Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Fury
1936 · Fritz Lang · Fury on Sightlines
A woman leans across a store counter to pass along something she heard. Lang cuts to a row of hens, heads jerking, beaks going. Then back to the women. It reads as a gag for about half a second, and then it stops being one, because the film has just told you where the next hour is headed: under the barbershop and the saloon and the tidy storefronts of this town there is a barnyard, and it is coming up through the floor.
Deleuze has a name for the layer that cut exposes. The furnished, sociable setting he calls a derived milieu — the town as it would describe itself to a visitor. Showing through it he finds what he calls an originary world, which is not a place you can drive to but a stratum of appetite: hunger, pack, slope. In the naturalist line he traces from Stroheim to Buñuel, the milieu is a crust and the originary world is what cracks it. Lang gets the whole idea across in two shots. The gossip is not this woman's private moral failing. It is the barnyard using her.
Once the crowd starts for the jail, Joseph Ruttenberg's camera stops finding people in it. The mob is photographed as one writhing organism with faces surfacing out of it, lit with a horrible exhilaration, then swallowed again. Deleuze's word for that is the dividual: a collectivity that has become a single unit of feeling, neither one person nor a sum of many. The faces aren't characters. They're readings taken off one body's temperature. And the fire that body sets is the most alive thing on screen. This is what Deleuze means by expressionism: light and shadow worked as a gradient until objects take on a life that is neither organic nor human.
The craft debts here are exact and worth naming. The hens come out of Eisenstein — Strike's shock cuts between people and animals are the direct license for an aside that argues instead of narrating. The assault on the jail is Frank Sullivan's rhythmic crescendo, small gestures of violence stacked until the crowd jumps to a new quality: the method of the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin, what Deleuze calls pathetic montage, where accumulation produces a leap rather than a sum. The chiaroscuro is Caligari's, cooled by an MGM cameraman until it distorts faces only at the moment they turn cruel. The mass choreography is Lang's own, carried over from Metropolis, where he had already learned to move human beings like material. And the crowd as tribunal is M, restaged in English, with the same refusal to say cleanly whether a mob is ever justice.
Structurally the first half is a textbook of the large-form action-image: a global situation bears down until someone acts decisively and the situation is transformed. Lang plays one trick with it. The man at the center never acts. Joe perceives, and then he is simply held. The acting subject of the first half is the town. Lang trained as an architect, and he builds the trap in the composition before he builds it in the plot — bars, window frames, doorways, sightlines. Deleuze thinks of the frame as a closed set, a system saturated with information that determines everything inside it. In Lang the frame is the verdict, entered early.
Then the jail burns, the film breaks in the middle, and the cutting goes quiet and clinical. Joe is alive and nobody knows it. What Spencer Tracy does with the second half is the film's hardest achievement: grief hardening into appetite, an ordinary man on what Deleuze calls a line of slope, the irreversible downward gradient of the impulse-image, where a drive eats the person carrying it. He is not recovering. He is descending, and Lang times the descent in silences.
And then Lang puts a movie projector in the courtroom. Newsreel footage of the mob at the jail is run as evidence, and faces are identified from it. This is the invention, the thing nobody had quite done: the recording apparatus walks into the story as a witness. Deleuze would call what it produces a lectosign, an image that has lost the self-evidence of action and now has to be read, deciphered, held up and interpreted. It also completes what he calls the relation-image — meaning that exists only for a third party who holds the relation, here literally a jury. The projector is making the claim André Bazin would later make for photography: this image carries a piece of its object with it, so it cannot simply lie.
Here is the cold part. The footage is true. Every face in it did what it shows. The proposition it proves is false, because Joe is sitting in a room listening. Lang has built a machine in which the evidence is honest and the verdict is a lie, and the man forging the lie is the victim. Deleuze calls that figure le faussaire, the forger: the character who manufactures a truth and gets an institution to ratify it. Fury doesn't go all the way into the powers of the false, since we always know what really happened. It goes to the door. The court has true pictures and no truth, which is a harder thought than "mobs are bad," and it is the thought Lang kept returning to for the rest of his American career.
One thing has to be said plainly rather than folded into the praise. Lynching in 1930s America was overwhelmingly a crime against Black Americans, and Lang's victim is a white man picked out by rumor. Whatever the mix of MGM caution, Production Code limits, and Lang's wish to universalize mob psychology, the evasion and the technique are the same move: rendering a crowd as one organism with one affect is exactly what lets the film avoid looking at who American crowds actually killed. The abstraction that makes the jail sequence terrifying is also the abstraction that protects the audience. Both are true, and the film is more interesting when you hold them together.
What it did to the form: a diptych that refuses to keep its victim sympathetic, built on the Warner template of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, where an innocent man is ground through an American institution and the camera treats that as documentary fact. MGM was the least likely studio to pay for it. The ending pulls Joe back from the brink and has been read ever since as a softening; who tempered it isn't something the record settles. They Won't Forget followed the next year, the lynching drama had its short American run, and the idea of footage as testimony has never left the courtroom or the movies.
Watch it again for eyes. Who is looking, who is being looked at, and who gets to run the film back. Then ask whether that last scene stops the machine, or only lets one man step out of it.
Concepts in play
- originary world (and its derived milieu) — The intercut of gossiping townswomen with a row of clucking hens: the town's sociable surface (barbershop, saloon, storefront) shown as the crust over a stratum of appetite and pack behaviour.
- dividual — Lang and Ruttenberg photograph the mob as a single writhing organism rather than as individuals, cutting to faces lit with a horrible exhilaration — a collectivity rendered as one unit of feeling.
- pathetic montage — Frank Sullivan's assault-on-the-jail sequence: individual gestures of violence stacked into an accelerating rhythmic crescendo until the crowd leaps to a new quality — the Odessa Steps method acknowledged in the film's debt to Battleship Potemkin.
- dialectical (Soviet) montage — The cut from gossiping women to clucking hens — associative intellectual montage producing a third meaning, directly licensed by Eisenstein's people/animal shock cuts in Strike.
- expressionism — The burning of the jail as mounting chiaroscuro: firelight, smoke and surging silhouettes, the Weimar light-shadow gradient (via Caligari) tempered by Ruttenberg to distort ordinary faces at the moment they turn cruel.
- large-form action-image — The first half's structure: the small town as an encompassing social ecology in which rumor circulates like current, pressing until the mob's decisive act (storming and torching the jail) transforms the situation — with the protagonist held out of the circuit entirely.
- the closed set (cadre) — Lang's architect-trained geometric framing: bars, windows and doorways composing the mise-en-scène into cages long before Joe is literally behind them.
- line of slope (degradation) — Tracy's second-half transformation into a gaunt, embittered figure whose grief has hardened into something close to sadism, the cutting turning patient and clinical to track the corrosion.
- lectosign (the readable image) — The trial sequence, where newsreel-style footage of the mob at the jail is projected as courtroom evidence and faces must be identified from it — an image that has to be deciphered rather than acted upon.
- relation-image (the mental image) — The courtroom installs a literal third party: the jury reads the projected footage, so the meaning of the images exists only in the relation a knowing third holds between film and charge.
- le faussaire (the forger) — Joe survives and conceals it, allowing the mob's ringleaders to be tried for a death that did not occur — the victim manufacturing a truth and forcing a court to ratify it, while the film evidence against the defendants is genuine.