Killing Them Softly · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The windshield comes apart slowly, in the rain, while Ketty Lester sings "Love Letters." Ray Liotta's Markie Trattman is being shot to death, and the film holds on it — each shard of safety glass, each raindrop, each shell casing — with a clarity that turns a murder into jewelry. It is the most beautiful thing in the movie, and it is meant to make you a little sick. That queasy seduction is the whole argument of Killing Them Softly, and it is worth slowing down to see what Dominik is doing to the gangster picture.

Start with that killing. In most crime movies, violence is the act that resolves the situation: a man perceives a threat, draws, fires, and the world changes. Deleuze called this circuit the action-image — perception flowing into action with nothing left over. Dominik refuses the flow. He stops the hit and exhibits it. The slow motion, the pop standard, the rain: this is no longer an act, it is a display. Borrowing from Eisenstein, Deleuze had a name for an image that figures rather than acts — the attraction-image, the staged number lifted out of the chain of events to be looked at for itself. The Trattman murder is pure attraction. It is the film quoting the operatic squib-deaths of The Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde — its direct grammar — but quoting them so you feel the obscenity of being moved. That is the craft debt turned into criticism.

Now the talk. Between the set-pieces the film is two men in a parked car, two men across a booth, haggling. Richard Jenkins's "Driver" negotiates a contract killing the way a middle manager negotiates a vendor invoice. Here Deleuze's idea of the gest helps — a posture or attitude that lays bare a social relation instead of advancing a plot. Gandolfini's Mickey is one long gest: a washed-up hit man dissolving into drink and grievance, his body carrying the dead weight of the whole gangster myth. He never kills anyone on screen. He just sits there being the ruin of the thing Gandolfini himself made iconic, and the film lets him sit, because the posture is the point.

Around them, the city. Dominik shot Higgins's Boston as post-Katrina New Orleans: vacant lots, water-stained underpasses, shuttered stores. Deleuze had a term for spaces like this — the any-space-whatever, a place stripped of its function as a setting for action, fragmented into pure mood. These lots don't host the drama; they are its diagnosis. Before anyone says the word "economy," the décor has already announced a system that stopped working. You could call it, in Deleuze's harsher register, an originary world surfacing beneath the social one — a crystal-decomposition, an ordered structure caught in the act of rotting from inside.

And under all of it, the radios. Bush, Paulson, McCain, Obama bleed from every television and car speaker, talking about confidence, credit, collective responsibility, the bailout. The images show men robbing and killing each other over money; the soundtrack shows a nation reassuring itself in the same vocabulary. Late in his cinema books Deleuze described images that no longer simply illustrate their sound — voice and picture telling two stories across a gap, so the image has to be read rather than merely watched. He called the readable image the lectosign; the split itself, audiovisual-disjunction. Here the two tracks rhyme until you can't pull them apart. "Confidence" is a banking word and a Mob word. The disjunction is the meaning.

Which is why the film can end not on a shootout but on an argument in a bar about whether America is a community or a business. The genre has been transposed into discourse — Deleuze's reflection-image, where action gives way to an image posing a problem it cannot solve. Cogan's last line, that America is not a country but a business, "so pay me," is the symbol in Deleuze's sense: the single object that condenses the relation the whole film is built on. Every negotiation, every killing-to-restore-confidence, was that line in advance.

What did this do? It took the most kinetic genre in cinema and drained the kinesis out, keeping the violence only as something to be ashamed of enjoying. Audiences hated it — an "F" CinemaScore, a real one — because they came for the action-image and got a discourse about why they wanted it. The lineage is honest: the weary tradesman-criminals come from The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the patient anti-suspense from Dominik's own Jesse James, the cold geometry of the hit from Point Blank. Dominik's invention was to weld that art-cinema patience to the 2008 newsfeed, so a small crime movie became a ledger of a country settling its accounts.

Watch it again with the sound up on the radios. The film is telling you what the men in the cars are too busy to hear.