The Untouchables · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the pram. A mother drags it up the marble stairs of Union Station, the strap slips, and as the gunfire starts the carriage begins its slow descent — bouncing one step at a time, the baby inside, while Ness and Stone trade shots in optical slow motion above it. You have seen this before. Not in your life: in 1925, on the Odessa Steps of Battleship Potemkin. That doubled vision — you are watching a shootout, and you are watching De Palma watch Eisenstein — is the key to the whole film, and Deleuze gives us the words to say why.

Start with the obvious. The Untouchables is the action-image in its purest Hollywood form: a man perceives a situation (Capone owns Chicago) and acts to change it. Deleuze called the strongest version of this the large-form action-image — a vast, encompassing situation presses on a character until a decisive act transforms it. The situation here is total: a city of corrupt cops, bought judges, gunmen. Deleuze had a name for that pressure too, the synsign or encompasser, the milieu that calls forth the act — and De Palma and Burum render it physically, in low-angle anamorphic shots that inflate courthouses and station ceilings into something that bears down on the small upright figure of Ness. Out of the encompasser the film organizes its binomial: force against force, Ness against Capone, the duel that the whole genre exists to stage. This is cinema's grammar at full sensory-motor power. Mamet's screenplay strips the history down to it deliberately — good man, evil man, the question of how far one will go.

So far, so classical. But notice what De Palma keeps doing to his own action. He lifts it into quotation marks. Deleuze, tracking the moment the action-image begins to turn back on itself, describes the reflection-image — action transposed into figure, into spectacle and discourse, rather than simply acted. Its cinema-native form is the attraction-image: Eisenstein's old "montage of attractions," staging that shows rather than does. This is the real De Palma. The Union Station sequence is not just a gunfight; the dossier calls it, exactly, "a piece of formal scholarship in genre clothes." The carriage on the steps is an action that has become a citation of an action. De Niro's Capone works the same way from the other side. The baseball-bat scene is, in the dossier's word, "pure spectacle of violence" — Capone circling his banquet table, the camera framing him as he performs the murder for the men at the table and for us. That is the gest in Deleuze's sense: a posture that lays bare a theatrical and social relation rather than advancing a plot. Capone does not inhabit the opera house, the suite, the courtroom; he occupies them, as a stage. De Niro plays him as "consciously artificial," and the artifice is the point.

This is why the lens earns its keep. Read The Untouchables as a straight thriller and the slow motion looks like decoration, the Potemkin quote like a film-school flex. Read it through the attraction-image and the decoration is the meaning: De Palma is making an action movie about the figures action movies are made of. His frame is the giveaway — those overhead shots that flatten characters into geometric elements on a flat plane (a debt to Welles and Toland that the film wears openly), Malone's bullet-riddled body seen from straight above as composition. The frame is no longer a window onto a deed. It is a picture of a deed, held up for reading. Deleuze would call De Palma's stylized, posed climaxes privileged instants — the decisive, sculptural moment, the opposite of life's any-instant-whatever — and optical slow motion is the machine that pries each privileged instant open and holds it past the threshold of abstraction.

Follow the lineage and the argument firms up, because the film is built from named debts. The carriage is dialectical Soviet montage — Eisenstein's collision of shots producing a third meaning, the shock that De Palma sustains across dozens of cuts to manufacture the same agonized duration. The slow-motion death comes from Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, which codified gunfire elongated "to the threshold of abstraction." The deep-focus institutional grandeur is Toland's Citizen Kane; the predatory Steadicam glides through corrupt corridors descend from Welles's Touch of Evil; the lawman-versus-gangster binary is Hawks's Scarface, the same Capone-era Chicago re-mythologized; and Morricone simply transplants the operatic leitmotif-and-brass method he built for Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, scoring Capone's rise the way he scored Frank's villainy. De Palma's invention is not any one of these. It is the act of welding them — making a major-studio prestige film whose every set piece is a visible essay on the history of the form, while still, somehow, delivering the genre goods.

That is what the film did to filmmaking. It proved you could run baroque self-citation straight up the middle of mainstream Hollywood and have it land as entertainment, not experiment — that the action-image could become knowingly about itself without losing a single ticket. The 1990s blockbuster's habit of quotation, of the set piece as bravura standalone aria, runs through here. Watch the pram again. It falls, and the baby lives, and the gunmen die in beautiful slow agony, and the whole time De Palma is asking the oldest question his medium knows: when an image moves us, are we moved by the deed — or by every film that taught us how a deed should look?