Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of A Face in the Crowd
1957 · Elia Kazan · A Face in the Crowd on Sightlines
A man alone in a penthouse, hollering at an empty room, waiting for applause that never comes up. That is the last thing Kazan shows us of Lonesome Rhodes, and it explains everything before it. He was never talking to people. He was talking to a sound, and the sound had a switch on it.
Wind back to the Arkansas drunk tank where Marcia Jeffries finds him: a Sarah Lawrence girl with a microphone, a hungover guitar picker on a jail floor. Everybody files this film under prophecy, which is true and a little lazy. What keeps it frightening is structural, and Deleuze hands us the words for it.
Start with what Rhodes is, dramatically. He is not the standard American protagonist, the one who sizes up a situation and acts on it until the situation changes. Deleuze called that circuit the action-image, and it drove nearly all of Hollywood. Rhodes doesn't really act. He feeds. Deleuze kept a separate category for characters made of appetite instead of intention: the impulse-image, the cinema of naturalism, where the visible social world is only a crust over what he called an originary world, a raw zone of drives underneath. The drunk tank is that zone, and Kazan's cruelest structural joke is that Rhodes never leaves it. The production design climbs from rural plainness to gaudy affluence and every step up is a step down. Deleuze's name for that shape is a line of slope: entropy, not an arc. You can hear it in Gene Milford's cutting, which accelerates and fragments as Rhodes's power grows, so the film gets faster and less whole at the same time. Broad Americana comedy at the start, horror by the end, and no seam anywhere you can point to and say the tone changed there.
Now the crowd, which is the title. Kazan puts Rhodes in front of mass after mass: jail inmates, radio listeners, live studio audiences, cheering rallies. Deleuze has a term for a mass filmed as one feeling body rather than a collection of persons — the dividual, a crowd that laughs and buys and roars as a single unit. Rhodes's guitar is the tool that produces it. The picking, the drawl, the man-of-the-people slouch: Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, would call that a gest, a bodily attitude that lays bare a social relation. It isn't music. It's a posture doing the work of consent.
Then the two objects the whole machine turns on. From Peirce, Deleuze takes the mark: an object that means something only by habit, the when-you-see-this-expect-that of ordinary life. The applause sign is a perfect mark. It lights, they clap, and everybody, in the studio and at home, has agreed not to notice. Its opposite is the demark, the same kind of object behaving wrong, snapping the habit and forcing you to actually read the image. That is the microphone left open. Nothing new enters the frame. A customary chain simply breaks, and every listener inside the fiction has to interpret instead of respond.
Kazan's specific invention is what surrounds those objects. Stradling and Rescher keep framing Rhodes through and around broadcast hardware, and the in-film shows are cut to the rhythm of live television: performer, control room, studio audience, back again. Deleuze calls an image that watches someone watching a dicisign, an image where you feel a second pair of eyes in the room. Kazan industrializes it. The apparatus perceives Rhodes, we perceive the apparatus, and the illusion of spontaneity gets assembled in front of us while it works on us. Warning America about demagogues was not the new thing; Capra and Rossen had done that. Giving the machinery a point of view was.
And then the ending keeps faith with 1957. Marcia flips the switch and the switch works. That is Deleuze's large form of the action-image at full power: an encompassing situation presses until one decisive act transforms it, delivered here in crosscutting between Rhodes's oblivious mouth and the faces receiving him. Notice what the decisive act actually is. Not a duel, not a confession, not a change of heart. An open circuit.
Which puts the film on a hinge in the history of film thinking. Rhodes is what Deleuze would later call a forger: not a liar exactly, but someone who manufactures a truth and then lives inside it until it grows teeth. In the cinema Deleuze called modern, the forger is unanswerable, because once the powers of the false are loose no image can settle the matter; images are what's in dispute. Schulberg and Kazan still hold the older contract, the one that says a recording is evidence and the camera doesn't lie. The hot mike is a truth-machine. And notice that the man and the persona never fuse into one indiscernible thing here — the plot depends on our being able to tell them apart. That is the period limit and also the charge. It is a movement-image film about the birth of the apparatus that would eventually dissolve the movement-image's confidence.
Kazan built it out of what he had. Kane supplied the arc from newsreel documentary into expressionist deep focus, exactly the trip this film takes from rough Arkansas texture to airless low-angle penthouse compositions. Meet John Doe supplied the fabricated common man, handlers and all. All the King's Men supplied crowd photography and stump rhetoric, which Kazan intensifies into the studio-audience sequences. Ace in the Hole gave Schulberg the anatomy of a press-made carnival and its complicit spectators. Viva Zapata! was Kazan's own rehearsal for staging a leader against a mass. And On the Waterfront, three years earlier with the same writer, brought the Actors Studio culture, the location realism, and the post-HUAC ambivalence about conscience and betrayal. Marcia's switch is an informing that is also a conscience. Kazan of all directors knew the price of that.
What came after took it in pieces. Network lifts the template whole: Howard Beale's rise as a ratings prophet, the same on-air charisma curdling into menace. Frankenheimer took the compositional idea, monitors placed inside the frame as the surface where political identity is manufactured. Quiz Show plays the corruption arc genteel, Van Doren as a Lonesome Rhodes with better manners. The King of Comedy and Bamboozled keep the manufacture itself, fame as a machine product that eats its own performer.
Watch it again and don't watch Rhodes. Watch where the camera is standing. Watch the faces in the studio audience deciding to believe. Then ask the question the film never had to ask, because in 1957 nobody thought to: what happens when the mike is left open, the private contempt goes out over the air, and the crowd likes him better for it?
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Rhodes is driven by appetite rather than intention — 'folksy charm masks a swelling appetite for power,' Betty Lou marking 'the callousness of Rhodes's private appetites' — a character who feeds rather than acts on situations
- originary world — The Arkansas drunk tank where Marcia discovers him: a raw zone of drives under the social surface that the escalating decor (rural plainness to gaudy affluence) only covers over
- entropy / line of slope — The rise-and-fall arc played as irreversible degradation: the editing 'accelerating and fragmenting as Rhodes's power grows,' the tonal drop from picaresque comedy through satire to horror with no visible seam
- dividual — Kazan stages Rhodes before mass after mass — jail inmates, radio listeners, live studio audiences, cheering rallies — the crowd choreographed as one affective unit; 'the face in the crowd' is both title and recurring image
- the gest — The guitar-picking 'man of the people' persona — songs and musical performance integrated into his rise as 'a vehicle for manipulation' — a bodily attitude that exposes the performer/mass relation
- mark — The applause sign among the film's inventory of broadcast hardware: an object that works purely by customary chain, cueing a response the studio audience and the home audience have agreed not to notice
- demark — The microphone deliberately left open at the climax: the same object breaking its habitual chain, so that everyone hearing Rhodes must interpret rather than respond
- dicisign — The camera repeatedly frames Rhodes through and around broadcast equipment, and the in-film broadcasts intercut performers, control-room reactions and studio audiences so the viewer feels the apparatus doing the perceiving
- action-image, large form — An encompassing media situation presses until one decisive act transforms it — Marcia flipping the switch, rendered in precise crosscutting between Rhodes's oblivious on-air performance and the faces of those who hear the truth
- the forger — 'Lonesome' Rhodes is a manufactured persona the drifter forges and then inhabits, folksy charm as fabricated truth — but caged by a film that still treats the live recording as evidence