Kiss Me Deadly · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman runs down the middle of a night highway with no shoes on, wearing a trench coat and nothing else, and the only thing on the soundtrack is her breathing. Then the credits arrive and they scroll the wrong way. Down instead of up, so you have to read them against your own habit. Ninety seconds in, Robert Aldrich has told you the terms. The machinery of the genre is still running. It's running in reverse.

Hammer picks her up. What matters comes after the thugs force the car off the road: he's face down in the dark, half conscious, and somewhere above him Christina — the woman who escaped the asylum, the woman he was doing a favor for — is being tortured until she dies. He hears it. That's all he does. For the rest of the picture he will punch and threaten and shove people into walls, but the scene that defines him is the one where he lies there and listens.

Deleuze has a name for that condition. When a character can no longer act on what he takes in, when looking and listening are the only things left available, the image stops being a link in a chain and becomes what Deleuze calls a pure optical and sound situation: an opsign, a sonsign. The man becomes a seer instead of an agent. In a European art film of 1960 that's ordinary. In an American detective picture in 1955 it is close to blasphemy, because the private eye is the cleanest engine the cinema of action ever built.

That engine is what Deleuze calls the movement-image, and its dominant form is simple and very powerful: a character perceives a situation, acts, and the act changes the situation. The detective is that circuit wearing a hat. He walks into a mess, and his fists and his questions resolve it. Kiss Me Deadly keeps every visible part of that circuit and quietly disconnects the drive shaft. Hammer acts constantly. Nothing he does produces knowledge. His investigation is a series of assaults that leave a trail of corpses behind him, most of them people who talked to him. He is always one room behind, and he never once figures out what he is inside of. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image — characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive — and he located it in postwar American cinema. Aldrich got there early, and he got there from inside the most action-bound genre available.

The crisis has a specific symptom that this film nails harder than almost anything else in the decade: what Deleuze calls the condemnation of the plot. Not plot as story. Plot as conspiracy — a plot behind the plot, an organization diffused everywhere and locatable nowhere, which the hero blunders through without ever reaching its center. Hammer chases "something big" for greed. What he finds is the great whatsit, and the whatsit has no address. It belongs to no gang, occupies no headquarters, answers to no villain he can hit.

The box is the film's coldest joke, and it's a joke made out of film history. The Maltese Falcon gave the movies the coveted object everyone kills for and that turns out to be worthless — the stuff dreams are made of. That's an object working by habit: you see the prize, you know the chain it belongs to, you await the deflation. Aldrich drops something into that same slot that refuses to behave. It's warm. It hums. It burns the hand that cracks the lid. Deleuze's word for an object that breaks its customary chain and forces you to interpret instead of recognize is a demark, and the whatsit is the great one. The falcon is a thing in a room. What's in the box cannot be put in a room, or in a shot. It opens onto an outside the frame can't reach — Cold War annihilation as a permanent adjacent space. The genre's last MacGuffin stops being a plot device and becomes the film's subject.

Aldrich's Los Angeles is built to receive it. The debts are precise: John Alton's ground-level, single-source expressionism in He Walked by Night gives Ernest Laszlo the upward compositions that make every doorway loom; Musuraca's nightscape in Out of the Past supplies the doom; Double Indemnity supplies the whole grammar of pulp turned fatalistic on screen; Murder, My Sweet supplies the beaten, drugged, first-person detective whose subjectivity keeps collapsing. Deleuze's expressionist image is about light and shadow charging things with a non-organic life of their own. Aldrich takes that literally. The box glows by itself.

And underneath it all runs Bezzerides. He'd adapted his own working-class novel for Thieves' Highway, and he brings that sweat-and-labor naturalism to Hammer's grubby city, which is what turns the hero into something Deleuze would recognize as an impulse-image: not a man with a flaw but an appetite with a car, moving along an irreversible slope. Ralph Meeker plays him sneering. Everyone he touches degrades. The film's line of descent only goes one direction, and it ends at the beach with the house on fire.

What's remarkable is that none of this winks. There is no parody in Kiss Me Deadly. It is a fast, cheap, brutal genre picture that happens to be filmed from the angle of its own exhaustion, and that combination is Aldrich's invention. The Cahiers critics saw it immediately — Truffaut and company took it as evidence that an American programmer could be modernist art, and that conviction fed straight into what the New Wave did next. The glowing container went the other way, into Repo Man and Pulp Fiction and every trunk and briefcase since, usually as a gag. Aldrich meant it.

Watch it again for the sound. The panting on the highway at the start and the hum at the end are the same noise at two distances, and Hammer never hears either one.