Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Pusher II
2004 · Nicolas Winding Refn · Pusher II on Sightlines
The word is on the back of his neck. RESPECT, block capitals, in the one place Tonny will never see it and everyone standing behind him will. He must have wanted it to arrive before he does. It doesn't work. For two hours we watch a man walk into rooms where the word on his neck reads as a joke, and nobody explains the joke to him.
Deleuze has a name for the kind of film this is, and it isn't "gritty realism." He called it the impulse-image, and he took the idea from Zola. In a Zola novel two worlds run at once. There is the world with an address — the laundry, the mine, the shop, everything dated and particular. Deleuze called that the derived milieu. And underneath it, feeding through it, an originary world: not a place but a pressure, raw appetite with no story attached, which takes hold of people and uses them up. Naturalism in this sense isn't a matter of grime. It's the claim that the social surface is a thin crust over a drive.
Pusher II is about as clean a case as the form gets. The derived milieu is exact and local: the chop shop, the tracksuits and cheap gold, the flats, the strip club, the christening. Refn shoots it in available light on grainy stock with a camera that hunts and breathes at the actors' shoulders, so nothing gets composed into meaning. The originary world is Tonny's hunger for his father's regard, and it has no content at all. He isn't after money from the old man. He wants to be looked at. The chop shop is both layers in a single image: a business whose whole method is breaking something whole into sellable pieces. That is what the film does to Tonny across ninety-odd minutes.
Drives have a shape in time, and Deleuze's word for it is the slope. Not a plot — a gradient. Refn builds the film episodically, a chain of encounters accreting toward a breaking point: humiliation at the garage, a botched deal, a chaotic christening. Nothing Tonny does arrests the descent. Every attempt to climb costs him altitude. The RESPECT tattoo is what Deleuze would call a fetish, the part-object charged with the drive's whole force, a relic carried on the body. And the blurted apologies, the sudden violence, the pratfalls — these aren't character beats. They're symptoms, acts that only make sense as pressure escaping.
Why insist on this vocabulary when "crime drama" is sitting right there? Because the machinery that makes a crime drama go has been pulled out. Deleuze's movement-image runs on a simple circuit: a character perceives a situation, acts, and the situation changes. That circuit is the engine of nearly every gangster film ever made — the score to settle, the debt to clear, the code that redeems. Refn withholds all of it. There's no honor among these thieves and no last job. Causality goes slack; scenes connect by adjacency more than consequence. That's the crisis of the action-image, and most films that hit it drift toward contemplation, toward a hero who can only watch. Refn takes the other exit. When action stops working, what fills the vacuum here isn't reflection. It's compulsion.
Which makes this an actor's film in a specific, Deleuzian way. He wrote about a cinema of the body, where an actor stops illustrating psychology and instead holds an attitude long enough that it becomes readable as a social relation — the gest. Mikkelsen's Tonny is built almost entirely from posture: the slouch, the hovering, the way blocking keeps putting him at the margin of the frame, at his father's world without a place at the table. He is inarticulate by design, so the body does the talking, and the camera pinned to his shoulder keeps making us feel someone watching him watch. Late in a humiliation his face does the thing Deleuze prized in close-ups — no single expression, just micro-movements climbing toward a threshold that the scene refuses to release.
Refn gets there by running a borrowed clock. Cassavetes is the debt, and it's specific: A Woman Under the Influence taught cinema to stay on shame past the point of comfort, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie taught it to hold a decompensating criminal inside his own discomfort for uncut minutes and let the plot leak out of behavior. Refn keeps confrontations running until they curdle. Those stretches are dead time in Deleuze's sense, passages that advance nothing, and they're where the film actually lives. Bazin argued that refusing to cut is a moral choice, that the long take leaves the world its ambiguity. The Dogme grammar Festen codified, and the off-balance handheld Breaking the Waves made respectable as tragedy, hand Refn the same tool with the mercy removed. Here the refusal to cut is a refusal to spare anyone. Mean Streets is the frame around all of it — plot subordinated to parish, ritual displays of respect, debt tightening — but Scorsese's hoods have charisma to burn. Refn's invention is to make the protagonist an incompetent, and to find real pathos in incompetence rather than in doom.
The other invention is structural, and it's easy to miss because we're used to sequels now. The Pusher trilogy moves sideways. Part II resurrects the hanger-on whose skull was caved in with a baseball bat in part I — the disposable one, the guy the first film spent for a beat of shock. That lateral move turns a franchise into a map of a milieu, and it's the reason the trilogy holds up as world-building rather than escalation. The film also came out of a director's near-bankruptcy after Fear X, shot fast to dig out of debt, and you can feel the urgency that produced in every unpolished frame.
Then the ending, which is the best reason to see it twice. Tonny's failure as a son opens onto the possibility of his becoming a father. Nothing in the film has prepared him for it. Read one way it's the first thing he does that isn't a symptom — the slope broken by an act nobody demanded of him. Read another way it's Nil by Mouth's cycle turning over: paternal violence handed down a generation, the originary world finding fresh material. The film won't decide. Neither should you, quickly.
What it left behind is visible in Refn's own later work, where the same paternal judgment and the same wordless male hunger get stripped of dialogue and lit in neon; Drive and Only God Forgives are this film's obsessions after the grain has been polished off. It also made Mikkelsen. And it proved something the Danish trilogy is still cited for: that you can take American gangster iconography, remove every trace of romance, and what remains is not a smaller film. Watch the neck tattoo. It's the whole thesis, worn where he can't read it.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Tonny's needs are appetites rather than goals: he wants his father's regard with no plan attached, and the film is a chain of compulsive acts (blurted apologies, sudden violence, botched deals) rather than decisions.
- naturalism — Refn's Vesterbro is a social surface — family business, christening, club — through which pure drives (respect-hunger, contempt, appetite) erupt; the dossier's "naturalist tragedy in a minor, almost pathetic key."
- derived-milieu — The densely specific criminal underworld — chop shop and car-theft economy, tracksuits, cheap gold, worn leather, the strip-club demimonde of Vesterbro — rendered with authenticity-first production design.
- originary-world — Beneath the milieu, the father's world operates as raw paternal judgment and hierarchy: Tonny is met at every turn with humiliation and dismissal from a contemptuous crime-boss father, a pressure with no negotiable content.
- entropy / degradation — The structure is "a downward slalom of small disasters," episodic and accreting toward a breaking point, with the redemptive machinery of genre (a score to settle, honor among thieves) deliberately withheld.
- fetish — The "RESPECT" neck tattoo — a part-object carried on the body, charged with the entire drive, demanding what he is never granted.
- symptom — Mikkelsen's performance is built from "wounded eyes, blurted apologies, and sudden violence" — acts legible only as discharges of a hidden need, not as choices.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Tonny perceives his situation clearly and can never act adequately on it; Refn removes the genre circuit (no clever score to settle, no code that redeems) so no act of his transforms anything.
- weak-links — "Episodic and behavioral rather than tightly plotted: a chain of encounters" — scenes connect by adjacency and accretion rather than by causal consequence.
- attitudes & postures — A physical, inarticulate performance carried by blocking that repeatedly places Tonny at the physical and social margin of the frame, with the handheld camera kept close to his body.
- the-gest — Hovering at the edge of his father's world, "literally and figuratively unable to find a place at the table" — a held posture that exposes the whole social relation the dialogue leaves implicit.
- temps mort — Refn "lets confrontations run until they curdle" — the garage humiliation, the christening — playing scenes in real emotional time instead of compressing them by montage.
- icon of power — Tight-lens proximity on Mikkelsen's face during prolonged humiliation: micro-movements building toward a threshold of violence or collapse that the scene refuses to release.
- dicisign — The restless handheld camera "pinned to the protagonist's shoulder" makes its own act of watching felt while it watches Tonny take in each rejection.