Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman lies face down in a field, a few feet from her shoes. The image holds. The camera doesn't move, and it doesn't move toward her. What moves is the sound. From somewhere else in time we hear her — the struggle, the choking, the end of it — laid over a body that is already finished. We never saw it happen. We're made to hear it afterward, against a picture that has nothing left to show.

That gap, between a still image and a sound that belongs to another moment, is where Henry lives. McNaughton and his cameraman, Charlie Lieberman, built the film out of it. The most famous device is a run of crime scenes: static shots of Henry's victims, posed like evidence photographs, while the soundtrack carries the audio of a killing we were never shown. Deleuze has a name for what's happening to us in those shots. He calls them pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns. Normally a film runs on a simple circuit: a character sees a situation, and acts to change it. See, then do. Here the circuit is cut. There's no detective to perceive-and-pursue, no survivor to run. We're handed an aftermath to look at and a soundtrack to listen to, and nothing to do with either. We can only watch. Henry, too, is mostly a watcher: soft-spoken, courtly, observing rooms before he ruins them. He is what Deleuze calls the seer — a man who looks and endures more than he resolves.

Pull on the displaced audio and you get the next concept. Sound and image, in those tableaux, tell two different times — the live struggle over the dead result. Deleuze would say the image has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and become a lectosign: a thing you have to read, not just register. You assemble the murder yourself, in the dark, which is far worse than being shown it. The film makes your imagination the instrument.

Why does Henry kill? The film refuses to say, and the refusal is the point. He tells Becky his mother made him watch her with men, that she made him wear a dress, that he killed her. The details slide. Did he stab her, or shoot her, or beat her? The accounts don't line up, and the film offers the contradictions as equally true. This is what Deleuze calls the powers of the false, here as falsifying narration: mutually exclusive versions presented as co-true, so that no origin can be fixed. The serial-killer genre is addicted to the origin story — the trauma that explains the monster. Henry forges one and withholds it in the same breath. The desire to understand the killer, the film argues, is its own false consolation.

What kind of creature is left when you remove the explanation? Deleuze has a category for it. Between the close-up of feeling and the full action-hero lies a degenerate zone he calls naturalism, or the impulse-image: a world of raw drives erupting beneath the social surface, sliding down an irreversible slope toward exhaustion and death. Henry is its portrait. The Chicago of cramped apartments, diners, gas stations and parking lots is the derived milieu — the ordinary visible skin. Under it runs an originary world of pure appetite. Otis is appetite with no discipline, leering and crude. Henry is the slope itself, the line of slope that only ever goes down. Nothing rises. The film ends with no escape and no moral arithmetic. He drives off; a suitcase by the roadside tells you what's inside.

The most notorious scene tightens the screw. Henry and Otis record a home invasion on a stolen camcorder and later sit on the couch and replay it, rewinding, pausing. We watch the killers watch themselves. The tape becomes a fetish — a part-object charged with compulsive force, the drive feeding on its own image. The lineage here is exact. Peeping Tom welded the camera to the act of killing so the viewer's gaze became the murderer's; Henry hands the apparatus to the killers and seats us behind them.

Place it in the larger story Deleuze tells and the film snaps into focus. He saw, after the war, a crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive, plots that disperse, trips that change nothing. Henry is a serial-killer movie with the action-image surgically removed. No investigation, no suspense build, no capture, no catharsis. Henry kills, moves on, and the film simply continues. The craft debts are real and specific: Lang's M, which staged child-murder off-screen through a rolling ball and a snagged balloon; In Cold Blood and The Honeymoon Killers and Badlands, which played real murder flat and refused to moralize; Texas Chain Saw's 16mm grain, which Lieberman extends into a grime that looks surveilled rather than designed.

What Henry did to film was to prove the genre's machinery was optional. Take away the supernatural killer, the stalking camera, the final girl, the payoff, and something more disturbing remains: a man in ordinary light, doing ordinary-looking things in ordinary rooms. It seeded the recorded-atrocity culture we now live inside. Watch it again and watch the camera's discipline — everything it declines to show, and how much more that costs you than blood would.