroad and makes life in Rock Ridge unbearable; the town demands a sheriff; the sheriff arrives to transform the situation. The genre skeleton is left fully functional.
- the encompasser — The frontier land itself and the railroad's claim on it form the encompassing situation that calls every character into motion.
- binomial — Biroc's low-angle compositions of Taggart and his men "have the weight of genuine menace" — force-against-force staged with real generic conviction against Bart.
- attraction-image — Lili Von Shtupp's saloon number, pastiching Dietrich in *Destry Rides Again* down to the accent, the chair-draped posture and the chorus-of-cowboys staging; and the Basie orchestra and the Busby Berkeley number next door.
- inversion-image — Gene Wilder's Waco Kid, the legendary gunslinger reduced to an alcoholic; Brooks's Governor William J. Le Petomane; Mongo punching a horse.
- consciousness of clichés — The film treats the Western's racial silence as the genre's constitutive lie and makes the townspeople say the word "in the flat unembarrassed register of people who have never been asked to justify themselves."
- the gest — The townspeople's flat, unembarrassed delivery of the slur, and Kahn's citational Dietrich posture — attitudes that expose a social and theatrical relation rather than express feeling.
- weak links — Howard and Greene cut so that "the film's basic unit is the bit, and the cutting protects the bit's timing above continuity, atmosphere, or narrative momentum. Sequences are permitted to run to their limit and then stop hard."
- condemnation of the plot — The conspiracy is run by the Attorney General himself: Hedley Lamarr persuades the Governor to send a Black sheriff expecting the town to collapse in outrage, so the railroad can take the land.
- the people are missing — "The frontier was built by Black cowboys, Chinese railroad labor, and Indigenous people whose land it was; the Western as Hollywood practiced it had largely erased all three." Brooks casts himself as a Yiddish-speaking Indigenous chief.
- out-of-field-absolute — The Western's horizon as the promise of a larger whole — a promise the climax cashes by breaking the brawl out of the backlot into the studio commissary and onto Hollywood Boulevard.
- out-of-field-relative — The brawl crashes through the wall into the adjacent musical soundstage, turning the unlocatable beyond into a space literally next door.
- the Open — The anamorphic scope format is used "not for landscape grandeur but as a citation of landscape grandeur," and the finale reveals the whole it opens onto to be a Warner Bros. production.