Midway · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the sky over Midway during one of the big attack runs and something keeps flickering at the edge of belief. A dive-bomber peels off; the grain coarsens; the blue goes thin and milky; the plane that pulls out of the dive is not quite the plane that went into it. Ships of the wrong class slide into the same engagement. For a second the war on screen is happening in two or three different decades at once. Hold onto that flicker, because it is the truest thing in the film. Midway's battle was never filmed. It was assembled.

That fact reorganizes everything. Jack Smight's 1976 spectacle is a movement-image picture in its bones — the kind of cinema Deleuze describes as a sensory-motor circuit, where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cut exists to serve that chain. The docudrama wants the cleanest version of this. Call it the action-image in its large form: a global situation (Japanese momentum running unchecked across the Pacific) presses on everyone until a single decisive act — the June 1942 ambush off Midway — transforms it into its opposite. The battle is the encompasser, the milieu that calls the action out of the men inside it; Nimitz, Spruance, Yamamoto are bound to it, force answering force, two navies locked in the oldest shape an action movie knows: the duel. The film inherits this shape honestly, from Griffith's convergent cross-cutting down through The Longest Day, which taught Hollywood to fracture a real battle into short ensemble vignettes, and Tora! Tora! Tora!, which taught it to intercut two command chains. When Smight cuts from an American flag bridge to a Japanese one and back, you are watching organic montage in the American grain — parallel lines converging on a single outcome.

The smartest stretch of the film leans on a different image entirely. The codebreakers at Station HYPO suspect the Japanese target is Midway but can't prove it, so Rochefort has the island radio that its desalination plant has broken — and waits. When Japanese traffic reports that "AF" is short of water, the riddle resolves. This is pure relation-image, what Deleuze calls the mental-image: meaning built not from anything we see move but from a chain the mind holds. "AF" becomes a mark — a sign legible only through its customary link, the way smoke means fire. The audience is enlisted as the knowing third party who closes the loop. It is the one place the film thinks rather than detonates, and it works because nothing has to match: a word on a page lies flat, immune to the seams that wreck the combat.

Those seams are the real subject. Editing — the dossier names it the film's "true authorial center" — is doing something no war film should have to do: binding library footage to new shots of actors reacting, building one sky out of stock that was never meant to fit. And here Midway backs into a concept it could never have intended. Deleuze's lectosign is the image that loses its sensory-motor obviousness and has to be read — you no longer simply see it, you decipher it. Midway's combat does exactly this, by accident of budget. The grain shifts, the color timing jumps, the aircraft change type mid-dogfight, and your eye stops believing and starts sorting: which footage is this, from when, of whom? The action-image is hollowed out — not into the modern time-image by any artistic intent, but into a thing you must puzzle over. Henry Fonda's Nimitz holds the line against this drift the only way a movement-image can: his measured, paternal, nearly immobile face is a qualisign, a reflecting surface that radiates one steady quality — authority — and gives the cutting something to keep returning to. John Williams's score does the rest of the suturing, supplying the through-line the assembled action cannot.

Go one layer down and the accident turns poignant. Some of this footage is John Ford's own 16mm color film, shot from Midway atoll under fire in 1942 — real planes, real men, many of them about to die. Recycled into a 1976 melodrama and scored by Williams, those frames become something Deleuze reserved for far more deliberate films: a stratigraphic image, an emptied past spoken over by a present that did not live it. The dead pilots perform their deaths again for Charlton Heston's invented subplot. The film doesn't know it has done this. That not-knowing is its own small instance of the powers of the false — truth and reenactment fused until you can't cleanly separate the document from the staging.

So what did Midway do to film? As art, little — it sits at the exhausted end of the all-star battle docudrama, before the propulsive combat editing that came later. As a limit case, it's worth keeping. It shows what an action-image looks like when its motion is entirely borrowed, when a war movie quietly becomes a reading of its own archive. The next time you watch it, don't fight the joins. Watch for them. Every visible seam is the film confessing that the past it depicts survives only as footage — and that someone, in a cutting room, decided where to splice it back to life.