Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Body and Soul
1947 · Robert Rossen · Body and Soul on Sightlines
A cameraman on roller skates, camera held in his hands instead of bolted to a tripod, being shoved around a boxing ring while two fighters work in front of him. That is James Wong Howe shooting the championship bout at the end of Body and Soul, and it is why the fight still lands when most 1947 action has gone soft. Before this, boxing was filmed from the good seats. Howe got down on the floor and let the lens reel.
What that buys is not just excitement. It changes what kind of image you are watching. It isn't Charley Davis's point of view, because we keep seeing Charley. It isn't the crowd's view either, because the crowd is watching a match and we are inside a mauling. It's a third thing: a camera that has caught the fighter's condition and goes on looking at him from inside it. Deleuze has a name for exactly this, and the precision is worth having. He calls it a dicisign — an image where the camera doesn't simply show someone perceiving, but takes on that perception and keeps its own body in the shot. You feel the operator. That's the point. Somebody is in there with him.
You don't need Deleuze to see that this film is about a man selling himself by installments. What the lens gets you is a precise account of the form Polonsky and Rossen are bending, and of where the bend is. Deleuze's map of classical Hollywood runs on what he calls the action-image in its large form: a big situation closes in, a man acts, the situation changes. The encompassing world that calls the act out of him is the synsign, the encompasser. In Body and Soul the encompasser is the fight game, and the film's argument is that it isn't scenery. It's ownership. The ring is where money buys men.
Deleuze adds a second term that fits this film almost too well: the imprint, the bond by which milieu and man stamp each other until you can't say which shaped which. Charley's body is the imprint. A poor kid's arms from the Lower East Side, converted into a negotiable asset, then leased back to him. And the large form, Deleuze says, ends in a duel — force against force, the binomial. Polonsky's real invention is to make the duel a decoy. The man Charley fights in the last round is not his opponent. Roberts is, and Roberts never throws a punch. That move set the template for every corrupt-fight-game picture after it: the promoter as the true antagonist, the ring as a rigged system in miniature.
Underneath the action-image there's a darker circuit Deleuze calls naturalism, and this film runs it hard. The idea: the realistic settings we see are derived milieus, and beneath them lies an originary world of naked appetite that they politely dress. Rossen stages the derivation as geography. The candy store and the cramped apartment, poor and morally legible. Then the promoter's offices, spacious and glossy and rotten. Then the nightclub. Each is a better-furnished version of the same hunger, and the ring is where the furniture comes off. What holds the whole descent together is what Deleuze calls the line of slope: an irreversible downward grade, where every compromise narrows the next choice. Polonsky's screenplay is built out of choices that eat each other. Canada Lee's Ben, the wronged former champion, is the business's previous property — the slope, already run to the bottom, standing in the room.
The film opens near its end, on the eve of a fight Charley has agreed to throw, then goes back. Deleuze is generally suspicious of flashbacks; a recollection-image, a dated past served up as explanation, is a signpost, and signposts are cheap. It earns its keep only when something else justifies it. In noir the justification is fatality: you're shown a past that is already finished. The lineage is explicit — Citizen Kane supplies the retrospective frame that anatomizes a self-made man. But Kane's witnesses contradict each other. Rossen's structure is a single closed account, which makes it a verdict rather than an inquiry, and turns the whole ascent into evidence.
And here is the cruelty of it. In a fixed fight, every punch has two meanings. Deleuze's term is the index of equivocity: the same act could belong to two entirely different situations, and nothing in the act tells you which. A clinch is a clinch whether you're tying him up or letting yourself be hit. The boxing picture's oldest contract is that the camera at ringside guarantees you saw what happened. Howe's skated handheld breaks that contract from inside. He puts you where you cannot referee it.
Howe brought his German-influenced low-key chiaroscuro forward from work as early as Transatlantic, and what Deleuze calls expressionism — the light-shadow gradient, things given a non-organic life — is doing the film's moral argument before any line of dialogue does. The corruption is in the photography. The Oscar-winning cutting by Lyon and Parrish supplies the other half: short hard shots colliding to make an impact that isn't in any single one of them, Soviet method naturalized into American melodrama.
It descends from Golden Boy (the Group Theatre ensemble values Garfield carried straight into Charley), from Kid Galahad (the fixed-bout machinery), from The Champ (the fighter as commodity), from The Roaring Twenties (the striver who climbs on rackets and is destroyed by them). What it seeded is two things: a genre in which the ring stands for the whole rigged economy, and a camera willing to go inside the ropes, years before light equipment made that routine.
The significance is this. Hollywood in 1947 was under the same postwar pressure that was producing neorealism in Italy, and it answered differently. It kept the action-image intact and poisoned the contents. The form still promises that a man can change his situation by acting; the film spends ninety minutes making you doubt the promise, then hands him one act anyway. Within a few years, most of the people who made it were asked the same question in a different room, and the blacklist damaged or ended their careers. Watch the last bout again and try to call it punch by punch. That uncertainty is the film's real subject, and Howe built you a seat inside it.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The rise-and-fall structure in which the fight game as a total situation presses on Charley until each choice narrows to one decisive act in the final bout; 'the last fight becomes a test of whether he can still refuse.'
- the encompasser — The fight game rendered as an encompassing milieu that owns its men — 'the ring is simply the arena where money buys men' — with staging that makes milieu into moral geography.
- binomial — The duel in the ring is displaced onto Charley vs. Roberts: the film 'set the template for the corrupt fight game drama, in which the ring stands for a rigged system and the promoter is the true antagonist.'
- empreinte — Charley's fighter's body as the bond between origin and milieu; blocking 'often isolates Charley within the frame as his choices cut him off from the people who love him.'
- dicisign — Howe hand-holding the camera on roller skates inside the ring so the lens 'weaves, lunges, and reels with the fighters,' collapsing the distance between spectator and combatant while still showing Charley.
- derived-milieu — The graded settings — cramped apartment and candy store, the 'seedy grandeur' of the promoters' offices, the nightclub demimonde — each a furnished surface over the same appetite.
- originary-world — The ring as the savage world beneath the glossy milieus, reached by Howe's in-the-ropes camera, where the fight becomes 'a subjective ordeal rather than a spectacle observed from a safe seat.'
- entropy / degradation — 'Each compromise narrows his options'; Canada Lee's Ben, the wronged former champion, stands as the business's used-up prior property.
- index-of-equivocity — The climactic bout is one Charley has agreed to throw, so no blow discloses which fight it belongs to; Howe's handheld denies the viewer the adjudicating ringside vantage.
- mnemosign / image-souvenir — The film 'opens near its end, on the eve of the fight Charley has agreed to throw, and then moves through extended flashback,' with Citizen Kane named as the model for the retrospective architecture.
- expressionism — Howe's 'expressionist noir — deep shadows, hard key light, wet streets and smoke-hazed interiors — applied to a story of moral descent,' descending from his low-key work on Transatlantic.
- montage-organic/pathetic — The Oscar-winning cutting: 'short, hard shots colliding to convey impact,' producing an immersive kineticism no single shot contains.