Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Misfits
1961 · John Huston · The Misfits on Sightlines
A light plane comes in low and the horses break. Men on trucks pay out rope across the flats. Engines, dust, an animal going down. It is the biggest thing that happens in The Misfits, it is staged with complete physical conviction, and nobody in the film can say why it is worth doing. The mustangs are too small to ride. They will be sold for pet food.
That is the switch John Huston throws. Every part of a Western climax is present and working. Russell Metty's light is hard and flat and gives the desert no glamour whatever. George Tomasini, who cut Psycho that same year, breaks the chase into collisions of men, trucks and animals. The machinery runs beautifully. It just isn't driving anything.
Gilles Deleuze wrote two books on cinema, and the Western is where he would expect the first one to hold. He calls classical cinema the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, feels its pressure, acts, and the act changes the situation. The Western is that circuit at its cleanest. Deleuze names the big version the large form — a milieu encompasses the man, the man acts, the milieu is altered. Land presses, someone finally does the thing, the world is different after.
The Misfits keeps every piece of that form and quietly deletes the last step. Deleuze has a name for this, and it isn't an insult: the crisis of the action-image. His account comes with symptoms, and Huston's film has them almost in order. The situation is dispersive — four people who don't add up to a group: a divorcée, an aging cowboy, a flier with a house he never finished, a rodeo rider who has been thrown too many times. They meet around a courthouse and some bars. The links are weak; they move in together on a whim, and nothing holds them but proximity and need. The shape is the trip that transforms nothing, what Deleuze calls the balade: bar, courtroom, rodeo, the half-built house, the desert, and no one arrives anywhere. And the characters are conscious of clichés. They know what a cowboy is supposed to be. They also know the picture has stopped paying. At the centre sit the mustangs as what Deleuze would call a symbol, the object that condenses the film's organising relation — small, unbroken, no longer worth riding, worth something only dead. The title names the horses. The horses name the people.
Why bother with this vocabulary? Because without it the last act looks like a Western that fumbles its climax. With it, the fumble is the subject. The film is not failing to deliver an action; it is showing you what a milieu looks like when it no longer calls one forth.
Underneath that, Huston is doing something he had done before. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a world where the recognisable social surface — he calls it the derived milieu — turns out to sit on an originary world of appetite and entropy. Reno's divorce court, the bars, the rodeo: that's the surface. The salt flats are what's under it. Metty photographs the desert as a hard place to make a living rather than as scenery, and the film runs down a line of slope, each scene a little more used up than the last, until men and animals are simply being worn out by heat. Huston shot it as an actual ordeal, the method he built on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where the location does the stripping and the camera records what's left. The flats give him Deleuze's any-space-whatever in its emptied form too: bleached ground that no longer functions as a setting for action, only as exposure. Huston keeps isolating his people inside the frame while they stand together. Loneliness becomes a fact of geometry.
Then Roslyn, who is why the film matters. When action is unavailable, Deleuze says, a character is reduced to seeing, and the seeing becomes the event. He calls her kind of figure the seer, and the situations that hold her pure optical situations. Roslyn has no rope, no truck, no share of the money, no standing in the trade. She can only watch. Her revulsion at what she watches is the only thing in the film that changes anything, and it isn't an action in the old Western sense at all. It is a refusal, made from outside the economy, by the person with the least power inside it. That is the hinge of postwar cinema in one scene: the moral centre passing from the man who acts to the woman who sees.
Deleuze also gives us a way to name what everyone notices about the acting. He separates a reflexive face, a contour that holds and reflects a single quality, from an intensive one, a face of features where small movements build toward a threshold. Gable's is the first kind, classical, weathered into authority, read from outside. Clift and Monroe give the second, Actors Studio faces in permanent micro-motion. People call this a clash of acting cultures. It's more useful to watch it as the film's argument running inside the performances: an old image of a man, still perfectly legible, being looked at by a newer interiority it has no answer for.
André Bazin, who called the Western the American film par excellence, worried late in his life about the superwestern — the Western grown ashamed of itself, borrowing justification from social theme or psychology. The Misfits is nearly the limit case of that suspicion, Arthur Miller's stage-talk under a cowboy hat. But Huston pays Bazin back in the currency Bazin cared about: real location, real animals, real heat, scenes long enough for people to talk themselves into the truth, black and white in a standard frame the year the market wanted colour and width.
The debts are specific. Red River had shown that livestock work photographed as labour frays a man and exposes him; Clift carried that knowledge across. The Ox-Bow Incident supplied the anti-Western's moral seriousness, frontier myth turned into indictment. The Gunfighter codified the elegy Gable inherits, the man outlived by his own legend. The Asphalt Jungle gave Huston his ensemble of doomed dreamers and gave Monroe her first real showcase as the outsider with more feeling than the men around her. A Streetcar Named Desire had already staged Method against classical technique, and brought Alex North, who threads restrained Americana through this one. Forward, 1962 is one long funeral for the cowboy: Ride the High Country, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Lonely Are the Brave. The Misfits got there first, and in modern dress, with trucks under the men instead of horses.
What it did to the art is narrow and permanent. It proved a genre's most physical sequence could be staged at full power in order to indict itself, and that a film could hand its resolution to someone who never acts. It was the last film either Gable or Monroe completed, and the tiredness in those bodies is not all performance.
The question it leaves open belongs to Gay, not Roslyn. He isn't stupid and he isn't cruel; when she makes him look at the roundup, he can see it. He does it anyway, up to that point, because the alternative is admitting there is nothing left for a man like him to do. What is a hero when the situation stops calling for one? The film doesn't answer. It keeps the camera on him until you feel the size of the question. Watch it again for the exact moment action stops resolving anything. It comes early. Everything after is four people improvising a life in the gap.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — A full Western climax — trucks, ropes, a light plane driving the herd, cut kinetically by Tomasini — that transforms nothing; the men can see what they are doing but cannot act commensurately with it.
- action-image, large form — The Western's encompassing desert milieu is preserved intact (Nevada exteriors, the roundup as the film's decisive act) but the situation it should transform is never transformed; the film resolves in 'fragile, provisional hope rather than triumph.'
- dispersive situation — Four weakly related principals — divorcée, aging cowboy-turned-gambler, ex-aviator, battered rodeo rider, plus Ritter's older friend — collide around a divorce court and Reno bars rather than forming a purposeful group.
- weak links — 'On a whim, the three decide to move into Guido's half-finished desert home together'; the group is held by proximity and need, not by causal necessity.
- the balade / trip that transforms nothing — Huston stages the film across thresholds and improvised domesticity — bars, a courtroom, a rodeo, the unfinished desert house — 'people temporarily sheltering in spaces that do not quite belong to them.'
- consciousness of clichés — The elegiac, modern-dress anti-Western: characters inhabiting an image of the frontier that has already been foreclosed, Gable's Gay Langland carrying 'the melancholy of the anachronistic frontiersman.'
- impulse-image (naturalism) — The mustang hunt as pure appetite and exhaustion — men, trucks and terrified horses in extreme heat, the animals caught to be sold for pet food; the wind, engines and screaming horses given documentary prominence on the soundtrack.
- originary world — Reno's divorce court, bars and rodeo are the derived milieu; the Nevada salt flats beneath them are photographed by Metty as 'Western landscape stripped of grandeur, a place where the mythic scenery has become merely a hard place to make a living.'
- line of slope / degradation — The film's irreversible downward movement toward exhaustion — the shoot itself a punishing ordeal in the desert heat, the roundup wearing down men and animals alike, in the Huston template of men undone by their own quest.
- any-space-whatever (emptiness) — 'The Nevada exteriors are rendered as bleached, unforgiving space; the human figures are small against salt flats and mountains'; staging 'repeatedly isolates figures within the frame even when they are together.'
- pure optical and sound situations — At the roundup Roslyn has no role in the trade and no means of intervening; she can only look and listen while the men work.
- the seer (voyant) — 'Roslyn's revulsion forces the men to confront what they are doing' — the film's decisive turn comes from the watcher, not from an agent, and is a refusal rather than an act.
- reflexive vs intensive face — Gable's classical star face, 'weathered, easy, authoritative,' set against the interior, Method-inflected faces of Monroe, Clift and Wallach — a friction the film converts into its subject, the old West meeting a newer neurotic modernity.
- symbol (relation-image) — The mustangs: 'the misfits of the title are the small, unbroken mustangs, no longer worth riding and fit only to be sold for pet food, and by clear extension the people who catch them.'