Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Bad Day at Black Rock
1955 · John Sturges · Bad Day at Black Rock on Sightlines
A man stands in the middle of a screen that is far too wide for him. The four buildings of Black Rock sit bunched at one edge of the frame. At the other edge, men lean in doorways and watch him. This is CinemaScope, the wide format the studios were betting on because television was small and square and free, and William Mellor's camera uses every inch of that width to make one person look cornered in open country. There is nowhere to hide because there is nothing to hide behind.
The man is John J. Macreedy. One arm, a dark suit, and a question: where is the family of the Japanese-American soldier who saved his life. No gun. No badge. No deputies. No way out until the next train. Nothing about him fits the kind of picture he appears to be standing in, and John Sturges knows it.
Gilles Deleuze noticed something genuinely useful about how American movies organize action. They came in two basic shapes. In the big one, which is the Western's own, an enormous situation bears down on a man until he does something that changes it. Deleuze called that surrounding pressure an encompasser: land, town, gang, the thing that squeezes. The act lands, the situation is transformed, the credits roll. The small shape runs backwards. You never see the whole situation. You watch a man make small moves, ask for a room, rent a car, try to send a wire, and each move leaks a little of what is hidden. Deleuze's name for such a move is an index: a gesture that points at something we cannot see.
Black Rock has the big shape's furniture and the small shape's engine, and everything good about it comes out of that mismatch.
Take the purest index first, what Deleuze calls an index of lack. The man Macreedy came to find is not there. There is nothing to photograph. The center of this film is a hole, and every scene arranges itself around the shape of somebody missing.
The second kind is an index of equivocity, a gesture that fits two situations at once and refuses to tell you which. This is Black Rock's daily weather. A man at a window. A truck idling at the far end of the street. A hotel that has no rooms. Coley Trimble crowding into Macreedy's space in the diner. Each of these is either small-town rudeness or a death sentence, and the film will not say. The suspense is not what will happen. It is which movie you are in.
Deleuze also has a pair of terms for how objects carry meaning. A mark is a thing that means what habit says it means. A demark is the anomaly that breaks the habit and forces you to actually think. Macreedy's empty sleeve is the demark this picture is built on. The film spends most of an hour training you, and the town, to read that sleeve as helplessness. Then Newell Kimlin's cutting turns abrupt and Macreedy puts the hulking Coley Trimble on the floor of the diner. The shock is not the violence. It is the retraining.
What Sturges does to the Western's big shape is subtler, and it is why the film still stings. He keeps the encompasser. The desert is enormous, it surrounds, it presses. But he takes away its job. In a Western the great milieu calls an act out of a man. Here it only watches, along with everyone standing in it. The other half of the trap is the town, and Deleuze's term for a frame composed as a working system, a closed set, fits it exactly: four buildings, a handful of interiors, hotel and diner and telegraph office and sheriff's office, the same faces recurring until the geography reads as a machine. Black Rock is a machine for keeping information from leaving. What lies outside the frame is not mystery but adjacency, one rail line away, one telegram away, which is worse than being nowhere near help at all. The train is the film's clock and its only door.
And the people are not, at first, people. Deleuze borrows a word for a crowd filmed as one feeling rather than a group of persons: a dividual. That is Black Rock. The guilt belongs to nobody in particular and sits over everyone like weather. Which makes the real action of the film the decomposition of that single body back into individuals, citizens strung out along a line from guilt through cowardice to late and partial courage, Doc Velie at one end, the sheriff who has drunk himself out of his own office somewhere in the middle.
The drama here is essentially the drama of these faces deciding whether to speak. Deleuze would call that the affection-image, a feeling registered on a face before it discharges into anything, and he distinguishes two kinds. Black Rock has one at each pole. Tracy's is a reflecting face, held nearly still, expressing a single steady quality, moral weight accumulating precisely because he refuses to spend it. Robert Ryan's Reno Smith is the other kind, an intensive face running a series of small movements toward a threshold. Deleuze's sign for it is the potisign, the icon of power, power in the sense of about to. Smith is frightening because his hatred arrives with reasoning attached.
Now the historical point, and it is not decoration. In exactly these years, European filmmakers were making pictures about people who see a situation clearly and find no action adequate to it. Deleuze dates the great break there and calls it the crisis of the action-image. Black Rock is full of such people. They are the entire town. They watched a murder, did nothing, and have gone on doing nothing for years. What is remarkable is Sturges's solution: he quarantines the crisis inside the town, then imports an agent from outside, by rail, on a timetable, to break it. The American action-image survives 1955 by arriving from elsewhere with one arm.
None of this comes from nowhere. The single-location desert standoff, strangers and locals sealed into a roadside outpost talking each other toward violence, is The Petrified Forest (1936), which Millard Kaufman's screenplay compresses into a diner and a hotel lobby. The engine, a whole town sharing one crime, is Fury (1936). The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) had already turned the Western into a tribunal on mob silence, and Black Rock revives that hybrid in a suit and tie, with a rented car instead of a horse. Stagecoach (1939) taught the staging Sturges uses and would use for the rest of his career, an ensemble of distinct moral types under pressure and dwarfed by terrain; watch him scale it up into Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape. The slow exposure of poison under a sunlit ordinary town is Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the reveal-by-degrees mechanism Sturges runs on Reno Smith's town while keeping us exactly as ignorant as Macreedy. And High Noon (1952) had just proved a Western could be squeezed into the classical unities with the community's cowardice as the real antagonist. Black Rock takes that structure whole and moves the date to now.
What it did to the art: it turned the Western's moral attention away from the frontier and onto the settled town, the seam revisionist Westerns would mine for the next twenty years. It changed the American hero's job from conquering a situation to extracting one, which is the shape every stranger-in-a-guilty-town thriller has used since. And it made a technical argument nobody expected, that the widest frame the industry had could be used for pressure instead of pageant.
Watch it again and count the watching. Almost every composition has someone at an edge, looking. Then notice how little Macreedy actually does, and how completely a town comes apart anyway. The hard question is not who killed the man he came to find. It is the one Doc Velie is stuck with. What do you call the years between the crime and the day somebody finally asked? Black Rock at the end is not healed. It has been made to stand in the light, which is the one thing that desert was always good for.
Concepts in play
- action-image-small-form — The plot advances by Macreedy's small moves — asking for a room, renting a car, trying to wire out — each of which discloses a piece of a situation the film never shows whole; the dossier calls it 'a mystery built on withheld information' in which the stranger 'extracts' a secret.
- index-of-lack — The man Macreedy came to find — the family of the Japanese-American soldier who saved his life — is absent from the film entirely; the picture is organized around an unphotographable missing person.
- index-of-equivocity — Mellor and Sturges stage surveillance out of ordinary furniture: 'a man at a window, a truck idling at the far end of the street,' a hotel with no rooms, Coley Trimble crowding Macreedy in the diner — each gesture readable as rudeness or as threat.
- action-image-large-form — The film wears the Western's large-form costume — desert, lone arrival, bought-or-broken sheriff, a town to be tamed — but the stranger 'brings not a gun but a question,' so the transforming act is replaced by an inquiry.
- the encompasser — CinemaScope used against type: Macreedy 'placed alone in a vast, sun-flattened width, dwarfed by land and sky, while the townsmen cluster at the edges of the image, watching' — the milieu surrounds and presses but calls forth no act from anyone in it.
- binomial — Tracy's Macreedy against Robert Ryan's Reno Smith, 'a rancher whose bigotry is rationalized rather than merely brutish,' with Borgnine and Marvin as the town's muscle: force against force, articulate malevolence against banked stillness.
- the closed set (cadre) — Near-unity of place — one street plus hotel, diner, telegraph office, sheriff's office — staged as 'a closed social organism' where 'information cannot escape and into which no help can arrive.'
- out-of-field-relative — 'The recurring image of the train — arriving at the start, longed for as an exit throughout — anchors the geography and the suspense alike'; help exists one rail line or one wire away, adjacent and sealed off.
- dividual — 'A community bound together by a shared crime': the same faces recur hemming Macreedy in, and the guilt belongs to the town as a body rather than to any citizen, until the ensemble decomposes into 'a gallery of citizens ranged along a spectrum of guilt, cowardice, and belated courage.'
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Tracy's 'study in banked stillness' — underplaying, moral authority accumulating through restraint — set against Ryan's 'coiled, articulate malevolence'; a reflecting contour face opposite a feature-driven intensive one.
- icon of power — 'The film's drama is essentially the drama of these faces deciding whether to speak' — micro-movement across held faces building toward a threshold of confession or violence.
- demark — Macreedy's damaged arm, kept half-hidden, trains town and audience to expect helplessness; the diner scene's abrupt cutting, in which the one-armed man fells the hulking Coley Trimble, breaks that customary chain and forces reinterpretation.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The townspeople perceived a murder and have been unable to react to it for years — the alcoholic, compromised sheriff, Doc Velie as unspent conscience — a paralysis the film breaks only by importing an outsider on the streamliner.