Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Quiz Show
1994 · Robert Redford · Quiz Show on Sightlines
The film opens on a car. It is a new Chrysler, lit the way Michael Ballhaus lights everything in Quiz Show: amber and mahogany, a honeyed glow on chrome. It is the most desirable object in the frame, and the frame knows it. Before we have properly met anyone, Robert Redford has shown us what the late 1950s wanted and how beautifully it could be sold. Keep that shine in mind. The whole film is about what lies underneath it.
The story is history. In 1958 the NBC quiz program Twenty-One was found to have fed answers to favored contestants. Herbert Stempel (John Turturro), an abrasive champion from Queens, is pushed out. Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a Columbia instructor from a family of poets and scholars, is groomed to replace him. Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a young congressional lawyer, starts pulling at the thread. None of this is a secret, and the film doesn't treat it as one. The suspense comes from watching how a lie gets built, and who agrees to live inside it.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, can help us see what Redford is doing, though not in the way you might expect. Deleuze describes two regimes of film. In the first, which he calls the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the editing serves that chain of perception and action. Quiz Show belongs to this regime, and happily so. Goodwin is its agent. He arrives from outside, asks questions and follows leads. Deleuze would call his story the small form of the action-image. In the large form, a vast situation presses until a hero's decisive act transforms it, as in a Western showdown. In the small form, the act comes first, and a phone call, an interview or a document uncovers a situation that was hidden in plain sight. Redford learned this rhythm as an actor in All the President's Men, where two reporters reconstruct a scandal through patient conversations. Goodwin's inquiry moves at the same pace, one interview at a time.
The most interesting images in the film don't belong to Goodwin, though. They happen inside the isolation booth.
For Deleuze, the close-up gives us the affection-image: a feeling shown on a face before it turns into action, held there for us to read. One kind of face he calls an icon of power. Its intensity builds through tiny movements until it reaches a threshold. Now watch Van Doren in the booth: the sweat on his brow, the theatrical pause, the face that seems to be in agony trying to recall. Stu Linder cuts to it and holds it the way live television did, building suspense out of reaction and delay. We know, because the film lets us know, that this agony is rehearsed. The face that seems to be thinking is performing the look of thinking.
That is Redford's discovery. He takes the image cinema trusts most, a face in close-up caught in the act of feeling, and shows a different screen counterfeiting it. Deleuze has a term for staging that represents an action rather than actually performing it. He calls it the attraction-image, borrowing from Eisenstein's "montage of attractions." Twenty-One is pure attraction. Nobody in that booth is really remembering anything. The booth is soundproofed and quiet, a small theater built for an event that isn't taking place.
The booth is also the film's symbol in Deleuze's sense, an object that sums up the relation organizing the whole film. Redford stages it as both confessional and cage. You step inside to be seen alone with your conscience, and you can't step out until the show allows it. Every relationship in the film passes through that glass box. The producers stock it, the sponsor pays for it, the audience at home believes it, and the men in it agree to sit there.
This is where the film says something about film theory. Classical cinema runs on a contract: inside the fiction, what the camera shows is true. In his late chapters on "the powers of the false," Deleuze praises films that break this contract on purpose, so that truth and lie can no longer be told apart and that confusion becomes the creative point. Quiz Show goes the other way. It is a classical film that keeps the contract by putting a broken one on screen. Television lies about the face. The film around it tells the truth about that lie, and everything stays decidable. Stempel, the least likable man in the story, is right. Turturro refuses to make him charming, and that is the braver choice. Here the truth comes in a grating voice that nobody wants to hear.
Ballhaus makes this harder to settle comfortably. His warm palette is seductive and a little suspect. The year before, he had used a similar glow ironically over the class surfaces of The Age of Innocence. His roving camera from GoodFellas fills the green rooms and studios with movement. So the film's own beauty is implicated. The Van Dorens' Connecticut world, with its soft light and its literary sparring at the dinner table, is somewhere we want to sit as much as Goodwin does. Stempel's world is cramped and fluorescent. The light makes the class argument before any dialogue does. On the soundtrack, "Mack the Knife," the song about a charming, well-dressed murderer, keeps turning up around Van Doren like a raised eyebrow.
What the film does to narrative is quieter but real. It braids three lives together with clean, legible cross-cutting: Stempel's aggrieved fall, Van Doren's compromised rise and Goodwin's disillusioned pursuit. It refuses to give us a single villain. A Face in the Crowd (1957) watched a drifter turn into a monster on camera. Van Doren is that figure with good manners, a decent man talking himself into it. Network (1976) made television a raging, amoral engine. Quiz Show cools that satire into sober tragedy and finds the corruption in the machine itself, whose commercial needs make deception routine. Martin Scorsese, in a cameo as the sponsor, lays out that logic as calmly as someone doing arithmetic. Redford carries over the restraint he developed in Ordinary People, holding back flourish so that the argument comes through performance and charged domestic staging.
Its significance lies in the timing it notices. Quiz Show marks the moment when the close-up's authority over a trusting public passed to another screen, and it asks cinema to look hard at its own tools. If a sweating face can be scripted, what in an image can we trust? Redford's answer is old-fashioned and still persuasive: arrangement, patience, actors, and a viewer trusted to read meaning from where things are placed rather than from what is underlined.
So when you watch, look at the faces in the booth, and then at the faces outside it, at the Van Doren table and in Stempel's household. Ask yourself which ones are performing. Part of the film's quiet power is that the booth isn't the only place where someone is.
Concepts in play
- the movement-image — A classical investigation drama: Goodwin perceives a hidden fraud and acts to expose it, carried by legible cross-cutting among three trajectories
- action-image (small form) — Goodwin, the outsider, pulls a thread through interviews, the investigative two-hander rhythm inherited from All the President's Men, and uncovers an institution's hidden situation
- icon of power — Van Doren in the booth: sweat on his brow, theatrical pauses, a face framed in apparent agony of recall, built up through reaction cutaways and held pauses, and shown to be rehearsed
- attraction-image — Twenty-One stages the appearance of unrehearsed thought; the hushed, soundproof booth is a theater that figures an act of memory that isn't happening
- symbol — The isolation booth, staged as both confessional and cage, condenses the relation linking producers, sponsor, audience and contestants