The Blues Brothers · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Bluesmobile bursts through the plate glass of a shopping mall, and Elwood, both hands on the wheel, says, "Disco pants and haircuts." Jake spots the Toys R Us. They are calmly cataloguing the stores while the stores disintegrate around them. Nothing on either face moves. Start there, because the whole film is hiding inside that stillness.

The usual word for John Landis's movie is "anarchic"—hundreds of wrecked squad cars, a mission from God, the biggest practical pile-up a studio had then dared. But the engine of the comedy isn't the destruction. It's the two men at the center who refuse to react to it.

Deleuze built his account of classical cinema around the movement-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. Perception flows into action across a tiny gap he calls the interval, or the centre of indetermination—the living hinge in a body where seeing gets converted into doing. Most movies keep that hinge oiled. The Blues Brothers deliberately jams it, in its two heroes, while running it at full throttle everywhere else. Jake and Elwood perceive everything—the cop cars, the explosions, Carrie Fisher's bazooka—and convert none of it into reaction. The interval is held wide open as a permanent comic suspension. Buster Keaton invented exactly this in The General: the stone face executing small precise tasks while the locomotive world comes apart behind him. Landis transplants the principle whole, and scales it to a city.

What you get is something close to world-movement—Deleuze's name for the figure who goes still while the world moves around him. (He coined it for the dancer absorbed into the dance, but the structure is the gag exactly.) The brothers don't travel through Chicago so much as Chicago erupts around their immobility. The purest instance is the church. James Brown preaches, the congregation detonates into motion, the light comes down on Jake—and he doesn't decide to be saved. The movement of the world throws him into a backflip. The body is moved rather than moving. That's the inversion the whole film keeps performing: motion belongs to everything except the people the plot is supposedly about.

Meanwhile the other engine runs wide open: the action-image, large form. A global situation presses—the orphanage will be sold, five thousand dollars owed, "a mission from God"—until one decisive act, the benefit concert and the cash delivered to the assessor's office, resolves it. The encompasser, what Deleuze calls the synsign, is Chicago itself: the expressways, the elevated rail, Daley Plaza, the flat horizontal Midwest sprawl that summons the action out of the men. Structurally the film is the large form in its plainest shape—Situation, then the act that transforms it. The joke is that the heroes skip the affective middle. They receive the mission and feel nothing. Cool is the absence of the interval.

Between those two engines the picture is a chain of episodes that accrete rather than build—the picaresque, what Deleuze (borrowing from the post-war moderns) called the balade and the dispersive situation: many weakly-linked pursuers, slackened causality, a trip that's really a pretext. The neo-Nazis, the country band, Carrie Fisher with her rotating arsenal—weak links, every one. The plot is a clothesline strung up to hang performances on.

And the performances are where the film stops being a demolition derby and becomes something rarer. Watch how it cuts: montage-organic, the edit serving the music's growth instead of colliding against it. George Folsey Jr. cuts Aretha Franklin's "Think" and James Brown's "The Old Landmark" to the phrase and the build, so each number swells as a single organic whole rather than getting chopped for coverage. The debts are specific. A Hard Day's Night taught movies to edit musicians on the musical phrase; The T.A.M.I. Show and Wattstax worked out the widescreen revue framing that keeps the whole band visible while the lead stays readable; Stormy Weather handed Cab Calloway "Minnie the Moocher" to carry, intact, across four decades into this film.

Then there's the suit. The black jacket, the porkpie hat, the sunglasses worn indoors, the flat refusal of expression—this is the brothers' entire content, and it's a gest in Deleuze's sense: a posture that exposes a social and theatrical relation. They have no psychology, only an attitude, and the attitude is an act of homage. Two white comedians in a borrowed uniform, conducting your eye toward Cropper and Dunn and the real Stax rhythm section, toward Brown and Ray Charles and Franklin and John Lee Hooker on Maxwell Street. The deadpan is a frame, and it points away from itself, at the music.

That's the achievement. A studio comedy that smuggled a musicology inside a blockbuster, and used the most expensive practical destruction of its era as a delivery system for a vanishing American art—Maxwell Street filmed months before the bulldozers, the Memphis-and-Chicago sound preserved at live fidelity while the rest of pop over-produced itself. The Keaton gag kept it funny. The revue architecture kept it reverent. Almost nothing holds those two at once.

So rewatch the mall. Notice how little the brothers actually do, and how hard the world works to stay funny around them. The joke turns out to be a small thesis about cinema: you can stand perfectly still and let everything else move.