All That Jazz · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Every morning it's the same cut. Dexedrine, eye drops, the shower, a cigarette, the hot light over the mirror, and Joe Gideon looks at the wreck of himself and says, "It's showtime, folks." Roy Scheider's grin is held together with pills and willpower. The film runs this ritual more than once, looping it the way a strip of film loops on a flatbed editing table — which is exactly what Gideon does for a living, and exactly what Bob Fosse is doing to Gideon. All That Jazz is a man editing himself to death, and it hands you the editing table in the first reel so you can't miss the joke.

Start at that table, because Deleuze gives us a word for what happens there. Watch Gideon run the same few seconds of stand-up footage again and again, trimming a frame, waiting for a laugh that won't land. He isn't remembering the past and he isn't simply living the present. He's doing both at once: looking at an image of his own life that he believes he can still re-cut. Deleuze calls this the crystal-image — a point where the actual thing in front of us and its reflection (a memory, a dream, the flattering version we narrate to ourselves) fold so tightly together that you can't pry them apart. The crystal is two faces of one moment, the real and its mirror, spinning. Once you see All That Jazz as one long crystal, its strange architecture clicks. The braided present — two productions, a failing heart — is wrapped around a recurring chat with Angelique, the white-veiled angel of death, and the film never tells you whether any of it is happening or being assembled by a dying man at a Moviola in his head.

That uncertainty isn't a gimmick; it's the engine. Angelique sits in soft light and lets Gideon confess, rationalize, flirt, perform. He talks; she reflects him back, calmer and more beautiful than he deserves. This is what Deleuze means by crystalline-description: an image that doesn't point to some solid fact behind it but composes its own object and then quietly replaces it. There's no "true" Gideon underneath the Angelique scenes for them to describe. The scenes make him as they go. And because he's editing his life as he'd edit a film — choosing the takes, softening the cruelty, scoring the regret — he becomes what Deleuze calls the forger: not a liar exactly, but an artist whose whole power is to keep the question of true-or-false permanently open. The film honors this. It refuses to redeem him and refuses to expose him. The Kübler-Ross stages give the decline a shape, but the powers of the false keep you from ever standing outside it on solid ground.

Watch the bodies and you find a second Deleuzian key. Fosse's choreography is instantly his: turned-in knees, rolled shoulders, splayed jazz hands, bowler hats, sharp isolations, an angularity that is sexual and faintly mechanical at once. These aren't steps that advance a plot. They're postures held up for inspection. Deleuze would call them gests — attitudes of the body that expose a whole social and theatrical relationship without explaining it. When the cheerful airline jingle "Take Off with Us" mutates under Gideon's direction into the sweat-slicked "Airotica" and scandalizes the backers, the gest does the arguing: this is what showbiz actually wants and won't admit. Fosse had been isolating the body part-by-part since Sweet Charity (1969), translating stage moves into jump cuts and freeze-frames. Here the technique becomes a worldview.

None of this fell from the sky. The self-reflexive artist-confession, where a blocked creator's memory and fantasy and present run together as one stream, comes straight out of Fellini's 8½ (1963) — imported, almost literally, through cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, who shot both. The rule of keeping song penned inside the diegetic stage and cross-cutting it against the drama is the lesson of Cabaret (1972). The nonlinear life-reconstructed-from-fragments is Lenny (1974), now turned into deathbed dialogue. And the deepest debt is The Red Shoes (1948), which codified art as a fatal compulsion, the dancer killed by the discipline that makes the work great. Over all of it sits 42nd Street (1933) and the whole "show must go on" machine, which Fosse quotes only to invert: the understudy-saves-the-show finale becomes a death spiral.

That inversion is the significance. The backstage musical had always sold the magic of putting on a show. Fosse detonates the form from inside by aiming the editing — the most pulse-driven, music-cut montage of its era, Alan Heim's Oscar earned on a film about editing — at a single target: the self that can't stop revising itself. The "Bye Bye Life" finale completes the move. Gideon dies as a production number, Ben Vereen grinning him offstage, the whole theatrical apparatus blazing while the man at its center goes still. The world keeps dancing; the dancer is absorbed into it. Then the zip of a body bag.

Here's the better pair of eyes to take back to it. The American musical was supposed to be the genre with nothing on its mind, all surface and shine. All That Jazz proves the surface can think — that a kick-line cut to a heartbeat monitor can hold a man's death and his vanity in the same crystal, undecidably. Watch it again and try to find the cut where the showbiz stops and the dying starts. You won't. That's the point. Fosse spent his last great film proving there isn't one.