Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Near Dark
1987 · Kathryn Bigelow · Near Dark on Sightlines
Somewhere on the Oklahoma flats, it is almost dawn. The sky at the horizon has started to turn orange. In nearly any other film that color means the night is over and everyone can breathe. In Near Dark it means run. Kathryn Bigelow and her cinematographer, Adam Greenberg, built the whole film on this reversal. Night is a deep cobalt blue, lit by sodium lamps and headlights. The edges of the day burn red and orange, and every time the sky gets lighter, the clock is running down.
The film never uses the word "vampire." Caleb, a farm boy, picks up a pale drifter named Mae one night, and she bites him. The bite pulls him into her family: Jesse, the patriarch, who says he fought for the Confederacy; Diamondback, his hard and protective partner; Severen, who enjoys the killing and plays it for laughs; and Homer, something ancient stuck in a child's body. They drive stolen cars, kill to eat, and spend the days in motel rooms with the windows blacked out. Caleb's father, Loy, and his little sister, Sarah, go looking for him.
Start with those blacked-out windows, because the film makes them into its first idea. Deleuze calls everything the frame leaves out but implies the out-of-field: the hallway past the door, the street beyond the window. In horror the out-of-field is usually where the monster waits. Bigelow turns that around. Here the danger is the entire world outside, the ordinary daylight everyone else lives in. Blankets get thrown over bodies. People ride in car trunks. The frame shrinks to whatever shelter is closest, and the wide 2.35:1 image, built for horizons, keeps getting crammed into car interiors and dim motel rooms. Then comes the daylight siege. Police bullets punch holes through the motel walls, and each hole lets in a hard shaft of sun that cuts through the smoke like a blade. The outside world is being shot into the frame, one hole at a time.
That light is more than a symbol of goodness or God. Deleuze has a name for a quality shown for its own sake, as pure intensity: the power-quality. Sunlight in Near Dark is exactly this. When it touches the clan they don't crumble into dust the way Hammer's vampires did. They catch fire like gasoline. Light acts as a physical force, and Greenberg's dusks are threats.
Now the bigger claim, and the reason Deleuze is worth bringing along to this film. He describes a rare kind of cinema he calls the impulse-image, or naturalism. In it, an ordinary, recognizable setting (he calls it the derived milieu) turns out to be the thin surface of an originary world, where nothing operates except raw drives: hunger, appetite, the urge to take things apart. Few films manage to stay in that register, because it keeps sliding toward either melodrama or a simple shocker. Near Dark stays there through its most famous sequence. A smoky roadside bar full of truckers and drifters: pool table, bar counter, doors. The family spreads out across the room and circles slowly and theatrically, and Howard E. Smith's editing stretches the menace out, holding on reactions before anything happens. The bar is still a bar. But we watch it turn into a hunting ground, its layout read the way a predator reads it. Severen's spurs, cowboy decoration, become a weapon. The feeding sounds are wet and frank. This is the originary world breaking through the floor of a truck stop.
That is also why leaving the word "vampire" unsaid is such a sharp choice. George Romero's Martin had already stripped away the fangs, capes and crucifixes. Bigelow and her co-writer Eric Red go further. Without the name there is no myth to lean on, only the drive. Caleb is physically sickened by his new hunger. He refuses to kill and survives by drinking from Mae's wrist. In Deleuze's terms the wrist is a fetish: a part of the body charged with all the force of a compulsion, standing in for the whole world of appetite Caleb won't yet enter.
Then there is the Western, which the film carries like contraband. Bigelow and Red wanted to make one, and in the mid-1980s nobody would pay for it. So they hid horses, spurs, saloons, showdowns and open landscape inside a vampire film, which could still be sold. André Bazin called the Western the American film par excellence. Deleuze reads it, through John Ford above all, as the purest action-image in its large form: a whole situation presses on a hero until he acts and changes it. Near Dark lifts its plot engine straight from The Searchers: kin taken by a nomadic band and chased across the plains by family. The cross-cutting between the hunting clan and Loy and Sarah's search sets up a binomial, Deleuze's word for force facing force. Here it is two families facing each other. Greenberg's low-angle silhouettes against the sky make the vampires look like gunfighters on a ridge. The rhythm is what Deleuze calls respiration-space: the vast milieu breathing out in long, drifting passages on the road, then pulling tight into a single taut line of action.
This is Bigelow's invention. The Western's whole sensory-motor machinery still works, but what drives it is no longer a moral situation that needs fixing. It is appetite, and appetite does not resolve. Jesse is a patriarch who has outlived his own history. The frontier has become a highway that never ends and a hunger that comes back every night.
The film's ancestors are all there to see. From Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night comes the naïve young man bound to a doomed lover and exploited by an older criminal family. From Bonnie and Clyde comes the road gang whose playful camaraderie lurches into blood. From Malick's Badlands come the magic-hour exteriors and the lovers silhouetted against burning heartland skies. From Bigelow's own The Loveless come the drifter gang's leather and poses and the diner intrusion, here turned into the bar takeover. Over all of it Tangerine Dream lays a droning electronic hum that runs against the dusty Americana.
The film failed on release. Its distributor was collapsing, and The Lost Boys took the attention. It has grown in reputation ever since, and this is where Bigelow's physical, kinetic style first appears: bodies, engines and light treated as forces with weight.
So watch for two things. Watch the color of the sky, because it tells you what time it is and what's at stake. And keep an open question going the whole way through: of the two families, the one on the farm and the one on the road, which is Caleb's home? The film takes that question seriously. When the horizon starts to turn orange, you'll feel it in your body.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image (naturalism) — The roadside-bar massacre: the family slowly and theatrically circles its victims, and appetite drives the action, with the feeding played with wet physicality
- originary world beneath the derived milieu — The truckers' bar (pool table, counter, doors) is turned into a hunting ground, a recognizable setting revealed as the surface of a world of pure drives
- fetish (part-object) — Caleb refuses to kill and is kept alive only by drinking from Mae's wrist; Severen's spurs used as a weapon
- relative out-of-field — Blacked-out motel windows, car trunks and blankets thrown over bodies make daylight the lethal space just offscreen; in the motel siege, bullet holes let shafts of sunlight into the frame
- power-quality — Hard, directional sunlight acts as a pure lethal force; vampires catch fire like gasoline rather than crumbling to dust; the cobalt-night/orange-dawn palette turns each brightening sky into a countdown
- action-image, large form (the Western) — Bigelow and Red smuggled Western elements (horses, spurs, saloons, showdowns, open landscape) inside a vampire film; the Searchers-style captivity-pursuit structure
- binomial — Cross-cutting between the hunting clan and Loy and Sarah's search builds a parallel structure of two families set against each other
- respiration-space — The 2.35:1 frame alternates flat horizons and low-angle silhouettes with cramped car and motel interiors; long, drifting road passages give way to sudden bursts of fast cutting