Simultaneity and Overlap in Stanley Kubrik's The Killing

Simultaneity and Overlap in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing Stephen Mamber ...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: Click for larger view View full resolution 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

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