They Live by Night · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film opens in the air. A camera slung under a helicopter runs alongside a car carrying three men who have just come over the wall of a Southern penitentiary. It doesn't survey them from altitude the way a fixed-wing mount would have; it stays low, stays close, matches their speed. Helicopter shooting was new to narrative features in 1947, and Nicholas Ray and his cameraman George Diskant used the new machine for something odd. The shot can keep pace with the car. That is the whole extent of its power. It isn't the law closing in and it isn't rescue. It's company.

Hold onto that, because it's the film in miniature. The standing deal in American cinema is what Deleuze calls the action-image: a man takes in a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. The crime picture is that deal at its purest. A job is planned, the plan meets resistance, the world gets rearranged. Ray's first move is to take the jobs out. The robberies are elided or truncated, the biggest one largely withheld and registered afterward through what it costs. Deleuze has a name for a gesture that points at a situation you never see: an index of lack. Lang got there first in You Only Live Once, where the bank job arrives as rain, a gas mask, and a newspaper front page, and Ray takes the grammar straight from him. What's new is the proportion. Remove the heists from a heist movie and you have to fill the running time with something.

Ray fills it with waiting. The picture spends itself on intervals: rooms, cars, the stretches between crimes where nothing advances and the marriage deepens. Deleuze calls these temps morts, dead time, the everyday simply held rather than used. In most crime films the dead stretches are connective tissue you cut around. Here they are the movie, and the eruptions punctuate them. That is exactly what being a fugitive feels like from the inside, which is the argument for reading the film this way at all: the genre's clock is the couple's enemy, so Ray hands the clock to the couple and lets the genre interrupt.

The places they wait in stop being locations. Diskant lights the cabins and tourist courts from one practical source, so the room falls away into black and the two of them sit in a small bright volume with darkness on every side. Ray shoots low, with a weight of ceiling or wall above their heads. Meanwhile the picture mostly declines the semi-documentary location realism then fashionable in crime films; it's built on sets, backlot, and process plates for the driving, so the country outside is a chain of way stations that never adds up to a map. Deleuze's term is espace quelconque, the any-space-whatever: space that has quit its job as a stage for action and become a piece of feeling instead, cut into fragments that don't connect. A film about people with nowhere to go should not have a map. It doesn't.

The craft debts here are specific and worth naming, because Ray inherited a finished apparatus and pointed it somewhere new. Toland's lantern-and-bare-bulb naturalism at low camera height in The Grapes of Wrath is the photographic template for the rented rooms. Musuraca's RKO house style in Out of the Past — blacks keyed to one visible lamp, faces half surrendered — is the register Diskant picks up at the same studio a year later. Diskant had already proved he'd light strictly from inside the set in Desperate, whose swinging-lamp beating and newlyweds-on-the-run plot are the dry run for this. And John Houseman carried over the Mercury habit from Citizen Kane: actors blocked across receding planes under ceilings instead of covered in singles. Ray, a theatre man, uses it so you can see the room's exits and watch them get used up. Every one of those tools was built to make menace. Ray aims them at a marriage.

He also keeps showing you the shelter from outside. The two of them curl together, heads close, the frame tight; then a cut to a wide reveals how little cover they actually have. Deleuze distinguishes the relative out-of-field, the next room you could walk into, from the absolute out-of-field, which isn't anywhere you could walk. The dark around that lamp is the second kind. The prologue title card names it: they were "never properly introduced to the world we live in."

That card is also, literally, letters over faces. The first image of the film is one you read before you follow, a lectosign in Deleuze's sense, and reading it disarms the plot in advance. Lang fixed his couple's fate before his story began; Ray puts it in type. Suspense converts to elegy on the spot. You are not watching to find out. You are watching two kids use up their remaining time.

The fifteen-dollar wedding is the best scene in the movie for the same reason. A justice of the peace performs a ceremony he has clearly performed many times, at a price, on a couple for whom it means everything. Deleuze would call the whole tableau a gest: a posture that exposes a social relation rather than expressing a private feeling. The Production Code required the marriage so the pair would read as innocent in essence. Ray took a censorship obligation and turned it into the most class-exact minute in the film.

All of this is what Deleuze means by the crisis of the action-image, and Ray's debut is one of its cleanest American cases. Bowie perceives everything accurately and can do nothing that helps. He was imprisoned as an adolescent for a killing he insists wasn't murder, which is to say he was never given a world in which his acts could mean what he meant by them. The trip he and Keechie take transforms nothing, in the way Deleuze says the postwar ballad-form trip transforms nothing; it only relocates them.

What it did to filmmaking: it invented the American lovers-on-the-run film as a mode rather than a plot, and it proved you could build a picture on the intervals and let the crimes happen offscreen. It also announced Ray — tenderness toward the young, distrust of institutions, an architecture of doomed intimacy — which he carried into In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without a Cause. The cruel joke is that Hughes bought RKO and shelved it, so the debut reached America in 1949, after those later films were already moving, and critics had to rediscover it as a key instead of hearing it as an announcement.

Watch it again for the cuts to the wide shot. Notice how often the couple is sitting still while the film's supposed engine idles somewhere else. Then ask the question the movie keeps not answering: is Bowie ever, at any point, someone who acts?