Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2007 · Tim Burton · Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on Sightlines

The chair tips back and a man goes through the floor.

Hold that image, because it's the whole film. Burton and his designer Dante Ferretti built a London you could cut open like an anatomical drawing: pie shop at street level, barber shop stacked above it, bakehouse dug in below, and one chute running down through all three. Bodies fall. Blood falls. The story falls. The set is the plot, and it only points one way.

Deleuze has a name for films built like this, and it isn't one of the famous ones. Between the close-up that holds a feeling and the action that changes a situation, he found a third kind of image: the impulse-image. Not a motive you could explain in court, not a plan. A pull. Films in this mode — Stroheim, Buñuel, Losey — show you a respectable surface (a hotel, a parlour, a shop) and then reveal it as the skin over something older and hungrier. Deleuze calls the surface the derived milieu and the thing underneath the originary world. Usually a director has to imply that relation with lighting or a glance. Ferretti builds it as a staircase. Shop, chair, chute, cellar.

Why bother with the vocabulary? Because "a wronged man snaps" doesn't predict anything about this movie, and the impulse-image predicts nearly all of it. It predicts that the victims will stop being individuals and become product. It predicts the fetish — the part-object that carries the drive — and here the fetish is a pie. In "A Little Priest" the two of them improvise a taxonomy of human flesh by trade, sorting the citizens of London into flavours, and the number is funny for about a minute before you notice what has happened. The revenge has become a business with a supply chain. Class, which the film keeps in its bones, arrives as a menu.

And it predicts the slope. Deleuze's word for the impulse-image's shape is degradation: an irreversible run downhill, entropy rather than development. Lebenzon's murder montage is exactly that — throat-cuttings compressed and rhythmed until the killing stops being an event and becomes a routine, a mechanism with a tempo. Nothing in that sequence builds. It runs down.

The film begins somewhere else, though, and the slide is the drama. Benjamin Barker versus Judge Turpin is pure action-cinema architecture: force against force, what Deleuze calls the binomial, the oldest engine in narrative film. Grievance, plan, decisive act. Rickman plays his half of it with silken patience, and for a while you are watching a genre do its job. Then the grievance metastasizes. Sweeney stops having an enemy and starts having a trade, and because this film carries its exposition, its scheming and its interiority in song rather than in scenes, you don't watch the decision — you hear it. The action-image collapses into the impulse-image inside the music. That is a genuinely strange thing for a studio picture to do, and nobody in the film comments on it, because Burton cut the commentary out.

That cut is his other structural decision. Sondheim's stage version is framed by a choral "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" — a Brechtian crowd standing outside the story, telling you it is a story. Burton deletes it. What's left is a closed set in the strictest sense: a sooty, vertical, interior London with almost no open sky, no chorus, no outside to appeal to. Deleuze's rule is that the tighter a frame closes, the more it needs an out-of-field to breathe through. Burton seals the door and lets the audience breathe the room.

What he puts in that sealed room is the film's real invention. The image is drained to ash — cold greys, bone, bruised blue, hard directional light carving faces out of gloom, which is Wolski paying Murnau's Nosferatu its lighting debt while Ferretti pays Caligari's warped verticals theirs, and Depp's chalk face and white-streaked hair collect both. Against that, the blood is a red with no referent in nature. Hammer had the idea first in The Curse of Frankenstein: lurid arterial red as a colour event inside a muted period frame. Burton's move is to drain everything else until the red is the only living thing in the movie. That's Deleuze's affective colour — a colour that stops describing an object and absorbs the whole scene into a feeling. Here the feeling is appetite.

The musical gets used just as precisely. Deleuze loved musicals for a specific reason: in a number, the character stops initiating movement and the world starts moving instead, carrying them. He calls it the movement of world, and it's why a dance sequence feels like a door opening in the middle of a plot. Watch "By the Sea" with that in mind. Mrs. Lovett sings an entire future into existence, and the film gives her its only expansive imagery to do it with, bleached and wide after all that interior gloom. Sweeney stays exactly as he was. Depp plays him coiled and near-catatonic; the number happens to him, the way weather happens to a post. Burton keeps the musical's machinery and removes the passenger. It is the saddest joke in the film: she can move a world and she cannot move him an inch. The same principle governs his memories of his wife and child, which arrive in warmer, idealised colour — a recollection-image, a dated past presented as a former present, quarantined in a palette he can look at and never re-enter.

The craft bequest is quieter than the blood. Because the film is through-composed, the cutting answers to Sondheim's phrasing rather than to spatial logic, and the "Johanna" sequence cross-cuts scattered characters and places against one unbroken musical line. Griffith's parallel montage bound its strands by convergence — two lines racing toward a rescue. This binds them by metre. And the vocals were performed by the cast and miked close, conversationally, at the scale of speech rather than of a proscenium. A musical that whispers. Between them, those two choices proved a hard, R-rated, graphically violent stage property could be sung to a camera instead of to a balcony and still find an audience, which is not a small thing to have demonstrated in 2007.

So here is a better eye for the rewatch. Track where Sweeney is during everyone else's songs. He is almost never the one moving. The world sings around him, the chute does the moving, and the only thing in the frame with any colour left is coming out of somebody's throat.

Concepts in play

impulse-image — Sweeney's revenge decays from a motive into an appetite: the grievance metastasizes into indiscriminate slaughter and a cannibal pie business, with the barber shop as the respectable surface over a world of pure drive
originary-world — Ferretti's bakehouse dug in beneath the shop, reached by the death-chute — the savage world the pie shop is merely the surface of
derived-milieu — The pie shop at street level and the barber shop stacked above it: an ordinary Victorian trade premises that is literally the lid on the bakehouse
fetish — "A Little Priest": the pair improvise a taxonomy of human pie, sorting Londoners by trade into flavours — the part-object that carries the drive is food made of people
entropy / degradation — The systematic murder montage, throat-cuttings compressed and rhythmized until killing becomes a grim mechanical routine; the revenge machinery circles back to destroy what he sought to recover
binomial — Barker vs Judge Turpin — Rickman's silken menace against Depp's coiled grievance — the force-against-force structure the film starts inside and then abandons for indiscriminate slaughter
expressionism — Wolski's hard directional key carving faces out of perpetual gloom, Ferretti's steep angles and looming shadow; the chalk-faced, hollow-eyed Sweeney lit as a Murnau vampire (Nosferatu) inside Caligari's distorted verticals
affective colour — The entire film graded to ash — greys, bone-white, bruised blue — so the blood registers as an almost fluorescent red divorced from any realistic reference (the Hammer/Curse of Frankenstein precedent pushed to its limit)
movement of world — The "By the Sea" fantasy, which the film reserves its expansive imagery for: Mrs. Lovett's world moves and dresses an entire future while Depp's near-catatonic Sweeney remains motionless inside it
mnemosign / image-souvenir — Flashbacks of the lost wife and child rendered in warmer, bleached, idealized colour against the drained present — palette itself marking a former present he can see but not re-enter
montage-organic-american — The parallel construction of "Johanna," cross-cutting multiple characters and locations against a single continuous musical line — Griffithian alternation whose binding agent is Sondheim's phrasing rather than convergent action
the closed set (cadre) — A vertical, cramped, perpetually overcast London with little open sky, sealed further by cutting the choral "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" and its Brechtian commentary — the film's out-of-field deliberately removed

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