Ride with the Devil · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Four men spend a winter in a hole in the ground. It's dug into a Missouri hillside and roofed with logs and dirt, and it's where bushwhackers wait out the months when bare trees can't hide a horse. They lie there. They cook, they bicker, their beards come in, and they go on addressing one another with the full formality of men in a parlor. Tim Squyres, Ang Lee's editor since the beginning, refuses to compress any of it. A conventional war picture gives you a montage and a title card. Lee gives you the hole.

That's the film. It's also part of why nobody saw it in 1999: a slow, verbally antique Civil War picture had no purchase on the year of The Matrix and Fight Club, and Universal gave it a token release with almost no marketing behind it.

Deleuze has a useful name for what Lee is declining. In the movement-image, which is the grammar of nearly all narrative cinema, a character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the act changes the situation; the cutting exists to serve that chain. The Western is the most reliable engine ever built for it. And this film is set on ground where that engine had already run. The Outlaw Josey Wales takes the same premise almost beat for beat, the burned Missouri farm, the boy who rides with the irregulars. Eastwood organizes it around revenge, which is the action-image in its most dependable form: a debt, a pursuit, a settling. Lee restages the premise and removes the settling. What remains is a border war where every act produces a reprisal and the reprisal produces another, so nothing anyone does closes anything. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image — people who still perceive perfectly well and can no longer respond in a way that changes their situation.

What the film offers instead is time you have to sit inside. Deleuze's term is temps mort, dead time: stretches that advance no plot and aren't filler, because the waiting is the content. He took the idea from Bazin's defense of Italian neorealism, where holding a shot let an event keep its ambiguity instead of letting a cut tell you what to think. The dugout is Lee's version. So, oddly, is the Lawrence raid. Its geography is established and maintained, so the massacre reads as a systematic house-by-house operation rather than a blur. Confusion would have been merciful. The horror comes from clarity.

Inside that time, two men mostly watch. Jake Roedel is the group's best reader precisely because he's never fully in it, the son of a German immigrant, "Dutchy" to men whose cause regards him as provisional. Daniel Holt barely speaks for half the picture, and Jeffrey Wright makes the silence the evidence: a freed man riding with pro-slavery guerrillas out of gratitude to the man who bought his freedom, which is ownership continued by other means. Deleuze calls this figure the voyant, the seer. Not the agent of the story but its witness, someone for whom looking has become the whole activity because acting stopped paying.

Meanwhile the war Americans mean by the Civil War sits past the edge of the frame and can't be located. No massed lines, no generals, no national narrative. Deleuze separates the out-of-field you could pan to from the kind that isn't adjacent space at all. Lincoln's war is the second kind here, and its refusal to arrive is the film's claim about what this war mostly consisted of.

What fills the space where action used to be is manners. Schamus's adaptation keeps Woodrell's ornate nineteenth-century register: complete, balletic sentences, courtesy worn as armor. In 1999 that read as stilted. It now reads as the boldest choice in the film, because the distance between how these men talk and what they do is where everything happens. They invoke honor continuously and execute unarmed civilians. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes the social relation holding it up a gest: an attitude that gives away the system. The bushwhackers' courtesies are gests. So are the embroidered guerrilla shirts that carry nearly the only saturated color in Frederick Elmes's mud and slate. Those shirts were sewn by the women of sympathizing families, which makes the men's vanity a visible ledger of the civilian network feeding the war.

This is Lee's specific invention. He took the instrument he had built for Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, the anthropology of a closed social world and the cost of its rules, and carried it into a guerrilla war, where a dugout becomes a domestic interior. Bodies keep the accounts. Months pass in weather and beards rather than titles. Jake's amputated finger stays visible for the rest of the film so the cost never detaches from the man carrying it. The closing haircut and shave demobilize him more decisively than any surrender, since long hair was the badge. Deleuze's late idea of a cinema of the body is exactly this: attitudes and postures made to carry duration, so that what a film knows arrives through a body's condition rather than through anyone's declaration.

Which sets up the quietest inversion in the picture. These men ride with four and six loaded cap-and-ball revolvers apiece and fire them at conversational distance; reloading is a logistical crisis, not a dramatic beat, and Elmes lets the powder smoke blind the frame instead of clearing it for legibility. Yet the one act that changes a room is Jake reading an intercepted letter aloud, a Union soldier's wife writing to her husband, her ordinary decency arriving where the enemy was supposed to be. Deleuze's late cinema is full of what he calls speech acts: language that isn't dialogue between characters but a voice testifying from elsewhere and altering the visible world. The film then makes literacy its real emancipation plot. Holt is legally free from the start and learns to read at the end, and the film's argument is that the first without the second was a partial condition. In a Western, the decisive act moves from the gun to the page. That is not a small thing to do to a genre.

Lee got there on borrowed craft, honestly declared. Atrocity filmed as logistics, flat unmoralized medium shots with no cutaway and no score to instruct your feelings, is Ulzana's Raid, and it's the register of both the roadside executions and Lawrence. The parlor where killing gets negotiated through hospitality and table manners is The Beguiled. Interiors lit off practical flame with the shadows left genuinely black, and archaic diction delivered straight instead of smoothed into modern speech, were licensed by Barry Lyndon. Almendros's available light and a story clocked by season and field labor, which is where Squyres learned to cut a whole winter into an ellipsis, come from Days of Heaven. The Long Riders had already established that the border war reads best as a kinship feud and that black-powder gunfights should be blunt and smoke-choked rather than choreographed.

Forward, the influence had to arrive posthumously, through Criterion's 2010 restoration of the long cut. But the mode is now the default setting of the serious American Western: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Meek's Cutoff, The Homesman, Slow West. History as weather, boredom and manners.

The deeper wager is political in Deleuze's sense. He argued that modern political films can no longer address "a people," because the people are missing, and that the work has to be made out of that absence. Ride with the Devil is a war film with no nation inside it. There is kinship, obligation, blood debt, a feud conducted at scale, and nothing to fight for that would recognize the men fighting. Jake belongs to a cause that will never accept him. Holt rides with men who would have owned him. The ending distributes everyone rather than resolving anything: Holt goes south to look for his mother, Jake and Sue Lee go west, and the war stops instead of concluding. Deleuze took a phrase from Pasolini, free indirect discourse, for images where the filmmaker's vision and the character's occupy the same frame. Jake the permanent outsider, reading a group he will never join, is not a bad description of a Taiwanese director filming an American history he didn't inherit, which is why he could see the machinery instead of the myth: how a society converts kinship obligation into organized violence.

Watch it again for the manners. Every courtesy is doing work, establishing rank, buying time, deciding who counts as a person. Then sit with what the film leaves open. If honor is only a vocabulary these men speak, what is Jake doing at the end, walking away from every group that could grant it to him? The film won't say. It gives him a haircut and the road west, and lets you decide whether unlearning belonging is a freedom or a quieter kind of exile.