Defending Your Life · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He dies on his birthday, reaching for compact discs he dropped on the floor of a new BMW. The bus is already there.

What comes next is not a tunnel of light. It's a shuttle, a mid-range hotel, a tram schedule, and a restaurant where you can eat anything you want without consequence. Judgment City. The recently dead are housed, fed, and then tried, and the charge is not sin. It's fear.

Albert Brooks did not invent the afterlife-as-bureaucracy; he inherited it, and we'll get to from whom. What he invented is the tape.

In Judgment City your life is not weighed by an omniscient intelligence. It is screened. Two attorneys sit at monitors, cue up episodes from your life, pause them, back them up, and argue over the footage while you sit there watching. Deleuze has a name for an image like that: a lectosign, a readable image. Normally a movie image explains itself as you look at it. Someone reaches for a door and your body knows what happens next. A lectosign has lost that automatic sense. It stops being something you simply see and becomes something that must be deciphered and argued about. Brooks builds an entire cosmology on that one shift. The horror of Judgment City isn't that you were watched. It's that the tape is unflattering and the edit is not yours.

That joke dates the film forward rather than backward. In 1991 the camcorder had made everyone a cameraman, VHS had made rewatching a household habit, and the courtroom video exhibit was about to become a fixture of American public life. Brooks looked at all that and drew the theological conclusion. If the record exists, judgment becomes an editing problem.

Watch what Allen Daviau does with the Earth footage. He shoots it flat and plain, in the drab register of ordinary offices and kitchens, so it doesn't look like memory. It looks like evidence. Deleuze calls the dated flashback a recollection-image: a former present hauled up and re-presented, a parcel of the past that the present can handle. He is a little impatient with the device, because a recollection-image isn't really time; it's the past converted into something manageable. Brooks turns that limitation into his plot. Daniel's past has been converted into something other people can handle. They hold it. They have the remote. Everyone who has seen video of themselves knows the sensation exactly; Brooks made a religion out of it.

Now the charge. Classical cinema, what Deleuze called the movement-image, runs a simple circuit: a character perceives a situation, feels it, and acts to change it. Perception in, action out. Westerns, gangster pictures, the last-minute rescue — whole genres are that loop at full power. Deleuze's history turns on the moment the loop breaks and the movies fill with people who see more than they can act on, who watch and endure instead of intervening. He calls such a person a seer.

Daniel Miller is on trial for being one. The prosecution's case, screened exhibit by exhibit, is that he perceived his life with reasonable accuracy and never once converted it into action. That is the crisis of the action-image, restated as a legal charge, inside a universe whose entire administration assumes a life ought to have been a movement-image. Advance, or don't. And here is the lovely trap: in Judgment City he can't act either. He can only sit and watch himself not acting. The film puts him in precisely the condition it is prosecuting him for.

Same footage, two lawyers, two stories. Deleuze, writing about action films, names a gesture that could belong to two different situations an index of equivocity. Usually it's a suspense device. Brooks makes it the courtroom's whole engine. Every exhibit is equivocal, and the verdict depends on which situation the better arguer can attach it to. Lee Grant prosecutes with brisk professional courtesy, which stings worse than hostility. Rip Torn defends with the serenity of a man who knows the building.

Structurally this is a stranger machine than it looks. Brooks fuses two forms that normally repel each other: the courtroom procedural, which runs backward through a life, and the romantic comedy, which runs forward in the present. They test the same proposition. Everything the trial says Daniel failed to do, Julia offers him the chance to do now, and Meryl Streep plays her warmth as a kind of competence, so the asymmetry between her ease and his tension becomes the romance's actual structure. The trial format also solved a problem that had dogged comedian-authored features: how to get sketch-length material into a movie without the movie collapsing into a revue. Each exhibit is a self-contained bit, the legal commentary is connective tissue, and the cutaways to impassive judges do the work of a laugh track without conceding one. David Finfer's cutting protects Brooks's real signature, which is patience. He builds humiliation in long units and lets the laugh arrive a beat after you wanted release.

Then there's the light. Daviau came off E.T. and Empire of the Sun with a warm high-key sensibility and aims it at eternity. Judgment City is bright, even, shadowless. An anti-noir afterlife. Following the light in Dreyer and Bresson, Deleuze calls this lyrical abstraction, the alternative to expressionism: instead of shadow-gradients and objects with menacing inner lives, a uniform luminous field, the spiritual as illumination rather than struggle. Brooks books it into a conference hotel. Ida Random's atria, ficus, pastel corridors and tram stops make the place an any-space-whatever, Deleuze's term for a space that has stopped working as a setting where things can happen. Nothing lurks. There is nowhere to hide, and Daniel is a man whose entire professional skill is managing where people look.

The robes finish him. The dead wear loose shapeless things that flatten everyone into one silhouette, which strips Brooks's character of the only language he speaks fluently. Deleuze would call the result a gest: a posture that makes a social relation visible. Take away the suit and the ad executive's bearing itself becomes evidence.

Brooks never pretends the architecture is his. Here Comes Mr. Jordan gave him the celestial functionary as an unhurried clerk correcting a filing error, and Bob Diamond is that man's grandson. The 1943 Heaven Can Wait built a life out of self-selected episodes recounted to a courteous examiner, which is Brooks's structure exactly, with one substitution — and the substitution is the film. Testimony becomes videotape. The moment you can no longer narrate your own life, you lose the case you would have won. A Matter of Life and Death supplied the appellate trial with assigned counsel and adversary; Brooks keeps the structure and inverts the palette, trading Powell's chromatic split for flat white. It's a Wonderful Life opens with supervising authorities screening a man's life as reviewable footage, and Brooks just moves the monitor into the courtroom. From the 1962 The Trial, the accused inside an institution that will not state its rules, with the menace rewritten as customer service. And the 1978 Heaven Can Wait gave the tonal permission for functionaries played with flat administrative naturalism, a debt Brooks pays by casting Buck Henry, who wrote it, as another defender.

What the film seeded is harder to point at than a remake, because it isn't a plot. It's a proposition that has only become truer: your life is already recorded, the recording is unflattering, and someone else controls the playback. Brooks arrived at it in 1991 by way of a joke about hotel accommodations.

Watch the ending closely. Brooks withholds the catharsis until the last possible moment and then makes it physical instead of verbal, which for this character is the entire argument — a man who negotiates for a living finally does something rather than saying it. Michael Gore's score plays it without a wink, and that sincerity is what lets it land as feeling. The question the film leaves open isn't whether there's love after death. It's whether a life spent watching yourself counts as having lived one.

See it again for the light. It never once gives him anywhere to hide.