The Squid and the Whale · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Walt stands on a school stage and sings Pink Floyd's "Hey You" as though he wrote it. He half-believes it. When he's caught, what wounds him isn't the lie but the accusation — hadn't he felt the song that deeply, and doesn't feeling it make it his? That scene is the whole film folded into ninety seconds, and it's the reason Deleuze's least intuitive idea turns out to be the right key to a small Brooklyn divorce comedy. Deleuze called it the powers of the false: cinema's capacity to treat forgery not as a lie to be corrected but as a way people actually make themselves. Walt is a forger. He assembles a self out of borrowed opinions and a borrowed song, and the movie's tenderness is that it understands why — his father did it first, and better.

Bernard is the master Walt is copying. He pronounces "philistine" and "Kafkaesque" the way other men throw punches, dispensing taste as if taste were truth. Here the useful concept is Deleuze's gest — a posture or attitude that lays bare a social relation without anyone naming it. In this literary household, taste is the currency and the weapon; the bookshelves aren't décor, they're the family's grammar. When Bernard rates a book, orders a meal, or explains why Walt shouldn't bother reading the whole novel, he is performing rank. The comedy of the film is almost entirely gestural in this sense: we laugh at the confidence of the verdicts long before we grieve the smallness of the man delivering them.

The trouble is that the two boys are handed a situation they cannot act on. This is what Deleuze meant by the crisis of the action-image — the older cinema ran on characters who perceive a problem and act to fix it, and here that circuit is simply cut. A divorce is not a problem a fourteen-year-old can solve. So Walt becomes what Deleuze calls a seer (voyant): not an agent but a watcher and endurer, someone to whom things happen and who slowly learns to see. The film's climax honors this precisely. It isn't a confrontation; it's Walt running to the American Museum of Natural History to stand before the diorama of the squid and the whale locked in combat — the thing that terrified him as a small child. Nothing is resolved outside him. Everything shifts inside.

His younger brother takes the other road out. Frank drinks, smears himself on library shelves, acts out sexually — and Deleuze would read these not as choices but as symptoms, the visible surface of a drive with nowhere social to go, a small line of slope toward degradation running underneath the comedy. Between the two brothers the film maps its whole emotional field: one child watches, one child comes apart.

What makes the household unlivable is that it offers no single truth to grow up inside. The editing — clipped, abrupt, dropping you into a fresh confrontation without cushioning — reproduces the children's actual experience: two houses, two parents, two incompatible accounts of who did what to whom. Deleuze had a name for this too, falsifying narration: mutually exclusive versions presented as equally live, with no narrator to adjudicate. The film never tells you whether Joan's affairs or Bernard's coldness came first, because the boys can't know either. You are stranded, as they are, in the gap between versions.

And the whole thing arrives already softened by memory. Baumbach and cinematographer Robert Yeoman shot on Super 16, foregrounding the grain, chasing the warm, slightly degraded look of 1970s film — not for nostalgia but because this is a recollection-image, a childhood recovered rather than recorded. The picture looks the way the past feels when you finally understand it. The squid-and-whale diorama is the film's symbol in Deleuze's exact sense: a single object that condenses the movie's organizing relation. Two great animals, evenly matched, devouring each other — the parents' marriage, and the terror a child buries until he's old enough to look straight at it.

Place this in its lineage and it snaps into focus. The verbally-driven American art film — My Dinner with Andre, where talk is the action — gives Baumbach permission to let precise speech carry the drama. From Rohmer's La Collectionneuse he takes the conviction that self-justifying talk reveals moral character, which is why the Berkmans' competing self-narratives are the plot. From Allen's Annie Hall and Manhattan he inherits the autobiographical New York intellectual comedy and reworks it into divorce seen from a child's height; from Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, the young people performing erudition they haven't earned — Walt name-dropping A Tale of Two Cities as "minor Dickens," quoting a father who's quoting a review. The loose, available-light handheld and the whiplash between funny and cruel come straight off Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player.

What did it do to film? It proved you could make a divorce movie with no villain and no catharsis — the anti-Kramer vs. Kramer — and let comedy and pity share the same frame without either winning. It seeded a whole cycle of Baumbach's wounded intellectuals and, more broadly, gave the American indie a way to be autobiographical without being confessional. The forger's secret, the film knows, is that borrowed feeling can still be real feeling. Walt didn't write the song. He meant every word.