The Producers · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A program comes down. A jaw stays open. Somewhere in front of that face, on a Broadway stage, chorus dancers are revolving into a swastika, and Mel Brooks has cut away from them to film a room full of people trying to work out what they are allowed to feel. That cut is the movie. The scandal of The Producers was never the number. The number is only bad taste. The scandal is that Brooks left it in order to look at us.

Start there, because everything the film understands is in that reversal. Deleuze, following Peirce, has a name for an image whose content is neither an action nor a feeling but a relation the viewer has to supply: the relation-image, or mental-image. The meaning isn't in the thing on screen. It's in the third party doing the reading. Two of his smaller tools work beautifully here. A mark is an object that means by habit — an overture, a rising curtain, a kick-line. You've been to a musical; you know what comes next. A demark is what happens when that chain snaps and you have to interpret from scratch. Alan Johnson's dancers rotating into the emblem, shot from overhead in a straight lift of Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade, is a demark of some violence. And rather than hold on the outrage, Brooks films the interpreting.

Why bother with the vocabulary? Because it puts the film's argument in the right place. People still discuss The Producers as a question of whether you can joke about Hitler. The film isn't interested in that. It's interested in the two seconds in which a roomful of strangers decides whether the thing in front of them is a tribute or a satire — and it stages that decision as editing.

Deleuze divides classical action-cinema into two shapes. In the large form, a situation bears down on a hero until he acts and transforms it. Burlesque runs on the small form, which reverses the order: someone acts, and the act discloses a situation nobody could see. Leo Bloom's mumbled aside to Max — that under creative bookkeeping a flop could pay better than a hit — is exactly that kind of act. A throwaway remark opens an entire economy. The small form also carries a specialty device Deleuze calls the index of equivocity: a gesture that could belong to two incompatible situations at once, with the comedy living in the gap. The whole film is a setup for one. As tribute, "Springtime for Hitler" is obscene. As satire, it's brilliant. The frames are identical. Max and Leo bet their liberty on the audience choosing the first reading. The audience chooses the second. They go to prison for being mistaken for artists.

There's a later Deleuze idea that turns up here early, and in a comic key. He was fascinated by a kind of character he called the forger: not a liar exactly, but someone who manufactures truth, and who is never alone, because behind one forger there is always another. Bialystock forges the books, the romance, the play, and finally a hit he never intended. Behind him Bloom forges the numbers, Franz Liebkind forges a Führer he still sincerely loves, Roger De Bris forges a director, and Dick Shawn's L.S.D. forges Hitler as a flower child. Nobody in this film is authentic. Deleuze called the productive version of this the powers of the false — falsity working not as a deficiency but as an engine. A show manufactured to be worthless turns out to be valuable. That's a joke about art and a truer joke about money. The last scene has the pair selling shares in the prison show. The forgery doesn't stop; it changes venue.

The other thing Deleuze can name is what happens to Hitler himself. He describes an inversion-image: the sublime figure, the one supposed to contain an entire people, replaced by his feeble double, with the sublimity not surviving the comparison. Chaplin built that grammar in The Great Dictator, turning the oratory into nonsense vocal music and letting the body betray the voice, and Brooks hands the instrument to Dick Shawn intact. From To Be or Not to Be he takes something structural: a theatre company whose backstage vanity and onstage Nazi impersonation are the same machine, so the show's success or failure drives the plot instead of decorating it. (Brooks settled that debt in 1983 by producing and starring in the remake.) What he adds is nastier than either ancestor. In Brooks, ridicule is not a moral act. It's inventory. Hitler is reduced to a clown because a clown can be sold.

The number itself is what Deleuze would call an attraction-image: staging that figures rather than acts, stopping the story to present it. And the Berkeley crane shot produces a dividual, his word for a crowd fused into one body with one feeling. Brooks sets two dividuals against each other. Onstage, bodies stripped of individuality assembling into the emblem of a state. In the house, an audience welded into a single slack-jawed unit, deciding together, in real time. The film's entire argument happens between them, and not one word of it is spoken.

One other image goes big, and it's the opposite of the swastika. At the Lincoln Center fountain, Leo Bloom, who has never done anything, decides to do something, and the water goes up. Deleuze borrowed a term from the musical for this: the movement of the world, where the character stops generating movement and the world takes it over, the way a dance absorbs the dancer. Bloom cannot act, so a fountain acts for him. It's the only frankly lyrical shot in a deliberately unlyrical film, and Brooks spends it on the moment a timid man becomes a criminal.

Everything else is filmed flat on purpose. Joseph Coffey lights it bright and even, nearer to television comedy than to the grainy New York naturalism then in fashion, and the camera holds still while Mostel and Wilder detonate in a small room. That's the Duck Soup setting: frontal, unprotected, no cutting away to protect the joke, so a performer's stage energy survives the transfer to film. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum had confirmed the year before what Mostel needs, which is room in the frame and a take allowed to run past the point where a film comedy would normally cut. The sweat, the wheedling swerves into conspiratorial address, De Bris receiving guests in an evening gown: these are postures that expose a relation rather than advance a plot, which is roughly what Deleuze means by the gest. (The De Bris material is also where the film has aged worst, its camp drawn in strokes broad enough to be a cartoon of a cartoon.) Each room is a little proscenium, and they get grander as the scheme gets filthier — shabby office, pigeon rooftop, gilded townhouse, Broadway house. The film's visual competence rises exactly as its taste collapses. The joke is in the budget.

So what did it do to filmmaking? It moved the punchline out of the performance and into the cut. Ralph Rosenblum, who had rebuilt A Thousand Clowns in the cutting room and would later cut Annie Hall, performed the same rescue here, arguing a first-time director out of material and into structure; the premiere montage is what that argument produced. Once you've seen the device work, you see it everywhere: stage something unbearable, cut to someone watching it, and let the second image tell you what the first one was. That's the grammar of modern comic embarrassment, and it works by installing the audience inside the film as a character with a job.

The film's stated faith is that ridicule reduces a tyrant to nothing. Its plot says something less comfortable: the ridicule is a hit. Brooks never resolves that, and the picture's slow canonisation through repertory houses, television, and eventually a Broadway musical that turned the joke into an institution has quietly proved his plot right rather than his faith. Watch it again, and don't watch the stage. Watch the house.