Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ball of Fire
1941 · Howard Hawks · Ball of Fire on Sightlines
A drummer in a nightclub plays a matchbox. Gene Krupa has already torn through "Drum Boogie" with the whole band; then, quieter, he takes out a matchbox and two matchsticks and plays the same figure on cardboard, and the room leans in to hear it. A matchbox is for matches. Pull it out of that job and it becomes an instrument.
That is what slang does to words. And slang is what Ball of Fire is about.
Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) has spent years in a book-lined house with seven elderly colleagues, compiling an encyclopedia. Then he learns his entry on American slang is dead on arrival: the language moved while he was writing it down. So he goes into the city to collect words in the wild, and comes back with Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a nightclub singer who speaks the living stuff fluently and needs somewhere to hide from the police and from her gangster's plans for her.
Gilles Deleuze's two books on cinema have a reputation for forbidding vocabulary. It's argot, the way "ball of fire" is argot: a specialist crowd's shorthand for things they got tired of saying the long way. Learn it Potts's way. In the field, from someone using it, one word at a time.
Start with the interval. Deleuze takes a thought from Bergson: a living thing is a gap. Light and sound come in, movement goes out, and in between sits a hesitation where the creature decides. He calls that gap the centre of indetermination, and argues that cinema's whole first era is built inside it. Someone perceives a situation, feels something about it, acts to change it. Perception, affection, action. That circuit running smoothly is the movement-image.
Now look at Potts. He is a hesitation that got out of hand. Eight men, a housekeeper, decades of delay, a whole building erected in the gap between seeing the world and doing anything about it. The encyclopedia is an interval with a roof on it. That is the joke, and it is why the film plays warmer than its premise sounds. It isn't about a stuffy man. It's about a man who has industrialized his own hesitation.
Then the small form. Deleuze splits the action-image in two. The large form starts with a situation that presses on someone until they act and transform it: the town needs cleaning up, a man cleans it up. The small form runs the other way. An act, a gesture, a detail, and out of that fragment a hidden situation gets disclosed. Deleuze calls the fragments indices. Comedy mostly lives here, because a gag is an index: one small wrong gesture and a concealed circumstance falls out of it. Ball of Fire makes this literal. Potts collects gestures of speech and reconstructs from them a world he has never visited. Fieldwork is the small form with a notebook.
Sugarpuss is built from the finest variety of index, the one Deleuze calls the index of equivocity: an act that could belong to two different situations and gives you no way to tell which. She is in that house because she is hiding. She is also in it because she is teaching. Every warmth she shows is cover and is genuine at once, and Stanwyck plays both without arbitrating. That is why the performance is the engine and not the trim. Deleuze's affection-image is a feeling that registers on a face without discharging into action, and its most charged variety, the potisign, is a face where small movements gather toward a threshold. Sugarpuss is brassy and self-protective, and the tenderness leaks through anyway, faster than she can paper over it.
We, meanwhile, know what she knows. Deleuze calls that arrangement the relation-image: meaning that lives in relations nobody on screen is holding, and the audience holds instead. Its small change is the mark, an object that means what it means because of the chain it customarily belongs to, and the demark, the thing knocked out of its chain, which stops signifying automatically and has to be read. Krupa's matchbox is a demark you can hear. So is every slang word in the picture, a word yanked out of the job it was doing. Potts's obsolete entry is a book of dead marks, and the comedy is a few hundred live ones: academic diction hitting street idiom, neither landing where it was aimed.
What Hawks invented here. Gregg Toland shot this in 1941, the year he shot Citizen Kane, at the peak of his deep-focus work. Bazin built a theory on that depth: the viewer set free to roam the frame, ambiguity restored to the shot. Deleuze reads Welles's depth as a shaft driven into time and memory. Hawks and Toland take the same optics and spend them on eight men in a room. The professors are staged in depth so a reaction can travel across the whole group while the group stays in one frame, and Daniel Mandell cuts for the beat of a line instead of chopping the scene into coverage. Hawks's refusal is the invention. He will not cut away to the reaction, because cutting away turns a collective response into one man's.
Deleuze's term for the result is the dividual: a collective rendered as a single affective unit while still made of distinct people. Eight lexicographers turning their heads at once. It works only because Hawks gives each of them a comic register of his own instead of using them as gag machinery. The house around them is a closed set, the frame taken as a system, ordered and alphabetical, a rule for everything. Every closed set has an out-of-field, the space it implies and excludes, and here that is the street, the nightclub, the gangster's orbit. Then the out-of-field walks in the door and asks for a room.
The climax changes gear, and it is the cleanest piece of construction in the picture. Joe Lilac reasserts his claim, a global situation presses on the household, and only a decisive act will resolve it. The film flips from the small form to the large. Deleuze's word for the bond that makes this possible is the imprint: before a man can act on a milieu, the milieu has to have marked him. Potts can fight for Sugarpuss only because the slang got into him first. He had to be changed by the world he went out to catalogue. And the rescue is pure Griffith, the organic montage of converging lines and the last-minute save, performed by seven old men with no business being there.
Where it comes from. Twentieth Century (1934) set the Hawksian comic line, dialogue pitched until it works as a percussion track, which is worth remembering while Krupa plays cardboard. Bringing Up Baby (1938) supplied the template exactly: the anarchic, competent woman who takes a sexless scholar's dignity apart. His Girl Friday (1940) perfected the overlapping speech the encyclopedists' cross-talk runs on; The Awful Truth (1937) modelled the loose staging that lets actors build a gag inside the take. It Happened One Night (1934) codified the engine of streetwise vitality thawing bookish rigidity, and Ninotchka (1939) was Brackett and Wilder's own earlier proof that cynicism thaws through an education.
Where it goes. Wilder wrote this one and spent the shoot watching Hawks direct, using the production as an apprenticeship; the next year he made The Major and the Minor himself. Mandell, cutting Hawks's timing here, would cut Wilder's for years afterward, as far as The Apartment. The film about a man doing fieldwork was itself fieldwork.
The screwball cycle was nearly finished by 1941, and this late in the run it found the thing it had been circling for seven years: a movie can make learning to speak into an action. Not a metaphor for one. What Potts perceives and what he finally does is a vocabulary. Which leaves the question the encyclopedia can't answer and the film is generous enough not to force. Can a living language be held in a book? No. You have to go live in it.
So watch it again, and don't watch whoever is talking. Watch the four men behind him, held in focus, waiting.
Concepts in play
- the movement-image — The perception-affection-action circuit at full power: Potts perceives that his slang entry is obsolete, ventures out to gather living idiom, and the research premise cleanly motivates every plot turn.
- the interval (centre of indetermination) — The professors' book-lined house of order, routine and shared purpose: eight men and a housekeeper, years of work, an architecture of delay standing between perceiving the world and acting in it.
- action-image, small form (ASA') — Potts's fieldwork method: collecting fragments of living speech and reconstructing from them a world he has never entered. The plot engine is disclosure from small indices, not a global situation forcing an act.
- index of equivocity — Sugarpuss is in the house both as slang informant and as a fugitive hiding from the police and from her gangster's schemes; every gesture belongs legibly to both situations, and Stanwyck plays the brass and the leaking tenderness without arbitrating.
- potisign (icon of power) — Stanwyck's face: 'brassy, quick, and self-protective, but Stanwyck lets the tenderness leak through as the character is genuinely moved by Potts's decency' — intensity gathering toward a threshold without discharging into action.
- the relation-image (mental-image) — The audience holds the relation the professors cannot: we know why Sugarpuss needs the house and they don't, and the farce mechanics are built on that third-party knowledge.
- mark — Potts's encyclopedia entry on slang, hopelessly outdated: a catalogue of words whose customary chains have died out from under them.
- demark — Krupa's quiet reprise of 'Drum Boogie' played on a matchbox with matchsticks — an object wrenched out of its habitual chain and forced to be read anew, the same operation the script's slang performs on words.
- dividual — Hawks choreographing eight men reacting in concert to one woman; the professors move as a collective while remaining a calibrated ensemble of distinct comic registers.
- the closed set (cadre) — The hushed, vertical, paper-filled house held by Toland's deep focus as one information-dense system, reactions rippling across a group kept in focus rather than parcelled into cutaway close-ups.
- out-of-field (relative) — The staging's contrast between the sealed scholarly interior and the noise outside it — the nightclub, the street, the gangster's orbit — implied by the frame before Sugarpuss carries it indoors.
- action-image, large form (SAS') — The gangster reasserts his claim and a global situation presses on the household until only a decisive act can resolve it; the film switches forms for its climax.
- imprint (empreinte) — Cooper's professor as 'a man who has to be taught how to feel and how to fight': the milieu of living slang marks Potts before he becomes capable of acting in it.
- organic (American) montage — A climax that 'turns the timid professors into unlikely rescuers' — Griffith's convergent last-minute rescue, executed by seven elderly lexicographers.