A Real Pain · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A tour group arranges itself for a photograph in a Warsaw square. Everyone finds the right face. Someone says thank you. Then they get back on the bus and ride out to Majdanek.

Jesse Eisenberg built a ninety-minute film in the few feet between the arranging and the thing being arranged in front of. Nothing much happens in it, in the way movies usually mean happening. Two American cousins fly to Poland on a small heritage tour to honor their grandmother, a survivor. There are conversations, a train, a dinner that goes wrong, a fight about who is more damaged. They fly home. The plot is slight on purpose. The slightness is the form.

For cinema's first fifty years the deal was simple: a character sees a situation and does something that changes it. Deleuze called that the movement-image, and he noticed it broke after the war, when European filmmakers kept arriving at situations no one could act on. What replaced it, first, was the balade — the trip that transforms nothing. A journey with an itinerary and no arc. Deleuze also noticed who takes these trips: not a protagonist but a loose, weakly linked bunch, what he called a dispersive situation. Eisenberg's tour group is exactly that. A deliberately assorted set of strangers, blocked so the cousins are inside the collective and slightly off to one side of it, held together by a booking rather than a purpose.

Then Majdanek, staged plainly, refusing spectacle. Deleuze's term for what the film does there is a pure optical and sound situation: an image that no longer functions as a cue for action, only as something to be looked at and listened to. The camp offers nothing to do. You cannot help, avenge, or fix. Everyone present becomes what Deleuze calls a seer — a watcher and endurer instead of an agent. The film has been training us for this the whole time with its long dialogue scenes, its silences, its held reaction shots. Deleuze would call those stretches dead time, and they are not filler. They are the film teaching your body that no act is coming.

This lens earns its keep because it explains why Benji is written the way he is. Benji is the last person in the movie still operating on the old contract. He perceives, and he tries to convert the perception straight into action: disrupt the group, break the guide's script, force a real feeling into the room. It never changes the situation. It only produces social friction, which is why he is funny and why he is unbearable. David gave up on the circuit before the plane landed, and his suppressed exasperation is the whole modern condition wearing good manners. Put them side by side and you get the film's real argument: there is nothing adequate to do, and one of them cannot accept it.

The camera knows this and shoots faces accordingly. Deleuze split the close-up in two. A reflecting face holds a single quality steady, a contour. An intensive face is all micro-movement, a series of tiny thresholds building toward something that never discharges. Culkin's Benji is the intensive one, charm sliding into neediness into provocation into sudden tenderness inside a single unbroken take. Eisenberg's David is the contour, contained and apologetic, a surface with pressure behind it. The performances are calibrated as a duet because they are two halves of one concept.

And the tour itself is a machine for producing postures. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. The guide's rehearsed narration, the group photo, the polite arrangement of bodies in front of monuments: these are gests, and the film sets them against the enormity of what is being toured without ever editorializing. It just lets you watch grief get scheduled.

The soundtrack does the deepest work. Eisenberg scores the entire film with Chopin, no original music at all, so present-day Poland is continuously overlaid by a voice from a Poland that is gone. Deleuze has a name for a landscape emptied of its people and spoken over by an absent past: the stratigraphic image, where the ground becomes a layer to be read rather than a place to act in. This is Lanzmann's discovery in Shoah, filming fields where nothing remains and letting speech carry what the image cannot, and it descends from Bazin's conviction that the camera's honesty lies in what it declines to stage. Eisenberg reaches the same place through a piano. The guide's tour-script becomes what Deleuze calls a speech act, a legending voice rather than dialogue, narrating a people who are not there to be filmed.

That absence is the film's subject and Deleuze's most political concept: the people are missing. Modern political cinema, he argued, cannot show a people; it can only register the hole where one should be. The tour exists because Polish Jewry was destroyed. The grandmother's former home is occupied by strangers. The film's emotional resolution is small stones set down per Jewish mourning custom, a gesture that changes nothing and is the only available act.

The craft debts are visible and specific. Sideways supplied the melancholy road-dramedy chassis, two mismatched men whose itinerary is a pretext for grief to surface as comedy. Nebraska supplied the elegiac homeland return grounded in regional location realism. The Squid and the Whale supplied the behavioral, verbally exact mode of family friction, and is literally where Baumbach cast Eisenberg and forged the persona he now writes for himself. The Meyerowitz Stories supplied the episodic chamber structure of Jewish-American resentment. Annie Hall supplied the over-articulate anxious voice. And Manhattan supplied the boldest move outright: score a whole film with one dead national composer instead of hiring one. Allen took Gershwin for a city. Eisenberg takes Chopin for a country, and the gambit does more work here, because in Poland the borrowed grandeur is also an inventory of what was lost.

What it deposits for whoever comes next is a proof: you can make Holocaust memory available to fiction again without dramatizing it, by filming the tourism instead of the event and refusing to let the comic register of pain and the historical one cancel each other. The film starts and ends in an airport, the most any-space-whatever there is, a place that has stopped being anyone's setting.

So watch it again and watch the group. Not the cousins, the group. See how fast the polite face reassembles after each of Benji's detonations. Then ask the question the film hands you and does not answer: when there is nothing adequate to do, is the one who keeps trying to act the healthiest person on the bus, or the sickest?