Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Army of Darkness
1992 · Sam Raimi · Army of Darkness on Sightlines
A forge, somewhere in the fourteenth century. A department-store clerk is building himself a hand. He machines a gauntlet into a prosthesis, retools a chainsaw off the blacksmith's stock, fits it to the stump of his right arm. Raimi shoots this exactly the way every sword picture shoots the arming of the hero: tools laid out, assembly rising, no wink anywhere in the cutting. The form is completely intact. The man inside it works in housewares.
That gap is the whole film, and Deleuze has unusually good names for it.
His two cinema books are difficult, but the first sorting isn't. In one kind of film a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action works. Deleuze calls that the movement-image, and its engine the action-image. Its grandest shape he calls the large form: an encompassing situation bears down on a man, a milieu so total it seems to summon him, until he performs the one decisive act that transforms it. Army of Darkness is that, at full power and without apology. Fourteenth-century England, a castle, an army of the dead, a prophecy, a duel, a world set back in order. Raimi had a full-scale castle exterior built on location in Southern California and filled the night with hundreds of extras and puppets, because the situation has to be big enough to press.
What's strange is that it presses on a man who is manifestly not a hero, and the film knows it. Deleuze has a category for precisely that: the inversion-image, where the sublime hero is replaced by his feeble double and the everyday goes uncanny around him. He has another for what Pope's camera is doing to Campbell. When action is transposed into figure, when the image stages heroism as spectacle rather than simply performing it, that's the reflection-image, the Figure. Bill Pope's photography here is nothing but Figures. Extreme low angles that turn Campbell into a monument. A wind machine for the hero portrait. Hard raking key, saturated primaries, one dominant diagonal per frame, the ironic push-in. None of it describes Ash. All of it describes heroism, with Ash standing where heroism goes. The joke it sustains, unembarrassed, for eighty minutes is about American self-regard: a clerk who assumes the Dark Ages are fortunate to have him. Twain's Connecticut Yankee, rearmed.
This is where the film gets genuinely interesting as theory. Deleuze thought that once filmmakers became conscious of their clichés, the action-image was finished. Consciousness of clichés is one of the symptoms he lists in the postwar crisis, the one that opens onto neorealism and the time-image, where the protagonist stops acting and can only watch. Raimi is entirely conscious of his clichés. He quotes them affectionately, at length, with a straight face. And the circuit does not break. It runs harder. Army of Darkness is a working demonstration that the action-image can survive its own quotation, which is more or less the operating principle of thirty years of genre cinema since.
Now the camera, which is the part of this group's work that changed other people's films. The most influential thing they ever built cost about four dollars: a camera bolted to a length of 2x4 and carried at knee height by two runners. In The Evil Dead that rig produced a point of view belonging to nobody, a vision cut loose from any human center, matter looking with no character behind the eye. What made it terrifying was where it came from. Deleuze distinguishes a relative out-of-field, the next room, the thing just off-screen you could pan to, from an absolute one: a pressure from outside the whole spatial system, which no widening of the frame could ever include. The Evil Force is absolute. Army of Darkness bolts the same camera to the same plank and runs it at a castle, and it is funny. Not because the technique softened. Because the thing has acquired an address. The absolute out-of-field becomes relative, and once a force can be located it can be shot. That conversion is Raimi's actual invention, and it is how a horror series turned into a fantasy comedy without swapping out a single tool.
Bergson gave Deleuze the idea that a living thing is a gap. A shock arrives, and instead of the response following automatically there is a hesitation in which something might be chosen. Deleuze calls it the interval, the centre of indetermination, and it is where a mind would go. Ash has no interval. Watch how the gags are built: bursts of three or four shots, hard and uncushioned, each cut landing on the impact rather than on a reaction. That is Sennett escalation by way of the Stooges two-reelers, where each piece of destruction tops the last and the punctuation is a percussive sound effect instead of a face. Raimi and Bob Murawski run the entire film on it. The result is a hero with the hesitation surgically removed, which is hilarious and is also the picture's ceiling. Nothing can develop inside a man with no gap in him. It is broad where Evil Dead II was precise, and crude in how it treats its one significant female character.
The gap reopens once. A mirror shatters and the shards produce tiny living Ashes who swarm the table and torment their original with cutlery. Deleuze's mirror is the crystal-image, where the actual and its virtual double become impossible to tell apart. Raimi's variation is to hand the reflections bodies and forks. The enemy cannot be shot without shooting himself, and the film's other double, the decaying Evil Ash that KNB built, is the same idea grown to full size. The craft debt is old and exact: the bell-jar homunculi of Bride of Frankenstein for the split-screen and forced-perspective grammar, The Incredible Shrinking Man for oversized props married to traveling mattes so a small man can swing a fork and be swatted with a spoon in one shot.
And the skeletons. Deleuze opens his first book by arguing that cinema's novelty was building movement out of any-instant-whatever, equidistant mechanical samples, rather than the posed privileged instants of older art. Stop-motion runs that backwards. Every frame of Harryhausen's Dynamation is a privileged instant set by a human hand, and twenty-four of them a second produce a motion that reads as alive and slightly wrong at the same time. The wrongness is the pleasure. Raimi's animators reproduce the method from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts down to the workflow: shoot the humans to a rehearsed count on fixed marks, then animate the skeletons frame by frame to match, shields raised, heads knocked off, limbs reassembling. Campbell is fencing empty air.
Which is where Bazin matters. His case for cinema rested on the photographic bond, on the thing having been there in front of the lens. The skeleton was there, on a table, in increments. T2 opened the summer before Raimi finished; Jurassic Park arrived four months after the American release. Between them they made Campbell's empty air permanent, and what fills it now never existed. This is the last fully confident demonstration of the other way.
The film seeded more than its reputation admits. Pope went from here to The Matrix and back to Raimi for Spider-Man 2 and 3, carrying the low-angle monumentalizing with him. Murawski took the gag-burst cutting into the Spider-Man films and eventually shared an Academy Award for The Hurt Locker. Ash became the template for a generation of protagonists who narrate their own heroism while botching it, in film, in comics, and above all in games, where the quipping player-character is simply the default now.
Two endings exist, and you can watch both. Universal's returns him to S-Mart with his job and his swagger intact and one more Deadite to kill in the aisle, which completes the inversion-image: the clerk is king of the only kingdom that would have him. Raimi's original leaves him overdosed and awake in a ruined future London, undone by his own incompetence. Neither settles the question the film keeps open, which is whether you can love a convention and mock it in the same shot without killing either one.
Watch the skeletons' hands next time. Somebody posed every frame of them.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The film's S-A-S' spine: a full-scale castle exterior built on Southern California location, night shoots with hundreds of extras and puppets, a prophesied deliverer sent for the Necronomicon, an army raised and then defeated — an encompassing situation that presses until one decisive act transforms it.
- the Figure (reflection-image) — Pope's mock-heroic grammar — extreme low angles making Campbell a monument, the wind-machine hero shot, deliberately overblown low-angle portraits, the ironic push-in — figures heroism as spectacle rather than enacting it; the arming-of-the-hero montage deploys a heroic convention straight-faced for a man who has no business with it.
- inversion-image — A department-store clerk taken for a prophesied deliverer, and the S-Mart coda that restores him to his job, his braggadocio and one more Deadite in the housewares aisle: the sublime hero replaced by his feeble double, the everyday made uncanny.
- consciousness-of-cliches — The affectionate archaism of the Harryhausen quotation and the straight-faced deployment of heroic convention: the film knows every cliché it uses and, unlike Deleuze's crisis films, keeps the action-image running on that knowledge instead of breaking under it.
- out-of-field-absolute — The homemade shaky-cam rig (a camera bolted to a 2x4 carried at knee height by two runners) invented the malevolent unmotivated POV in The Evil Dead; Army of Darkness reuses it for the Evil Force charging the castle, where the unlocatable pressure acquires an address and becomes something Ash can shoot.
- engramme/photogramme — The low, fast tracking shot standing in for the unseen evil force: a point of view belonging to no character, the camera as pure matter perceiving, with no human eye behind it.
- the interval — Gags cut in three- or four-shot bursts with hard unmodulated cuts and no cushioning, landing on the impact and punctuated by a percussive sound effect rather than a reaction shot — the Sennett/Stooges escalation scheme inherited from Three Little Beers, which removes the hesitation between perception and action.
- montage-organic — The escalation structure taken from Three Little Beers, where each destruction gag tops the last in an accumulating spiral, is the editorial engine of the windmill sequence and of the film's whole splatstick timing.
- hyalosign — The set-piece in which miniature Ashes erupt from a shattered mirror and torment their original — split-screen, forced perspective, puppetry and stop-motion, with the Bride of Frankenstein homunculi and The Incredible Shrinking Man matte toolkit behind it — plus KNB's decaying Evil Ash as the same doubling at full size.
- privileged-instants — Harryhausen's Dynamation method reproduced exactly: humans shot to a rehearsed count on fixed marks, then the skeletons animated frame by frame to match — movement rebuilt out of hand-posed instants rather than mechanical sampling, which is why the skeletal army reads as alive and slightly wrong at once.