Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Dirty Dozen
1967 · Robert Aldrich · The Dirty Dozen on Sightlines
The officers and the women who came with them for the weekend are trapped in the shelter below. The men above drop grenades in, then pour gasoline down after them. Nobody hesitates. Nobody improvises. The soldiers doing it have been rehearsing this exact sequence of motions for most of the picture, and Edward Scaife's camera covers the killing the way it covered the drill: clear, fast, each man exactly where you were told he would be. That is the provocation. Aldrich doesn't stage an atrocity as chaos. He stages it as competence, and he stages it well enough that some part of you is still checking whether the plan is on schedule.
Deleuze has a name for the shape that satisfaction comes in. He called it the action-image in its large form, and his shorthand for it is almost rude in its simplicity: S–A–S′. A situation presses on a man, the man acts, the situation is changed. Around that act sits what Deleuze called the encompasser: the milieu wide enough to give the act its meaning. Here, the war. Nearly every combat picture runs on this. So why bring a French philosopher to a Lee Marvin movie? Because the large form isn't only a plot shape. It's a moral claim wearing the clothes of a form. It says the world poses problems a competent man can solve by force, and that solving them improves the world. The Dirty Dozen keeps the form in perfect working order and quietly removes the claim. Seen that way it stops being a rowdy hit with a nasty ending and becomes something colder and much more deliberate.
Deleuze's word for the bond between situation and character is the imprint: the milieu stamps the man, the man carries the stamp into the act. Most war films assert this with a montage and a speech. Aldrich builds it into the blocking. The early compositions scatter the twelve, isolate them, set them against each other; by the war games they move as interlocking parts; by the raid each man executes a numbered assignment inside a plan we have watched them rehearse. That last detail is Aldrich's specific invention and it deserves naming. He teaches you the plan before he shows you the raid. So the finale isn't suspense. It's grading. You already know what is supposed to happen; you watch to see whether they hit their marks. Moral attention gets converted into procedural attention, by craft rather than by argument.
Something happens to the twelve on the way there. They stop being twelve. The marching chant Aldrich gives the unit binds them into one sounding body before the raid begins, and Deleuze has a term for that too: the dividual, a collective the film handles as a single affective unit instead of a sum of men. You can hear the moment the group becomes an it. The picture's Oscar was for sound effects, and the chant is the part of that soundwork doing dramatic labour — the unit's identity, audible, portable, finally indistinguishable from the drill.
Michael Luciano's cutting is the film's finest formal achievement, and in the château it does something worth staring at. The assault intercuts simultaneous actions across the grounds and the interiors, converging them on one point in time. Deleuze called this the organic American montage, the Griffith invention: parallel lines rushing toward convergence, built historically to deliver the last-minute rescue. Nobody is rescued here. Aldrich runs the rescue grammar at full speed and lands it on people burning. Around that tightened line the film keeps breathing in the large form's characteristic rhythm — Deleuze's respiration-space, the alternation between the wide milieu of stockade and camp and war-games country, and the taut compressed line of the action itself. Luciano's editing nomination was for precisely this: geometry held under duress.
Underneath the machine a different kind of image keeps surfacing. Deleuze's impulse-image names a cinema of drives rather than decisions: appetite, compulsion, degradation, the slope downward. Savalas's Maggott is pure impulse-image, a religious mania that reads as the symptom of something the film never bothers to diagnose, erupting into the ugliest violence in the picture and nearly wrecking the operation. The château answers him. In Deleuze's terms it is a derived milieu — a concrete social setting, officers at leisure with wine and women — that the raid strips back to an originary world: a pit with bodies in it and fire coming down. The long crescendo is also what he called a line of slope, the irreversible descent. The men are recruited under sentence of death and most of them arrive at it roughly on time. Redemption and extermination run on the same rails.
Aldrich had been machining the parts for a decade. Attack (1956) supplies the animus, the enlisted man's contempt for hollow command, staged there as claustrophobic interrogation and turned outward here at the whole officer class — which is why the film's real duel (Deleuze's binomial, force against force) is Reisman against Breed rather than the Dozen against the Germans. Kiss Me Deadly (1955) supplies both the theme of institutions rotting from within and Luciano himself, whose aggressive rhythm-driven cutting arrives here fully formed. The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) supplies Lukas Heller and the trapped-ensemble pressure cooker that becomes the training camp. The architecture comes from further out: Seven Samurai (1954) codified recruit / train / execute and the choreography of many bodies in a defended space; The Magnificent Seven (1960) taught the gallery of misfit professionals, each introduced by one signature-skill vignette; The Guns of Navarone (1961) supplied the deadline-driven commando structure behind enemy lines.
Forward, the film became a template. The assemble-train-execute engine is now so portable that audiences follow it without being told. What Aldrich added was the discovery that the engine runs perfectly with no moral supply at all. Deleuze would call the finale a discourse-image: an image posing a problem it declines to resolve, offered as figure rather than settled as act. The script never reconciles the prisoners' redemption with what redemption costs, and the refusal is the whole point. In 1967, with American faith in military authority coming apart, that refusal was not a formal exercise.
There's a small historical irony in the cast. John Cassavetes, whose Franko is the most volatile thing in the film and earned him a supporting-actor nomination, spent the rest of his career making the kind of cinema Deleuze turned to when the action-image finally broke — films of bodies and postures where nobody's action fixes anything. He is standing inside the most efficient action machine of 1967, playing the man who won't fall in line. Donald Sutherland, barely used, walked out of it into stardom.
Watch it again for one thing. Find the moment in the training camp where you start wanting the plan to work. It arrives early, and it is engineered. Everything after it, the fire included, is Aldrich collecting on that debt. His question was never whether these men are redeemed. It's what you do with your own satisfaction when the drill goes exactly as rehearsed.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The textbook assemble-the-team / train-the-team / execute-the-mission architecture: a global war situation compressed into one raid that a decisive act is meant to transform (S–A–S′)
- the encompasser — The war as the encompassing milieu that calls the mission into being; stockade, training camp and war games establish the whole against which the château raid registers
- empreinte — Staging progresses from disorderly compositions (men scattered, isolated, resistant) to the interlocking precision drill of the raid; the numbered assignments and rehearsal literalize the milieu stamping the men
- montage-organic-american — The château assault intercuts multiple simultaneous actions across the grounds and interiors, converging them — Griffith's parallel-convergence grammar, here landing on the burning of trapped officers rather than a rescue
- respiration-space — Luciano's structure alternates the wide milieu of stockade, training camp and the war-games sequence with the rapid, spatially fragmented compressed line of the nocturnal raid
- dividual — The recurring marching chant devised for the unit, a diegetic motif that binds twelve men aurally into one forged identity before the climax (the film's Oscar-winning sound work)
- binomial — Force against force doubled: the Dozen against the German officers, and beneath it Marvin's Reisman, a competent cynic contemptuous of the officer class, against Breed and the regular army in the war games
- impulse-image — Savalas's Maggott, whose religious mania erupts into the film's ugliest violence; the unit is built from murderers, rapists and psychopaths whose drives keep breaking through the drill
- derived-milieu — The château presented first as a concrete social setting — German officers on vacation with their female companions
- originary-world — That same château stripped by the raid to a savage originary world: people trapped below, grenades and gasoline poured down, bodies burned alive
- entropy / degradation — Men recruited under death sentences on a mission most will not survive; the film is structured as a long crescendo whose payoff is an irreversible descent into the massacre
- discourse-image — The script refuses to resolve the tension between the prisoners' redemption arc and the barbarity redemption requires; the finale is staged as a figure of institutional hypocrisy rather than an act the film endorses