The Killing · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The wind, first. At the end of The Killing, on an airport tarmac, a cheap suitcase tips off a luggage cart, the latch gives, and two million dollars climbs into the propeller wash like so much paper trash. A small dog set it off. Johnny Clay — ex-con, planner, the man who thought of everything — stands and watches the money he can no longer run after, and all he can manage is a flat "What's the difference?" Keep that gust in mind. Everything before it exists to make those few seconds of moving air land like a verdict.

Kubrick is working inside what Gilles Deleuze called the movement-image: a cinema where a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, where the cut serves the chain of cause and effect. The Killing is nearly a teaching model of its most strenuous version, the large-form action-image. A whole encompassing situation — the racetrack on its biggest day, the daily take, the running of the feature race — presses down, and the drama is the assembling of one act big enough to answer it. Deleuze calls that pressing-down milieu the synsign, the encompasser: the situation as a kind of weather that calls the crime out of the men. The track is exactly that. It sets the clock, dictates the window, supplies the crowd to hide in. The men don't choose their moment; the race does.

What makes the plan thrilling — and this is Kubrick's real invention — is that we never watch it run forward in one line. The film tells the heist, then rewinds the clock to tell it again from another man's position, the strands converging on the robbery itself. Deleuze's term for convergent parallel cutting is the organic-American montage, the tradition of Griffith: separate lines of action braided so they meet. Kubrick keeps the convergence but strips out the thing it was built to deliver — the last-minute rescue. Nobody is rescued. A documentary-style narrator stamps each strand with a precise time of day, lending the shuffle a newsreel sobriety, and the small inconsistencies people have caught in that timekeeping only sharpen the joke: the film flaunts a clock it is quietly proving useless.

Watch the architecture of the spaces and you feel the design in your body. Lucien Ballard's camera, fitted with the wide-angle lens Kubrick reportedly forced on him, tracks laterally through cramped apartments as though the walls had been pulled out, holding the front and back of the room in equal hard focus. This is the deep-focus grammar Gregg Toland built for Citizen Kane and that André Bazin prized for keeping the world whole inside the frame — except Kubrick turns it cold. The rooms become corridors. Treated this way, the frame stops being a window and becomes a closed set, a system the men are pinned inside, sliding across the composition like figures on rails. Then the film opens out: against these tight interiors Kubrick sets the flat vastness of the track and, last, the airport. Deleuze has a name for that pulse between the huge milieu and the taut line of the deed — respiration-space, the breathing of the large form. The Killing breathes exactly so: room to track to tarmac.

And the binomial — Deleuze's word for the action-image's duel, force against force — is staged for us literally. Maurice the wrestler-philosopher is hired to start a brawl, and the chess game he plays underwrites the whole picture: men moved like pieces by a player who has calculated every move except the one no plan contains. That is where the wind comes back. The duel in this film is not finally Johnny against a rival or a cop. It is Johnny against the part of the world that cannot be engineered. Deleuze, after Bergson, called the largest term the Open — the sense that any closed set gives onto a greater whole that keeps changing and can't be mastered. Most heist films keep the Open offscreen so the plan can look total. Kubrick lets it blow straight through the frame as a dog and a gust, an out-of-field you can't locate on any map or clock. The plan was a closed system; reality was not.

The lineage is plain and worth naming as craft debt. From Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) Kubrick took the doomed-crew blueprint and Sterling Hayden's granite planner whole. From The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949) he took the noir habit of recounting a robbery from a vantage already lost. From Rififi (1955), the heist as cold procedure. From his own Killer's Kiss (1955), the lateral tracking and wide-angle rooms. What he added was structural: he fused the caper's clockwork plot to a time-fractured telling, so that form and subject became one thing. The shuffle is not decoration. It makes us experience the heist as a web of interlocking dependencies, any one of which can snap.

That is the film's significance. The Killing took the action-image at its most confident — the large form, the man who masters the situation — and built a machine to expose its limit, the seam where chance lives. A few years later, characters in films around the world would stop being able to act on what they saw at all, and cinema would tilt toward the time-image. Kubrick doesn't go there. He stays inside the action-image and finds its hairline crack. Watch it again for the clock, and then for the wind the clock never counted.