Sleeper · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Miles Monroe, two hundred years out of his own century and already running from the secret police, hides in a field of the future's chemically swollen vegetables. He steps on a banana peel the size of a surfboard. And he rides it — helpless, arms wheeling, a small dark man skating across a sunlit absurdity he never asked to wake into. Hold on that image. Almost everything Sleeper is doing is folded into it: a body, a prop, one clean location, and a predicament the body answers the only way it can, by moving.

That looks too plain to need a philosopher. It isn't. Gilles Deleuze opened his study of cinema by arguing that for its first sixty years film was built on what he called the movement-image — a world where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, where perception flows into action and the cut exists to keep that current running. Slapstick is the purest specimen of the type. There is no faster circuit from eye to body than a man who sees a banana peel and is already falling. When Deleuze names the burlesque, he reaches for exactly Allen's ancestors — Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd — because in them the sensory-motor link is at full, gleaming health. Sleeper is their late, deliberate heir.

More precisely, it runs on what Deleuze called the small form of the action-image. The large form starts from a vast situation that bears down until a hero transforms it; the small form works the other way, from the act outward — a gesture, a fall, a mishandled gadget, and only through it does a sliver of the world disclose itself. That is the grammar of the gag, and it is the grammar of this entire picaresque. Miles doesn't comprehend 2173 and then act on it. He grabs the wrong sphere at a party (the narcotic 'Orb'), wrestles an inflating hydro-vac suit that swells into a balloon, mishandles instant food, and each blunder is how the future gets revealed to us. The plot, the dossier admits, is a clothesline. Deleuze would say: of course it is. The small form never needed a strong plot. It needs a body meeting a thing.

Watch what the cinematography understands about this. David Walsh shoots in wide and full, keeping all of Allen in frame, because a pratfall cut too tight loses its geography and a gag with no geography isn't funny. The camera holds and lets the action play out to the beat of the joke's completion. This is not timidity; it is the precise visual ethics of the movement-image. The whole body, the whole space, the unbroken arc of cause into effect.

Then there is the robot. Disguised among the regime's silver servants, Miles freezes his spine, stiffens his gait, and submits to a beauty-parlor sequence as a malfunctioning domestic machine. Deleuze has a name for a posture like this: the gest — an attitude of the body that stops being mere business and starts exposing a relation. Allen impersonating a robot is funny twice over. Once because the movements are wrong. And once because the nervous, stammering twentieth-century man miming the obedient machine is the film's whole argument about the future compressed into a walk: the human reduced to appliance, performing its own obsolescence. The body becomes a piece of social criticism without a word spoken.

The chase that strings these set-pieces together has its own shape. Deleuze would call Miles's route a vector — a zig-zag line of the universe linking spaces that don't otherwise connect, hospital to rooftop to vegetable patch to the Leader's inner sanctum, where the dictator survives as a single nose awaiting cloning. And the film breathes the way action cinema breathes, alternating the vast bright modernist milieu with the taut local line of a man in immediate peril, what Deleuze terms a respiration-space. The antiseptic white architecture — real Colorado Brutalism standing in for the year 2173 — isn't menacing like ordinary dystopia. It is the blank canvas that throws every flailing limb into relief.

Here is why the lens earns its keep, and where the film quietly matters. Sleeper came out in 1973. By then the action-image was, in Deleuze's account, long in crisis: European cinema had broken the link between seeing and doing, handing us characters who could only watch and endure. Allen, working in comedy, did the opposite and did it on purpose. He reached back past sound, past the war, to the silent body of Chaplin's Modern Times fed into the conveyor belt, to Keaton's deadpan endangerment in The General, to Lloyd dangling off the clock in Safety Last!, to Keaton's in-camera trick effects in Sherlock Jr. that taught a future gag could be a real, photographable thing. Sleeper revives the healthy movement-image like a museum keeper who happens to be a genius of timing — and proves it still works, that a man and a banana peel can still carry ninety minutes.

What it did to filmmaking was smaller and sweeter than a revolution. It showed Allen, and us, that his anxious talking persona could be hung on a Keaton skeleton. The screenwriting partnership with Brickman and the Keaton chemistry that crystallize here run straight into Annie Hall. But on its own terms Sleeper is the last great argument for slapstick as a complete philosophy of the image: perceive, act, fall, get up, keep moving. Watch it again for the geography of the gags — the way the camera refuses to cut until the body has finished its sentence. That refusal is the whole silent tradition, smuggled into the future, still funny, still alive.