Nebraska · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

An old man is walking on the shoulder of an interstate. Cars pass. The frame is anamorphic scope, the format built for spectacle, and three-quarters of it is sky. He is small, low, near the bottom edge. His name is Woody Grant. He is leaving Billings, Montana on foot for Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect a million dollars he has not won. The letter is a magazine sweepstakes mailer. Anyone who can read knows what it is. He goes anyway.

Hold that shot. Everything else in the film is a variation on it.

For most of the history of movies, a man walking somewhere meant he wanted something and was going to get it or break himself trying. Gilles Deleuze gave that arrangement a name: the movement-image. Someone perceives a situation, acts, the situation changes; the cutting exists to carry the chain from link to link. Nebraska keeps the whole shape of that — a road picture, a goal, a destination city — and takes the engine out.

Deleuze had a word for a journey that transforms nothing: the balade, the stroll. He found it in postwar European films where characters could still see clearly but could no longer do anything adequate about what they saw. He called that break the crisis of the action-image. What's odd about Nebraska is that it runs the maneuver in 2013, in English, in a Paramount Vantage release that got nominated for Best Picture. The road structure promises forward motion and Kevin Tent's editing keeps halting it. The second act simply parks in Hawthorne, a town assembled out of real ones, and the film turns into a series of arrivals among relatives who each want something. Nothing accumulates into a plot. Deleuze would call these weak links: causality gone slack, scenes joined by proximity instead of consequence.

The comedy comes from duration, not from jokes. Tent lets scenes run past the point where the information has been delivered, and the surplus is where the film lives. Grant men sit in a paneled rec room reciting car models and travel times at each other. Silent cousins are ranged in front of a football game. Deleuze called these stretches temps mort, dead time, the everyday held past its usefulness. The crucial thing is that they are not filler between the real scenes. They are the real scenes.

Payne and Tent also refuse the shot the grammar demands. Where coverage would cut to a close-up, they hold the wide two-shot. Reaction shots are withheld. This is an old ethic and it is Bazin's: leave the event whole in the frame, let the viewer find it, don't pre-digest the emotion and hand it over. Bruce Dern's performance is built for exactly that treatment. He withholds nearly everything, so you are made to read an old face across time rather than across an expression. That is a different job, and a harder one. It is what Deleuze meant by a cinema of the body, where a posture carries duration that no line of dialogue could.

Giving up the close-up has a consequence. Deleuze says the affection-image has two poles: the human face, and the any-space-whatever, a deserted or fragmented space that stops serving as a setting for action and simply radiates feeling. Nebraska takes the second pole almost exclusively. Papamichael's gray scale is soft and flattened, nearer a farm-bureau pamphlet than to noir, and it pours that flat light over main streets whose vacancy rates are visible in the frame. Hawthorne's emptiness is not set dressing. They shot in Norfolk, Plainview, Osmond, Elgin and repaired nothing. Grain elevators, water towers and telephone poles are the only vertical events for miles.

Images like that ask to be read the way you'd read a document. Deleuze's term for an image that has lost its sensory-motor self-evidence and requires deciphering is the lectosign, and a boarded storefront in scope is one: it states an economic history that no character in the film ever says out loud. The strongest instance is the derelict boyhood farmhouse, entered and toured like a museum with no docent. There is nothing to do in there. There is only looking. That is Deleuze's pure optical situation, the moment a character stops being an agent and becomes a seer.

Payne stages families frontally and symmetrically, which turns an ordinary gathering into something between a portrait and a lineup. Deleuze borrowed a word from Brecht for this: the gest, a posture that exposes a social relation without anyone having to explain it. Nobody has to tell you what these people are to each other. They're seated.

And the letter? It is false, and it produces more than anything true in the film. A fortune that does not exist makes Woody briefly a man worth visiting, and the people around him rearrange themselves around the number. Deleuze called this fabulation: subjects caught in the act of legending themselves, inventing a story they can live inside. He tied it to a harder idea, that modern political cinema begins when the people are missing — when a filmmaker cannot address a community because there isn't one left to address, and has to help invent one on screen. That sounds abstract until you watch this film count empty buildings. Payne fills the frame with non-professionals recruited locally, a method he takes straight from Forman's Czech films. The missing people, playing themselves. It arrived a few years before flyover country became a national argument, and the looking was already done.

None of this comes from nowhere; films are chapters in a discourse. The Last Picture Show set the template, Surtees shooting a real dying town in deep-focus monochrome with locals in the ensemble and faces cast for wear. Paper Moon supplies the road grammar exactly: Kovács' huge Plains skies over a two-hander stuck in a car, whole scenes played in one wide with both figures dwarfed by the flatness. Harry and Tonto supplies the structure and the casting logic, an episodic old-man picaresque carried by a comic performer handed a dramatic lead. The Straight Story supplies Tent's discipline, Freddie Francis holding elderly Midwestern travel in static wides while the film refuses to cut away from Farnsworth's face. The Firemen's Ball supplies the living-room tableaux and the humiliation comedy of letting an unremarkable event go on too long. Stranger Than Paradise supplies the deadpan: hold on inert bodies in drab winter monochrome well past where a normal cut would arrive.

What Nebraska adds is a technical argument. It was shot on an Alexa and made monochrome in the grade, with Payne and Papamichael monitoring in black and white on set so costume and design were judged as gray values from the first day. Black and white stopped being a chemistry and became a decision, in the same stretch of years when North American exhibition went almost entirely digital and a monochrome release no longer meant striking monochrome prints. Payne took the leverage of an Oscar hit and spent all of it proving that a digital image could carry a deliberately archaic surface without irony. He did it while using scope, the format of spectacle, as an instrument for measuring how little is left in a place.

Watch it again with the sound in mind. Wind, tire hum, a refrigerator, a television murmuring under the talk, all of it so low that a slapped face detonates. Then watch what the camera does when nobody is speaking, which is most of the time. The open question isn't whether Woody gets the money. It's what would count, for a man like this, as arriving.