It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film ends in a hospital ward. Everybody who has spent three hours driving, flying, digging and double-crossing is now in traction, strung up in plaster, unable to move. Ethel Merman comes in, steps on a banana peel, and goes down. The ward laughs. It is the oldest gag the medium has, and the laughter is involuntary, produced by pain — bodies that can no longer act doing the only thing left.

Hold that picture. It is the punchline of the largest machine for manufacturing motion American comedy ever built, and it is a picture of total immobility.

Deleuze's name for the ordinary logic of classical cinema is the movement-image: somebody perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it. Perception, feeling, action, closing a circuit. Plot is the record of that circuit closing. Nearly all of Hollywood before 1945 runs on it. Mad World runs on it harder than anything else in the language. A man dies on a mountain road and says a number. Everyone acts. For three hours nobody stops. What Kramer found out, probably not on purpose, is what the circuit does when you keep your foot down until it floods.

Start with what these people actually are. Between the pure feeling of a close-up and the clean choice of a hero, Deleuze puts a category he calls the impulse-image: a world where behavior isn't decision but appetite. He built it out of Stroheim and Buñuel. It has two floors. The derived milieu is the plausible, socially furnished world we're shown; the originary world is the savage ground the milieu is a thin crust over. Kramer lays both out with a bluntness that's almost diagrammatic. The milieu is aggressively banal — gas stations, a hardware store basement, a small airfield, a municipal park. The production design keeps it that way on purpose, because the joke depends on the mundanity of what greed destroys. The originary world is the desert, and the thing buried in it: a number spoken by a dying man, $350,000 under a big W. That's a fetish in Deleuze's exact sense, a part-object nobody has seen, carrying enough charge to strip a dentist, a furniture mover, an entrepreneur and a wife of everything that made them a dentist, a furniture mover, an entrepreneur and a wife.

And the impulse-image has a direction. Deleuze calls it the line of slope, and it runs down. Knudtson's cutting is additive rather than rising: parallel collapses stacked side by side so the sensation is a system overloading, not a climax approaching. Saul Bass says it before a frame of live action, with a globe that cracks, splits and comes apart. Everybody arrives at the same ward.

The convergence machinery is inherited, and the film names its creditors. Keystone had the grammar by 1914 — Tillie's Punctured Romance already has unrelated parties converging on one object, cross-cut in parallel, cheerfully indifferent to whether the map makes sense. That's Griffith's parallel montage, what Deleuze calls organic-American montage, and its moral shape is convergence toward the last-minute rescue. Kramer keeps the convergence and deletes the rescue. The physical standard comes from Keaton, whom Kramer cast to make the debt explicit: The General established that a vehicular gag must be shot in real space with real hardware really destroyed, held wide enough that nobody can suspect a cheat. Hence a hardware store built to be demolished and a gas station built to be dismantled — that one lifted almost verbatim from Two Tars, where Laurel and Hardy wreck a place by strict, escalating turn-taking. And the noise is Hawks's: the stepped-on, argument-volume overlapping of His Girl Friday, here spread across six-track magnetic stereo so that separate arguments occupy separate positions in the room, years before Altman made that a signature.

Kramer's own invention is the frame. Ultra Panavision 70 gives him 2.76:1, nearly three times wider than tall, a shape that refuses the close-up and the shot-reverse-shot that comedy had lived on since Sennett. Comedy was a genre of the reaction shot. He made it a genre of the wide field: performers ranked across the width, several people doing several irreconcilable things at once, all of it legible, Laszlo lighting it high-key and merciless with no shadow anywhere to hide in. That solution is the argument. Greed is the condition under which a whole crowd becomes readable simultaneously. Nothing is concealed because nobody has an interior worth concealing.

Which makes 1963 stranger than it looks. Deleuze dates the crisis of the action-image to the postwar years and hunts it in Europe: characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they see. His symptoms are a dispersive situation of many weakly linked figures with no real protagonist; a voyage that transforms nothing; a film awake to the clichés it's moving through. Mad World has all three, in a Hollywood comedy, at maximum volume. There is no protagonist; the subject is a system. The trip covers a full day and hundreds of miles and reforms nobody — injury distributed universally, enlightenment to no one. And the cliché-consciousness is in the casting: Keaton appears as a citation rather than a performance, the Stooges as an image of themselves, the finale as the oldest joke available, offered deadpan as the terminus of three hours. Antonioni broke the action-image by going quiet. Kramer broke it by redlining.

One figure sees this coming. Deleuze calls the living center of the movement-image the interval — the hesitation between taking in an image and returning an action, the gap where a self lives. Spencer Tracy plays two hours of pure interval. Culpeper watches from a police office, underplaying continuously, a still point on a screen otherwise full of shouting, the only person in the film who perceives without acting. Then the interval closes and he takes the money. The watcher was never exempt. He was just slower.

So back to the ward. What comes after the action-image, for Deleuze, is the pure optical situation: someone stranded in front of something they can only look at, with no action available. He finds it in bombed Italian streets and Antonioni's hotels. Kramer gets there by breaking everyone's legs. Discharged of every impulse, immobilized, the cast can only look at a woman falling down, and what comes out of them isn't judgment or response, just reflex. For about ten seconds the loudest film in American comedy is a time-image.

Its legacy is easy to trace and hard to love: the ensemble-catastrophe template — a crowd of famous faces, a thumbnail each, one escalating physical disaster — returns as Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, then cheaply as The Cannonball Run and Rat Race, and expensively as 1941, which reproduced the scale and the reviews. The deeper significance is that it is a terminus. Vaudeville, silent slapstick, radio, burlesque and live television sat in one frame, photographed in the widest format the industry ever built, weeks before both the tradition and the roadshow economy that could pay for it came apart.

The open question is the last shot, and the film won't answer it: is the banana peel a confession of exhaustion or a thesis? Watch it once for the stunts. Watch it again for Tracy, who is doing the one thing none of the comedians can do — waiting. The picture is deafening because everyone in it only knows how to act. It's better than its reputation because one man knows how to watch, and the bleakest joke in it is that even he couldn't hold the position.