Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Cecil B. Demented
2000 · John Waters · Cecil B. Demented on Sightlines
Somebody rolls up a sleeve and there it is, inked into the arm: PECKINPAH. Somebody else has Fassbinder. Anger, Preminger, Warhol, on down the roster. The Sprocket Holes have tattooed their taste into their skin the way a gang tattoos its street or a convert tattoos a saint. It's the funniest idea in Cecil B. Demented and also the most serious one. John Waters looked at film love in 2000 and saw a religion with membership markings.
Start there. The whole movie runs through that arm.
Here's what these people actually do. In an ordinary action picture, what Deleuze called the action-image, someone sees a situation and does something that changes it. Punch lands, situation shifts, chain continues. Cecil's gang never quite gets there. They hit a studio location, a state film-commission luncheon, a multiplex, always armed, and always with their own camera rolling. Kidnapping Honey Whitlock is an act. Kidnapping her while your crew shoots coverage is a picture of an act. Deleuze had a name for that bend: the reflection-image, where the deed is transposed into figure and spectacle instead of being driven into an obstacle. The Sprocket Holes don't do things. They stage things. That's the comic motor, and it's why the film escalates without ever arriving — Jeffrey Wolf cuts each scene to its punchline and leaves, so the picture becomes one long ladder of raids with barely a breath between rungs.
Waters puts the joke in the lens. Robert Stevens photographs all of this flat, high-key and poster-bright, the clean light of a mainstream studio comedy, while Waters blocks nearly everything frontally, wide or medium-wide, performers squared to us rather than to each other. A cartoon about people who despise cartoons. That blocking is the Dreamland house style going back to Pink Flamingos, where you plant a non-actor facing the lens and let them declaim to an implied crowd. Deleuze, borrowing from Eisenstein, calls staging like this the attraction-image: a scene presented as a turn, an exhibit, a number, rather than melted into story. Waters has been mounting attractions since Multiple Maniacs, whose Cavalcade of Perversion lured a paying audience into a tent, locked the flap, and turned the performers loose on them. Cecil B. Demented is that apparatus at feature scale. Captive spectators, an armed troupe, a show aimed at the people watching it.
The cell itself comes from Godard. La Chinoise gave us the small ideological commune in a shared flat, slogans on the walls, each member turning to camera in turn to deliver a position statement. Cecil's roll call is that device rebuilt as farce: state your name, state your director. Godard's students recite Mao. Waters' recite Preminger. Deleuze's late word for this is fabulation, and it's worth having plainly: political cinema, he thought, doesn't record a people that already exists, it catches people in the act of legending themselves, inventing a collective by narrating one. The Sprocket Holes take adopted names, claim patron saints, swear a vow of celibacy for the duration of the shoot (Dogme's Vow of Chastity, five years on, played for laughs), and chant "Demented forever!" the way a congregation answers a priest. Deleuze's companion phrase lands with a sting here: the people are missing. The gang claims to be defending the small theaters, and in 2000 the small theaters were dying, the late-90s megaplex overbuild folding into a wave of exhibitor bankruptcies right as the film opened. They're a liturgy with no parish.
Which brings back the tattoo. Deleuze took the word gest from Brecht: a posture that lays bare a social relation without anyone having to explain it. Van Smith's costumes are the film's densest writing, and the director tattoo is its sharpest gest, cinephile identity converted into a literal gang marking. Taste as tribe. Anger's Scorpio Rising had already shot patches and gear in close-up as a readable creed, pop songs running over ritual dressing; Waters swaps the bike club for the film club and the swap costs him nothing, which is the observation. And the gang moves as one thing. Low-angle, hard-cut, uniformed, a single body in motion — that metabolism comes straight out of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. Deleuze would call the result a dividual, a collective filmed as one affect instead of a set of separate people.
Now the good part. In the raid sequences, Waters intercuts the gang's footage with his own coverage of the same event. Two image regimes, one moment. The gang's material is grainy, unstable, roughed up at the lens; the surrounding photography stays clean and legible. Deleuze's crystal-image is an actual image and its own reflection locked together so tightly you can't say which one came first, and the film-within-a-film was his favorite instance of it. Here the crystal has a blade in it. The "honest" image is the one that took a professional crew and 35mm to counterfeit.
That's where the film picks a fight with film theory. Bazin's realism rests on a photographic contract: the camera's mechanical witness underwrites the image, so the stolen, unpermitted, handheld shot feels truer than the lit one. Cecil believes this with his whole chest. Deleuze's answer is the powers of the false, where truth and falsity become undecidable and that undecidability turns into a creative engine rather than a defect. Cecil is a forger in Deleuze's precise sense: not a liar, a manufacturer of truth, and a persuasive one. Honey's conversion from studio diva to believer is the demonstration. She isn't unmasked, she's re-made, and each version of her is fully sincere while it lasts.
Meanwhile the enemy is clichés and the weapons are clichés. Manifesto, hostage, gun, gang, a director's cut of Patch Adams, a Forrest Gump sequel shooting downtown. Deleuze described postwar cinema arriving at characters who can see the clichés they move through and still can't climb out of them. Waters gets to the same place by comedy instead of exhaustion.
And he implicates himself, which is the film's live nerve. This assault on Hollywood money was shot on 35mm with French capital, Canal+ in the deal, and released in America by Artisan, the company that had put out The Blair Witch Project the summer before. Waters was once the Baltimore kid with a cult and a stolen camera. He cast that kid as a maniac and handed him a gun. Deleuze's discourse-image names a picture that poses a problem it can't resolve, and this one doesn't resolve. There's no position inside it from which the argument can be won. It flopped in 2000. The cult came later, because the target — film love as fundamentalism, the canon as identity, your favorites as your face — turned out to be a forecast.
Watch it again for the seams. Every time the grain changes, ask which image Waters actually trusts. Then ask whether the tattoo has an outside.
Concepts in play
- the Figure (reflection-image) — Every raid — the Forrest Gump sequel location, the film-commission luncheon, the multiplex — is carried out at gunpoint with the gang's own camera rolling, so the deed is staged as spectacle rather than executed to change a situation.
- attraction-image — Waters stages nearly everything frontally in wide or medium-wide, performers arranged for the audience rather than for each other — the presentational Dreamland blocking inherited from Pink Flamingos and the captive-audience tent of Multiple Maniacs' Cavalcade of Perversion.
- fabulation / legending — The Sprocket Holes take adopted names, tattoo chosen patron directors on their bodies, swear a vow of celibacy for the shoot and chant 'Demented forever!' as liturgy — a collective narrating itself into existence, with Cecil's roll call of recited director-names taken from La Chinoise's position-statements to camera.
- the people are missing — The gang attacks exhibition venues in defense of the small theaters, at the exact moment (the late-1990s megaplex overbuild collapsing into exhibitor bankruptcies) when those theaters and their audience were disappearing.
- the gest — Van Smith's uniforms, color-coded specializations and the director tattoos — Preminger, Peckinpah, Anger, Fassbinder, Warhol — turn cinephile taste into a literal gang marking, rebuilt from Scorpio Rising's insignia-in-close-up as readable creed.
- dividual — The gang is shot as a single unit in motion — low-angle hero framing of costumed figures moving together, hard cuts landing on movement, the metabolism and uniform logic drawn from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.
- hyalosign (crystal-image) — In the raid sequences, footage from the gang's camera for Raving Beauty — visibly degraded grain, dropped stability, rough at the lens — is intercut with the film's own clean coverage of the same event, so the viewer holds two mediations of one moment and must judge which looks more real.
- powers of the false — The film's whole apparatus turns on the belief that only stolen, handheld, unpermitted images are honest — a belief the picture disproves by manufacturing that roughness with a professional crew on 35mm.
- le faussaire (the forger) — Cecil, a messianic underground director, abducts Honey Whitlock and converts her; she shifts from studio diva to true believer without being unmasked, each identity sincere in turn.
- consciousness of clichés — The running gag of a 'director's cut' of Patch Adams and the Forrest Gump sequel shooting downtown: a gang at war with clichés whose entire arsenal — manifesto, hostage, gun, uniform — is itself cliché.
- discourse-image — A satire of anti-Hollywood purity made on 35mm with Canal+ money and released in America by Artisan, the distributor of The Blair Witch Project, by a director who had himself been a Baltimore filmmaker with a cult and a stolen camera.