Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of El Dorado
1966 · Howard Hawks · El Dorado on Sightlines
A hand that will not close.
That is the image to keep. John Wayne's gunfighter, Cole Thornton, carries a bullet lodged near his spine, and every so often the hand he makes his living with stops taking orders. Hawks never flashes back to the shooting. No surgeon explains it. The hand quits, at the worst possible moment, and every other body in the room has to shift to cover the gap. Watch that once and you have the film.
Deleuze's Cinema 1 describes classical cinema as a machine he calls the action-image: a person takes in a situation and acts on it, the situation absorbs the act and comes back changed, and the cutting exists to keep that chain legible. Nearly every Western runs on it. But Deleuze splits the action-image in two, and the split is what makes El Dorado readable.
The large form goes situation → action → new situation. The world presses in until one man's act transforms it. High Noon is the textbook case, and Hawks rejected it outright. He built Rio Bravo, and then this, as the deliberate inverse: professionals who refuse the town's help and shut the door.
The small form runs the other way, action → situation → new action. You are handed an act, and the act discloses a situation you were never shown whole. Deleuze puts Hawks at the center of this form, and El Dorado is close to a demonstration piece. The nominal plot is a water war between the MacDonald family and the rancher Bart Jason. You barely see it. It arrives as a job offer declined, a shotgun leveled at close range, a wounded man's stumble, a drunk sheriff who has to be sobered up. Each act hands over one more piece of a situation that never assembles into a panorama.
Deleuze has a name for the piece doing the most work here. He calls it an index of lack: a gesture standing in for a situation the film withholds. The bullet near Thornton's spine is the purest one in the genre. Never seen, never operated on, never diagrammed. It exists only as a hand that will not grip. The whole physical predicament of the hero, and with it the question of whether these men can still do this work, is delivered through one failed grasp.
Leigh Brackett had learned the method on The Big Sleep, where she dissolved a knotted novel into behavior and let the plot fend for itself. She does it again to Harry Brown's The Stars in Their Courses. Deleuze lists slackened causality, weak links between scenes, among the symptoms of a cinema losing faith in action. In Hawks it is not a symptom. It is a preference. He would rather watch these people than move them.
Now look at the space. Hawks refused the wide anamorphic frame the mid-sixties Western loved and shot flat, because the very wide image scattered attention and cost him the two-shot. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a system holding a fixed quantity of information. Hawks wants that set narrow enough to keep faces, hands and gun rigs all readable at once, and Harold Rosson, on his last feature after a career that began in silents, lights it frontally and evenly so nothing is hidden by style. Then Hawks empties the Western of its horizon and rebuilds it as a floor plan: jail, saloon, doctor's office, street, used and reused until you could draw it from memory. Suspense comes from doorways. The space just outside the frame that you can locate and name is what Deleuze calls the relative out-of-field, and the film runs on it. The threat is not the landscape. It is the next room, and who is about to come out of it.
The trumpet is the best single idea in the picture. The antagonists play a mournful dirge to announce a killing. Deleuze's word for an object that means by habit, see this and expect that, is a mark. Two or three uses and the horn is doing the gun's work, pressure applied before a shot is fired. Then Harrah turns it around and plays it back at them. The sign comes loose from its owner. Deleuze calls a break in the customary chain a demark, and here the break is also the joke, and also the moment a ruined sheriff becomes a sheriff again. He takes the town's language back.
Which brings the argument. Deleuze dates the exhaustion of the action-image to the decades after the war: characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they perceive. The usual signs are drift, dispersal, plots that dissolve. El Dorado has none of that and has the crisis anyway. Hawks's version is arthritic rather than existential. His men perceive perfectly. They know exactly what to do. The body declines. Thornton's hand, Harrah's shakes, Bull's age, Mississippi's inability to hit anything with a pistol.
Hawks's answer is the invention worth naming. He keeps the circuit alive by splitting it across four insufficient men: Thornton's judgment, Mississippi's knife, Bull's long experience, Harrah's recovered nerve. The self-sufficient professional group he had been building since Only Angels Have Wings, where competence was the only moral currency, becomes here a prosthesis. Competence stops being something a man has and turns into something a group assembles.
That is also why the blocking starts to resemble something Deleuze would only describe two books later. His cinema of the body covers films where posture and endurance carry the time instead of action. El Dorado is not a time-image film and I will not pretend it is. But the sweat-out sequence, played for laughs and for real pain in the same breath, is a body enduring in a way no plot point requires. Wayne had been the weathered authority since Red River. Here the weathering is the subject.
Mississippi keeps reciting Poe's "Eldorado," the poem that gave the town its name, about a knight who rides his whole life after a golden place and never arrives. It is spoken by the one man who cannot shoot. Hawks was the case that made auteurism a theory, the proof that a director working entirely inside genre could be an author, and this is what that authorship looks like late. What the film did to narrative is small and durable: it showed a genre picture could run on behavior rather than incident, and that a film could take another of its director's films as its situation. He remade Rio Bravo, would remake it once more as Rio Lobo, and let the middle version be about men whose hands are going. Leone's Westerns had already arrived and the violent revisionists were close behind. Hawks answered with good humor and a floor plan.
Next time, don't watch the guns. Watch the hands, and watch who is standing in which doorway. The question Hawks leaves open is whether competence is a virtue, or just the last thing these men still have.
Concepts in play
- action-image-small-form — The water war between the MacDonalds and Bart Jason is never shown whole; the situation is disclosed act by act — a job declined, a shotgun at close range, a wounded man's stumble, a sheriff to be sobered up — in Brackett's behavior-driven string of scenes.
- index-of-lack — The bullet lodged near Thornton's spine is never seen or explained; it exists in the film only as a gun hand that periodically goes dead, the gesture standing in for the withheld situation.
- weak-links — Leigh Brackett's method, carried over from The Big Sleep, dissolves Harry Brown's somber novel The Stars in Their Courses into a character- and behavior-driven string of scenes; the dossier calls the film episodic and relaxed by design, privileging camaraderie over suspense mechanics.
- the closed set (cadre) — Hawks distrusted the very wide frame and composed flat, keeping faces, hands and gun rigs legible at once; Rosson stages the jail and saloon for clarity of space and sightline so the audience always knows who stands where.
- out-of-field-relative — Entrances and exits through doorways structure the suspense; the film's handful of reused enclosed spaces (jail, saloon, doctor's office, street) make the adjacent room, not the landscape, the source of threat.
- mark — The mournful trumpet dirge the antagonists play to signal a killing, used as a diegetic instrument of psychological pressure — hear the horn, expect a death.
- demark — Harrah eventually turns the dirge back on his enemies, detaching the signal from its owners and breaking the habitual chain the film had established.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Thornton's gun hand periodically paralyzes at the moment of action; Harrah's shakes, Bull's age and Mississippi's inability to shoot straight mean these men perceive the situation correctly and cannot execute — the sensory-motor link failing in the body rather than in the plot.
- attitudes & postures — Hawks's blocking takes bodies and their limitations as its real subject; the sweat-out sequences play Harrah's degraded drunkenness and painful recovery for humor and pathos at once, duration carried by a body rather than by incident.
- symbol — Mississippi's running recitation of Poe's "Eldorado," the poem that supplies the town's and film's name — a lifelong ride toward a golden place, spoken by the one member of the group who cannot shoot.