Point Blank · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the sound before the image: footsteps. Hard, echoing, metronomic, ringing down a deserted airport corridor — Walker walking, and the film cutting his stride against his wife at home, so the rhythm of his shoes becomes the percussion of both his vengeance and his memory at once. You never quite locate which is happening now. That uncertainty is the whole film, and it is why a $93,000 pulp revenge plot turns out to be one of cinema's strangest meditations on time.

John Boorman, a British documentarian handed an MGM crime picture and Lee Marvin's contractual blessing, did something almost no American studio film had dared: he treated a Donald Westlake Parker novel as raw stock for the grammar of Resnais. The flashbacks don't announce themselves. There's no dissolve, no harp. The betrayal on Alcatraz — the gunshot, the wife, the partner — keeps intruding on the present without a frame around it, bleeding in mid-scene. Deleuze has a name for an image where the present moment and its memory have become impossible to tell apart, where the two faces reflect each other like a two-sided mirror: the crystal-image. Point Blank is built out of these. We are never given a clean before-and-after; we're given a present so saturated with its own past that the past seems to be producing it. The cracked logic at the film's center — that Walker may have died on that cellblock and that everything after is a dying man's loop — isn't a twist to solve. It's the crystal at full power, the indiscernibility made into the structure itself.

This is also where the film becomes, in Deleuze's sense, an exercise in the powers of the false. Classical noir told its lies and then let a flashback set the record straight — the voice-over restored the truth. Boorman refuses that contract. He gives us mutually exclusive versions and lets them stand as co-true; Yost, the helpful informant, turns out to be the man at the very top, which retroactively rewrites every scene we trusted. There is no reliable ground to stand the story on. Falsifying narration doesn't mean the film cheats. It means it has stopped pretending that revenge, or memory, has a true and false version — and that refusal is the engine, not a flaw.

What makes it more than a clever puzzle is what Walker is doing while the time fractures: nothing that works. He climbs the Organization's ladder demanding his money, and at each rung the answer is the same — nobody keeps cash. The Organization is a corporate hierarchy of accountants and middlemen, violence laundered through bureaucracy, a system and not a safe. So Walker's relentless forward motion — the name is the thesis — drives at an object that has dematerialized. This is precisely Deleuze's crisis of the action-image: the sensory-motor circuit, situation-into-decisive-act, has seized up. Walker perceives perfectly and acts decisively and changes nothing, because there is no longer a situation an act can resolve. The scene where he empties his pistol into an empty bed is the crisis made literal — maximum violence discharged into absence. So is Chris beating her fists against his immovable body until she's exhausted, human feeling meeting an abstraction that won't register the blow.

The spaces tell the same story. Lathrop's anamorphic frame isn't used for landscape; it's used for emptiness — brutalist concrete, glass curtain walls, the dry engineered channel of the LA River, Walker a small hard figure dwarfed by depopulated planes. Deleuze calls these any-space-whatevers, deserted or void spaces that have stopped functioning as a stage for action; here the film tilts toward the emptiness kind, modern Los Angeles zoned clean of human warmth. And color carries feeling the way action no longer can: whole sequences tint toward a dominant hue — clinical green, sterile white, the reds and golds of the nightclub — so that color absorbs the scene and becomes its emotion. That's the affective colour-image, color as structure rather than decor.

Place it in the discourse and the debts are exact. The cut-on-uncertain-memory, the contradictory fragments returning to the same image, comes straight from Last Year at Marienbad; the sound bridge that carries a voice across a hard cut into another time is Hiroshima mon amour's collision of present sound and past image. Marvin's affectless, economical hitman was templated in The Killers; the doomed man circling a betrayal through interlocking flashback is Out of the Past, abstracted into pure architecture. Kiss Me Deadly supplied the alienated noir hero chasing a near-meaningless prize through cold geometry — the box of nothing that Point Blank's vanishing money echoes. And across the ocean the same year, Le Samouraï arrived at the silent ritual avenger in modern interiors, a sibling reached independently.

What Boorman did to film was to prove that the hardest genre skeleton could carry the most dissolved modernist surface — that a revenge thriller could be a time-image and still hit like pulp. Its vocabulary has been borrowed for half a century. Watch it again and watch the seams: every time the past leaks into the present without warning, ask whether Walker is remembering, planning, or already gone. The film won't tell you. That's the gift.