Stephen Mamber

Department of Film/TV
University of California at Los Angeles
smamber@ucla.edu

 

…the cinematographic image is in the present only in bad films.

 

–Deleuze

 

Stanley Kubrick’s racetrack robbery caper film The Killing (1956) is a conceptual exercise in time travel.[1] Using a narrator reminiscent of Dragnet, or the impersonal narrators of Kubrick’s later films, the film goes forward in time most often in overlap, by first going backward to pick up the thread of another character’s movements earlier than where we are currently placed. There is no progress in the film, because wherever you go returns you to where you’ve already been. Once again, an early Kubrick preoccupation is evident–exactly the same might be said of The Shining or Full Metal Jacket and most of his circularly organized constructions.

 

Rather than stress the intimations of early Kubrick in The Killing, I want to explore what it does rather strikingly on its own terms–to express temporal notions of simultaneity and overlap. The ingenious, complex narrative structure is worth some examination in its own right. The Killing might be called a flashback film with no flashbacks (with one exception, as I shall discuss), an expression of the idea Deleuze has expressed so well in Cinema 2: The Time Image: that awareness of the past doesn’t depend upon flashback constructions. The Killing goes backward from the very beginning, and its end is where we start, so the entire movie is a series of elliptical goings-back.

 

To illustrate this strategy, let us resort to a chart:

 

The chart is of roughly the second half of the film, which all takes place in one day–the day of the robbery and the subsequent capture of Johnny, the leader (or should we say recapture, as a week earlier, at the start of the film, he had just been let out of jail). Each horizontal line of the chart represents the character announced by the narrator, always in terms of where they are at the start of a sequence and importantly, what time of day this action is taking place. If a segment shifts location or time, the narrator generally offers us the particulars, and most sequences end as well with another announcement of time (“Nikki was dead at 4:23”). By following these indicators, we can construct the chart. Each colored rectangle represents a narrative sequence; the gaps indicate temporal breaks. To “read” each line from top to bottom is to go through all of the film on the day of the race. Ordinarily we would have to line up the sequences in time, as shown in this chart. When do we go backwards? By a lot or a little? And more importantly, when do we go back over time we have already seen elsewhere or by some other point of view? To see that on the chart, one must construct vertical time slices after we’ve seen all the pieces. When we do, as we might expect, the overlap and the expressions of simultaneity are considerable.

 

The film has some interesting means to express simultaneity, generally through repetition, which perhaps keeps it from being completely impossible to follow. However, its genius lies in the conceptual nature of this enterprise, the glimpses of a grand design which are far larger than the simple signs that can initiate the investigation.

 

Easy-to-read repetitions obviously include the racetrack announcer, who can tell us that the seventh race is about to begin or a horse is down. Others include repetitions of dialogue, such as Maurice the Wrestler’s staged racial epithet as he begins to cause a scene. When these repetitions occur, we know we are back where we’ve been, free now to see another piece of the puzzle. Some use of this kind of construction is not unique to The Killing. What is unique is the extent to which it becomes the organizing principle of the work. One clear predecessor (as for so many movies) is Citizen Kane, whose flashback structure also has pointed overlaps–Susan’s opera debut being shown twice would be one instance among many. It’s not for nothing that Kane and The Killing both make overt use of the jigsaw puzzle metaphor, as both films also make clear that their pieces aren’t going to fit. Also, what constitutes a “piece” becomes a nice problem, as particularly in The Killing, we often might not be sure where and how the overlaps are coming. There is, in fact, only one true flashback in the film, tossed in like one of those moments in a jazz improvisation where the melody is played straight, to show that the person breaking the rules knows what they are. That one flashback occurs in a scene in which most of the gang are still alive and are back at their rendezvous-apartment. There they recall how the money bag had been thrown out the window to land at the feet of Randi the Cop–an action we had already seen from inside during one of Johnny’s sequences. In The Killing we lurch back and forth in a manner that only comes to make sense retrospectively.

 

Along with the narrator, the failed mastermind Johnny warns us of this difficulty in seeing the big picture. Johnny is that combination of grandiose, power-mad genius and dumb sap so familiar in Kubrick–in no small ways, something like both God and a film director. The linkage between the artist and the gangster is made perhaps too explicit in a near incomprehensible speech by the heavily-accented Maurice,² but importantly, while Johnny has come up with the grand scheme, he doesn’t motivate or control it. Johnny is under the thumb of the narrator as completely as all other characters, and while he gets somewhat more attention (see the chart again), he has no privileged position. The king on the chessboard is still a piece, and still as vulnerable to attack.

 

An important consequence of this temporal strategy is spatial isolation, although we could as well reverse the equation–the sequences of isolation lead to the temporal overlaps (the small diagram below seeks to represent this notion). Members of the gang during the course of the robbery rarely see each other. They can occupy the same space briefly, Johnny going in a door as Maurice is dragged away by a gaggle of security cops, but only as they go in different directions (and/or to their deaths). As such, the little boxes of the chart have a counterpart in the separation of spaces. Even though most of the film takes place at one racetrack, our view of it is greatly fragmented. The task of filling in the spaces, as it were, is just as conceptual as the temporal ordering. In both cases, the filling in is a mental activity on our part of grand designs Kubrick suggests through his ingeniously fragmentary construction. We as much have to figure out a temporal ordering as a spatial arrangement; the two, of course, strongly depend upon each other.

 

In his useful new biography of Kubrick, Vincent LoBrutto reports (very thoroughly, but without all the irony it deserves) that Hollywood was less than pleased with Kubrick’s temporal experiment. Attempts were made, fortunately to no avail, to see if the film could be recut and presented in a more classical manner (LoBrutto 123). That would be rather like Michael Powell trying to do The Red Shoes in black-and-white, taking the film’s reason for being and seeing if it could be eliminated. These last-minute fears about intelligibility have, of course, dogged Kubrick throughout his career.

 

Back at the racetrack, let’s add some spatial considerations to our temporal ones. In a simple reconstructed overview, let’s visualize the space of the film as follows:

 

Even in so simple a view, some things become apparent a bit more easily. For one, the space of the film is extremely limited (maybe not much bigger than the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, say). Even though nobody hardly ever sees anyone else, you’d think they’d have a hard time not doing so. If Nikki’s shot at Red Lightning were to miss, he’d as likely hit Johnny or the easy target of Maurice. In other words, temporal isolation enforces spatial separation. Also, the spaces are used as isolated fragments. Even though no more than a door or a window may separate two spaces, they are as likely to be shown to us in separated temporal segments. Johnny going through a door in one episode won’t come out the other side until much “later” in another sequence. (The same can be said many times, of money bags, girl friends, cops.)

 

Seen as a construction in this manner, The Killing becomes something like what it already is, a grandly conceptual vision that perhaps can be expressed in something like a video game as much as a movie, or as much a chessboard filled with game pieces as a jigsaw puzzle. To that end, I have taken the visual pieces included here and put together a way to explore the film which uses space and time to explore each other. Clicking on the chart above would take you to the appropriate point in the film, together with a model of the space in question and an indication on an overview of where this moment/place belongs. It’s only by visualizing this linkage between isolated spaces and temporal overlaps that one begins to appreciate the conceptual complexity of Kubrick’s film. To that end, a few of the 3-D recreations are included here, and it will be left to the reader to see where they would belong in the earlier time chart, though it’s not feasible to include the corresponding video clips here as well.³

 

Click here to see the 3-D images 

To look at one key moment in a bit more detail, we can examine the all-important shooting of Red Lightning, which signals the delay (Johnny using a wise Kubrick strategy) that allows the money to be in one place long enough for Johnny to steal it. While this is only one instance of temporal overlap, it gives a pretty good idea of how the rest of the film also works (Johnny getting in the door during Maurice’s diversionary fight, finding a way to get the money out of the park, and the gang shootout are a few other examples of the same narrative strategy). We can take a little “time slice” of one hour and see how extensive the overlap becomes–pieces of the same hour are shown during five separate sequences.

 

In virtually every one of the episodes, not everything goes according to plan, but it goes smoothly enough to keep the whole enterprise lurching forward. Nikki shoots the horse as he was hired to do, but is himself killed. Earlier when accepting the assignment, Nikki has theorized what the effects of his act will be, but Johnny characteristically insists upon the importance of his remaining in the dark. Ironically, however, Nikki’s horseshoe-aided demise seems to be the result of his own human deficiencies and not Johnny’s plan. (Like Major Kong in Strangelove, the guy who delivers the goods is the first to go.) We get an inkling of simultaneity when the “horse is down” announcement is heard while Johnny dons his disguise just before bursting into the money-counting room. In another near screw-up, after sending the money through the window, Johnny escapes as planned, but only because the drunken Marv has ignored his instruction to stay away from the track and is there to bump into a returning security guard. Are we seeing unplanned contingencies or major errors? Is there a grand design? The horse-shooting suggests the general orientation–the isolated pieces fit in terms of a strategy, but the foul-ups can never be fully accounted for. Somebody’s always going to fight in the War Room.

 

Click here to Get Quicktime File – 3-D Model of Betting Area 

In John Huston’s great earlier version of the grand caper, The Asphalt Jungle (also starring, of course, the wonderful Sterling Hayden), the plan falls apart because of human weaknesses of the participants involved. The Killing seems to offer a similar conclusion, but it veers into more complex territory. The ability to conceive the exploit, like the bone-becoming-weapon in 2001: A Space Odyssey, carries both the brilliance of the plan and with it the capacity for self-destruction. (The title 2001, by the way, is also a nice temporal indicator.) By the time Johnny’s plan has fallen apart in at least a dozen ways, one almost begins to adopt Johnny’s own bit of philosophy in the film’s last line: “what’s the use?”. The problem lies in the difference between the elegant conceptual construction and the need to use human beings to execute that construction. What makes The Killing particularly brilliant is that its own daring construction exposes that process so extensively.

 

Notes

 

1. This article assumes the reader has already seen the film, so no summary is provided. For one very useful breakdown of the film, see Falsetto 100-123.

 

2. Quoted by Falsetto, 106-107.

 

3.The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of one of his students, Kevin Scharff, to the 3-D model.

 

Works Cited

 

• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
• Falsetto, Mario. “Patterns of Filmic Narration in The Killing and Lolita.” Perspectives on Kubrick. NY: G.K. Hall, 1996. 100-123.
• The Killing. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flipper, Coleen Gray, Sterling Hayden, and Marie Windsor. United Artists, 1956.
• LoBrutto, Vincent. Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. NY: Donald I. Fine Books, l997.