Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Bad Sleep Well
1960 · Akira Kurosawa · The Bad Sleep Well on Sightlines
A cake comes in on a trolley. It is a model of the company's headquarters, built in sugar, accurate down to the windows, and in one upper window someone has set a single rose. A man went out of that window. The firm called it suicide and buried the story. Now it is dessert at his son's wedding, and the son is the groom.
Kurosawa stages that reception like filmed theatre, then does the thing almost nobody else would think to do with the camera: he parks it at the back of the hall, with the press. Reporters crowd the doorway and narrate. They know the gossip about the public-works contracts, they watch the police arrive, they hand the backstory to each other in mutters while the ceremony proceeds in front of them. We receive the story of this corporation from the people with the least power inside it.
Deleuze has a name for what that camera is doing. He calls it a dicisign: an image of someone perceiving, composed so that you feel the position the film is perceiving from. The wedding isn't presented to us. It's overheard. And once you notice you're standing with the reporters, you notice the worse thing. They are the only people in the building who see clearly and the only ones who can do nothing about it. The film's entire moral situation is set by where the camera chooses to stand in its first sequence.
That choice has a documented parent. Citizen Kane opens on a newsreel and a screening room of journalists trying to build a dead magnate out of hearsay, and it shoots in deep focus so foreground and background stay equally sharp. Kurosawa takes both debts at once — the bravura opening that delivers a whole corrupt milieu before the plot proper starts, and the depth that keeps watchers and watched in the same crisp plane. Bazin defended deep focus because it hands the viewer freedom to choose where to look and preserves the ambiguity of the real. Kurosawa uses that freedom against you. In these wide Tohoscope compositions there is no uncompromised place in the frame to rest your eye; every figure held in focus is a term in the same equation. Deleuze's word for a frame built this way is the closed set: composition treated as a system, information-dense, nothing decorative. His other lineage here is his own Ikiru, which had already used a long ceremonial gathering — a wake — to anatomize a bureaucracy from the inside out.
Then there is the telephone. It rings in the offices and corridors, and instructions come out of it. Deleuze calls an object like that a mark: a thing that signifies by habit, so that seeing it makes you expect what customarily follows. Here the customary chain runs instruction, then a man does something that destroys him. Hold on to the telephone. The film ends on one.
The machine Kurosawa builds around these objects is, on paper, the most solid structure in cinema. A son takes a false name, marries into the family of the man who killed his father, and works from inside. That's Hamlet's spine, and it's also the noir template of The Big Heat: a lone avenger burrowing into an entrenched syndicate in hard key light. Deleuze would classify it as the large form of the action-image, the mode he thought Kurosawa was the modern master of — an encompassing situation presses on a man until a decisive act transforms it. Force meets force. Nishi and Iwabuchi, the avenger and the vice-president, the duel the whole shape promises.
The promise is a trap, and the film's greatness is in how coldly it springs it. Nishi wins nearly every round. He reconstructs the crime, breaks the subordinates, terrifies the guilty men one by one from a hiding place. And the situation does not move, because the second force has no body. Guilt in this firm is diffused down a chain of functionaries, each of whom can only obey, and above them the film simply refuses to show anyone. Deleuze's term for this diffusion is the condemnation of the plot: behind the plot you can follow, another plot you cannot locate. It's the schema Force of Evil found when it made the racket itself the villain, moved here into the postwar Japanese corporation, where officials descend from ministries into company sinecures and nobody signs anything. What breaks is the sensory-motor circuit that action cinema runs on — perceive a situation, act, resolve it. Nishi perceives perfectly and can't act adequately. That's the crisis of the action-image, arriving in 1960 in a film that keeps every gear of the thriller and removes the discharge.
Half the vengeance is conducted in a bombed-out munitions factory, walls open to sky and volcanic ground. The offices are the world the postwar order presents: desks, corridors, telephones. The ruin is what that world is standing on. Deleuze distinguishes the derived milieu, the concrete social setting, from the originary world beneath it, savage and pre-social, where drives run without manners. Kurosawa makes the distinction geographic. Business is done in the tower; the truth is extracted in the crater the war left, which the tower was built to paper over.
And Mifune, of all actors, plays this bolted shut. Bespectacled, buttoned, banked. The most explosively physical body in Japanese cinema held in a secretary's posture for two hours. That held posture is what Deleuze means by the gest: an attitude that exposes a social relation rather than expressing a private feeling. Nishi's stillness is the corporation's stillness. He has to become one of them to get at them, and the film is honest enough to let that cost him — his wife's innocence, which he counted on being able to use, is what finally stops his hand.
The last thing you hear is an ordinary phone call, conducted in the flattest possible tone, to someone who is never shown. Deleuze separates the relative out-of-field, space you could walk into, from the absolute out-of-field, a presence beyond the frame that has no location at all. Kurosawa spends the film teaching you that power speaks through telephones, then puts power permanently off-screen, unnameable, and has a man bow to it. This was the first production of his own company, made the year Tokyo was in the streets over the Security Treaty, and the independence was the point: he wanted to indict a real evil, and a real evil has no third act.
What it did to narrative is exactly that missing third act. Films that attack a system almost always grant one prosecution that lands. This one grants total knowledge and zero effect, and it does so without a single sloppy or self-pitying frame. The shape — the complete case, the untouched institution, the hero erased off-screen — became the standard grammar of political cinema a decade later, and it has not been improved on.
Watch it again for the second row. Kurosawa put the film's argument in the backgrounds of his deep-focus frames: the man already sweating, the man bowing a half-second too long, the one who hasn't been told yet. And whenever a phone rings, ask who is on the other end. The film will never tell you, and that is the answer.
Concepts in play
- dicisign — The opening wedding reception is staged like filmed theatre and shot from the vantage of the press corps at the back of the hall, who supply the whispered exposition; the camera perceives a group of perceivers.
- the closed set (cadre) — Yuzuru Aizawa's deep, planar Tohoscope compositions keep foreground and background in the same crisp focus so watchers and watched share one frame — composition as an information system.
- symbol — The wedding cake modelled on the corporate headquarters, with a rose marking the window from which Nishi's father supposedly leaped — accusation, plot device and organizing relation condensed in one object.
- mark — The telephone recurs as the instrument through which invisible power issues its commands; its customary chain (call, then instruction, then a ruined man) is established across the corporate interiors.
- action-image-large-form — The revenge armature taken from Hamlet and The Big Heat: a global situation of graft presses until the avenger, working from inside under a false identity, moves to transform it.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Nishi reconstructs the crime and breaks the subordinates yet cannot alter the situation; the film closes with the avenger destroyed and the guilty untouched.
- condemnation-of-the-plot — Guilt is diffused through a chain of complicit functionaries (the Force of Evil schema) and the ultimate villains are never shown, leaving a plot-behind-the-plot that cannot be located.
- out-of-field-absolute — The closing telephone conversation, enormity delivered in the flattest of tones to an interlocutor never seen; the true powers are never shown on screen.
- originary-world — The gutted wartime munitions factory, walls blown open to sky and volcanic terrain, where Nishi conducts private justice beneath the derived milieu of desks, corridors and telephones the postwar order papered over it with.
- the-gest — Mifune, Kurosawa's usual figure of explosive physicality, played bespectacled and buttoned-down with his fury banked beneath a bureaucrat's surface; posture as the exposure of a corporate relation.