Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Crimes and Misdemeanors
1989 · Woody Allen · Crimes and Misdemeanors on Sightlines
A well-dressed man stands at the edge of a Seder table and talks to people who are dead. He isn't a child in this memory. He's the ophthalmologist he became, standing in the room as himself while his relatives argue about God and justice and keep passing the food. Allen doesn't cut away to the past and cut back. He walks Judah Rosenthal into it, bodily, and lets him address the table.
This is the film's boldest piece of staging, and it's worth being precise about what it does. A flashback is a dated box: this happened, then, and here it is. What Allen builds is not that. Deleuze has a better name for it, sheets of past — the idea that your past isn't a shelf of retrievable episodes but a set of regions that all still exist at once, and that you move among them the way you move between rooms. Judah is not remembering. He is going somewhere. He needs a ruling on whether a man who kills gets away with it, and the only court he knows how to petition adjourned forty years ago. Call the scene a memory of childhood faith and it goes sentimental. Call it a man consulting a jurisdiction that no longer sits, and it turns cold and exact.
The device is borrowed and the debt is specific. Bergman walks Isak Borg back into his family's past in Wild Strawberries as an unseen adult observer. Allen takes the staging and changes its charge. Bergman's old man is looking for what he lost. Allen's is looking for a verdict, and doesn't get one.
Now the structure, which is where the film does its real thinking. Two plots run in parallel and touch only at the end.
Judah's half runs on the oldest machinery in cinema. Deleuze calls it the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. Most films are made of this, and its grandest version is the large form, where an encompassing situation bears down on a man until he performs the one decisive act that transforms it. Dolores is going to expose the affair and the embezzled funds. Jack knows people. She dies. The situation is transformed. The circuit closes with a click. Plenty of films show a murder; the shock here is that Allen hands the classical, fully functional, Hollywood-grade action machine to the murderer and lets it work. Judah waits for punishment. It doesn't come. The guilt thins out and he goes back to his life.
Cliff's half runs on the opposite. Deleuze's term is the crisis of the action-image: characters who perceive accurately and can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Cliff sees clearly. Lester is a fraud, and Cliff is being paid to make him look good. None of that seeing converts into anything. He loses Halley to the man he correctly despises. He is, by trade, a professional watcher. Deleuze's word for this modern figure is voyant, the seer: someone things happen to visually, with no act available. Allen has built a diptych in which the old cinema and the new one run side by side on the same moral field, and the old one wins. The murderer gets the working plot. The man with a conscience gets to look.
The two strands never cause each other, and that matters. Griffith's parallel montage cross-cuts in order to converge, so the rescue arrives in time. Allen keeps the shape and removes the causality: the lines meet at a wedding, socially, and nothing is rescued. What holds the film together is us. Deleuze calls this thirdness, the relation-image, where the meaning sits not in either strand but in the relation a third party maintains between them. The verdict is the audience's job. Renoir is the model, The Rules of the Game braiding farce and death across one house and one moral field.
Then the coda, the most quietly radical thing in the picture. Judah tells Cliff the story of the murder as if pitching a movie. Cliff objects that the killer has to turn himself in or the story has no meaning. He thinks he is talking about ethics. He is reciting screenwriting convention, and, for decades, actual American law: the Production Code required that crime not pay. Judah's answer is that in life the man goes home and lives comfortably. The thesis arrives as small talk at a party with no music under it. Deleuze would call this the discourse-image, an image that poses a problem it declines to resolve. Allen declines on purpose. Resolving it would prove Cliff right.
The sound carries the rest of the argument. Professor Levy's voice runs over Cliff's black-and-white footage, warm and reasonable, saying that meaning is something human beings make. Then Levy abruptly kills himself, and every calm sentence on that tape curdles. The voice remains; the man who guaranteed it is gone. When voice and image stop underwriting each other like that, the image loses its self-evidence and has to be read. The Levy footage, cut in at intervals like a chorus, is also what makes this film think rather than illustrate — a noosign, in Deleuze's phrase, cinema as a brain working a problem in public.
The craft is Bergman's, imported by hand. Sven Nykvist lights the film the way he lit Cries and Whispers, faces surfacing out of pooled lamplight. Here the grammar becomes an argument, because the protagonist is an eye doctor, the film's rabbi is going blind, and what is lit and what is left dark is a moral distribution. There is no score, only Schubert and jazz records, the compiled-soundtrack method Manhattan perfected. Nothing swells over the killing. Winter Light is the precedent for the flat, unscored theological argument staged as people talking at a table, and Interiors is where Allen first proved he could sustain that register in English without jokes. Crimes is the film that puts the jokes back in without softening anything.
One production fact is worth keeping. Allen was unhappy with the first assembly, rewrote, reshot, and reconceived the Cliff–Halley material. The seamlessness everyone admires in the braid was substantially made in the cutting room. That's useful to know: a tonal double-track like this one is an editorial achievement, not a screenplay's.
What the film hands forward is that shape. A comedy and a murder cut into one moral field, with the judgment relocated from the ending to the viewer. It's a way of letting the guilty walk that doesn't collapse into nihilism, because the film hasn't stopped caring; it has only stopped pronouncing. Renoir's house party made the shape possible. Allen made it portable, and made it available to an American art cinema that had inherited the Code's reflexes long after the Code was gone.
Watch it again for who is permitted to act. Judah acts, and is fine. Cliff only watches, and loses. Ben keeps the faith and loses his sight. The film leaves that arrangement on the table without comment, which is the question it hands you: is seeing clearly worth anything at all, if the man who sees can't move? Watch the lamps.
Concepts in play
- sheets of past (order of time / coexistence) — Judah 'walks into' the Seder flashback, standing in the present room as an adult and addressing his relatives while they debate God and justice — the past entered as a region, not retrieved as a dated episode.
- action-image, large form — An encompassing situation (Dolores's threatened exposure of the affair and the embezzled funds) presses on Judah until he authorizes the decisive act through his brother Jack, and the act genuinely transforms the situation: no exposure, no punishment, an 'eerie, unpunished equilibrium.'
- crisis of the action-image — Cliff perceives Lester's fraudulence exactly and can do nothing with that perception — he is paid to flatter Lester, and loses Halley to him; the 'misdemeanors' strand is a comedy of acts that change nothing.
- the seer (voyant) — Cliff is a documentarian, a professional watcher; his real work is the footage of Levy he screens rather than any action, and the film ends with him listening to Judah rather than acting on what he hears.
- relation-image (the mental-image, Thirdness) — The two plots never causally intersect until a coda at a wedding that resolves nothing; the moral argument — grave crime rewarded, minor vanity punished — exists only in the relation the audience holds between the cross-cut strands.
- discourse-image — Judah relates the murder as if pitching a movie plot; Cliff insists the killer must confess for the story to mean anything, and Judah's reply that in life he goes on living comfortably is delivered as anticlimactic party talk, with no score and no resolution.
- audiovisual disjunction — Louis Levy's calm recorded voice on love and meaning plays over Cliff's black-and-white footage, then is retroactively devastated by his suicide — the voice persists on the track while the body that guaranteed it is gone.
- noosign (the image of thought) — The Levy footage is cut into the fiction at intervals as an explicit philosophical commentary track, making the dramaturgy essayistic: the film reasons about whether morality survives God's death rather than merely depicting it.
- symbol (the object condensing the organizing relation) — The eye: Judah is an ophthalmologist, the rabbi Ben goes literally blind, and Nykvist's chiaroscuro stages moral perception as a distribution of what is illuminated and what is left dark.