X-Men: Days of Future Past · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A kid walks through a Pentagon kitchen. Bullets hang in the air around him at head height, a guard's fist is stalled mid-swing, and he takes his time — nudging a trajectory here, repositioning a body there, a period pop song playing as if nothing urgent were happening, because from where he stands nothing is. Singer and Sigel got that shot with cameras reportedly running at several thousand frames a second. That number is the whole idea.

Deleuze, following Bergson, says cinema made one founding bet: stop rendering movement by its poses. Older arts pick the privileged instant — the discus-thrower at full coil, the pietà, the moment that stands for all the others. Cinema instead samples: twenty-four equal slices a second, none of them the right one, movement rebuilt out of any-instants-whatever. Ordinary in-between time, mechanically taken. Now push the sampling rate past the threshold of the eye, and something comes back the other way. At thousands of frames a second every ordinary instant looks composed. Quicksilver's scene turns any-instants back into privileged ones, and then lets him arrange them by hand. He is standing inside the interval cinema normally throws away. The Matrix built the grammar for this — freeze the world, keep the camera moving — but Neo's bullet-time was mastery. This kid's is boredom. He has all the time there is and he isn't impressed by it.

Hold onto that, because the film runs on the same reversal at full scale.

Deleuze cuts cinema in two. In the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation; the action-image is that circuit at full power, and the large form is its grandest shape — a global situation presses down until one decisive act transforms it. Extermination of a species, one choice on a lawn in 1973. You could not ask for a cleaner example. Deleuze also argued this circuit broke after the war, when filmmakers started making people who could only look. That break is the time-image.

What makes Days of Future Past worth this lens is that it stages the break on purpose and then fights its way out of it. Look at the future half. The Sentinels scan, analyze, and adapt: whatever power you use becomes the thing that kills you. That destroys what Deleuze calls the binomial, force against force, the duel that organizes every action movie ever made. You cannot duel something that becomes your own strength. So the future X-Men are reduced to holding a room. The siege on the refuge is a defense of a space while the only act that matters happens fifty years away, in someone else's body. That is Deleuze's crisis of the action-image, precisely: people who see their situation perfectly and have no adequate response available to them.

The postwar answer was to sit in that and let time show itself. Singer's answer is to smuggle an agent out through it. Marker got to the device first — a mind sent back into a past body to reach a catastrophe already suffered — and La Jetée is assembled from frozen photographs, a cinema with the movement removed. Days of Future Past borrows the machinery and reverses the philosophy. It wants the movement back. The Terminator supplies the protector dispatched against a machine apocalypse; T2 supplies both the adaptive enemy and the determinism-versus-agency spine, the future that is not set; 12 Monkeys supplies the exact temporal palette Sigel reprises, ashen dying future against a warm, textured period past. Every one of those either closes its loop or leaves the win in doubt. This film lets the change take.

Ottman, editing and scoring at once, gets the credit for the climax. Two presents run side by side: the siege in the future, the decision at the public event in 1973. They cannot both be true. If she chooses differently, the siege never occurs, and we are watching it happen while it is being unhappened. Deleuze's name for presents that coexist without being compatible is peaks of present; Robbe-Grillet used the structure to make you unable to say which present was real. Ottman uses the same structure as a suspense engine. Griffith's parallel cut was invented to converge two lines of action. What converges here is two versions of what will have been.

Then there is Xavier, and this is where the film gets quietly serious. McAvoy plays a telepath who has lost his telepathy and is dependent on a drug. Put that next to Deleuze and it is almost too neat: the break into the time-image comes when someone perceives more than they can act on. Xavier in 1973 is a man who has cut his perception down to what he can survive. He does not need convincing. He needs to be made to look again. And the meeting Singer stages between Stewart and McAvoy is what Deleuze would call a crystal — an image where the actual and the virtual change places and you stop being able to separate them. The old man is the young man's future. The young man is the old man's memory. Two actors playing one person, and the film simply puts the mirror in the room and trusts them, clean coverage, no effect required. Sigel's whole instinct here — legibility, faces, a camera that stays out of the way — is the corrective the franchise needed, and it is why the scene doesn't buckle.

The ending works on a channel Deleuze calls the relation-image: meaning built out of relations the viewer holds, the audience as a knowing third party. Nothing on screen announces that the film is dissolving the continuity knots left by The Last Stand and the sequels that bruised the brand. You supply that. The film puts your memory of six previous movies into the load-bearing position, which is the real invention here. Fox's reply to Marvel's shared universe was not tighter coordination. It was a movie that reached back and edited the ones behind it, and discovered that a franchise's own past is dramatic material — that erasure can be a climax.

What it did to the art: it showed that the movement-image doesn't have to be naive. Deleuze wrote the action-image's obituary in 1983 and the blockbuster kept the body walking, mostly by not thinking about it. This one thinks about it. It builds the conditions under which action genuinely fails, an enemy that absorbs every force and a future with nothing left to do, and then argues its way back to a single decisive act. The optimism is a position, not a default.

One thing it never asks: what about the people who lived the version that got deleted? Watch the siege again knowing that everyone in it will be unmade not by the Sentinels but by the film's own repair, and their time in that room stops being a countdown. Then go back to the kitchen and count the poses.