Monster · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A mother sits across a low table from a row of teachers who will not look at her. They bow. They apologise in the smooth, de-personalised cadence of people apologising for nothing. She has come because something is wrong with her son, and she is right. Something is wrong. And everything she does about it makes it worse. Hold that image, because it is the engine of the whole film: a person who correctly perceives that a situation has gone bad, and who cannot find the action that would set it right.

Deleuze had a name for the cinema built on the opposite faith. He called it the movement-image, and it is the grammar of nearly every film you were ever taught to expect. A character takes in a situation and acts to change it. Perception flows into action; the duel is joined; the situation resolves. Kore-eda hands you the makings of exactly that film. Wronged mother, stonewalling school, a teacher who seems to have hurt her child. We know this movie. We lean toward the confrontation. The confrontation comes, and it does nothing. The principal only bows lower. The teacher reads his apology off what might as well be a card. This is what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image: the sensory-motor link, see-then-do, has gone slack, and Saori is left holding a perception she has no way to discharge into a deed.

Then Kore-eda rewinds.

The film's structure is its argument. Three times we live the same stretch of days, with the mother, then the teacher, then the two boys, and each pass leaves the one before it standing while quietly draining it of the meaning we had assigned. Here it is tempting to reach for Rashomon and what Deleuze called the powers of the false, and just as easy to be wrong. Kurosawa's witnesses lie. Their stories cannot all be true, and that undecidability is the subject. Kore-eda does the reverse. Nobody here is lying. The teacher's apparent guilt, so plausible in the first section, simply dissolves once we stand where he stood. What changes between passes is never the facts. It is the frame, and that word should be taken literally.

Kondo, who shot Shoplifters, locks the camera to whoever's consciousness we currently inhabit. The mother's sections compress the institution into adversarial corridors and conference rooms; the camera height, the lens, the quality of light all shift when we move into the teacher, then again into the children. The debt is to Ozu, whose tatami-level camera always sat at the sightline of a scene's emotional centre. Deleuze would call this the perception-image, the kind of shot that foregrounds the angle of perception itself, and at its sharpest the dicisign, the camera caught in the act of perceiving someone who is also perceiving. We never saw falsely. We saw partially, and we trusted the part. That is the lectosign at work, Deleuze's term for the image that has stopped being self-evident and has to be read. The triptych turns our reading habits into the trap. We convict, then we are shown the cost of the speed at which we convicted.

The third section walks out of the institution altogether, into an abandoned rail car standing in overgrown scrub, where Minato and Yori have built a country of their own. The frame opens. The lenses lengthen, natural light floods in, the handheld register loosens its grip. This is Deleuze's any-space-whatever, a place emptied of its old job as a setting for action, where something purely optical can happen instead. Nothing is achieved in the rail car. The boys name things, invent games, sit in the dim. They are seers rather than agents, what Deleuze called the voyant, the figure who can only watch and endure because the world has offered no action that fits. The music withdraws to meet them. Sakamoto's solo piano, the same economy he found scoring Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and now his last completed work, arrives beside a feeling and then leaves it alone, and several of the film's highest emotional peaks play with no score at all. The typhoon comes as sound before it is ever an image. That is an opsign and a sonsign in their plainest form, a pure optical and aural situation in which looking and listening are the only things left to do.

What did Monster do to its own form? It took the machinery of the puzzle film, the structure Haneke sharpened in Cache and the 2000s built into a genre, and pointed it the other way. Those films withhold and reframe in order to manufacture dread. Kore-eda withholds and reframes in order to manufacture mercy. Each reset is an instruction to suspend the judgment the last section taught you to make. The withheld-script method he developed on Nobody Knows, telling his child actors only what they need at the moment of shooting, is the same logic at the level of performance: the boys are not playing a position in an arc they understand, they are living each scene blind, exactly as we are.

So the question the film hands back is not who the monster is. It is why we were so sure, so early, that there had to be one. The monster was never a person on screen. It was the confidence with which each of us watched the first time through, before the second pass came and asked us to look again.