Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Milk
2008 · Gus Van Sant · Milk on Sightlines
A man sits down with a tape recorder and dictates his own obituary while he is still alive. The instruction is explicit: to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. Then he tells the story in order, with names and dates, a report he won't be around to file. Harvey Milk really made that tape. Van Sant builds the whole film on it, so that from the first minutes you are listening to a dead man explain how he got that way.
That looks like a framing convenience. It is the film's entire theory of politics.
Deleuze, writing about modern political cinema, kept returning to a line he took from Klee: the people are missing. He didn't mean the seats were empty. He meant that when you work on behalf of a group with no standing — no place in the archive, no legal existence as a constituency, not even an agreed name — you cannot simply address a people, because that people has not been assembled yet. Older political cinema assumed a public already there, needing only to be roused. The modern kind has a harder job. It has to help invent the collective it claims to speak for. Deleuze called that work fabulation, or legending: not lying, but story-telling that brings a subject into being.
Milk is a film about a man doing this on purpose, shot by a director who understood that it needed doing. The tape is addressed to people who don't exist yet. Not the friends who would actually hear it, but a constituency that has to be convened out of a neighborhood of individuals who were, politically, nobody. Milk turns forty, moves to San Francisco with Scott Smith, opens a camera shop. The shop becomes the film's hearth, the room a community organizes itself from, and the Castro becomes territory the movement takes block by block rather than a backdrop it walks through. He loses elections, repeatedly, before winning one. Each loss is a draft of the people.
Deleuze's name for the tape itself is the speech-act — a voice that testifies and legends rather than converses. Milk is not talking to anyone in the scene. He is composing the record in advance, and the film lets him.
Van Sant's specific invention is what he does with the archive. Anita Bryant is not cast. She arrives on television, the actual woman in actual broadcast footage, and plays herself opposite actors. Elliot Graham's editing keeps the seams porous instead of hidden; the grain and color are matched so that record and reconstruction pass into each other. This is close to what Deleuze called the crystal-image: a point where the real thing and its reflection become impossible to sort, each one the mirror of the other. The Castro was rebuilt on the Castro. The candlelight march is restaged almost shot for shot from the documentary footage in The Times of Harvey Milk — the same 1984 film whose news material Milk literally reuses. So an actual march becomes a documentary image becomes a staged image sitting beside the documentary image, and you stop being able to say which one is the copy. Savides states the method in the motif: Milk composed through the camera shop's windows, in glass, in layered reflections.
The soundtrack does the other half. A dead narrator recounting his own story is Sunset Boulevard's device; the architecture of reconstructing a public man through retrospective testimony wrapped in newsreel is Citizen Kane's; braiding real witnesses into dramatized history is what Reds worked out. Milk's version has a particular torque. The image shows a present that still has a future in it. The voice comes from after that future closed. When voice and image tell time differently like this, the picture loses its self-evidence and has to be read — Deleuze's lectosign. Every scene picks up a second layer: what is happening, and what the voice already knows about it.
Now the strange part, and it is worth arguing. Everything above belongs to Deleuze's time-image, the postwar cinema where action stops resolving anything. Yet the body of Milk is a movement-image film of the most classical kind: a large situation presses, a man acts, the situation changes. Votes get counted. The Briggs Initiative is beaten. Deleuze thought that circuit broke after the war and never fully healed. Van Sant reinstates it deliberately, because for this subject the proposition that organizing works is the political content. You cannot make a film urging people to act and shoot it as if action were futile.
Where the circuit jams is Dan White. Brolin plays a man who perceives everything and can respond adequately to none of it, which is the crisis of the action-image housed in a single body. Danny Glicker's costumes make the case before any dialogue does: the shaggy activist milieu, the buttoned civic order of City Hall, White's straitened respectability. Deleuze called a posture that exposes a social relation the gest. White's rigidity is his, and the gun is what is left when the only act a man can still perform is the wrong one.
The candlelight march is where the film's two halves meet. Deleuze has a word for a crowd filmed as one feeling body that is nonetheless made of individuals: the dividual. Van Sant stages the mass scenes for scale and for faces at the same time, so political history stays legible as particular people. The missing people, for one night, present.
What did it do to film? It solved the biopic's oldest dead spot. We know the ending; the tape makes foreknowledge the form rather than a problem, and Elfman's unusually restrained score plays hope and elegy in the same phrase. It carried the handheld, available-light intimacy Van Sant developed in Mala Noche and My Own Private Idaho, for lives mainstream cinema wasn't filming at all, into a studio prestige picture without sanding it smooth — the ensemble reads as a web of relationships, not a great man with satellites. And it made the seam between archive and reconstruction a place to put an argument instead of a flaw to conceal, which is now simply available to anyone making a political film.
Then it did something films almost never do. Released weeks before California passed Proposition 8, its 1978 footage stopped being history.
So watch it again with one question open. The tape was recorded for people who did not exist yet. Are you them? Watch which faces the camera finds in the march. The film is not remembering a people. It is still assembling one.
Concepts in play
- the people are missing — Milk's dictated tape is addressed to a gay constituency that had no legal or political existence yet; the film's arc is the convening of that constituency out of the Castro, block by block, through repeated electoral losses before a win.
- fabulation / legending — The real recording made 'to be played only in the event of my death by assassination' catches its subject in the act of composing himself into a story for people not yet assembled — the film narrates a life as an act of testament.
- acte de parole — Milk's recorded voice runs as a spectral first-person presence across the soundtrack, testifying and legending rather than conversing with any character in the scene.
- the readable image — The dead man narrates his own life over images of himself still living; the image carries a present that still has a future, while the voice speaks from after that future closed, so each scene has to be read rather than simply watched.
- audiovisual disjunction — The testament voice is detached in time from the visible bodies it describes, and the archival footage brings its own degraded sonic quality into the mix alongside the staged scenes.
- hyalosign — Anita Bryant appears as real archival television footage acting opposite performers; the Castro was reconstructed on the actual Castro; the candlelight march is restaged almost shot-for-shot from The Times of Harvey Milk, with grain and color matched so record and reconstruction become indiscernible. Savides's recurring glass and mirror compositions state the motif.
- action-image, large form — The narrative body is a working sensory-motor circuit: an oppressive global situation, sustained organizing, an election won, the Briggs Initiative defeated — action that genuinely transforms the situation.
- crisis of the action-image — Brolin's Dan White is a man undone by rigidity and resentment who cannot respond adequately to what he perceives, the one figure in the film for whom the circuit jams.
- the gest — Glicker's Oscar-nominated costume design separates Milk's shaggy activist milieu from the buttoned civic order of City Hall and from White's straitened respectability — posture and dress exposing the social relation.
- dividual — The candlelight march and rallies are staged for both mass scale and human particularity, so the crowd reads as one affective body that remains legible as individual faces.