Tora! Tora! Tora! · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A message is decoded in one room and has to walk to another. That short trip — down a corridor, into an in-tray, behind a queue of other paper — is where Tora! Tora! Tora! actually lives. Watch it again and notice how much of it is people reading: intercepts, telegrams, war-room maps, the faces of clocks. The Japanese carrier fleet is already at sea. American command can tell something is wrong and cannot make the knowing arrive anywhere in time. The film's real suspense isn't whether the attack comes. It's the drag on a piece of paper.

Deleuze has a name for what has happened to these men, and it's the reason this cold, procedural film is more interesting than it first looks. He called it the crisis of the action-image. In the classical Hollywood the film was born into, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; perception flows into action, action resolves the situation. Deleuze called that circuit the sensory-motor link, and it's the engine of nearly every war picture before this one — a hero sees the threat and answers it. What the postwar cinema broke was exactly that link: people who can see perfectly well what is coming and can no longer react adequately to it. That is not a failing in Admiral Kimmel or General Short (Martin Balsam and Jason Robards, the two commanders who took the official blame). It is the film's subject. They are drowning in accurate information that will not convert into a single timely act. The film makes the crisis of the action-image into history itself.

Deleuze also gave us the shape such films tend to take, and Tora! hits the whole checklist. No hero. No romance. No villain. Instead a dispersive situation — a swarm of loosely connected officials across two governments, two navies, two languages, none of whom is the center. The connective tissue is deliberately slack: weak links, elliptical cuts between a Japanese planning room and an American code office that never once share a scene. Classical editing binds cause to effect. Here the editing keeps two chains of cause running side by side precisely so they can fail to meet. The bi-national production — Masuda and Fukasaku shooting the Japanese half in Japanese, Fleischer the American half in English — isn't just a fairness gesture. It's the dispersive situation built into the crew.

So who holds the film together, if no character does? You do. This is what Deleuze means by the relation-image, the mental-image: meaning that exists only in the relations a knowing third party — the audience — supplies. Every scene of American complacency is unbearable only because you carry knowledge the men on screen lack. Dramatic irony isn't a mood here; it's the film's basic image-type. The picture is engineered around a viewer who reads the whole board while each official reads only his corner of it.

And once you're reading, watch the objects. Deleuze distinguishes the mark — a thing that means by an agreed chain, "when you see this, expect that" — from the demark, the anomaly that should break habit and force a new reading. The title is the purest mark in all of cinema: Tora! Tora! Tora!, three syllables of radio traffic that mean nothing except, by prior agreement, "surprise achieved." A signal that is pure relation. The tragedy on the American side is a parade of demarks misfiled as marks — warnings, odd readings, a decryption that should have detonated the whole command and instead got slotted into routine. The film is a study in signals that arrive and don't land.

Then the attack, and the logic inverts. For roughly two hours the sensory-motor link is jammed; in the raid it is suddenly, brutally restored — but on the Japanese side. This is the action-image in its large form: a global situation pressed to the point where a decisive coordinated act transforms everything. The staging knows it. All those airless conference rooms give way to harbor, airfield, open sky; L.B. Abbott's full-scale mock-ups and miniatures render the assault as one machine doing exactly what it intends. The shock is formal before it's moral — release from interior confinement into pure efficacious movement.

The countdown grammar is inherited, and worth naming. Cross-cutting to build dread toward a foreknown act of violence runs straight back to Battleship Potemkin; the distributed-direction, multi-command, bilingual ensemble is lifted whole from Zanuck's own The Longest Day; the disaster-as-reconstruction method — no hero, cut between the bridge and the boiler room — is the grammar of A Night to Remember, and the dossier-fidelity procedural look is Fox's own The House on 92nd Street scaled to catastrophe. What Tora! does with this inheritance is turn Griffith's organic American montage — the convergent cross-cut racing toward the last-minute rescue — inside out. Everything converges. The rescue never comes. The parallel lines meet only in the fire.

That's the film's quiet radical move, and why it still feels modern. It made a bureaucracy the tragic agent of a war film and asked the audience to be the only mind in the room that sees the whole. Some viewers feel the long build as inertia, and that's fair — but the inertia is the point. It's the sensation of a system that perceives and cannot act, held for two hours until the sky opens. Watch it again for the paper, not the planes. The paper is where the war is lost.