Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Heavenly Creatures
1994 · Peter Jackson · Heavenly Creatures on Sightlines
Two girls are running through a garden in Christchurch, and the camera runs with them, low and swooping, ducking the hedges. The light thickens. The colour comes up as if someone were turning a dial. Somewhere in that run a plasticine courtier is standing in the garden at human size, and the film never told you when you crossed over.
Most writing about Heavenly Creatures calls these the fantasy sequences. That is the one description that cannot be right. A fantasy sequence is something a film brackets: here is the world, here is the daydream, here is the world again. Jackson and his editor Jamie Selkirk build the transitions as transformations instead of cuts, so Christchurch does not stop and hand over to Borovnia. It melts into it. Nothing closes the bracket, because there is not one.
Deleuze has two names for what is happening, and the distance between them is the film. The first is the dream-image, the onirosign: a circuit that leaves the present, loops through a fantasy anchored to no memory, and sets you back down where you were standing. You always know your position. Borovnia begins there, a kingdom invented on paper by two clever girls, with a clay court and a murderous prince, entirely theirs.
The second is the crystal-image, and it is simpler than it sounds. A crystal, for Deleuze, is an image in which a thing and its double (its reflection, its memory, its dreamed version) swap places so fast that you cannot say which one is the real one. He built the idea out of Ophüls's mirrored ballrooms and Visconti's rotting palaces. Jackson builds it out of a garden. By the middle of the film Borovnia is no longer a circuit that returns; it is a second state of the same world, arriving on the same continuous camera move, in the same shot, the drab period palette simply saturating until the other world is the one you are in.
That is what the lens buys, and it is worth being blunt about why it beats the alternatives. The clinical reading is available: folie à deux, two girls who confused imagination with reality. The film puts that reading onstage in the form of doctors, teachers and alarmed parents, and it belongs to them, and they are wrong about everything. The crystal says the film is not about two people who could not separate the invented from the real. It is built so that you cannot either. There is no position inside it from which to be sensible about them.
And it is a made thing, not a mood. The morph was about two years old. ILM had built the modern version for the sorceress transformation in Willow; Terminator 2 made it famous with the liquid-metal man. In both, the effect says a creature can become anything. Jackson and George Port took that just-invented tool and aimed it at a claim about consciousness: these two states of the world are one state. Nobody had used morphing to make a metaphysical argument. It was done in a small country, cheaply, at a moment when digital effects meant Hollywood scale. That is the invention.
Under the crystal there is an older and dirtier structure, and Deleuze has a name for that too. In Stroheim and Buñuel he found naturalism: a world of manners, the derived milieu, sitting on top of a savage originary world of pure drives that keeps showing through. Heavenly Creatures stages this literally; the production design is a war between surfaces. Christchurch is the derived milieu — uniforms, a boarding house, a grander house up the hill, medical authority. Borovnia is the originary world, a court of outsized clay figures where appetite is the only law. Drives feed on part-objects Deleuze calls fetishes, and the girls have theirs. Mario Lanza's recordings, played as relics. James Mason's face. A religion for two, built out of gramophone records.
Naturalism runs downhill. Deleuze calls that the line of slope, an entropy no one in the film can reverse, and Jackson makes it structural by opening near the aftermath. You know the bottom of the slope before you know the girls.
Which brings the ending into focus. For most of its length this is a cinema of time: the girls watch, write, and endure decisions made about them, and nothing they do alters the situation. Then they do one thing that alters everything. A situation presses, they will be separated; an act resolves it, a path in Victoria Park; and the old movement-image logic of the cinema snaps back into place, complete with cross-cutting that gathers momentum. That is the horror of the last stretch. The sensory-motor circuit is re-welded and functions perfectly, except that the situation it answers exists only in the Fourth World. Delusion is the last place where action still gets results.
The deepest trick is that both regimes come from the same document. Pauline's diaries were evidence at the 1954 trial, which is where the naturalistic scenes get their reportorial authority: this happened, it is on the record. The same diaries are the girls' self-mythology, the account in which they are exceptional beings with a private genius the adult world cannot grasp. Deleuze's word for a subject caught in the act of telling their own legend is fabulation, and there is no cleaner case anywhere in cinema: here the legend is the evidence. Melanie Lynskey delivers it flat, matter-of-fact, nearly bored — a speech act in Deleuze's sense, testimony rather than dialogue. The craft debt is exact and it is to Badlands, Malick's incantatory girl's-diary narration laid over a real killing spree. Jackson borrows the device and makes the document work both shifts. Then he scores the murder to swelling opera, reaching for La Bohème. It is not ironic counterpoint. It is what they hear.
The rest of the craft comes from the splatter films, which were not a phase he outgrew but the workshop where the tools were built. Bad Taste established the do-it-yourself New Zealand model, rigs and effects made in-house by the filmmakers, and this production industrialized it into the nucleus of Weta. The latex-and-foam grotesques of Meet the Feebles are the direct ancestors of the Borovnia courtiers lumbering through the garden. Braindead's careening handheld camera is carried wholesale into the fantasy set-pieces; the gore-comedy camera turned out to be an ecstasy camera. It runs forward too. Weta was founded around this film, and the digital work here is the proof of concept for the infrastructure Jackson would later marshal for The Lord of the Rings. The larger demonstration outlasts even that: a small, state-supported industry could use the new tools expressively rather than for scale.
What it did to the art is not small. Digital effects had existed to show impossible objects. Heavenly Creatures used them to argue that the interior life of two teenagers has the same standing as a street, and then made you watch what that costs someone else.
So watch it again for the one thing in it that will not morph. Everything else can turn into something else: the garden, the light, the clay, the colour, the girls' own account of themselves. Honorah Rieper's body on an ordinary park path cannot. The film gives its fantasy every advantage and sets one immovable object in front of it. The question it leaves open is whether you can name the moment you stopped being able to tell the two worlds apart, because the girls could not either, and the film is not convinced that makes them a different kind of person from you.
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Selkirk's transitions designed as transformations rather than cuts: Christchurch dissolves and morphs into Borovnia and back inside continuous camera movement, so the fantasy is never bracketed off but bleeds continuously into lived reality.
- dream-image (onirosign) — The invented kingdom of Borovnia with its plasticine court and clay inhabitants — a fantasy circuit tied to no localizable memory, which the film begins with and then refuses to keep as a separate circuit.
- originary world — Borovnia staged as hand-made grotesquerie — a plasticine court of outsized clay figures and its own violence — showing through the surface of 1950s Christchurch; the production design is explicitly a war between surfaces.
- derived milieu — The period-specific reconstruction of repressive mid-century Christchurch: Girls' High uniforms, the Riepers' modest boarding house, the Hulmes' grander household, parental and psychiatric intervention.
- fetish (part-object) — Mario Lanza's recordings recurring as objects of worship, and the girls' veneration of James Mason — relics that carry the compulsive charge of the whole fantasy life.
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — The tragic, inevitable architecture: the film opens near the aftermath, so the killing is known from the start and the friendship's escalation is felt as an irreversible descent.
- action-image, large form — The climax restores situation-to-act logic — the prospect of separation as the pressing situation, the murder on the Victoria Park path as the decisive act meant to transform it, with cross-cutting between mounting fantasy and approaching act building the momentum.
- fabulation (legending) — The fantasy sequences give the girls their own account of themselves as exceptional beings with a private genius the adult world cannot grasp — written in the diaries that were used in evidence at the 1954 trial.
- acte de parole (the legending voice) — Pauline's diary delivered in Melanie Lynskey's flat, matter-of-fact voiceover — testimonial and self-mythologizing rather than dialogue, on the model of Badlands' incantatory diary narration.
- affective colour — Colour used programmatically: the controlled, slightly drab period palette of the real Christchurch against the saturated, dreamlike light of the fantasy interludes, the image softening and intensifying as imagination takes over.