Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Set-Up
1949 · Robert Wise · The Set-Up on Sightlines
A blind man sits at ringside. He has paid for his seat like everyone else, and he follows the fight by ear. Wise drops him into the crowd without comment, the way you'd set a piece of evidence on a table. Whatever people come to a fight for, it isn't only to look.
Near him a man eats steadily through the carnage. A woman screams for blood. Above them, Bill "Stoker" Thompson, thirty-five and years past whatever he had, is climbing toward one of the bleakest victories in American movies.
The whole picture runs on one withheld sentence. Stoker's manager Tiny has sold the fight to a small-time gangster called Little Boy, and hasn't bothered to cut Stoker in, because a man that far gone doesn't need paying to lose. Stoker goes up the stairs believing tonight is the turn. He is the only person in the building who doesn't know what he's for.
Deleuze split action cinema into two shapes, and the difference is worth a minute, because it's the difference between a boxing movie and this one. In the large form, a whole situation bears down on a man until he performs the act that changes it: the town, the threat, the showdown. In the small form it runs backwards. Someone acts, and the act uncovers the situation he was really in. Deleuze calls that revealing act an index. The Set-Up is the small form at its cruelest, because Stoker's index works on everyone except Stoker. His hands disclose the fix to the men who arranged it, to the crowd, to us. He finds out last, and not in the ring.
Deleuze has a finer name for what those punches are doing: the index of equivocity, an act that belongs to two different situations at once, with nothing visible to tell you which. The punches Stoker lands are, to him, the comeback he still believes is one win away. To Tiny and Little Boy they're a breach of a paid contract. Same glove, same angle, two irreconcilable worlds. The image can't separate them. Only a cut to Little Boy's men can, which is why Wise keeps making that cut. The film's famous irony isn't a writer's trick, then. It's built into the grammar of the shot. That's the case for reading this picture through Deleuze at all: you don't need him to feel the film work, you need him to say why the irony isn't cheap.
Watch what Wise does with the seats. He keeps cutting away from the fight to people watching the fight. Deleuze's word for an image that shows us someone perceiving, so that we start to feel the camera doing the same thing, is the dicisign. Once it's running you can't get out of it. And then the strongest shot in the fight turns out to be a shot of nothing: the empty seat where Julie should be, a woman who can no longer bear to watch her husband work. Deleuze calls an object that implies a situation the film withholds an index of lack. Everything Wise has to say about that marriage sits in an unoccupied chair, intercut with the beating.
The crowd, meanwhile, stops being individuals. Faces stack up behind the ropes in Krasner's deep, pressurized compositions and fuse into one appetite with a thousand mouths, what Deleuze calls a dividual: a collective handled as a single unit of feeling. This is where the film turns naturalist in the exact sense Deleuze meant. The arena town, with its ticket booth and its prelim card and its fleabag Hotel Cozy, is the derived milieu, the ordinary social surface. Underneath it is an originary world of pure drive, and Wise keeps letting it show through. The glutton isn't comic relief. He's the thesis with a mouth full.
Naturalism, for Deleuze, always slopes downward; he calls it the line of slope, an entropy the film can't reverse. Wise builds it into the architecture. Dressing room below, ring above, alley behind. Fighters are called up by name one at a time and come back down elated or ruined, a conveyor belt of bodies with Stoker sitting in the middle of it, waiting his turn. Those dressing-room stretches are the picture's secret engine, and they are pure temps mort: dead time, where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held. Wise learned that cutting The Magnificent Ambersons, where pressure comes from letting a shot run and stacking people inside it rather than covering a scene from four angles.
Which brings us to his actual invention. Story time and running time here are the same seventy-two minutes, and clocks on the walls keep saying so. Other films had tried the unities; Rope was doing it the year before. What Wise found is specifically an editor's discovery. He came up in the RKO cutting rooms, he cut Citizen Kane, and he worked out that the way to make a fight unbearable is to refuse to compress it. The cutting reads every punch and every count and never buys suspense by cheating duration. It lets the clock do the work. Bazin was arguing in exactly these years that cinema's honesty lay in duration and depth, in the shot that doesn't rearrange the world on your behalf. Here is Welles's editor, on a B-picture schedule, proving it with wet pavement and a ring apron.
He strips the score too. Almost no orchestra: the ringside band, the announcer, the bell, the slap of gloves, the crowd rising and falling. With no music to tell you what to feel, the crowd becomes the soundtrack, and in the last scenes sound carries a horror the image only implies. That was radical in 1949 and it is now simply how fights are shot. Every camera under the ropes owes James Wong Howe on his roller skates in Body and Soul; every scoreless, ring-level beating since owes the refinement Wise made of it. Golden Boy had already given the fight film its tragic shape, the sensitive man ground up by a corrupt economy, and the Val Lewton unit had taught Wise to make shadow and a tight frame do the work of a budget. The Set-Up pays off all of it in one night.
What it did to narrative is the hardest part and the best. The action-image runs on faith that acting changes your situation. Stoker acts. He wins. The win is the sentence, and the resolution is bitter and physical rather than moral. Deleuze dated the collapse of that faith to postwar Europe, to characters who can only watch because nothing they do lands, and you can feel the collapse beginning here, in a genre picture, in the one figure the film refuses to put in the arena. Julie has no act available. She can only endure, and she knows the thing Stoker doesn't, which is precisely the position the next decade of cinema would hand its protagonists. Wise keeps her off the bench and cuts to her chair.
Watch it again and give the fight to the crowd. Don't follow Stoker; follow who is looking at him, and notice how often Wise lets you hear before he lets you see. There's no music in there to tell you how to feel, so whatever comes up in you at the end is yours. The blind man at ringside is the question the film never answers: is there a way to want this that isn't his neighbour's way?
Concepts in play
- action-image-small-form — Stoker is never told the fight is sold; his act in the ring is what discloses the situation he was in, and it discloses it to everyone before it reaches him.
- index-of-equivocity — The same punches are a career-saving comeback to Stoker and a breach of Little Boy's paid arrangement; only the intercut reaction shots of Little Boy's men separate the two situations.
- index-of-lack — The fight sequence is intercut with the empty seat where Stoker's wife should be; Julie's refusal to watch is present only as a visible absence.
- dicisign — Krasner's low ringside camera shoots from the spectators' angle, and Wise repeatedly cuts from the fight to the crowd perceiving it — the glutton, the woman screaming for blood, the blind spectator following by ear.
- dividual — Wise choreographs the crowd as a collective character, faces stacked behind the ropes in deep crowded compositions, so that the arena reads as one appetite rather than many people.
- impulse-image — The recurring grotesques — the man eating steadily through the carnage, the woman screaming for blood — present the crowd as pure appetite erupting through the ordinary business of a fight night.
- originary-world — The arena town's derived milieu (ticket booth, prelim card, the fleabag Hotel Cozy) is the surface under which the smoky, low-ceilinged, pressurized arena operates as a world of drives.
- line-of-slope — The vertical geography — dressing room below, ring above, alley behind — turns the picture into a conveyor belt of bodies called up in turn and returned broken, ending in the alley's bitter, physical resolution.
- dead-time — The dressing-room waiting, held in near-continuous real time with clocks marking the minutes; the cutting never cheats duration for suspense.
- the-seer — Julie, the film's moral counterweight, has no available action and is kept out of the arena entirely — a figure who can only endure while knowing what Stoker doesn't.