Becket · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Henry kneels. His back is bare, the monks' rods come down, and from inside that scourging the whole film unspools backward — a king flogging himself at the tomb of the friend he had murdered. Becket gives away its ending in its opening posture. Everything between is remembered.

That is the first thing to notice, because it tells you what kind of film this is. The picture is built as a flashback, narrated out of grief from Henry's penance at Canterbury. Deleuze had a precise name for the dated, retrieved past that a film stages as a former present: the recollection-image, the image-souvenir. Not the mere act of remembering, but a chunk of bygone time set up onscreen as if it were happening again. Henry at the tomb is the present; the friendship is the summoned past; and because we watch the love knowing it ends in blood, the whole picture tilts backward, elegiac, already mourning what it shows. The architecture isn't accidental. Lawrence of Arabia, cut by the same editor, Anne Coates, opens on a death and remembers its way toward it. Becket borrows the frame and turns it inward, from desert to throne room.

But time is not really this film's engine. Two faces in a room are.

Watch O'Toole's Henry when Becket disappoints him. Nothing is decided in that moment; nothing is done. A feeling registers and stays trapped on the face — what Deleuze calls the affection-image, the close-up as a held charge that hasn't yet spent itself in action. O'Toole gives you the finer version of it, the potisign, the icon of power: micro-movements crossing a face, tenderness curdling toward rage by degrees, the threshold approached and not yet crossed. The cruelty here is that the dossier names a real obstacle. This is an anamorphic widescreen film, a format that resists the tight close-up, mounted around a story that lives or dies on two faces. The filmmakers had to wring intimacy from a frame built for landscape. They did, and the strain is part of the drama.

Now the central move, the one that explains why critics both praised and faulted the film. In an action-image — Deleuze's name for the ordinary grammar of cinema — a man perceives a situation and acts to change it; the punch lands, the situation turns. In Becket almost no one acts. They argue. The church-and-crown conflict is never fought so much as staged, transposed into oratory, ceremony, the long verbal duel. Deleuze calls this the reflection-image, or the Figure: action lifted out of the sensory-motor circuit and reposed as discourse and spectacle. When people dismiss Becket as a "filmed play," they are describing exactly this, but as a flaw rather than a form. The descent it claims — Olivier's Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III — is a whole tradition of English-history cinema where a star's command of verse, not distinctly filmic invention, carries the weight. That lineage is real craft debt, and it is also a Deleuzian commitment: cinema as Figure.

What is the Figure arguing about? "The honor of God" — a phrase the film circles and never settles. This is the discourse-image: an image that poses a problem it cannot resolve. Becket finds a cause worthy of him precisely because Henry hands it to him, and the irony is airtight. No verbal victory is available to either man, which is why it has to end in a body on cathedral stone.

And bodies are where the abstraction becomes visible. Watch Becket put on the vestments. The investiture is not a plot point; it is a posture, and the posture exposes a relation. Deleuze calls this the gest — an attitude of the body that lays bare a social or theatrical bond. Crown versus church is made material in how a man kneels, how robes fall, how Unsworth's camera sets Becket dwarfed beneath the nave and Henry isolated on his throne. The staging carries the politics so the dialogue doesn't have to.

Underneath it all, a world is rotting. Henry's chambers are warm and disorderly, the friendship is corroding scene by scene, and the order that produced both men is decaying from inside. Deleuze's term for an aristocratic, ordered world going to ruin from within is crystal-decomposition. It is the deep mood of Becket: a closed medieval totality, fur and stone and candlelight, with the fracture already running through it.

Where does this leave the film's reputation? The supposed limitation — that it is theatre photographed rather than cinema invented — is the source of its real interest. Becket belongs to a cinema of the Figure and the gest, where power is performed and remembered instead of enacted, and it sits in a tight historical cluster: Murder in the Cathedral gave the same martyrdom a liturgical, interior treatment that Anouilh answers with secular irony, and two years on, A Man for All Seasons runs the identical engine — a principled cleric-statesman destroyed by a willful English king, sustained by two men talking in confined rooms.

So rewatch it for the faces. Not for what Henry and Becket do, because they barely do anything until the end. Watch what crosses O'Toole's face when the love turns, and you will see an entire film's worth of action that never had to move.