Issue #355: Samuel Fuller's Most Violent Film Is a Lacanian Gold Mine
I don’t know if Ridley Scott still has the juice. He’s a hell of a director, sure. And I actually liked The Last Duel (2021). But he’s had some snoozers. And he has exercised somewhat questionable judgment throughout his career. He has his preference for actors. He did five flicks with Russell Crowe, three with Michael Fassbender, two with Matt Damon, two with Joaquin Phoenix. Until this year, only one with Denzel Washington: American Gangster (2007). Meanwhile, Denzel was doing five movies with Tony Scott, Crimson Tide (1995) [namedropped in one of the episodes of Suits season 6 when Mike Ross is in prison], Man on Fire (2004), Deja Vu (2006) [allegedly Vertigo plagiarism], The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009), and Unstoppable (2010). Aside from their 2009 and 2010 collaborations suggesting one or both men have a less than normal relationship with trains, their collaboration is one of the best in show business (RIP Tony). Why was Ridley Scott off making movies with Russell Crowe?
The Crowe/Washington connection is even more important considering they are co-stars of American Gangster. I love that movie, but it is not uncommon for me to turn it on and fast forward through all the parts where Russell Crowe is trying to go to law school or whatever. Now, Washington does his second movie with the elder Scott with Gladiator II (2024), in the shadow of Crowe’s Maximus. Will I be not entertained by it? No idea. But it reminds me of how great Denzel could have been in Prometheus (2012) or Hannibal (2001) or Matchstick Men (2003). Actor profile be damned, what a Deckard he would have made starring in Blade Runner (1982) between Carbon Copy (1981) and A Soldier’s Story (1984).
Am I being unreasonable here? Yes, of course. And Denzel Washington has rarely wanted for work in Hollywood. But I would like to see the duo put a couple more up on the scoreboard, especially if Gladiator II is as good as they say (they say it is reasonably good). Hang some movie posters in the rafters. I don’t really know why I landed on this sports metaphor, but it’s all for your entertainment.
A Lesson in Subtlety from Samuel Fuller
Samuel Fuller is not a subtle filmmaker. At least, that’s what three films tell me: Shock Corridor (1963), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld U.S.A. (1961). There are a couple of particularly relevant biographical facts to note about him. He was born in Worcester, was a crime reporter before he directed film, and was a true auteur, producing, writing, and directing many of his films. The three I mention above are among those where Fuller had all three credits.
The Deception of the Face
Fuller regularly dealt with issues of racial discrimination and the psychology of racism in his work. His depiction of Trent (Hari Rhodes) in Shock Corridor, an abused Black student attending college at one of the first integrated Southern universities who imagines himself as a KKK member, is sometimes seen as more salacious than socially conscious. But there is no question in The Crimson Kimono about Fuller’s view of racial prejudice. It is easy to hide but impossible to miss.
The Crimson Kimono follows a detective duo, one white American and one second-generation Japanese American, a nisei. Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) and Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta) are tasked with solving the murder of a dancer who is shot after her act. More importantly, Bancroft and Kojaku are embroiled in a love triangle with Christine Downes (Victoria Shaw), an art student who painted a portrait of the deceased dancer, Sugar Torch (Gloria Pall), in the titular kimono.
The dispute between Bancroft and Kojaku comes to a head in a kendo match. Crucially, kendo requires the face be covered.
But the face and its expression is what the film takes as the critical symbol to discern important facts about the other. Kojaku expresses his rage toward an expression he perceives on Bancroft’s face, an expression of racist hatred and disgust toward Kojaku’s relationship with Downes, who is white. Bancroft insists, however, it is a more pedestrian look of anguish reacting to the news that Downes loves Kojaku and not him. Downes, too, tries to talk Kojaku down from his perception of Bancroft — with whom he shares blood, the result of a transfusion during the Korean War. Downes recalls, but is unable to express clearly to Kojaku, being criticized by Bancroft for the same kind of racial hatred Kojaku believes Bancroft himself possess. On every occasion, by the logic of the film, the accusation of racism is wrong. Bancroft and Downes are very enlightened and cosmopolitan. But Kojaku only comes to recognize his own misrecognition in the final encounter with Roma (Jaclynne Greene), Sugar Torch’s killer. Roma recounts killing Sugar Torch because she, incorrectly, believed Hansel (Neyle Morrow) to have been unfaithful to her. She saw it on his face, so she said. Knowing Hansel was never unfaithful, Kojaku sees his own mistake and forgives Bancroft in an overt description of this momentary subtext.
Fuller’s script makes Kojaku’s turn painfully obvious, but there is a less obvious function of the face as a symbol in this work. The face is also the locus of racial definition. Regardless of what other criteria define race in a given context, the face will always project one’s race, correctly or incorrectly. I write about this idea in Thought Crimes (2024), my doctoral dissertation:
On the European front, where opposing troops are white, Max advises his squad:
You want to live, you shoot first and ask questions later. All you got to tell me is that you saw a white face. Don’t tell me what that white face is wearing, because I don’t want to know … What you got to remember is that nobody here likes us; nobody here wanted us. If you’ve read the papers, you know that our own colonel can’t make up his mind about us. And if you haven’t read what the General said, I’ll tell you … You remember that; otherwise you’re going to wind up in some American cemetery laid down in the middle of pretty green hills and your name’s going to be in a three-by-give index file—and that place might be segregated. (Williams 73)
In this advice, the discourse of national warfare is substituted for the logic of U.S. racial hierarchy. The only condition required for killing is that a soldier “saw a white face.” This conclusion on Max’s part, following his recounting of both the chain of command’s and Axis soldiers’ hostility toward Black soldiers, is in service of his subordinates’ continued survival. The white face is threatening enough as a symbol to require a lethal response.
The face as a symbol, with phenotype placed at the forefront, is something shared across depictions of war in The Man Who Cried I Am and John Keene’s Counternarratives (2015). In the novella “Rivers,” Keene revises Jim from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) into the character James Rivers. James finds himself enlisted in the Civil War to protect others from the horrors of enslavement he experienced firsthand. The conflict also puts him at odds with Huck himself, Rivers focused on the “white faces” of the enemy combatants:
[W]e can discuss that whole story of the trip down the river with that boy, his gun aimed at me now, other faces behind his now, all of them assuming the contours, the lean, determined hardness of his face, that face, there were a hundred of that face, those faces, burnt, determined, hard and thinking only of their own disappearing universe, not ours (Keene 235-236)
For both Williams and Keene, the face signals one’s membership in a collective; Keene describes the hundreds of a singular face, “that face,” using the same logic as Max Reddick’s advice regarding who and when to shoot. This logic is, of course, precisely the logic of antiblack racism that deems Black Americans inferior and subject to the same kind of violence in a peacetime setting as Reddick calls for in the theater of war. Racial injustice and white supremacy in the U.S. impose complex legal criteria for determining race but ultimately rely on what is seen in the face. Max makes the same observation when contemplating marrying Margrit, a European white woman, “She was white, that was enough; it was what you saw first, right away, at once” (Williams 281) and later about his own Blackness, “a black skin you could see for a block away” (Williams 312).
From Fuller’s perspective, the face both misleads in terms of displaying race as a meaningful identifying characteristic and displaying affect. Kojaku and Bancroft are brothers under the skin because of their shared blood, something that defies the racial calculus of the United States with its hyper-focus on phenotypical characteristics.
Crime, Punishment, and More Crime
Underworld U.S.A. does not deal as overtly with U.S. racial politics compared to The Crimson Kimono or Shock Corridor. The film is an obscene cacophony of depravity and violence, the darkest of film noir by far. The Big Heat (1953) is uplifting by comparison. Underworld U.S.A. is a phenomenal diagnostic tool for the corpus of film noir, showing how far any film that ends with a living protagonist — and even some of those that end with a dead one — shys away from the most salacious and capricious dimensions of life. Even as film noir gumshoes, journalists, bodyguards, and disgraced cops are subject to life’s vicissitudes regardless of their choices or morality, the genre is characterized by its commitment to a Kantian moral system. As Sam Spade (Humphry Bogart) says in The Maltese Falcon (1941), “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.” This is the most clear summation of the genre’s moral core as a whole, from Boris Ingster to Akira Kurosawa to Orson Welles. Even Jean-Pierre Melville’s noir-inflected post-Touch of Evil (1958) crime films are grounded by the idea that there is honor among thieves, more optimistic than the American noir milieu where if there is not honor, there is at least consistency.
All of this is to say that Underworld U.S.A. offers no such moral logic to ground its characters. Tolly Devlin (Cliff Robertson) is one of the most miserable sociopaths ever committed to film, delivering on the sinister promise of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le Doulos (1962) without the 11th hour moral justification. Devlin lives up to the implicit devil in his surname. Like a figural antichrist, he is born bad, “rolling drunks” and spending the majority of his adolescence in prison (played by David Kent for the first bit of the film until Robertson takes over as adult Devlin). Unlike The Naked City (1948), this is a film that truly lives up to its name in its attempt to present the incoherent cruelty of any US “underworld.” Fuller’s unnamed city in this film is the best ever Gotham, Devlin the most interesting adaptation of Batman.
Underworld U.S.A. inadvertently hits the high chased by contemporary gritty crime works like Homicide: Life on the Street (1993) or The Wire (2002). But the world it represents is bizarrely incongruent with its look. There is no movie that has ever looked more like it was filmed on a sound stage. At times, it looks like children are getting killed on the streets of an amusement park.
Moving through that world, Devlin is a menace. He is single-minded in his quest for revenge, but there is no prohibition he will not transgress. He acts as a “fink,” informing to the law, deceives his colleagues both among the police and the criminal class, uses women who love him. A moral framework sets a limit to a character’s behavior. Devlin has no such framework, only a mission about which he is utterly determined. Like Batman, Devlin rarely kills by his own hand and never fires a gun until the film’s final moments. But unlike Batman, there is no principle at work. Instead, Devlin takes the most expedient path toward avenging himself, and it is rarely through brute force.
There’s also a romantic subplot between Devlin and Cuddles (Dolores Dorn), both entrenched in the criminal underworld. But Cuddles, inspired by Devlin’s tragic backstory and the single admirable quality he has — love for his father — resolves to change her fate. She entices Devlin to join her in ‘going straight’ and making “every minute count twice for the one [they] lost.” Devlin rejects her at first, but eventually comes around, telling her he wants her to be his wife “and everything that goes with it.” What Devlin can’t articulate is exactly what Cuddles tells him a few scenes earlier: what “goes with” the union of man and wife is children. But the fate of the child is grim in the world of Underworld U.S.A. They are either killed for the sins of the father or left alone to avenge those sins.
In film noir, “everything that goes with” marriage isn’t procreation, but annihilation. Devlin’s death is guaranteed as soon as the promise of escape from the underworld presents itself. Devlin dies because he learns something impossible, the “whole truth” about Cuddles, which his mother-figure Sandy (Beatrice Kay) says is impossible for a woman to articulate to a man.
The question of Cuddles telling “the whole truth about herself” points toward a knot of Lacanian theory and another interconnection to Underworld U.S.A.’s anxiety about truth.
Repeatedly, the idea of knowing something — the details or perpetrator of a crime, for instance — is dangerous. One’s family or oneself may be imperiled as a result of such knowledge, something that repeatedly happens in the film. But the truly incendiary knowledge is that of the other, knowledge that threatens the non-relation between beings — emphatically, men and women. From a Lacanian vantage point, if le femme n'existe pas, then to know the whole truth about Cuddles is to know the whole truth about nothing.
Of course, Lacanian theory suggests the formulation of the “whole truth” is specious on its face. In Television (1974), Lacan writes, “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real” (3). Likewise, in Seminar XX (1975):
[A] witness is asked to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, and what’s more, the whole truth, if he can — but how, alas, could he? We demand of him the whole truth about what he knows. But, in fact, what is sought — especially in legal testimony — is that on the basis of which one can judge his jouissance. The goal is that jouissance be avowed, precisely insofar as it may be unavowable. The truth sought is the one that is unavowable with respect to the law that regulates jouissance. (92)
He goes on, “the whole truth is what cannot be told. It is what can only be told on the condition that one doesn’t push it to the edge, that one only half-tells (mi-dire) it” (92).
The legal, sexual, and epistemic dimensions of subjectivity are all interlinked within Underworld U.S.A.’s treatment of truth. Not for nothing, the executor of the law in this film is not the police but an attorney, precisely the one who demands the testimony of “whole truth,” John Driscoll (Larry Gates). Driscoll never has the whole truth, because Devlin withholds and misrepresents it for his own ends, but the outcome remains satisfactory for Driscoll: the imprisonment or execution of three crime lords.
But what of the “whole truth” Cuddles tells to Devlin? It is a more dangerous truth than the identity of Devlin’s father’s killers. It is the truth of the limit imposed by this non-relation. Lacan writes in My Teaching (2009):
[T]here really must be a reason why sexuality once took on the function of truth — if it was just once, the whole point being that it was not just once. After all, sexuality is not all that unacceptable. And once it took on that function, it kept it … What is within reach is the fact that sexuality makes a hole in truth. (21)
Lacan offers all this theorizing of sexuality and knowledge without even the benefit of the idiom “knowing someone biblically” in French. The volatility of Cuddles’s “whole truth,” a truth that partakes in the fantasy of a sexual relation, is precisely what leads Devlin to his death. Whether it is his aspiration toward a domestic ideal or the instability of a whole truth that is always-already holey as it relates to sexuality, both aggravate the peril Devlin is subject to in the incomprehensible world of criminality that isn’t governed by truth and justice. Instead, it is ruled by everything about the “American way” that goes unstated.
In Underworld U.S.A., expressing truth is the most dangerous thing of all, but some truths are more dangerous than others.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/graduate/2024/11/19/bu-suspends-admissions-humanities-other-phd-programs — BU suspended several humanities and social sciences PhD programs, reported on by InsideHigherEd the day after I dropped last week.
Hmmm… I wonder if the same problems drive a university to suspend admissions to English, philosophy, and history programs (and American studies, anthropology, classical studies, art history, linguistics, political science, and sociology). Maybe the blight of theory, contemporary literature, and film is plaguing all these disciplines? Somebody grab the bone saw.
Watching this video got me thinking. I wonder if the skill gap between Justin Wong and the next best person at Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (2000) is the biggest skill gap to exist in any endeavor. He is absolutely unbelievable, so good that he could only be defeated by a more skilled player. It’s rare for such a thing to be true. In games, where wins or losses are unambiguous, there are often other factors that could make up for a skill gap, even a large one. In other fields where measuring skill is more difficult, one might not even be able to define what constitutes a “win” or a “loss” or what kind of achievement is demonstrative of skill. How “skillful” am I of a writer or a film critic compared to those who make more money doing it? Like I said, I had this thought while watching this video. Then I heard the idea echoed by Magic commentator Cedric Phillips:
The point, simply, is this:
Does it help when I tell you what movie I am going to write about next week? On December 2nd, I’m planning on writing about Collateral (2004). I also wrote about it way back in 2021:
That was good, but this time will be better. Collateral is currently streaming on Netflix and on blu-ray hidden under a shelf at your local big box store.
Until next time.