Something Wild · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He skips out on a lunch check. Two dollars, maybe three, a crime committed mostly to see whether he can, and a woman in a black Louise Brooks bob is standing there having watched him do it. When Demme cuts to Lulu sizing him up, the camera sits almost exactly on the eyeline, so that Melanie Griffith seems to be looking slightly past Jeff Daniels and into the seat where you're sitting. It's a charming shot. Five years later Demme puts the camera in that same position in The Silence of the Lambs and it becomes one of the most frightening setups in American movies. The lens didn't change. Who's using it did.

That's the film in miniature. Something Wild pulls off something almost no other movie manages: it changes genre without changing images.

Deleuze has a useful word for what that frontal close-up is doing. He calls it a dicisign — a shot where the camera doesn't just show us what someone sees, it shows us someone in the act of seeing, and we feel the camera there doing the showing. It's perception with a witness attached. That's why the shot is unstable. Lulu reads Charlie instantly and completely; Charlie can't read her at all; and we're handed the transaction from a position that belongs to neither of them. Demme keeps giving us more information than his hero has. For an hour that surplus is the comedy. After that it's the dread.

The first hour is a drive, and it goes nowhere in a very particular way. Liquor stores, used-car lots, a motel, John Waters selling cars, John Sayles on a motorcycle, Charles Napier at a griddle. The cutting is associative — signs, faces, passing cars — and a needle drop will often carry the cut across fifty miles of geography without bothering to explain the trip. Deleuze called this shape the voyage-balade: the journey that transforms nothing, all movement and no consequence, which appears in movies right when characters stop being able to fix their situations by acting on them. He named that broader collapse the crisis of the action-image. Charlie is its perfect specimen. He is handcuffed to a bed while a stranger phones his boss. There is no move available to him. He can only look, and the film looks with him, and looking turns out to be a pleasure — which is exactly what Demme wants you to believe for as long as possible.

The handcuffs are also the film's sharpest formal joke. Deleuze's term for an act that could belong to two entirely different situations is an index of equivocity, and Frye's script is built out of them. Restraint is foreplay or it is abduction. The ride is a pickup or it is a kidnapping. Hitchcock had already found this in The 39 Steps — two strangers cuffed together, flirtation and lethal pursuit running through the same scene with no signal as to which one is live — and Capra had supplied the chassis, a scheduled man detached from his appointment book by a woman traveling under a false name, walls of Jericho and all, here rewritten as a Pennsylvania motel room with a cuff on it. Demme's contribution is refusing to arbitrate. He won't tell you which situation you're in.

He can't, because the woman is a forger in Deleuze's sense — not a liar to be found out, but someone who makes things true by asserting them. Lulu is a wig, jewelry, a bold print, and a name that isn't hers. When she gets to her mother's house the wig comes off and she's Audrey Hankel, blonde, modestly dressed, married, and the reveal is executed almost entirely through wardrobe and hair. Charlie is running his own con: a wife and children who, it turns out, have left him. Deleuze's idea of the powers of the false is that certain films stop asking is this true and start asking what does this invention make possible. Audrey's fiction is what produces the version of Charlie who could steal a lunch check in the first place. Both of them are counterfeit, and the counterfeit is the only generative thing either one has.

Then Ray Sinclair walks into the ten-year reunion. Demme plants him inside the warmth of the set piece almost offhandedly, the way you'd plant a name-tag gag, so the audience registers him a beat after it should. In Deleuze's grammar this is a demark: an element that breaks the customary chain and forces you to reinterpret everything around it. Crepe paper, a cover band, old classmates — the whole reunion is a chain of signs you know how to read, and Liotta de-marks it. From there the cutting tightens, the associative cutaways stop, and the coverage becomes ordinary thriller grammar. The film stops being able to look around.

Here's why the lens is worth the trouble. Deleuze's history of cinema runs one direction: the action-image, where a situation presses and a decisive act resolves it, breaks down after the war into wandering, looking, waiting. Something Wild runs that history backwards inside a single picture. It opens in the aftermath — dispersed, slack, curious, a man who can't act and a movie that would rather photograph a parking lot — and Ray restores the action-image. He installs a binomial: force against force, a man and his opposite, the sensory-motor circuit snapping shut with an audible click. The restoration is a relief and it is a loss. What Charlie gains in agency, Demme's camera gives up in peripheral vision. That trade is the film's real argument, and it's a bleak one for 1986.

And the images never lie to you. This is where the trick becomes moral. Demme and Fujimoto shoot the second half in the same available light, the same real places, the same amiable extras, nothing restaged. Fujimoto brings it directly from Badlands — the flat American middle distance, the camera riding in the car, violence photographed without the emphasis that would dignify it. The staging stays Bazinian throughout: depth, clutter, backgrounds full of actual commerce and bystanders who are doing something rather than pretending to, a frame that keeps insisting there is more world than plot. That surplus is what Deleuze calls the Open, and the second half closes it. So the photographic contract is honored perfectly. It's the genre contract that gets broken, which is precisely the bad manners Psycho invented at a roadside motel and Bonnie and Clyde refined when Dede Allen declined to warn anyone that the banjo was about to stop. Craig McKay's tempo shifts descend straight from that refusal.

What it seeded: Demme's eyeline close-up went from this film to Married to the Mob to Lecter, and with it a whole grammar of intimacy weaponized. The dense pop score, dozens of cues carrying transitions across geography, made the compilation soundtrack a structural instrument instead of a merchandising afterthought. Both are now so standard they're invisible.

Watch it again and count the strangers doing something in the backgrounds of the first hour. Then notice the shot where they stop. The question Demme leaves open is which half of his country he thinks is the real one — the one full of people who look like they were already there, or the one that had a man like Ray in it the entire time and simply hadn't cut to him yet.