Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Shaun of the Dead
2004 · Edgar Wright · Shaun of the Dead on Sightlines
A bus stop in north London, morning. A queue of people who have stood in this exact spot every weekday for years, heads down, shoulders slack, swaying slightly out of time with each other. Then a checkout girl scanning. Then a kid nodding on the spot to headphones. Edgar Wright cuts the sequence to the rhythm you would use for the dead, and the gag doesn't land until an hour later, when the real dead turn up moving exactly the same way. Nothing was added to those commuters to make them funny. The camera just watched them at the right speed.
Hold on to that shot. It sets the film's terms, and it also happens to stage, as a joke, the single most important break in Gilles Deleuze's account of what movies are.
Deleuze noticed that for fifty years cinema ran on one circuit. A character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the action changes the situation. Perceive, act, resolve. He called that circuit sensory-motor, and the films built on it movement-images: the western, the gangster picture, most of what any of us saw as kids. Then it broke. Characters began perceiving more than they could act on. They walked and looked and waited, and nothing they did moved the world in front of them. Deleuze located the break in postwar Italy, in people wandering through rubble with no available move, and named it the crisis of the action-image. It is the hinge his whole two-volume argument turns on.
Shaun of the Dead opens with a man in precisely that condition and treats it as a hangover.
Shaun perceives fine. He sees the girlfriend running out of patience, the mother he doesn't call, the best mate welded to the sofa, the pub where the evening goes to die. He converts none of it into action. That isn't a clever reading, it's the premise. What makes it worth Deleuze's vocabulary is the walk to the corner shop. Deleuze has a term for the trip that transforms nothing: the balade, the stroll, neorealism's great empty form, the journey that produces no event. Shaun's balade is a trudge for milk through a city that has already ended, and he registers none of it. The apocalypse is happening behind his head.
Here is where Wright does something nobody else had done with this material. He keeps the broken circuit in the character and moves the working one into the cutting. The errand is shot like an action sequence: whip-pans, crash-zooms, the fridge door and the coins and the turn of a key snapped onto a percussion track. The film's sensory-motor system is in perfect health. Shaun's is dead. And because the style is already operating at apocalypse pitch during a trip for groceries, the famous thing happens: when actual mayhem arrives, the grammar barely has to change. The style was there first. Only Shaun had to catch up.
That mismatch generates the film's basic comic unit, which Deleuze, following Peirce, called the index of equivocity: a gesture that could belong to either of two situations and won't tell you which. A body slumped on a lawn. A stranger swaying at a bus stop. A man lifting a pool cue in a pub. Every one of those reads as Tuesday and as catastrophe at the same time, and the film simply declines to disambiguate.
Which brings the commuters back. A crowd rendered as one feeling rather than as individuals is what Deleuze calls a dividual, and the shuffle those commuters share is what Brecht taught him to call a gest: a posture that gives away a social relation without anyone saying a word. Romero got there first. Dawn of the Dead put its ghouls in a shopping mall in 1978 and let them ride the escalators, and the zombie has been a satirical instrument ever since. Wright's move is to invert it. Romero's dead go shopping; Wright's living already shamble. The satire slides off the monsters and onto us, and it gets funnier and considerably meaner in the process.
The zombie itself is one of cinema's purest examples of what Deleuze calls the impulse-image: not a character with motives but a raw drive, appetite with a body attached. Deleuze's point about such figures is that they reveal an originary world under the ordinary one. The concrete setting turns out to be a skin stretched over a landscape of pure hunger. English suburbia is the funniest possible skin. The garden fence, the corner shop, mum's front room, the pub fittings pulled off the wall and swung. Wright inherits that domestic-siege comedy from Braindead, where the household object becomes the weapon, and the deadpan-over-wet-gore register from An American Werewolf in London, including the upbeat needle-drop laid over carnage that he pays back by killing a zombie to 'Don't Stop Me Now.'
And then there is the rulebook. Deleuze's mark is an object whose meaning comes from a customary chain: when you see this, expect that. Night of the Living Dead installed the chain in 1968 — slow shamble, headshot only — and by 2004 the audience holds the entire thing while the characters hold none of it. That gap is where the film lives. Deleuze calls the image whose sense is completed by a knowing third party the relation-image, and here the third party is us, fluent in a genre the people onscreen have never heard of. Wright isn't spoofing that fluency, he's building on it, which is the difference between this film and a parody. The clichés are load-bearing.
Then the Winchester, and the action-image comes back online. The boarded-up farmhouse of Night of the Living Dead replayed beat for beat as a boarded-up pub: an encompassing situation pressing down until somebody has to do something decisive about it, Deleuze's large form, the oldest shape in the movies. The structural joke is exquisite. The only intervention capable of restarting this man's sensory-motor circuit is a full-scale outbreak of the dead, and the room where he finally acts is the same room he has been hiding from adulthood in for a decade. It costs him a mother and a best mate. The film knows exactly what it charged him.
All of it was incubated on television. Spaced built the Pegg–Frost flatmate duo and the whip-pan reference grammar; Evil Dead II supplied the splatstick camera, the crash-zoom into a face, the undercranked slapstick. What Wright added, and it turned out to be enormously portable, was pointing that horror camera at errands. The lineage runs mostly backwards here, six ancestors deep, but the one forward debt on record is the best kind: Romero cast Pegg and Wright as ghouls in Land of the Dead. The chapter got written back into the book it came from.
Watch it again and don't watch Shaun. Watch the backgrounds, and the queue at the bus stop, and ask the question the film leaves open: is a broken sensory-motor circuit a catastrophe, or is it just how most of us get to work?
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — A 'genial North London slacker — pub-bound, drifting, allergic to adulthood' who perceives his collapsing life (girlfriend, mother, flatmate, pub) and can convert none of it into action, and who 'barely notices at first' a full-scale zombie outbreak happening around him.
- the voyage/balade form — The 'mundane trip to the corner shop' — a stroll that transforms nothing, taken through a city already overrun, while the walker registers none of it.
- montage (the cut as the unit of meaning) — Wright's signature velocity — 'whip-pans, crash-zooms, errands cut to percussion' — applies action-sequence grammar to a grocery run, so the film's sensory-motor drive lives in the editing while the protagonist's has failed; 'when actual mayhem arrives the style barely has to change.'
- index of equivocity — The same gesture reads as ordinary Sunday and as apocalypse at once — a body on a lawn, a swaying stranger, a pool cue lifted in a pub — because the film shoots the banal and the catastrophic in identical grammar.
- the dividual — The opening 'shuffling commuters' montage, where a crowd of checkout workers and bus-stop waiters is rendered as a single collective rhythm rather than as individuals.
- the gest — The shamble as posture: 'the living already move like the dead' in the commuter montage, a bodily attitude that exposes a social relation (wage routine) with no dialogue required — Wright's inversion of Dawn of the Dead's consumerist ghouls.
- the impulse-image — The Romero ghoul as pure appetite rather than character — 'strenuous attempts to snack on ordinary Londoners' — a drive with a body attached, inherited wholesale from Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.
- the originary world — North London domesticity — the garden, the corner shop, mum's front room, the pub fittings improvised into weapons in the Braindead manner — revealed as a thin surface over a landscape of pure hunger.
- the mark — The zombie rulebook installed by Night of the Living Dead — 'slow-shambling, headshot-only' — functioning as a customary chain the audience knows by heart and the characters don't.
- the relation-image — Meaning generated in the gap between the audience's total genre fluency and the characters' total ignorance of it; Romero is 'honored rather than spoofed,' so the clichés are load-bearing rather than mocked.
- consciousness of clichés — A self-declared 'rom-zom-com' built out of borrowed genre furniture it names and reuses in earnest — deadpan-plus-gore from An American Werewolf in London, the ironic needle-drop turned into killing a zombie to 'Don't Stop Me Now.'
- the large form of the action-image — The boarded-up Winchester standoff, replaying Night of the Living Dead's single-building siege beat-for-beat: an encompassing situation presses until decisive action is forced, restoring the very circuit the first act had broken — at the cost of 'a mom, a best mate, a pint.'