Targets · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A young man climbs an oil storage tank above a Los Angeles freeway, sits down with his rifle, and starts shooting at cars. It is the middle of the afternoon. The light is flat and even, the hard California daylight that hides nothing because nothing is hidden. The shot is a small dry crack, about as loud as a door closing. Bogdanovich holds the wide angle past the point where it is doing any narrative work, and the length of that hold is what makes it obscene. A man has just died down there. The landscape does not respond.

Keep that shot. Most of what Targets knows is inside it.

The film runs two stories side by side and refuses to let them touch. In one, Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff at seventy-nine, playing a thin disguise of himself) announces he is quitting pictures, because nobody is frightened by painted monsters anymore and the newspaper does the job better. In the other, an insurance salesman named Bobby Thompson buys rifles the way other men buy fishing tackle, kills his wife and mother in a tract house, and drives out to find a high place. No investigation. No net closing. For an hour the lines simply alternate, and we understand they must meet long before anyone in the film does.

That structure is where Deleuze becomes useful, because his two books on cinema are about the exact passage this film stages. He describes the classical movie as a circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation. He calls the link sensory-motor. Horror had a sturdy version. A monster appears, villagers light torches, the mill burns. What Deleuze calls the crisis of the action-image is the moment that circuit stops converting, when people see clearly and can do nothing adequate with what they see. Orlok is that crisis with a face and a contract dispute; the only move left him is to stop working. Bobby is the same crisis from the other side, and stranger. He acts constantly, and none of it is action in Deleuze's sense, because nothing he does answers a situation or transforms one. It is the motor half of the circuit running with the sensory half unplugged.

Deleuze has a category that looks tailor-made for him: the impulse-image, the cinema of naturalism, where appetite erupts under the social surface and drags everything down a slope. Bobby's arsenal, laid out on the bedspread like laundry, is one of its fetish objects, a part-object loaded with drive, and Polly Platt's design gives the guns the same flat attention as the Coke bottles and the wood panelling. But naturalism needs depth. The impulse-image works because an ordinary milieu turns out to be the skin over an originary world of drives, and Bogdanovich keeps the fetish while deleting the world underneath. Bobby tells his wife he gets funny ideas; the line lands flat and is never picked up. Psycho invented this killer and then supplied a psychiatrist to explain him; The Sniper (1952), which built the rooftop procedural grammar, came with a psychiatric alibi of its own. Targets keeps the grammar and throws away the alibis. Its proposition is that the violence has no depth, and that the old horror, with its curses and its legible evil, has no equipment for anything that shallow.

Then there is how we are made to see. Long stretches go through the telescopic sight. Deleuze's term for an image in which we perceive someone perceiving, and feel the camera perceiving too, is the dicisign; the crosshair makes it literal, drawing a frame inside the frame and putting a trigger on it. Peeping Tom had welded the viewfinder to the murder weapon eight years earlier, and Rear Window had made the telephoto a thing a character holds. Bogdanovich's own move is to treat aiming and framing as a single gesture and then build the optics out of that claim instead of saying it in dialogue. Kovács shoots the killings long, so the freeway flattens into a plane and distance is abolished optically while staying absolute physically. That is a working definition of the any-space-whatever in its disconnected form: space that has stopped being a setting where action is possible, held together by sightlines rather than by anything a body could cross.

The drive-in is the invention. Bogdanovich found a location where the screen is a physical object with a front and a back, the audience sits in metal boxes, and the killer occupies the projectionist's opposite number. Orlok walks toward the boy while his own enormous face advances on the screen behind him, and Bobby cannot tell which one to shoot. No effect, no cut, just geometry. That is a crystal-image, Deleuze's name for an image in which a thing and its virtual double swap places until you cannot say which side you are standing on. It has a precedent earlier in the film: Orlok watching Karloff's 1931 face on a hotel television in Hawks's The Criminal Code, whose compressed staging of a killing sits inside the movie as its own standard of economy while the younger face becomes raw material the new film consumes.

Deleuze has a finer name for a crystal like Orlok's. Crystal-decomposition is his word for an ordered world rotting from within while everyone in it arrives too late; his examples are Visconti's aristocrats. Orlok is a gentleman of an extinct craft, living out of hotel suites and back-lot corridors. Drunk, he recites the Appointment in Samarra, where Death's gesture in Baghdad turns out to be not a threat but an appointment.

What makes the last reel unbearable is not on the screen. We know there is a rifle behind it; the people in the cars do not. Deleuze puts Hitchcock at the far edge of classical cinema for precisely this, the relation-image, where meaning lives in relations only the audience holds, so the circuit closes only by including us. Bogdanovich came to directing from criticism, from monographs on Hawks and Hitchcock, and here he does criticism in the medium: he takes Hitchcock's structure and puts a real rifle at the end of it, pointed at people watching a horror film.

What it did to narrative is easy to say and was hard to do. Fuller's uncredited rewrite, by Bogdanovich's long-repeated account, supplied the parallel structure and the withheld meeting, which leaves the picture without a protagonist for most of its length. No score. No reaction shots. No explanation. The method is subtractive all the way down, and it wrote the grammar for every later American film that stages a mass shooting in daylight, in a familiar place, without music. The blank killer runs forward into Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, Halloween; Van Sant's Elephant inherits the whole kit, motive refused, long lenses, duration doing the work.

The film's last idea is its hardest. Deleuze inherited from Eisenstein the hope that an image could deliver a shock strong enough to force thought. Targets is about the afternoon that stopped being true. A projected face fifty feet high, one of the most famous frightening faces ever photographed, cannot make a boy with a rifle flinch. Paramount released it in August 1968, between Robert Kennedy's killing and the Gun Control Act, and stuck an anti-gun message on the prints. Then comes the ending, stranger than its reputation. The old man walks over and takes the gun away. The action-image works one last time, performed by a frail body in a leg brace, and it settles nothing: the killer folds into a whimper about how many he missed. The horror is not defeated. It is revealed to be small, which is worse.

Watch it again for the distances. Notice where Kovács puts the camera during the killings, always slightly too far off, always holding a beat too long. That distance is the argument. The film is asking what a horror movie is for once the news has taken the job, and it is honest enough not to pretend it has the answer.