Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Getaway
1972 · Sam Peckinpah · The Getaway on Sightlines
A machine turns over. The same machine turns over again.
Peckinpah opens The Getaway with several minutes of prison that tell you almost nothing about the plot. Fragments of machinery, routine, confinement, repeating and overlapping and gathering speed until the repetition itself is the subject. Doc McCoy is inside it, and nothing he does in those minutes changes anything. That's the point. It isn't a scene; it's a mind being worn flat, cut at the speed erosion actually feels like.
Hold onto that overture. Everything after it is an escape from it, and not only from the prison.
Deleuze cuts cinema roughly in half. In one kind of film a person sees a situation and does something, and the doing changes the situation: perception runs to action along a taut wire, and the editing exists to keep the wire taut. He calls that the movement-image, and its high-tension form the action-image. In the other kind, the wire is cut. The character sees, and there is nothing available to do with what they see. Deleuze names that figure the voyant, the seer. Time stops being the measure of movement and becomes the thing you're watching.
The overture is a pure optical situation in exactly that sense. Doc can look at the machinery, and that is the whole of his agency. Deleuze calls such moments opsigns, and they normally belong to the art cinema of the 1960s, not to a Steve McQueen vehicle. The engine of this film is Doc's conversion from a man who can only watch into a man whose hands work again. Benyon's bargain isn't just plot mechanics. It's a splice. It reconnects the wire.
Which is why the lens is worth the trouble. The standing complaints about The Getaway — MacGraw's flatness, the softened ending — treat it as a story told a little badly. Watch it instead as a film about the restoration of the power to act, made in the decade that had stopped believing in that power, and the shape snaps into focus.
Deleuze splits the action-image into two shapes. The large form: a whole situation presses down until one decisive act transforms it, which is the Western and the epic. The small form: you begin from an act, and the act discloses a piece of a situation you couldn't see. The Getaway is small form all the way down. The robbery goes off, and only afterward, act by act, does the double-cross underneath it surface. That is Rififi's real bequest — its subject was never the safe, it was the unraveling after — and Walter Hill's script keeps the anatomy and runs it flat out.
The small form has a shape, and Deleuze's name for it is the vector, the line of the universe: not a journey across a coherent country but a zig-zag stitching disconnected places together. Motel forecourt. Gas station. Junkyard. The inside of a garbage truck. A hotel corridor in a border town turned into a shooting gallery. Nothing links those spaces except two people crossing them, and Lucien Ballard's telephoto lenses keep flattening the distance so that pursuers and pursued share one compressed plane. Ballard's other gift is restraint: bleached highways, available-feeling light, an ordinary sweltering Texas. Bazin argued that the honest image leaves the world's ambiguity intact and that cutting lies. Peckinpah buys the right to fracture by keeping everything around the fracture plain.
The fracture is his invention. Several cameras on a single beat, running at different frame rates, reassembled in the cutting room across speeds and angles. Deleuze, following Bergson, says cinema is founded on the any-instant-whatever: the ordinary sampled instant, as against the posed climactic instant of classical art. Peckinpah takes the most privileged instant genre owns, the moment a body is hit, and refuses to pose it. He re-samples it. You don't get a better instant, you get more of them. That's why the shotgun work feels operatic and clinical at the same time, and why the garbage-truck sequence, which is two people and a compactor, tightens like a vise. The prison overture comes from the other end of Deleuze's history of montage, the French school's fascination with mechanism, superimposition and sheer accelerating quantity of movement, dropped into a 1972 thriller as psychology.
Doc's opposite number gives the film its floor. Between feeling and action Deleuze puts the impulse-image, the naturalist mode, where a concrete setting turns out to be skin stretched over an originary world of pure appetite. Its people don't act, they feed, and its geometry is a slope that only runs down. Rudy Butler's abduction of the veterinarian and his wife, the humiliation, the sexual domination, is that world opening under this one. Doc and Carol have a code, so they can act. Rudy has hunger, so he can only descend. The junkyards and the trash truck are the same argument in set dressing: an America of transit and disposability, with a compactor that tries to digest the heroes.
What is all of it circulating around? Exchange. Carol slept with Benyon to buy Doc's parole, and the price stays paid. The money in the satchel is that same substance in portable form, goal and liability at once. Deleuze calls an object that condenses a film's organizing relation a symbol; here it isn't a metaphor for the marriage, it's the currency the marriage was bought in. The marital drama isn't a subplot bolted to a chase. It's the chase's accounting. Even the authorship went through that till: McQueen's cut approval, held through First Artists, killed Jerry Fielding's score and installed Quincy Jones's, cool jazz and Toots Thielemans's harmonica laid over Texas heat. You can hear who owned the picture. It also works, because the music keeps the film moving instead of mourning.
The lineage runs clean. You Only Live Once set the doomed couple running across an unforgiving landscape. High Sierra made the aging professional's competence into a moral code, which is what McQueen plays with his whole body. Gun Crazy invented the front-seat flight grammar, the getaway staged from inside the car. The Killing scattered its loot to the wind and carried dialogue by Jim Thompson, whose novel this is and whose own draft screenplay was set aside for Hill's. Behind all of it stands Peckinpah's own Ride the High Country, where men are judged by competence and their word. Forward, the debt is Hill's: this was among his first produced credits, and the lean grammar of transit and professionalism he wrote here he carried into Hard Times, The Warriors, 48 Hrs. A whole strain of American action cinema starts in this script.
By 1972 the action-image was supposed to be finished — heroes who couldn't act, plots that dispersed, journeys that changed nothing. The Getaway is the counter-argument, and it's a technical one. Keep the story single and taut, and put the modernity in the instant rather than the structure. Break time inside the shot and you don't have to break the story.
Which leaves the ending everyone argues about. Thompson's novel ends in a nightmare; the film hands the McCoys to Slim Pickens' old cowboy and lets them over the border, and the grace of it is genuinely startling. Read this way it's the thesis said out loud. They act, the act works, they cross. Peckinpah spent a decade filming men who arrived too late, and here he gave two people a border and opened it.
Watch the overture again and count how long it takes before Doc's hands change anything. Then ask the question the getaway leaves open: is the marriage repaired, or only outrun?
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns) — The opening prison overture: an associative montage of machinery, routine and confinement, overlapping and accelerating, in which Doc can only perceive his own erosion and has no action available.
- the seer (voyant) — Doc inside Huntsville as a watcher/endurer whose 'psychological erosion' is shown rather than narrated; the corrupt parole bargain with Benyon converts him back into an agent.
- montage-quantitative-french — The prison montage's fragmented, repetitive, overlapping images of machinery, built on accelerating mechanical rhythm rather than narrative continuity.
- action-image, small form (ASA) — The heist-aftermath structure adapted from the Rififi tradition: the shotgun bank job goes off first and the double-cross underneath it is disclosed act by act as allies turn predator.
- vector / line of the universe — Peckinpah's staging across a landscape of transit and disposability — motels, gas stations, train stations, a junkyard, the trash truck, the border-town hotel — linked only by the couple's zig-zag flight.
- binomial (force against force) — Doc against Rudy Butler, the sadistic double-crosser, resolved in the besieged border hotel whose corridors and rooms become a shooting gallery of pump-action confrontations.
- any-instant-whatever — The multi-camera methodology: several cameras running at varied frame rates on the same violent beat, then intercut across speeds and vantage points so the moment of impact is extended and fractured rather than posed.
- impulse-image (naturalism) — Rudy's abduction and psychological domination of the veterinarian and his wife — a sequence of humiliation and sexual power that mirrors and darkens the McCoys' loyalty plot.
- line of slope (degradation) — The Rudy subplot has no arc of transformation, only descent: appetite and domination curdling the film's midsection while Doc and Carol's code keeps them capable of action.
- originary world — The grubby, functional America of junkyards and refuse — the McCoys hiding in garbage and nearly crushed in the compactor — presented as the savage world beneath the ordinary highway milieu.
- symbol — The money, 'both goal and liability,' as the same currency in which Carol bought Doc's freedom by sleeping with Benyon — the transaction that poisons the marriage and organizes the whole flight.