Sullivan's Travels · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start at the end, in the dark. Sullivan, an amnesiac convict on a Southern chain gang, sits in a rural church where the congregation has invited the prisoners in to watch a movie. The screen throws up a Disney cartoon. The men in chains laugh. He laughs too — helplessly, then wonderingly — and in that laugh a Hollywood director who set out to film human suffering discovers what comedy is actually for. Preston Sturges builds his whole film to detonate on that single image, and it tells you what kind of movie you've been watching: not one that acts on the world, but one that finally learns to watch it.

That distinction is the reading. For most of its running time Sullivan's Travels looks like the movement-image at full throttle — Deleuze's name for the classical cinema where a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting chains perception to action to resolution. Screwball is that circuit sped up and made verbal: the studio-conference argument, the caravan of staff chasing Sullivan's 'land yacht,' Demarest's blunt objections tumbling over Pangborn's fuss. Sentences are sensory-motor events. Everyone is doing something to someone. The film's opening gag — a brutal life-and-death struggle atop a moving train, revealed to be a clip from the grim 'significant' picture Sullivan worships — is Sturges stating his subject as a discourse-image: an image that poses a problem it can't yet resolve. Should film act on suffering or entertain? He lets the whole movie become the argument, and then rigs the argument to lose.

Because Sullivan's plan is pure crisis of the action-image. He believes he can act his way into knowing trouble — put on the hobo costume, go out, suffer on schedule. Deleuze calls this the moment classical cinema breaks: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Sullivan keeps trying and the world keeps refusing him. Every escape lands him back in Hollywood, once literally driven home in his own trailer. This is the voyage-balade-form, the trip that transforms nothing — the road movie emptied of destination. And it's laced with consciousness-of-clichés: Sullivan is a man moving through his own picture of poverty, and the Girl, credited only as 'the Girl,' exists partly to puncture it, deflating his romance of the poor with a dry Veronica Lake glance. He is directing a Depression movie starring himself, and it isn't working.

Then Sturges does the thing that makes this more than a smart comedy. He turns off the dialogue. The celebrated central montage — Sullivan and the Girl through flophouses, soup kitchens, missions, freight cars, John F. Seitz's camera darkening from high-key comedy toward the shadowed register he'd soon bring to Double Indemnity — is a passage of pure opsigns and sonsigns, Deleuze's optical-and-sound situations: moments where a character, and the audience with him, can only look and listen because no action is available. Nobody banters. Music by Shuken and Bradshaw carries what words carried before. The sensory-motor engine that drove the screwball scenes simply cuts out, and time stops being the measure of movement and starts being felt as dead time — the everyday held, going nowhere, weighing.

The chain gang completes the break. Stripped of name, memory, and power by his amnesia and the sentence, Sullivan becomes the seer — Deleuze's voyant, the one who endures and witnesses rather than acts. He can do nothing to his situation. He can only see it. And it's precisely there, at zero agency, that the film delivers its verdict in the church: the man who could no longer act learns that laughter is itself a form of grace for people who can't act either. Sturges uses the machinery of comedy to interrogate the claims of social drama, and hands the win to comedy — not by dodging suffering but by passing through it.

That tonal instability is Sturges's specific invention. He didn't blend screwball and social realism; he made the collision structural, the argument the film is having with itself. He inherits pieces of it — the class-crossing road picaresque of It Happened One Night, which he inverts by sending a rich man down instead of stranding a rich woman among the poor; the laughter-plus-pity recipe of My Man Godfrey; the very thesis of Modern Times, that near-wordless comedy can dignify the destitute; the overlapping grotesque-gallery tempo of Twentieth Century; the farce-to-cruelty whiplash of Nothing Sacred, which he alone makes load-bearing. And he quotes I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang directly, dragging its stark Warner Bros. prison imagery into a comedy so the comedy has to answer for it.

What it seeded is a permission: that a movie can put its own conscience on trial and survive as entertainment. The film became the touchstone the industry reaches for every time it argues entertainment against 'message,' which is to say Sturges won the argument so thoroughly that we now stage it in his terms. Watch it again for the seam — the exact cut where the words drop away and the looking begins. That seam is the whole history of cinema learning it could stop acting and start seeing, told as a joke that turns out to mean it.