Out of Time: Atemporal Machines in the Garden-- Contemplating the âWestâ in two films by Andre de Toth and Robert Aldrich
ââŚ(T)he essential impurity of cinemaâŚthis thesis has signified above all that the passage of an idea in a film presupposes a complex summoning forth and displacement of the other arts (theatre, the novel, music, paintingâŚ), and that as such âpure cinemaâ does not existâŚâ - Alain Badiou, Philosophy and Cinema in Infinite Thought; Truth and the Return to Philosophy
âThe pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not lost its hold upon the native imaginationâŚhere was a virgin continent! Inevitably the European mind was dazzled by the prospectâŚ(i)t was embodied in various utopian schemes for making America the site of a new beginning for Western Societyâ - Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
Those who led the âmarch of civilizationâ from the 18th century on were inclined to be contemptuous of the countryside, the home of the backward farmers, shaggy yokels, or pleasure-seeking aristocrats living on their feudal rents, not on profits wrung from trade and manufactureâŚâ - Lewis Mumford, âSuburbia-and Beyondâ in The City in History; Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
We have here, on the one side, as if in the form of brackets (let us say), a vision of America stretching as far back as the 15th century, and a bit later during the age when Shakespeare wrote his New World play, The Tempest, where rugged, New Europeans tested their mettle against God and Nature starting in the Florida, Massachusetts and Virginia forests and then, some two centuries later after the Louisiana Purchase, forced their way past the Mississippi River and into the plains and foothills; the avant-garde of these settlers pushing deep into the land and space of the imagination, further westward, but also northward, into the Wyoming mountains. These people constitute the eastern, right-hand side of these conceptual brackets that make up the idea of the West.
On the other side, far away from the mountainous peaks of Wyoming, lay the land of California (along with that almost eschatologically-absolute body of water, the Pacific Ocean), which was to become, if not the formative space and land of the imagination, describing what America is as a whole, then at least its most rugged and constitutive metonymic representative; California as the United States.
Between the right-hand bracket of the Wyoming mountains and the left-hand bracket of California and the Pacific is where much of our nationâs imagination has oscillated back and forth, throughout half of our history, between an individualistic view of nature and land as something to be tamed and controlled, and a view in which the land is envisioned as a cornucopia of plenty, given to all those who live in it, free of charge. A âlaissez-faireâ Elysium Field where we write our most holy myths of life, youth and infinitudeâŚâGodâs countryâ, as perhaps that most paradigmatic of Western individualists, the actor Ronald Regan, might say.
Both the movies by Andre de Toth, Day of the Outlaw, and Robert Aldrichâs Kiss Me Deadly, can be seen as engaging with these conflicting yet intertwined views of the American West. De Tothâs movie renders the Wyoming landscape as brutal and difficult, yet it can be seen as an idyllic representation of the Pastoral Ideal (1), where individuals race against Nature to carve out their own identities and senses of belonging, ultimately finding success after harsh trials and tribulations. On the other hand, Aldrichâs movie sets upon the stage, in a future over a century later and within the now overrun idyllic landscape, the machine of the city (2), which has rooted itself as an a-historical being that feeds upon older ideas of individuality along with contemporary ânewnessâ, only to spit back a similar kind of loneliness and emptiness that the rugged West shot back at the original Pioneers.
Also, this is the case not just in the way the stories unfold (they are, in their narrative construction, typical Hollywood cinematic storytelling vehicles), but perhaps more significantly in the way each director, with his cinematographer, situated the camera and then chose the precise shot in the editing room. Both filmmakers would end up using very talented lensmen and editors (3) to execute their respective visions of the West--It is here, in the âRange of Lightâ (4), that the great conflict in conceptualizing the West is set in these films, a situation which one could argue continues to this day.Â
If we look at de Tothâs Day of the Outlaw as a conflicted arena of forces pitting the idyllic concept against the realities of nature (whether physical, or even psychological), we can see it reflected most effectively in both the composition of the shots and some of the editorial decisions.
Right from the start, in the transition from the first scene to the second, evidence of this conflict is alluded to, as the main male protagonist Blaze finishes his conversation with a local townswoman (with whom he has a love interest), the editor performs an L-cut transition, letting the sound and dialogue from within the saloonâs interior carry over into a shot that shows the great expanse of mountains behind a portion of the townâs buildings. This strategy creates an excellent mood for mixing the interior world of humanity and the exterior world of nature, which can be viewed as being separate and antagonistic, yet combined, forming an unstable whole.
Likewise, the latter part of the second scene shows Blaze exiting the saloon by allowing his upper body to come into the right of the fame in close up, while the rest of the frame shows the mountains beyond, along with small figures of other townsmen walking on the dirt road that constitutes the main avenue in the town.
In these two examples, the mixing of far-off nature and in-close humanity is exactly the kind of visual trope that illuminates this film as a space of atemporal conflict of no resolution between nature itself and the local residents. Cerntainly, this is by no means unique to this particular film, but the manner in which de Toth and his cinematographer render it gives it an artistic weight that creates a dialog with other photographic renderings of the West (c.f., 4).
Another cinematographic technique in line with this idea, used a bit later on, is one in which the filmmakers panned the camera in an almost 180-degree arc, starting at the opening of the townâs road, pointing out to the peaks of the nearby range, and turning across the townâs few buildings nearly stopping at the other end of the road. The whole time, the gigantic range of mountains behind loom over the ramshackle buildings, de-scaling them into insignificance even though they take up most of the frame. This flattening of the picture plane meshes figure and ground relationships, yet, at the same time, puts into conflict the idyllic landscape and the humans trying to live in it.
A point in this film which is not only pivotal, but also an integration of outer and inner worlds, is a moment when the male protagonist is in his hotel room staring out his window at the mountain range that is to be his and so many other menâs fateful space of reckoning. After a moment, the camera tracks him from behind as he moves towards a mirror in his room and then stares into this alternate looking glass. Indeed, mirrors will prove pivotal at several moments in this movie serving as symbolic surrogate for either the interiority of the character or the outside world itself (5).
As the story continues, de Toth has the camera play these tricks of in-and-out compression of space (6) more voraciously. For instance, as the dance scene whirls the camera round and round, figured in the earlier, near 180-degree pan that showed us the townâs main street and looming mountain range, the director then, in an excellent effort to transition from one scene-space into the next, pulls the camera outside the bar to look in through the window as we view the whirling dancers. Then, a direct cut is performed that reveals the âdocsâ place, which leads to a cut to the exterior shot of the town and its main road finishing with a fade back into the bar.
Such complex maneuverings of camera and editorial decision-making are well thought out artistic choices that completely enclose the space of the town and its residents with their (unfriendly) visitors, yet at the same time open all of them into the surrounding environment. This is part and parcel the kind of technique that is often used in cinema of this genre to rewrite, time after time, the story of idyllic nature and âmanâsâ place in it as a completely conflicted being wrestling with both internal conflicts of various sorts and the mighty untamed bear of Nature (7).
The penultimate scene of this film is one that has Blaze surviving most of the antagonists on a desolate peak above his town. Here, he (predictably) defeats his remaining enemies by outlasting them in the cold. The most interesting feature of this scene is the space in which de Toth decided to shoot the âshowdownâ. In this space, there are several rock outcroppings in a fairly flat spot of ground that eerily mimic the mountain peaks as seen from down below in the town. Itâs as if Blaze and his final two enemies have been transformed into allegorical giants hovering above the Lilliputian town, thrashing and outwitting each other in a final clash of titans, as this space can be viewed as the very edge of existence itself (8). Indeed, it is the eastern edge of the idyllic West, a space that had to be won and conquered from not only unwanted âIndiansâ, but by the very struggle of  âWhite Manâsâ battles within himself to define who he is and how this land may be conceptualized; either as magnificent place of plenty, or (no)place of resistance and fury.
So, we see that no matter where any of the characters turn, gaze, place themselves, consecrate as their home, love, or die, they are always battling between an individualistic view of nature as something to be tamed and controlled, and a view in which the land is envisioned as a nourishing blessing--De Tothâs camera is both a magnificent witness and constructor of this tangle of myth and Being.
Though the vision of Robert Aldrichâs Kiss Me Deadly is of a different order both spatially and historically (the West has long been âwonâ and we are thrown into a metaphysical no-place that eats history up in the name of progress and finds the protagonist awash in an atemporal space much akin to Day of the Outlaw), the resulting experience of the West is (not so) strangely the same. That is, even in mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, the West has not changed much as a conflicted conceptual entity of combined myth equipped with an antagonistic view of nature.
In the beginning of Aldrichâs movie, a rhythmic repetition is established between the dividing-lines on a road, the running footsteps of our soon-to-die heroine and two different close-ups of her running towards the camera. This cinematic progression is repeated three times as cars pass on the road, ignoring her until the main male protagonist, Mike Hammer, stops and picks her up.
This action of repetition, though seemingly different from the ins-and-outs of de Tothâs camera, performs the same recombination of spatial features between character and âNatureâ but in a tighter circle: less expansive outside of the characterâs body (9), yet still rotating around them in a similar fashion. As we shall also see, this kind of spatially tight, enclosing repetition will find its way into the various decaying architectures that constitute the city of L.A. in the 1950âs. An L.A. that was quickly disappearing, from Bunker Hill to the Chavez Ravine; a victim of progress and various urban issues emanating from this era which would come to a head in the 1970âs (10).
Many of the shots in Kiss Me Deadly are tilted and/or at an angle, starting with the hospital exterior where the camera starts out below Hammer and then shows a shot above from the rooftop, looking down to the figures on sidewalk. This kind of back-and-forth is similar to the shots in Day of the Outlaw where the characters were combined with the idyllic landscape and mountains, but the main difference with Aldrichâs movie is that we see very little of what is beyond, and only view pieces of street intermixed with buildings.
The most significant scene where this kind of hermetically sealed camera work is in play, is the âshadowingâ scene where Hammer is stalked at night by a crook armed with a switchblade. Here, the camera sets itself at various 30 to 45-degree angles to follow the characters as they play a short game of detective cat-and-mouse. The camera sets itself up to capture light, shadow, store fronts, close-ups of faces, back to angles of shops, close-ups of shoes, back to the faces now in profile, cigarette machines with mirrorsâŚthis whole cinematic, German Expressionistic menagerie ending with Hammer beating up the crook and sending him down a monstrous flight of stairs.
The back-and-forth, in-and-out action that the camera executes in Aldrichâs film is, again, similar to de Tothâs choice of movement. By keeping the cameraâs cuts between the figure and its immediate surroundings locked together in a dance (11), Aldrich ends up stripping the idea of the landscape down to its bare minimum--Here in L.A., at the outer limits of the West, there is no landscape to speak of. Here, there is no grounding outside of a personâs immediate surroundings. It is indeed, a âsilent landâ. Ironically, this situation locks the characters into the very atemporal sense of time that the others experience in Day of the Outlaw. The West may now be a barren wasteland filled with decaying buildings, but it is still the purveyor of space qua space and only space.
The spaces within the architectures in Hammerâs city are just as self-referential in layout as they are in occupying the city grid. Each clue or potential source he finds (12) leads him to a stunning array of labyrinthian houses and hotels from the Victorian era. And, each of these architectures contain within themselves an almost Danielewski-like (13) set of staircases:
The first lead takes Hammer to a very old Victorian mansion possessing a large flight of stairs (the building is subdivided or turned into an apartment complex, like many large old houses in the area; an early hint that the domestic spaces of L.A. are voraciously fragmented).Â
Hammer then helps an old mover lug a trunk into the building. Camera shoots from above, looking down, then looking up as they ascend. Old guy tells Hammer where Christinaâs roommate moved. Hammer goes to where she supposedly lives and finds it also has a huge flight of stairs going up to her room. He climbs these stairs and we watch him from above, looking down through the maze of a rectilinear spiral staircase that goes upward to some unseen floors.
Later on, after a few other scenes, Hammer drives to another lead at a certain Hillcrest Hotel. Here we see him arriving in his car, driving underneath a pair of cable-car looking trolleys that pass overhead in opposite directions (This is the old Bunker Hill part of LA that has long since faded). Hammer gets out of his car and climbs the longest set of stairs so far, in order to get to the hotel only to have to climb another flight of stairs to access the room to meet his lead.Â
All of these stairs lead to dead ends (or to themselves); none of them are truly passages to any place whatsoever, and the camera locks us, along with the characters, into the labyrinth that is L.A., and the West--Whether we are trapped in the great range of the Rocky Mountains, or some dank set of stairs that spiral into the darkness of reality itself, there is no (meta)physical escape âway out hereâ, and we are doomed to circle our own wagons in fear of a place without any sense of time or history.
But, this space of repeating stairs and soon-to-vanish Victorian architecture is not the most sublime âno-placesâ Aldrich builds for us. That discovery is reserved for the end of the film where we encounter the Malibu beach house in the final scene, placed as it is on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the very outer limit of the West.Â
It is in this house that Christinaâs (supposed) roommate takes control of an object that is the primary source of mystery in the story, now given as an anti-matter, anti-MacGuffin Pandoraâs Box (and she as Lotâs daughter who is to open the box, which results in herâall of our?âdeath via nuclear detonation).Â
What the viewer ultimately finds in this box is the limit of the Western conception of Nature and âmanâsâ place in it--The absolute expression of which is the atomic bomb. This is the eschatological warning and âclueâ for humanity in Aldrichâs film, as we cower like the two figures in this closing scene, stuck in the no-place between the beachâs shore and the Pacific Ocean, our backs to the infinite darkness, with the fiery winds of history, and the future, howling all around us.
(1) The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Leo Marx, Oxford University Press, 1964 and 2000.
In this magnificent and very influential book, Marx writes about the long-standing contradictory views we as Americans have built up concerning technology and progress and its effect upon the landscape. It may seem an obvious observation that there are those that would see the land as mainly a source of profit and those that would see it as a paradise to protect, but Marx delves deep into the American cultural psyche, as well as older European origins, to thoroughly illuminate the deep rift in our cultural vision concerning this vast body of land that we call home. I am deeply indebted to his book for the general thrust of my thesis.
(2) The City in History; Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Lewis Mumford, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961, 1989.
Los Angeles is, of course, one of Americaâs largest cities. However, due to the automobile (especially through the influence of the Firestone company and family in the 1930âs), L.A. as a whole is more of a mass form of suburban sprawl. Therefore, I am tending to conceptually treat the whole city as such in this essay. For an excellent historical survey of how suburbia became such a powerful American urban form, Mumfordâs book is an excellent point in which to start any research on the matter. The section I have in mind is âSuburbiaâand Beyondâ, pgs. 482-524. Please note that his research covers historical developments through 1960.
(3) Both of these movies have some of the best Hollywood cinematographers and editors available as crew. Day of the Outlaw boasts cinematographer Russell Harlan, a six-time Oscar nominee who also lensed To Kill a Mockingbird, and editor Robert Lawrence, also an Oscar nominee, who cut films such as Spartacus. Also, it should be mentioned that for sound, the great Alexander Courage, (nominated for two Oscars and winner of an Emmy) of Star Trek theme song fame (as well as all of the Trek movies up until his death last year), composed the music. He was also responsible for the theme song from Lost in Space and was lead composer/sound designer for Audrey Hepburnâs classic, My Fair Lady.
Though the film is chock-full of formal and post-production errors (bad V.O. over-dubs, inconsistent match-on-action cuts, etc.), Kiss Me Deadly has an equal class of lensmen and editors. Cinematographer Ernest Laszlo is an Oscar winning cameraman who also shot Stalag 17. Editor Michael Luciano (nominated four times for an Oscar) was also responsible for cutting The Dirty Dozen, The Grissom Gang and The Longest Yard.
(4) What I am referencing here is Ansel Adamsâ great photographic âessayâ Yosemite and the Range of Light which engages not only the Yosemite, but much of the surrounding and nearby lands that compose the Rocky Mountain range (âRange of Lightâ was Adamsâ term for this particular geographical region). But, aside from Adams, Edward Weston, Carleton Watkins, and a number of other West Coast photographers (some, not 20 years earlier) had gone on to photographically capture (or project) something of this concept of nature in the West, whether they were consciously after it or not. All of these master artistsâ work photographing the West is something that has embedded itself into our national psyche, and one can fairly postulate that the cinematographer for the film had seen at least some of these menâs work, and perhaps absorbed their influence.
(5) There is the mirror in Blazeâs hotel room that he consults, and then there is also the mirror in the saloon. This mirror eventually gets broken by the outlaws when one of them throws a fit because they canât drink or rape the townswomen as they are wont to do. It is certainly the pivotal axis point in the movie when this mirror gets smashed. Afterwards, the plot starts rolling towards its inevitable conclusion and is situated exactly mid-point in the film, almost as if it were a textbook example of Aristotelian poetics that has a story build up into a high, mountainous and climatic point, and then roll back down to its eventual conclusion.
(6) There is always compression or reconstitution of space in both of these films, but there is little temporal configuration. As a matter of fact, there is little sense of time outside of the one we physically experience while watching these movies (i.e. we sense the passage of time because we are watching a movie, not because of the movie and its narrative). These films are almost entirely spatial entities. There is no History associated with the lands shown in either of these films, whether itâs the vast open mountain ranges of Wyoming, or the urban wasteland of Los Angeles. We are trapped, scene-by-scene, in an atemporal machine that only re-circulates the space around itself.
(7) It is interesting to note that this particular Western (and many others in the genre) shows no other animals aside from the horses. The wilderness is replete with frightening giants like the Grizzly and lesser-sized, but no less fierce, beasts such as the wolf. Perhaps it is just a matter of money available for the use of trained animals in a production, but one would think that if a Western truly wanted to show what it is like for âmanâ to wrestle with the great outdoors, they could throw in a wolf or a bear, for good measure, into the plot.
(8) The only dialogue between Blaze and the Cheyenne Indian:
C.I., âYou see anything?â
C.I., âThereâs nothing to seeâŚâ
This is perhaps the most lucid and significant dialogue in the movie. At the very top of the mountain, one reaches a limiting edge (of the concept) of the West; there is nowhere else to go. Later on, we will experience another, similar physical limit upon both the concept and the space that constitutes the West in Kiss Me Deadly.
(9) A very interesting discussion for unifying the body and the earth in both a cultural and physical manner can be found in Wendell Berryâs book The Unsettling of America; Culture & Agriculture. This is an excellent small volume that concerns itself with farming and sustaining the land for use in an agricultural sense.Â
(10) For an excellent glance into the issues of environmental, economic, and population studies that were to overwhelm the American city by the 1970âs, please reference The Prospective City, edited by Arthur P. Solomon. The issues brought up in this book were just starting to be sensed in the 1950âs when Kiss Me Deadly was filmed: intra-metro population distribution of African-Americans (not to mention Hispanics); the changing roles of city centers; industrial locations in relation to populated urban areas; transportation issues. All of these matters are an integral part of the perception we now have of our cities, but we can sense their presence within the fragmented urban space of the Los Angeles as portrayed in this movie.
(11) An interesting parallel between cinematic movement and urban planning can be found in Wayne Attoe and Donn Loganâs book, American Urban Architecture; Catalysts in the Design of Cities. In their book, Attoe and Logan propose the concept of âcatalystsâ to both describe what goes on in downtown redevelopments, as well as use it to help model potential sites of change that could be targeted for efficient redevelopment.Â
The tie with cinematography is in the way singular urban spaces (such as a particular business, or park, etc.) link to others by becoming economic/social moving agent/forces (catalysts) which direct their own growth, as well as the (now) connected spaces. Itâs almost like looking at a combined map and shot list for moving though a scene/city during a film.Â
(12) Hammerâs âneed to knowâ takes on epic and mythical proportions well beyond a typical detectiveâs drive to find clues in a story. For instance, there is a scene when he is in his girlfriend/secretaryâs apartment and she whispers in his ear, âVa Va Voom says your Greek name would be âMikela SulfurisââŚâ What is so interesting about this is that in the Christian Bible, burning sulfur is referred to as âbrimstoneâ, or, more to the point, fire and brimstone (this word will appear in the dialogue, again, at the apocalyptic end of the movie). Subjects for such sermons were âeternal damnationâ, and the like. Hammer must find out all there is to know, even at the risk of experiencing eternal damnation himselfâŚ
Taking the directorâs cue in attaching mythical significance to a character, one could conceivably view Va Va Voom as a figuration of tekne; the Greek word for artisanship, craftsmanship, or even (like the philosopher Martin Heidegger interprets it) technology itself. He is, after all, a mechanic with craftsman-like skills.
(13) The House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski, Pantheon, 2000.
This book has perhaps one of the most frightening staircases ever conceived in the history of literature. It resides behind some walls in a sweet, 1930âs Palmer-like suburban house on some street in Anytown, U.S.A. (thoughmuch of the novel is focused within Los Angeles). This staircase not only lives, breathes and growls, it grows and shrinks to epic proportions, all underground... Growing from being only a couple stories deep, it becomes several thousands of miles deep (at one point I believe it is theorized that it goes further in depth than the circumference of the earth). Basically, it is a spatial demon one can walk through, and, some of the staircases in Kiss Me Deadly must be the early relatives of this later monster.
