Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of West Side Story
1961 · Robert Wise · West Side Story on Sightlines
The Jets are just walking. One of them snaps his fingers, the walk picks up a beat, the beat picks up the block, and somewhere in there — you can never quite find the frame — the boys stop walking and start dancing. Real pavement. Real brick, real cyclone fencing, a neighborhood that was being torn down for Lincoln Center while the camera ran.
Nobody in that sequence decides to dance. Hold onto that.
In an ordinary movie a person wants something and moves to get it. He perceives a situation and acts on it, and the world holds still while he crosses it. Deleuze called that the movement-image and said Hollywood ran on it for half a century. The musical reverses the wiring. The dancer stops supplying his own motion and the world starts supplying it for him. Deleuze's name for this is the movement of world, and he meant it flatly, mechanically: initiative drains out of the character and into everything around him, until the dance appears to be dancing the dancer.
Every musical does this. In the films West Side Story descends from, the thing that takes you over is love, or music, or Paris. What Jerome Robbins invented is a movement of world that isn't benign. The thing that picks these boys up and moves them is a gang — turf, surname, skin, a pack that thinks in formation. An American in Paris had already won the right to hand the plot over to dance for seventeen unbroken minutes, and that's the license Robbins spends when he opens a tragedy with a wordless ballet. But there the surrender is rapture. Here it's recruitment.
The snap is the key to the vocabulary, and it's worth asking what it actually does. Nothing. It isn't a blow. You couldn't charge a boy with it. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls this kind of thing a gest: a posture that doesn't advance an action but holds a social relation up where you can read it. The snap says, this sidewalk is ours, and we are a plural. Robbins built a whole grammar out of gests — the prowling group formations, the leaps, the ensemble turning as one animal. Deleuze has a term for a crowd rendered as a single feeling-unit: the dividual. The Jets and the Sharks are dividuals before they are characters, which is exactly the horror the story is about.
The production then did that to its own cast. Dark makeup was applied to non-Puerto Rican and lighter-skinned performers to homogenize the Sharks. Natalie Wood, a white star, played María. The singing you hear from both leads belongs to other people, Marni Nixon and Jimmy Bryant. A film that staked everything on the documentary truth of a real condemned block was at the same time falsifying the bodies standing on it, flattening individuals into one readable mass. That is the gangs' own logic, run by the studio. Rita Moreno has said so for decades. It doesn't cancel her Anita; it sits next to it.
Before any of this, the film looks straight down. The opening is an aerial held over Manhattan, drifting across the grid, descending until it lands in the particular blocks where the story lives. Deleuze distinguishes the frame, which is a closed set, from the Open — the sense that a closed set is a slice cut out of an unbounded whole that keeps changing. Daniel Fapp's descent performs that distinction before a word is spoken, and it says something the script never does. You see the entire grid first. Then you land, and the turf two sets of boys will die over turns out to be a few blocks of it, indistinguishable from above. From that height the turf is nothing. From the street it is everything. The film never reconciles the discrepancy. It doesn't have to: those streets were already condemned.
Structurally this is a textbook large-form action-image. An encompassing situation — the block, the two gangs, the heat — presses down until a decisive act is supposed to transform it. Duel structure, force against force, the two-gang symmetry Arthur Laurents flattened Shakespeare into on purpose. Carousel had proved five years earlier that a book musical could put a death at its structural center and still stand up. West Side Story goes further and lets the machine fail. The rumble is the decisive act and it decides nothing; it only starts the killing. Tony dies. Nobody is resurrected. The sensory-motor circuit stays intact the whole way through, these characters can always act, and every act makes it worse.
Now the part that lifts the film past well-made tragedy. In the 'Tonight' quintet five parties sing at once: the lovers, Anita, both gangs. One word, tonight, and it means a wedding to one person, a good time to another, a killing to two more. Bernstein doesn't cut between them. He stacks them.
Deleuze spent a whole book chasing films that could present time directly instead of as the measure of movement, and one of the forms he found he called peaks of present: the present split into several simultaneous presents that contradict each other, each genuinely the now for somebody, with no way to rank them. Editing can only approximate this. A cut gives you one thing and then another and you assemble the simultaneity yourself. Counterpoint doesn't approximate it. Five presents arrive in your ear at the same instant, incompatible, none cancelling the others.
You could object that this is simply what a musical quintet is. That is the argument. The form was already sitting in Broadway's toolkit; this is the film where somebody made the coexistence of irreconcilable presents the actual subject, because the tragedy of that night is nothing but that coexistence. If any one of those five presents could reach the others, nobody dies.
The cutting has its own problem, and Thomas Stanford won an Oscar solving it. Dance believes in the held pose, the fully readable line of the body — Deleuze would call that a privileged instant, the old idea that motion contains special forms worth stopping on. Cinema has believed the opposite since it was invented: motion is a continuous sample of ordinary instants, none of them privileged. Stanford has to keep faith with both, holding the figure long enough to read it while accenting hard enough to keep Bernstein's pulse. That negotiation is the film's real texture, and it comes down from The Red Shoes, which first made the extended dance number a self-contained world built out of Technicolor and editing rather than a filmed stage act.
The color follows the same logic. Fapp's palette is expressive rather than naturalistic: saturated reds and oranges that take over a scene the way a mood takes over a room, gel-lit fantasy passages, the world bleached away to leave the lovers alone in it. Deleuze's colour-image is precisely this, a color that absorbs a scene and its feeling instead of describing a place. And the bleaching produces what he calls an onirosign, a dream-image — a circuit belonging to nobody's memory of anything, just a world that desire opens. 'Somewhere' is not a place. It's what the movement of world looks like when it has no street left to move through.
The debts are exact. On the Town, same Bernstein, same Robbins, had taken dancers off the soundstage into real New York first; this film pushes that method past the tourist city into a slum with an eviction date. Oklahoma! made the dream-ballet carry plot and brought the 70mm reserved-seat roadshow, which is why West Side Story exists in Super Panavision 70 with six-track sound. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers had made male-ensemble dance athletic and competitive; Robbins keeps the muscle and removes the good humor.
What it changed is easier to state than to achieve: after this, a number could be the site of the violence instead of a break from it. The genre had been drifting toward seriousness for a decade. This is where it arrived, and ten Oscars meant the industry agreed. Any later musical that wants to be believed has to get past that prologue on the way in.
Watch it again and try to catch the frame where walking becomes dancing. You won't. That failure is the film's whole proposition, and it leaves a question the film is honest enough to leave open: the thing that takes those boys over and moves them — is it the music, or is it the block?
Concepts in play
- movement of world — The wordless prologue, in which the Jets escalate from walk to full dance without any character deciding to: initiative drains from the boys into the street, the beat, the pack
- the gest — Robbins's finger-snap and prowling group formations — a stylized physical vocabulary that accomplishes no action but displays the turf relation itself
- dividual — The gangs choreographed as ensembles turning as one body; literalized offscreen by the dark makeup used to homogenize the Sharks
- the Open — The opening prolonged aerial over Manhattan drifting across the grid before descending into the specific blocks — the closed set revealed as a slice of an unbounded city
- action-image, large form — The encompassing milieu of the contested block and two-gang symmetry pressing toward the rumble as decisive act — a large form the film runs intact and lets fail, Tony dead with no reconciliation
- peaks of present — The contrapuntal 'Tonight' quintet, which layers multiple characters' incompatible desires simultaneously rather than cutting between them
- privileged instants — Thomas Stanford's Oscar-winning cutting balancing the theatrical impulse to hold the full readable figure against the cinematic impulse to fragment and accent
- affective colour — Fapp's expressive rather than naturalistic design — saturated reds and oranges, gel-lit passages — colour absorbing the scene and its feeling
- onirosign / dream-image — The gel-lit fantasy passages and the bleaching of the world to isolate the lovers in the 'Somewhere' sequence