Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Hot Fuzz
2007 · Edgar Wright · Hot Fuzz on Sightlines
A hand brings a rubber stamp down on a form. Cut: the stamp again, tighter. Cut: the drawer. The camera whips to the next desk, and the sound treats all of it like a magazine going into a pistol. Nothing has happened. A police officer has filed some paperwork, in a village where the gravest offence on the books is an unlicensed street performer.
Hold that shot. Most of what Hot Fuzz knows is inside it.
Deleuze got the idea from Bergson, and it's simple. Before cinema, showing motion meant choosing the pose that summed it up: the discus thrower at the top of the throw, the martyr at the moment of the vision. Deleuze calls those privileged instants, instants elected and arranged so that they mean something. Then cinema arrived and did something cruder. It sampled movement mechanically, twenty-four times a second, taking whatever instant happened to land there. He calls that the any-instant-whatever, and it is the bargain film struck for its realism: give up the pose, get the world.
Edgar Wright breaks the bargain for a laugh, and the laugh turns into a method. He takes the any-instant-whatever of English village routine, a form being stamped, a pint being pulled, a trolley being loaded, and shoots each one as an elected instant. Crash zoom, whip-pan, three cuts where one would do, a needle-drop underneath. The grammar is Sam Raimi's; Evil Dead II is where those percussive inserts of small business come from, the ones that make loading a shotgun feel like a world-historical event. Wright's own invention is to run that idiom across an entire feature and make it carry the comedy, so the joke lives in the cut, not the line. You cannot perform this. It has to be built. He storyboarded it to the frame, which is why the film survives being paused.
Now the story, because the story is doing the same thing from the other end.
Nicholas Angel can see. He is the best-trained pair of eyes in England, exiled to Sandford for the sin of competence, and for an hour he watches a village kill people and can do nothing whatsoever about it. That gap between perceiving clearly and acting effectively is the hinge Deleuze's whole two-book history of cinema turns on. He calls it the crisis of the action-image. Classical movies ran a circuit: a character sees a situation, acts, and the act changes the situation. Postwar cinema cut that circuit and left people standing in ruins, watching. Wright cuts it too. His instruments are paperwork and good manners. Angel reports a murder and is handed a form.
What holds him there is specific enough to have its own name. The grisly accidents that start rocking Sandford fit two stories at once, perfectly, without preference: an accident is what a murder looks like when it is done properly. Deleuze calls that an index of equivocity, a sign belonging equally to two different situations, so that what you see cannot tell you which world you are in. A whole hour of a comedy is built on it. And the shape of that hour is what he calls the small form of the action film, the one that runs backwards. No grand situation pressing down on a hero; just a man performing small acts that gradually disclose a situation he cannot yet see whole. Detection is the small form's home genre. Hot Fuzz plays it straight.
Then it discloses something much older than the cop picture. Beneath Sandford's hanging baskets is The Wicker Man: an isolated English community whose respectable elders quietly murder to protect the town's standing as a model village, restaged here as the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance and the moment the hoods come off. Deleuze has a two-part structure for exactly this. There is the derived milieu, the furnished sociable place with its fête and its pub and its rota, and there is the originary world it turns out to be the skin of, a region of naked drives gnawing at the milieu from underneath. In his examples the drive is usually hunger or sex. Wright's originary world runs on tidiness. That is the real discovery of the film, and it is genuinely unnerving: an appetite for order turns out to be as savage as any other appetite, once you let it eat people. The casting carries the argument. Edward Woodward, the policeman a village consumed in The Wicker Man, is one of Sandford's own here, and Dalton and Broadbent lend their accumulated cosiness precisely so it can be turned over.
And then the film changes form. Deleuze says the small and large forms can convert into one another, and I know of few cleaner demonstrations than this last act. The village stops being a puzzle to be disclosed and becomes an encompassing situation, the synsign, a whole milieu that calls out for one decisive act to transform it: the large form, the shape of the western. Angel walks onto the village green like a gunslinger, and the debts arrive with him. Leone's extreme close-ups and town-square staging out of A Fistful of Dollars. Bay's circling low-angle hero framing from Bad Boys II, quoted almost shot for shot, the film literally playing on Danny's DVD earlier. John Woo's two-handed sliding dive-and-fire from Hard Boiled. The model village is where the crisis of the action-image gets settled by a man with two pistols.
Here is where the film could have been worthless, and isn't. Deleuze's charge against late commercial cinema was the cliché: images so used up that we no longer see them, only recognise them. Modern cinema, he thought, had to break them in order to think at all. Danny Butterman is the cliché given a character, a constable who has watched Point Break too many times and treats his shelf as an instruction manual. Wright's answer isn't a refutation. It's a counter-proposal. Don't break the cliché; perform it with total conviction and it turns back into a rite. The gun fired into the air in frustration, lifted straight from Point Break, is not sent up. It is honoured. The film wants its shootout to be good, and the shootout is good. That conviction is what separates this from the blank quotation a lot of 2000s pastiche settled for, and it is why the finale lands as release and not as footnote.
One last piece of engineering, the thing everybody notices without having a word for it. Almost every throwaway line in the first hour detonates in the last. Deleuze's term for an object that means by its customary chain, so that seeing it makes you expect what habitually follows, is the mark. Wright's first hour is a stockroom of marks and his third act spends the lot. This is why the rewatch is a different film. Knowing the ending, the opening hour stops being a comedy about a stiff man in a soft town and becomes a conspiracy transacted in front of you in plain sight, everything visible, and dismissed by you the first time exactly as Angel's colleagues dismiss him.
What did it do? It proved you can construct a comedy the way you construct an action sequence, out of cutting rhythm and planted hardware, and that the result holds up frame by frame. The idiom spread fast after 2007, and Wright took it further himself, into the on-screen annotation of Scott Pilgrim. But watch this one again for the small stuff. Notice how much of it is shot with the grammar of consequence, and then ask the question the village green is really posing: what happens to a place where the most decisive thing anyone does all week is stamp a form?
Concepts in play
- Privileged instants — The percussive insert-montages of mundane business — a form stamped, a pint pulled, a trolley loaded — shot with crash zooms, whip-pans and needle-drops as if each were the elected, decisive instant of a Bruckheimer set piece.
- Any-instant-whatever — The raw material Wright elevates: ordinary sampled village routine (paperwork, pub visits) that carries no dramatic weight of its own until the cutting confers it.
- Crisis of the action-image — For the first hour Angel perceives a village committing murder and can take no adequate action; the sensory-motor circuit is cut not by ruin but by paperwork and village politeness — he reports a killing and is handed a form.
- Index of equivocity — The series of grisly 'accidents' belongs equally to two situations — accident or murder — and nothing in the image itself decides between them; the whole first-act engine runs on that undecidability.
- Action-image, small form — Detection structure: Angel's small investigative acts progressively disclose a hidden situation he cannot see whole, rather than a global situation pressing him toward one act.
- Derived milieu — Sandford as picture-postcard model village — hanging baskets, fête, Neighbourhood Watch rota, an unlicensed street performer as the gravest crime on the books.
- Originary world — The Wicker Man architecture beneath the village: respectable elders who murder to preserve the town's model-village standing, revealed in the hooded Neighbourhood Watch Alliance ritual — a world of raw drive where the drive is tidiness.
- Action-image, large form — The last act converts the film: the village becomes an encompassing situation transformed by one decisive act, with Angel striding onto the green for a high-noon confrontation staged out of A Fistful of Dollars.
- The encompasser (synsign) — Sandford itself — countryside, green, high street, the model village — becomes the milieu that calls the shootout into being; Bay's circling low-angle hero framing from Bad Boys II gives it its scale.
- Consciousness of clichés — Danny treats his Point Break and Bad Boys II DVDs as an instruction manual, and the film reproduces their beats — the gun fired into the air in frustration — as sincere iconography rather than send-up.
- Mark — Wright's setup-and-payoff engine: virtually every throwaway line planted in the first hour detonates in the last act, so objects and phrases mean by the chain of what customarily follows them.
- Inversion-image — The sublime action hero placed in the uncanny English everyday — a London supercop exiled for competence, his paperwork and pub rounds given the coverage of a gunfight.