Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Iron Giant
1999 · Brad Bird · The Iron Giant on Sightlines
A deer comes close enough to touch. The Giant puts out one finger, slow, the way you'd hold a hand toward a strange dog, and the deer's nose meets the metal. Hunters spook it off. Minutes later the deer is on the ground with a hole in it, and the Giant is crouched over a body he can't repair, looking at the rifles in the men's hands, then down at his own hands.
That's the whole film in one shot, and the question it asks is stranger than "will the machine turn out good." It's: is there any gap between what a thing sees and what it does?
Deleuze, following Bergson, thought that was the question separating a living being from a rock. The universe is movement passing through matter. A rock takes a blow and hands it on, instantly, in full. What a living thing does is delay. Light comes in, and the response does not come straight back out. Deleuze calls that pause the centre of indetermination: a hole punched in the chain of causes, and everything we mean by a self lives inside it. Not a soul added to a body. A gap in the wiring.
Bird's Giant is built without one. Perception is soldered to reaction. Hogarth points a toy pistol at him in play and a cannon unfolds from the Giant's shoulder and locks onto the boy before anything like a thought can happen. The Giant is more frightened than Hogarth is. He didn't do it. It was done through him. He is a hundred feet of chain-of-causes with a face on the front.
So the film's project, and this is the part I find genuinely radical for a family picture, is the manufacture of an interval inside a machine. "You are who you choose to be" is a bumper sticker until you notice the film has spent its whole running time engineering the physical possibility of choosing at all.
Why the lens earns its keep instead of being bolted on: it describes what the animation is literally doing. Delay is drawable. It's a held pose, a beat of stillness before a movement starts, a body too heavy to snap. Bird took the Giant's silhouette and his walk from Fleischer's Superman: The Mechanical Monsters (1941), riveted art deco and that particular rotoscope-smooth mechanical gait. Rotoscope is worth pausing on. Photographic cinema samples motion mechanically, taking the ordinary instants nobody posed, which is what Deleuze means by the any-instant-whatever. Drawn animation has no such sampling; somebody decides every frame. Rotoscope was the trick that let real, unremarkable, in-between motion into a cartoon, and Bird's crew inherited the result: a body with inertia. Inertia is delay you can see. The Giant is slow because he's enormous, and being slow is the first condition of being able to stop.
Around him: October 1957, Rockwell, Maine. Sputnik going over. Children folding under their desks in a drill. Deleuze's word for a crowd rendered as one feeling rather than a set of people is the dividual, and that classroom is the cleanest one in American animation, a roomful of kids performing a single body's fear on cue. The antagonist here isn't the government man. He's the fear's errand boy. The plot is a town being saved from itself.
Structurally this is Deleuze's large form of the action-image at full power: a situation so big it presses on everyone until one act large enough to change it becomes necessary. The encompassing milieu is the sky. Everything arrives out of it — the satellite, the Giant, finally the missile. And the Giant has no memory, which puts his origin in what Deleuze calls the absolute out-of-field: not the next room, not offscreen left, but somewhere that can't be placed on a map at all. That unlocatable elsewhere is what Rockwell is actually afraid of, and the film is honest enough never to fill it in.
The climax is the oldest machine in American cinema. Griffith's last-minute rescue, two lines of action converging, a clock running. Deleuze called this organic montage and treated it as the native form of the movement-image. Bird runs it straight and turns it inside out. The thing we're rescued from is our own defense. The rescuer is the monster. And the ride isn't across country toward the cabin, it's vertical.
Watch the face just before he goes. Two eyes and a jaw plate; there is almost nothing there to act with. The debt is to King Kong, which established that a colossus could carry its entire inner life through anthropomorphic facial and gestural acting. Deleuze distinguishes the face that holds one steady quality, wonder or contemplation, from the face where small movements accumulate toward a threshold, a face on the verge of crossing into something. The plates shift a fraction. He says the word. That's a threshold face, and the word he chooses is a name nobody gave him.
One object condenses the film: the gun. The hunters' rifles, the toy pistol, the arsenal in his own back, Gort's ray in The Day the Earth Stood Still — that Cold War arrival-from-the-sky robot who mirrors our atomic militarism back at us, which Bird relocates to 1957 and then improves on by handing the moral education to the robot instead of the human. "I am not a gun" isn't a description. It's the refusal of one. By manufacture, he is precisely a gun. Frankenstein gave Bird the innocent made thing learning gentleness from a child by the water while the mob and the authorities mobilize; Pinocchio gave him the engine, a fabricated being earning a soul through one self-sacrificing choice; E.T. gave him the child's-eye structure of hiding something hunted in American suburbia, and the death-and-resurrection ending. Kong dies of our misunderstanding. Bird inverts that on purpose. Kong falls; the Giant rises.
Deleuze borrowed a phrase from Spinoza and Leibniz for what cinema does to a mind: the spiritual automaton, thought moving under its own necessity once an image has shocked it into motion. He meant it for difficult European films. Bird built the phrase at a hundred feet out of rivets and had it speak one word before impact. You don't need Deleuze to be wrecked by that. But the concept names what's on screen with unusual precision — an automaton acquiring a spirit, and the spirit consisting of nothing but a delay it taught itself to insert.
What it did: in 1999, with traditional animation being written off and the rest of American cinema discovering reality-twist puzzles, Bird made an unembarrassed classical action film with real death and real politics in it, and proved a computer-generated body could be the warmest character in a hand-drawn world. The industry kept the CG half and dropped the drawing. The film flopped, then found its people, the way some films do.
Then look at the last shot again. A bolt in the snow, hopping along, going home. The body reassembles because the parts remember. The choice outlived the machine that made it, which is the film's real proposal and worth arguing with: it says a soul is a decision, then quietly suggests a decision is something that can be stored in metal. Rewatch it for the pauses. Not the big moments. The half-second before each one, where Bird keeps putting his money.
Concepts in play
- the interval (centre of indetermination) — Hogarth's toy pistol triggers the Giant's shoulder cannon and it locks on the boy before any thought intervenes; the film's project is installing a gap between his perception and his reaction, stated as 'you are who you choose to be'.
- any-instant-whatever — The rotoscope-smooth mechanical locomotion Bird took from Fleischer's Superman: The Mechanical Monsters (1941) — mechanically sampled ordinary motion imported into a drawn world, producing a body whose visible inertia is delay made physical.
- action-image, large form (SAS') — The 1957 Cold War situation — Sputnik overhead, duck-and-cover drills — presses down until one decisive act, the Giant's vertical interception of the missile, transforms it.
- the encompasser (synsign) — The sky over Rockwell, Maine as the milieu that calls forth every action: the satellite, the arrival-from-the-sky robot, and finally the missile all come out of it.
- out-of-field-absolute — The Giant has no memory of where he came from and the film never supplies it — his origin sits in an elsewhere that can't be located in space, and that unplaceable beyond is what the town's fear is aimed at.
- dividual — The classroom duck-and-cover drill: a room of children folding under desks in unison as one frightened body, and the town's collective 'fears and prejudices' that the Giant ultimately saves people from.
- montage-organic-american — The climax runs Griffith's convergent last-minute rescue with a clock, inverted: the threat is the town's own missile and the rescuer is the monster.
- icon of power (potisign) — the intensive face — The Giant's near-featureless face of two eyes and a jaw plate, inheriting Kong's principle that a colossus's inner life is carried entirely by facial and gestural acting; micro-shifts in the eye plates build to the threshold as he says 'Superman' and launches.
- symbol — The gun condenses every strand — the hunters' rifles, Hogarth's toy pistol, the arsenal in the Giant's own back, Gort's ray, the missile — and 'I am not a gun' refuses the description he was manufactured to fit.
- spiritual automaton — A literal automaton acquiring a spirit: Bird's central idea that a soul is a matter of choice rather than design, embodied in a machine whose interior life consists of a learned delay before reaction.