Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Chicago
2002 · Rob Marshall · Chicago on Sightlines
A woman walks a corridor in Cook County jail. Grey light, iron doors, a matron's keys. Cut. She is in a spotlight in front of a roaring house, and the whole room is watching her.
Nothing carried her there. No dissolve, no harp glissando, no shimmer at the edge of the frame. Just the cut.
That cut is the film, and it is the answer to a problem that kept Chicago off screens for nearly thirty years. Bob Fosse made the stage vaudeville in 1975 and never got to film it. The trouble was never the songs. It was that audiences had stopped being able to watch someone on a movie screen open their mouth and sing. Fosse had solved that once, in Cabaret, with a rule: you sing only where singing is a job, on a stage, for money, in front of paying Berliners. Rob Marshall, a Broadway choreographer making his first film, solved it the opposite way. He kept the stage and moved it inside Roxie Hart's head.
Deleuze is precise about the kind of image that gets you, and the precision is worth having, because "fantasy sequence" undersells it. He separates two ways a film leaves the present. One is the recollection-image, a dated flashback, a former present filed under the past. The other he calls the onirosign, or dream-image: a circuit that isn't anchored to any memory at all, that spins the present off into what is merely wished. Roxie's numbers are the second kind. She isn't remembering a stage. She has never stood on one. What we're watching is an appetite with a proscenium around it.
Here is why that lens earns its keep. Read the numbers as decoration and Chicago is a well-cut revue with a courtroom attached. Read them as Roxie's wanting, and the film's argument comes into focus. Deleuze has a category for action that gets transposed into spectacle instead of taken — he calls it the reflection-image, the Figure. Usually that names a failure: people who can no longer do anything, so the film stages what cannot be done. Marshall's twist is nastier. In 1920s Chicago, being looked at works. Roxie and Velma are on death row and their only available act is publicity, and publicity saves them. The circuit from perceiving a situation to changing it hasn't broken here. It has been rerouted through the press. The Figure is the act. That's the satire, and it has aged forward rather than back: a trial as an opening night, a public whose memory lasts exactly one news cycle.
Deleuze noticed something about musicals generally that fits this one strangely well. In the great dance films, the dancer doesn't simply move — the world starts moving and carries the dancer along, which is why an Astaire number feels less like exercise than like weather. He calls it the movement of world. Marshall inverts it. Roxie's body stays where it is, in a cell, in a courtroom chair, in a chorus of flashbulbs, and the world does all the moving, in a place that exists only when the film cuts to it.
The ancestor here is 8½, where memory, fantasy and the day's business circulate inside one man's head until you stop sorting them. Deleuze built his idea of the crystal-image partly out of Fellini: a point where the real thing and its reflection fold together, spinning, each throwing the other back. The finer term for what Marshall does is the crystal-seed. A drab actual world keeps producing spontaneous entrances into its own glamorous double. Cell, stage, cell. Fosse drew on Fellini for All That Jazz, cross-cutting a dying man's production numbers against hospital reality; Marshall took that editing scheme whole and gave it to a woman who wants to be famous rather than a man who wants to be forgiven.
Watch how the bodies are made. Fosse's vocabulary is angular and hard — jutted hip, isolated hand, bowler tipped over the eyes — and Deleuze, after Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. These aren't dancers expressing themselves. They're bodies arranged to be sold. And crucially, you are never watching a dance. You are watching an edit. Fosse learned in Sweet Charity to build a number out of fragments and cuts on movement rather than hold the full figure, and further back, Busby Berkeley's kaleidoscopes in Gold Diggers of 1933 existed only in the cut, in a space no theatergoer could ever have bought a seat for. Martin Walsh won the Oscar for Chicago and it was the right award: the editing is doing the work Fosse once did with hips and hats. The stage has no geography. That is exactly what lets it be a mind.
Which brings us to the lawyer. Richard Gere's Billy Flynn conducts the press like an orchestra, and the film's most famous move is a press conference staged as a number, with Roxie mouthing the version of the killing he has written for her. Cinema's oldest contract, the one Bazin loved in neorealism, is that the photographed thing testifies — the image was there, so it doesn't lie. Courtroom procedure runs on the same faith. Deleuze's powers of the false is the principle that cuts both: once truth stops being a form and becomes something made, what you get isn't lying but creation, and the artist of it is the forger. Flynn is a forger. Two accounts of one shooting are put in front of us and neither is retired; the manufactured one wins because it's better staged. The film doesn't condemn him. It likes him, which is the honest position.
What this did to the art: it re-opened a genre that had been declared unwatchable. Moulin Rouge! had cracked the door; Chicago took six Oscars including Best Picture, the first musical since Oliver! in 1968, and it did so by conceding the modern audience's whole objection — nobody in a real Cook County jail bursts into song — and then finding the one place where song is still true. Inside someone's wanting. Every musical since has had to answer that question, and most have answered it Marshall's way.
One thing to carry into a rewatch. Every number in this film ends. The applause stops and you're back in the corridor with the keys and the grey. Watch what the cut returns to, and watch how fast the reporters lose interest. The film is very funny about a public with no memory. Then notice that it has just spent two hours giving you a spectacular time and counting on you to forget the body on the floor.
Concepts in play
- onirosign (dream-image) — The numbers unfold inside Roxie's fame-addled imagination rather than as dated flashbacks — she has never been on a stage, so the circuit spins off the present into pure wish, not memory.
- the Figure (reflection-image) — On death row, Roxie and Velma's only available act is publicity; every response to their situation is staged as a number rather than performed in the world — but here the spectacle actually works, and the fame keeps them from the gallows.
- crystal-seed — The grubby Cook County jail keeps producing spontaneous entrances into its own glamorous double, cell-to-stage-to-cell — the reality/fantasy crystallization Marshall took wholesale from All That Jazz and, behind it, 8½.
- movement of world — Roxie's body stays in the cell or the courtroom chair while the imagined world does all the moving around her, in a spectacle-space that exists only when the film cuts to it.
- the gest — Fosse's angular vaudeville vocabulary — jutted hips, isolated hands, bowler hats — bodies arranged to be sold rather than to express, inherited from the Kit Kat Klub choreography of Cabaret.
- montage — Martin Walsh's Oscar-winning editing does the work Fosse once did with hips and bowler hats; the numbers live in the cut, with no coherent stage geography — the Sweet Charity grammar of building dance by editing, and Berkeley's Gold Diggers precedent of spectacle that exists only in edited space.
- puissances du faux — Billy Flynn conducts the press like an orchestra and manufactures a version of the killing that wins because it is better staged; the film treats truth as something made rather than found, and declines to condemn it.
- le faussaire — Richard Gere's silver-tongued lawyer is the film's artist-figure: a forger who writes his client's story, rehearses her in it, and stages it for the press as an opening night.
- falsifying-narration — The shooting reaches us in more than one mutually exclusive version — the act as committed and the account Flynn composes for Roxie to mouth — and the film retires neither.