Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of What's Up, Doc?
1972 · Peter Bogdanovich · What's Up, Doc? on Sightlines
Four plaid overnight bags, identical down to the tartan. One holds igneous rocks. One holds stolen jewels. One holds secret government documents. One holds Judy Maxwell's clothes. Everything in What's Up, Doc? comes out of that pile: the slamming doors, the hotel fire, the courtroom, and a chase down San Francisco's hills that ends in the bay.
Watch what a bag does to the person carrying it. Picking up your own luggage is a complete, ordinary act. Here it means four different things at once, and the man performing it has no idea which of the four he has just done. Deleuze has an exact name for a gesture like that. He calls it an index of equivocity: an action that could belong to two or more entirely separate situations, with the film declining to say which until the collision arrives.
Why reach for a French philosopher to talk about a Barbra Streisand comedy? Because Deleuze is one of the few theorists who takes comic construction as seriously as tragedy, and he does it by asking a builder's question: which direction does the film run? The large form goes situation → action. A town is menaced, a man decides, the town changes. That's the Western. The small form runs backwards: an act comes first, and from that act you deduce a situation that was hidden. Detective films are built on it. So is slapstick. So is farce, which is the art of a correct action landing in the wrong world. What's Up, Doc? is small-form all the way down, which is why its coincidences aren't sloppiness. In this shape, coincidence is the structural principle. The situation only becomes visible when two people collide over the same bag.
1972 was a strange year to build this machine. Deleuze's account of postwar cinema turns on the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer answer what they perceive, trips that transform nothing, causality gone slack. American film had arrived there. László Kovács had shot Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces — the grain of the drift itself. Bogdanovich hires him and asks for the opposite: bright, high-key, postcard-clean, framed wide and legible so the physical business plays out in full view. The cinematographer of the aimless road supplies the farce with its clarity. That isn't nostalgia. It's a decision about what an image is for.
Bogdanovich's specific invention is to treat a lapsed genre as recoverable engineering. He was a critic and a programmer before he was a director, and he came at 1930s screwball not as a mood to evoke but as a mechanism to rebuild with its tolerances intact: the character types, the door logic, the set-piece math. Nobody had done that with a dead form before, at this scale, with this seriousness. It's the argument that genre is transmissible craft rather than period sensibility — that a narrative machine can be taken apart, studied, and fired up again by people who weren't there the first time.
An index only works if you can read it. That is why the clarity is structural rather than decorative. Kovács keeps the geography of streets and stairs comprehensible at speed; Verna Fields, three years before Jaws, cuts so that every escalation lands as a payoff to the one before. The chase is what Deleuze calls a vector, a line of the universe: a zigzag stitching together places with no natural relation to each other. A hill, a ladder, a pane of plate glass crossing the street, a Chinatown parade, the bay. In the large form, space exists and the action crosses it. In the small form the line makes the space. Then Fields converges it, gathering every party to every bag into the same place at the same moment. That's the oldest American montage figure there is, Griffith's last-minute convergence, running here for laughs instead of a rescue.
Meanwhile Polly Platt's design stages the swaps so that we can track what the characters cannot. Deleuze calls this thirdness: meaning that exists only in a relation, held by somebody outside the action. In farce that somebody is us. We are not watching people be funny; we are holding a piece of information the film has deliberately withheld from everyone on screen, and the laugh is the sound of that gap closing. And every so often a bag opens on igneous rocks. Deleuze calls that a demark — an object yanked out of the series it belongs to, stopping habit dead and forcing interpretation. Half the picture's laughs are demarks.
None of this is claimed as original, which is the point. Bringing Up Baby (1938) is the acknowledged blueprint, reconstructed close to beat for beat: the absent-minded academic, the chaos-agent heroine, the disapproving fiancée, the property destruction. His Girl Friday (1940) supplies the machine-gun overlapping tempo, and in a small-form film that sound does structural work — the offscreen crash is an index of lack, a gesture whose situation we never see and must supply ourselves. The Lady Eve (1941) gives the con-woman-dismantles-a-scholar shape that Judy works on Howard. The Awful Truth (1937) gives the loose, improvised-sounding sparring. It Happened One Night (1934) gives the runaway-couple rhythm. And Charade (1963), closest of all, gives the interchangeable luggage itself.
Forward, the debts are just as concrete. Fields carried this chase's discipline into Jaws, the film that helped re-found the American action-image for the blockbuster era. Madeline Kahn arrives here, first film, as Eunice, and a career starts. Bogdanovich went straight on to Paper Moon (1973). The largest inheritance is the method: the director as archivist, rebuilding a form from its parts rather than quoting it.
Deleuze noticed that once the action-image cracked, films became conscious of their own clichés, and the usual reflex was corrosive — quote the convention in order to kill it. This film has the consciousness without the acid. Streisand sits at a lobby piano and sings "As Time Goes By." The title is borrowed from Bugs Bunny. The picture signs off like a Looney Tunes short. All three are a Warner Bros. movie citing Warner Bros., and not one is a wink at the material's expense. Bogdanovich knows every cliché in the box and plays them straight, at speed, with real stunt work and real hills.
So the open question. Can a form be rebuilt, or only imitated? This film is the strongest evidence for rebuilt, and it stakes everything on craft precision to prove it. Next time through, don't watch the gags. Watch the bags. Notice how often you know something the people on screen don't, and how long the film makes you carry it before letting go. That gap is where the laugh is manufactured, and it's the same gap a detective film opens with a fingerprint. Comedy and the crime picture are one machine at different speeds. Bogdanovich knew it, and built accordingly.
Concepts in play
- index-of-equivocity — Four indistinguishable plaid overnight bags holding rocks, jewels, documents and clothes: the identical act of picking up or opening a bag belongs to four incompatible situations at once, and no character can tell which one they are in.
- action-image-small-form — The farce runs act → situation throughout: the plot 'compounds coincidences deliberately,' and the hidden situation (thieves, spies, a stolen jewel collection) is disclosed only through collisions over misplaced luggage.
- vector (line of the universe) — The extended chase zigzags across disconnected San Francisco spaces — hills, stairs, ladders, bicycles, a runaway delivery of plate glass, a Chinatown parade, a plunge into the bay — with the trajectory itself building the film's geography.
- relation-image (the mental-image / thirdness) — Polly Platt's staging of the bag swaps 'for maximum visibility': the audience must be able to track objects the characters cannot, so the comedy exists only in the relation held by a knowing third party.
- demark — A bag opened on igneous rocks rather than its expected contents — the object pulled out of its customary series, halting habit and forcing every character on screen to reinterpret.
- index-of-lack — Sound design built on offscreen crashes and overlapping dialogue in the slamming-door hotel farce: the gesture is heard, its situation stays unseen and must be inferred.
- montage-organic-american — Verna Fields's cutting gathers every pursuer and every bag into convergent parallel action across multiple vehicles, sustaining momentum while preserving spatial and causal clarity — Griffith's last-minute convergence played for laughs.
- out-of-field-relative — The hotel's interchangeable rooms and doors 'that open and close on cross-purposes,' with converging characters just beyond the frame in adjacent, implied space.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Made in 1972 by New Hollywood personnel — Kovács, fresh from the grainy naturalism of Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces — yet deliberately restoring a fully functional sensory-motor circuit in bright, legible high-key images.
- consciousness-of-cliches — Streisand singing 'As Time Goes By' at the hotel-lobby piano, the Bugs Bunny title, the Looney Tunes sign-off: a Warner picture citing Warner's own heritage knowingly, but reinvesting the conventions rather than corroding them.
- movement-image — Perception drives action throughout and action resolves the situation: continuity cutting, comprehensible geography at high speed, and a resolution in 'a burst of implausible order' after the chase.